So, any view or belief must be tested against your experience? — Janus
whereas 'the Buddha' and the 'aryas' (noble disciples) are by definition no longer subject to those - accordingly, they provide a standard of wisdom and conduct to aspire to. — Wayfarer
I know you won't be swayed by rational considerations because your faith, or your emotional need to believe, is too strong. — Janus
you will cease to feel the futile need to proselytize. — Janus
Christian mystics typically don't believe in past lives; they believe the soul is "one-off", immortal and unique. — Janus
Cuts both ways, you know. — Wayfarer
I'm not proselytizing although I don't share the same distrust of anything religious that you habitually exhibit. — Wayfarer
Actually, there is an undercurrent of such beliefs in Christian culture. Origen considered something called 'metempsychosis' and the pre-existence of souls, influenced by neoPlatonism. But his ideas on the matter were declared anathema by the early Church - that is one of the reasons that reincarnation is a cultural taboo. — Wayfarer
Janus
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↪Frank Apisa
Why do you keep repeating the same nonsense over and over instead of at least attempting to tender some reason for why I should believe you are right and I am wrong? — Janus
So, regarding the cartoon example I gave: are you saying that we can prove such a thing is impossible, or are you saying that it is actually, as opposed to merely logically, possible that such a planet exists? If the latter, then how could you know that? — Janus
Note that I am not saying that we know that such a planet is actually impossible; the point is that we don't know that such a planet is actually possible either. So, it is only so far as we know that such a thing might be possible.
In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to. The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground. Stevenson was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a flower vendor in Kataragama who ran a stall near the Buddhist stupa whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while the girl played with her mentally challenged brother. The man lived in a house where the neighbors threw meat to dogs tied up in their backyard, and it was adjacent to the main temple where devotees practiced a religious ritual of smashing coconuts on the ground. The little girl did get a few items wrong, however. For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were) and his name wasn’t “Herath”—that was the name, rather, of the dead girl’s cousin. Otherwise, 27 of the 30 idiosyncratic, verifiable statements she made panned out. — Wayfarer
In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to.
The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground.
For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were)
↪fdrake Sure - ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. But what makes such cases 'extraordinary'? It's because, as I said, they go against the grain. I get that it's controversial, but his research is out there. — Wayfarer
So despite me going through all that effort to show you why the report is not particularly strong support for remembering past lives, you don't care, and supplant your own prejudice that I'm just having an auto-immune response to woo. — fdrake
Janus
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↪Frank Apisa
OK, I tried to open your mind to a more nuanced way of thinking about it, but you have proved to be the most locked-in interlocutor I have ever encountered, so much so that you feel the need to capitalize your words of insistence, so I'll leave you to it. — Janus
I don't see how any of this makes sense unless you assume there is some "essence" of a person.By "rebirth", I mean something along the lines of "getting caught up in consciousness/life/world again."...
The idea here is of getting 'caught up' in life in some way again. It already happened once. If the pre-birth and post-death condition are the same, then why would life not again come forth? — Inyenzi
2,700 cases, right? So we could go through all of these and show how every one of them was just coincidence and confabulation and wishful thinking, but I just don't think so — Wayfarer
It is not as far as we know, but regardless if we know.Note that I am not saying that we know that such a planet is actually impossible; the point is that we don't know that such a planet is actually possible either. So, it is only so far as we know that such a thing might be possible. — Janus
But Stevenson's magnum opus is almost 3,000 pages, it's full of tabular data about carefully-researched claims such as the one you dissected above. A three-year-old boy in Lebanon recalled having been killed in battle in his former life. He accurately reported how much money the person he had been had in his pockets at the time of his death and identified various personal articles when taken to that person’s home. A two-year-old boy in Turkey claimed he had frozen to death after an airplane crash in his previous life. The person’s family believed the man had died instantly in the crash, but when consulted, a Turkish Airlines official confirmed the man had indeed died from freezing. A two-year-old girl in Thailand remembered living in a monastery in her previous life. When taken there, she knew her way around, recognized a number of monastics, and even detailed what had changed about the buildings in the time since she had lived there. In many such cases, the location of a birthmark on the child’s body is said to correlate with an injury sustained at the time of death in a prior life. — Wayfarer
What we have here is a discredited false authority — S
Note that I am not saying that we know that such a planet is actually impossible; the point is that we don't know that such a planet is actually possible either. So, it is only so far as we know that such a thing might be possible. — Janus
It is not as far as we know, but regardless if we know.
Our knowledge as to the aforementioned example, neither gives or takes away from its possibility. — Shamshir
Rebirth, to use the example of this thread, might be impossible due to the nature of the Cosmos. — Janus
You are supposed to establish that it is a memory of a past life, and to do that you need to show that the description was caused by the event or influenced it (or was influenced by it) in a manner which provides information. — fdrake
It's just that the design for their collation and verification will never allow you to establish the effect they're supposed to establish. — fdrake
I don't see how any of this makes sense unless you assume there is some "essence" of a person. i.e. that which makes you YOU, as a unique individual - and this essence cannot be physical, not even partly physical. — Relativist
I don't see how you can escape the essence issue if we are to regard this as an individual person (such as ME) being re-born. Whatever it is that is reborn is not ME unless it has all the necessary and sufficient properties that individuates me.I don't see how any of this makes sense unless you assume there is some "essence" of a person. i.e. that which makes you YOU, as a unique individual - and this essence cannot be physical, not even partly physical. — Relativist
If you were a process philosopher, then you might analogise the possibility of rebirth as being more like a coherent stream of consciousness, than an essence. In fact that's close to the Buddhist attitude, which is that there is no person or singular self-existent entity which transmigrates from one life to another. Instead it's conceptualised in terms of the terminology of the 'citta-santana' (sometimes translated as 'mind-stream') which is the moment-to-moment continuum (Sanskrit: saṃtāna) of sense impressions and mental phenomena, which is also described as continuing from one life to another . — Wayfarer
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