Rebirth

[Odin]

[Celestia]

I like this theory and I think it’s possible. I’ve seen documentaries where people recollect memories from “another life” and they match up with someone else’s life from the past.

Sometimes I feel as if I have unexplainable connections to items or events. I’ve also always felt as if I was an old soul. So who knows. I’m open to the idea

[Loki]

You must be Born Again to see the Kingdom of Heaven.

I don't believe in reincarnation, though. I think it's based on deception and lies.

[sean]

The idea has been with us since time immemorial, many different belief systems had/have it. Even more scientific minds are warming up to this possibility, there has been some scientific work done on the subject as well. The strange past life memories some kids have, the feeling we get sometimes like we have been through it already, or been there already and find new things totally familiar to us, etc. Do you think rebirth is reality?

Rebirth and transmigration are different conceptions. The sages of old taught transmigration, but I can't think of a single instance of reincarnation. The problem is that it's thought of as some sort of ontological entity transmigrating, like a personal soul.

When conceptualizing what the Hindus call "Atman" in this way you get a warped version of something that resembles Christianity, which is expressed in materialistic terms (places, events are held to be as real history).

But Hindu literature paints a rather different picture. Atman is closer to being a sort of "role" and life itself a play in which different variations of the same roles act out the cycle of life in repetition. That is very different than what is thought of as a personal soul because here there is nothing personal about it.

In Buddhism, it is possible to die and then be reincarnated as a new and separate biological entity while still retaining, in some sense, the identity of the old "you".

However, it is not sameness of memories or any sort of psychological continuity that unites these two biological entities. So then, one might think to say that it is instead the fact that these two bodies are associated with the same eternal soul which enables us to say "they are the same person".

Having said that, I've noticed that there are often those who "rhyme" with past individuals. Sometimes people desire to connect themselves to a respected past psyche, and sometimes to connect another living person to someone in the past. Perhaps it says more about our thinking than it does about the facts.

Spoiler!

Dr Ian Stevenson that's one name

Stevenson's work isn't totally airtight. As this essay shows, several of his studies may have been contaminated by using unreliable translators and his research as a whole relies on putting a whole lot of trust in a succession of random strangers.

He admits in this paper that most, if not all, of his cases occurred among people who already believed in reincarnation. For a child with a birth mark or more major birth defect, I think its very likely that they would cling to a story they happen to hear that matches with both their belief in reincarnation and their birth defect. This is further supported by the fact that (again, by his own admission in the article) the majority of previous-life-memories were of family members.

His cases are also solely intra-special (humans returning just as humans). What implications does population growth have for reincarnation -- for tens of thousands of years humans had small populations and now we have 8 billion.

How would the theory of reincarnation be reconciled with extended phenotypes in genetics?

Does soul transmigration take place across large geographic distances? Does soul transmigration take place across significant cultural boundaries?

What is the time delay between death and rebirth?

Obviously addressing these questions would require much more research, but even posing these questions assumes quite a bit based on such scant evidence.

In other words, his work is probably thorough enough to convince the agnostic, yet nowhere near airtight enough to win over the sceptic.