Question from Jaak:
I found this interesting video on youtube, with children recalling supposed past lives. They seem genuine, do you think this demonstrates that reincarnation exists?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLnTl3PRZL0
Answer by SmartLX:
If everything in these stories were true, it would be a choice between the reality of reincarnation (at least in a few cases) or extreme coincidences between deceased people’s lives and the imaginations of children. That “if” is a huge one, and it’s the main barrier to these stories being credible evidence for reincarnation.
The meat of each of these stories is things a child has casually said to the parents, which seem unexplainable at first but then are found to match details of someone’s old life. These initial statements are never recorded, because why would parents record every word their kids say? Equally important is that the interrogation that immediately follows is never recorded, so if the parents asked leading questions that essentially fed the kid the necessary information (deliberately or not), no one can prove it. Once the parents start writing and speaking publicly about the child’s “recollections”, the child is caught in a feedback loop where repeated tellings of the story shape and reinforce the memory itself, until any fabricated parts of it seem as real as the rest. Any authors, paranormal researchers, religious figures, etc. who latch onto the story only amplify this cycle of reinforcement. Short of someone in the family admitting a total hoax, these stories never really get smaller, and not a shred of evidence is needed; only a bit of research into the life of a dead person.
Ultimately, if a kid apparently identifies as a former person then jumping to an actual reincarnation as the reason would require a pre-existing belief in reincarnation, psychologically speaking. If that’s not already there, it’s a huge shift in one’s worldview just to explain some unexplained stories that have no bearing on one’s own life. All other possibilities would have to be completely ruled out, and it’s hard to eliminate coincidence, pure or partial fabrication, and the child being led by the nose or otherwise fed details.
Tag: reincarnation
Death, Energy and Reincarnation
Question from Nathan:
Hi I was asked a good question about Atheism the other day can you answer this. What happens to Our Energy when we die? because if energy doesn’t die where does it go? my friend was trying to ask if I believe in Reincarnation which sounds ridiculous to me because I don’t believe in that shit can you expain?
Answer by SmartLX:
The human body’s energy consists of a certain amount of heat energy, some electrical energy in the brain and nervous system and a few different types of chemical potential energy in the various bodily fluids (stomach acid, for example). When a human dies and the body decays, that energy escapes into the world around the remains of the body. It might be consumed and carried away by worms and other creatures, seep into the earth and feed plants or be released into the atmosphere by cremation.
This fact is not conducive to reincarnation, because once the energy from your body is dispersed it cannot be reassembled in any form which can be thought of as you. Reincarnation would require all of the energy which comprises your identity to leave the body in a single package, which could in principle be re-inserted in another body – in other words, a soul. There is currently no evidence for such an entity in any of the life-related energies we’ve ever been able to measure. (There was one scientist who figured from his experiments that the body decreased in weight by 21 grams upon death as the soul left it, but his own results varied widely and have not been duplicated since.) If your friend is trying to support the idea of reincarnation, he or she will need better material than general scientific concepts of energy.
The Journey of a Soul
Question from Heather:
I really appreciate this website, it is quite useful. Early thank you for answering my question.
Most theists often worry about where our ‘soul’ goes when we die. I am more interested about where our ‘soul’ was before we were born. I often ask my theist friends this and most of them are perplexed by the question. Where were we before our existence? Shouldn’t we go back to the same place after our death?
When I asked myself this question I came up with no answer because I don’t know. Why don’t people draw the same conclusions about death?
Answer by SmartLX:
Most people can fairly easily understand and accept the idea of previously not having existed. After all, they normally don’t remember anything before at least a year after their own birth. It’s much more difficult to wrap one’s head around not existing at some future date, because it means directly confronting one’s own mortality. That’s why the fate of souls after death commands so much more of people’s attention than the path of souls before birth. Having an immortal soul gets around the whole mortality thing.
Atheists tend not to place so much importance on the possible types of afterlife, for obvious reasons. Considering the before-and-after question regardless can lead to a level of acceptance, as Mark Twain reached long ago: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
This famous quote echoes one of the popular theological options, which is that each soul has existed for as long as the universe. Many theists believe in at least some period of pre-existence. Jews and Christians can even back it up with Biblical passages, such as Jeremiah 1:5 – “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee…” The ensoulment of a human body is usually believed by the religious to happen at conception, or at least before birth, so it’s implied that before that point we exist as thoughts or ideas in the mind of God. Given that we’re supposed to be here to carry out God’s plan, whatever that is, it stands to reason that we ourselves were also planned.
Moving beyond the Abrahamic religions, the concept of reincarnation suggests that your soul was in another body before yours, and many more going back through time. A soul has to have its first vessel at some point, though; the world’s population has doubled in about the last 40 years, so anyone under the age of 40 only had a 50% chance of inheriting a soul from another human (assuming that’s the default option). Therefore there’s a good chance that either your body is your soul’s first outing, or you were once an animal. Maybe at one stage you were a single-celled organism.
I think those theists who have given this particular question some thought are the ones who are genuinely interested in theology beyond its implications for their own welfare. Everyone wants to know what will happen when they die and how they can make it easier on themselves, but it takes real curiosity to want to trace one’s personal origins. Whether the pursuit ends up making the concept of souls look a bit silly is probably up to the theists involved.