Aug 25 2013, 11:03 am
In response to TheDarkChakra
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Stephen001
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Well, where is the evidence?
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How is it irrational? Not remembering happens for more than one reason such as to have another chance starting all over again. What you do learn is to increase your consciousness and maturity until you can stop reincarnating entirely.
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If that's the case, it will still never impact us as long as we are living. Might as well believe in what you want, and find out if anything comes next. If it doesn't, you'll just be a blob of dark-matter anyways.
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TheDarkChakra wrote:
How is it irrational. Not remembering happens for more than one reason such as to have another chance starting all over again. What you do learn is to increase your consciousness and maturity until you can stop reincarnating entirely. If this is the case, you would be able to measure the human population becoming more 'conscious' and more mature over time. Do you know if anyone has performed that experiment? Obviously you'd have to have some kind of proxy measurement for maturity (perhaps number of tantrums per unit time?) and I'm not entirely certain what you mean by 'consciousness' here, but in principle this is a testable belief. Have you tested it? Why or why not? | |
I'm glad you asked. I'll give you the evidence right now. First I will tell you a case that happened in 1930. A girl named Shanti Devi at 4 years old alerted her parents that this is not her home and she lives with someone else. She was able to describe her past life in rich detail including her past life name, date of death, place of death, her husband's full name, that she had a child, where she lived exactly, her personal affairs with her family and more. Mahatma Gandhi heard of this case and set up a committee to investigate and this was proven as a real case of reincarnation. Then in 1960s a credible scientist Ian Stevenson heard of a person who remembered his past life and went to investigate. He was impressed and spent the next 40 years investigating this phenomena. He was able to come up with nearly 3000 cases of reincarnation all over the world with top 100 being the strongest cases. He wrote lots of books and made many publications in peer-reviewed journals. He was able to disprove all normal explanations for these children remembering past lives and all other paranormal explanations. Even the respectable Carl Sagan admitted it is well researched cases of reincarnation. Not only do children remember their past lives but also have birthmarks and birth defects at the exact places where the previous personality has died. There are also similarities in personalities, phobias, philias, facial structure, body types, astrological similarities,identification as being the previous personality and traits and abilities. This is really the summary of this. They are still investigating at the University of Virginia. So yes there is evidence supporting reincarnation.
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I'm not sure. Depending on the soul. Population is growing so there could be new immature souls coming in.
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Right. And the reporting period we've had for this phenomena is ... 80 years?
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I am Vrocaan. I was once a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Because of my efforts, small mammals survived. I fought meteors head on around 65 million years ago. You're welcome.
3001 cases. | |
About 40 years. I think most people don't report it. There could've been millions of cases and millions of children now who can remember their past lives.
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I think we all know what animal I was in my past life.
Come to think of it, I do recall people complimenting me on my "hops" back in high school when I'd play basketball. THE PLOT THICKENS! | |
Just looked up some information on Ian Stevenson, and he seems to be a pretty classic case of confirmation bias. He isn't testing his hypothesis - he's finding stories that fit his preferred hypothesis and not considering stories that don't fit it. There are other explanations for Stevenson's data - for example, a combination of leading questions (very much a problem when dealing with children), translation difficulties, cultural barriers, contact between the source and destination families prior to Stevenson getting involved, and confirming interpretations. Stevenson ignores all of those.
To do science, you have to attempt to falsify your hypothesis. Stevenson never even attempted to discuss what would falsify his hypothesis. | |
Right. But no-one, among the millions and millions, felt it unusual enough to report to anyone, not to psychologists, medical professionals etc.
What it seems you have, is evidence of some vague phenomenon. Of which there are a number of theories that can explain it. It's much like the notion of afterlife claims. They are quite easy to assert and you can find people that will have asserted going to some form of afterlife. Which is one thing. It's another thing entirely to produce a reliable body of evidence that supports a theory on the matter beyond reasonable doubt. | |
He did everything scientifically. He tried disproving his own cases and was unable to do so. I think you got that from skepdic.
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TheDarkChakra wrote:
He did everything scientifically. He tried disproving his own cases and was unable to do so. I think you got that from skepdic. Or just looking him up on Wikipedia. You misunderstand me: there's a difference between 'disproving his cases' and disproving his /hypothesis/. What would count as evidence that reincarnation a-la stevenson was not happening? He attempted to eliminate some alternative explanations (e.g., fraud), but he always assumed the default was reincarnation. I note that one of his explicit tests - the safe he left in his office, with a promise to attempt to communicate the code to it to is colleagues - is, as of right now, coming down not in favour of reincarnation. | |
TheDarkChakra wrote:
Everything but reincarnation has been disproven. Still waiting on substantial proof that reincarnation exists. So far, all I've seen is hearsay/rumors. Atheism is a default position. When we are born, we don't have any religion. The default human state is "no god." Until, someone feeds us the wrong information and crashes our system. With that said- someone fed you too much Buddhism. | |