Reincarnation...

[devonin]

Originally Posted by atalkingcow

@ devonin : Could you please edit your quote to include the statement that those ideas were what I had been taught, not just me spouting out personal ideas as solid fact? ^_^

I don't recall saying that you were spouting personal ideas as solid fact so I'm not sure what you're asking me to edit.

And again we reach the inevitable quandry of religious discussion:
Unfortunately, the fact that we cannot PROVE it, doesn't prove that it is false.

I never said it was false because it had never been proven true. I said it -seemed more likely- to be false or at least only true in a very limited way because of the high degree of unlikliness that people have been getting reincarnated for 13,000 years and yet not a single person has ever been able to "remember" enough of a past life to make it past even a cursory examination by someone who knows their history.

While I myself have never put much stock in psychics and mediums...(anyone who seeks monetary gain from religious beleifs is unsavory in my opinion.) I myself have experienced Deja Vecu, on multiple occasions when there was no feasible(sp?) way for me to know what was going to happen. (Deja Vecu is a version of Deja Vu involving premonitions of the immediate future due to seemingly normal stimuli. E.G.: Hearing a line in a movie you've never seen before, and getting the feeling that the phone is about to ring with very bad news.)

Something happening that gives you a feeling about the future has even less to do with reincarnation than normal deja vu. The future is the opposite of the past, and past lives cannot possibly give you a premonition about the future, that's an entirely seperate power.

Deja Vu is tied into reincarnation under the idea that you may have to live almost the exact same life multiple times until you "get it right".
(I have been to a medium just for S&G, I was informed that in a past life I was burned as a witch. Made me giggle a bit.)

Well, first off, to say nothing for the fact that reincarnation involves being reborn into an entirely new body each time, thus making it pretty impossible for me to have lived "almost the exact same life" before, I mean even one generational lifetime back, and the vast majority of things in my life didn't even exist. How can I have had this forum discussion before in a time with no internet or computers?

Secondly, Deja Vu as a concept has a pretty thoroughly convincing scientific explanation. One of the effects of certain kinds of drugs is to basically scramble the input/output system of your brain, this is why people can claim to see smells, and hear colours, and this is also how synaesthisia works all the time. The input is getting rerouted through a part of the brain that it doesn't normally go through. Deja Vu is nothing more than an incoming stimulus being routed through the portion of your brain controlling memory. So the thing that is going on right then feels like you are remembering it having happened before. This is something I'm pretty sure is recreatable in labs (I'd have to do some more research into it) where they can just stimulate a certain part of your brain and create deja vu at will.

Basically, Reincarnation is just another of man's attempts to explain the unknown, and just happens to be the one I choose to believe.

Fair enough, I never once said you ought not to believe it, or that it had to be wrong. I merely observed that given all the evidence (or lack thereof) as a belief it doesn't really -mean- anything, because an inability to ever be aware of past lives means you can't learn your lessons, because you can't know what you did or didn't do right or wrong previously.