You mean the birthmarks matched those on people they remembered being? That’s eerie at best!
If the evidence is sufficiently strong, one should look for other exotic
possibilities besides reincarnation. So, for example, a restless spirit tries to regain entry to this world by acting through a child whose own personality is
not yet sufficiently strong to resist it. Eventually it goes away. But, first, you have to have the good well-sourced evidence.
- You really ought to watch the TV series. https://www.justwatch.com/us/provider/freevee/tv-shows
- A spirit of someone who once lived and died on earth returns to earth in a different body with different parents.
It doesn’t have to be a coincidence at all – maybe cause and effect is actually the other way around – maybe the children were aware of their difference in appearance and wanted to find a way to “explain” to themselves or their peers/parents why their body looks the way it does, using their highly attuned imagination. Doesn’t that seem a more likely explanation than “they must have had a past-life experience”?
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The closest I’ve heard first-hand to dead people coming back to life:
Quote from a surgeon that our pastor had for a 6-inch blockage in a major artery several years back: “Have you ever performed this before?” “No, I don’t operate on dead people.” The only two previous cases that one of his other surgeons had seen were both in morgues.
And also, my grandfather in the hospital recovering after treatment for a pericardial infection: after 3 days, he decided to do a bit of washing up, so he got out of bed, walked over to the sink, and put some “dry shampoo” in his hair. He then went back to the bed, sat down, and started combing his hair. Soon afterwards, his nurse rushed in looking rather concerned. My grandfather asked what was wrong, and she pointed to the monitor: he had flatlined. A bit of looking revealed that what had actually happened was that he had detached the cable from the machine when he got up. Later, he phoned my father and was describing this, and noted that he had heard about a number of near-death experiences, but not of them involved sitting in bed coming one’s hair. “But dad, that proves you were de-parted.”
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I may have heard worse, but not in recent memory. 
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What if God’s judgment is for your spirit/soul to return to earth and have another go?
Or why need that be anything more than a cultural idiom expressing the general belief in the certainty and finality of death for a person?
Same question for @St.Roymond
How about yours, as a frog?
I think I’d be a pretty low one.
One of the interesting questions for me is what if God had made me as a proto-Sapiens. I’m not sure what I would think–but honestly, if there’s a purpose in it for God, I think He would teach me to be grateful.
Tough one.
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There are other descriptions of judgement in the NT, and it’s funny, but that isn’t included. It also does not fit the familial metaphors (or reality) that we read about.
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If you want a large supply of such, some worse than that, you can look into acquiring The Pun-Dementals: Biblical Limericks from Verse to Bad.
[@moderators Does this qualify as unpermitted advertising?]
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Hmm. Noting the authors…
(At least there shouldn’t be anything I would expect to object to apart from the groan factor. ; - )
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Sounds like a close brush with death.
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That would depend somewhat on how long the bristles were.
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It might even be described as kind of a hairy experience.
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The evidence, and then some for the existence of “restless spirits”!
I think I like the Jungian racial subconscious idea better.
Hebrews was written by someone who most likely was educated in Alexandria, a very thoroughly Greek city with a large Jewish section. From the Greek side there wasn’t a strong belief in a finality of death; the idea of recycled souls was common. The Jewish heritage I don’t know much about other than that the Pharisees and the Sadducees disagreed on whether there will be a resurrection.
I think it’s punpermitted.
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Have you looked at the 50 year study done at UVA?
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- Some citation is useful:
- University of Virginia, School of Medicine, Department of Perceptual Studies
- Fifty Years of Research
About
Over the last 50 years of active research, the UVA DOPS faculty have collected 2500 cases, most of which have been found outside of the United states. Members of the research staff at the Division of Perceptual Studies have published numerous articles and books about these cases. Of these 2500 cases, over 2300 have been coded and entered into our SPSS data base to date. During most summers for the past 15 years, first year UVA medical students research interns, assist us in coding the field notes on 200 variables. They develop research projects based on access to the original research files. These research interns apply various statistical analyses to look into the accumulated data thus far, for patterns and trends.
Publications about the research being done at DOPS into memories of previous lives:
We invite you to view a list of books on reincarnation written by our research faculty. The list includes books written by our director, Dr. Jim Tucker, as well as the long list of books authored by our esteemed founder, Dr. Ian Stevenson. Among the many ground breaking books by Dr. Stevenson is his comprehensive two volume set, Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects, Volumes I and II. In this 22268 page, two volume set, Dr. Stevenson wrote about his extensive research into cases of birthmarks and birth defects which appeared to strongly correlate to memories of a past life in particular subjects. Dr. Stevenson also wrote an abridged version of this research called Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.
In 2013, Dr. Jim Tucker, authored his second book on the topic of cases of children who report memories of a previous life. In his most recent book Return to Life, Dr. Tucker describes the research into strong American cases being carried out at DOPS. In Tucker’s first book, Life Before Life, he reviews forty years of research into children who report memories of previous lives. This book contains some accounts of interesting American cases, as well as descriptions of Dr. Ian Stevenson’s classic cases in Asia.
In addition to books, the faculty have published many academic papers on this subject in a wide variety of professional journals. For a list of academic papers specifically on the study of past life memories written by our faculty, please see Publications on Past-life Memories.
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I know Reddit is not always the best source for commentary, but I’m not personally going to invest the time in reading Ian Stevenson’s research papers myself. But I found this detailed analysis by someone who posted there which seemed useful. I quote:
I gave it a good read. I am not convinced.
First, the complete lack of description of his experimental methods isn’t encouraging. The only source linked in the article is his organization’s website, and the link yields a 404. I searched again, this time from the website’s front page, but couldn’t find anything about his experimental methods. I’ll come back to that later.
Secondly, the alleged sample size. The article claims he found 2000+ children with memories matching events from a dead person’s life they probably knew nothing about (wikipedia says 3000+).
The article states that only 1 in 500 children were “in the right emotional space to remember their past lives” (which itself is an unproven assertion). That implies the 2000-3000 affected children were part of a 500x larger sample size. That means 100 000-150 000 children interviewed in total over a period of 40 years, that’s 7-10 children interviewed on average every single day over 40 years. That’s a MASSIVE sample size with a very small portion of positive results. That will also matter later.
Then, there’s the evidence. Children who hint at events that took place before their birth. Those include an unknown number of the following :
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Deaths related to their phobias.*
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Deaths related to their physical defects or birth marks.*
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An alleged strong reaction to their assumed killer.*
If asked for how they died, the children might have perceived an expectation for an answer and felt pressured into making things up on the spot. They would most likely have used elements from the environment, including their own bodies and experiences, as a base for their stories. They might look at themselves and use that as inspiration to make up a story that would include these details. And if asked for how you might have died in another life, wouldn’t you instinctively think of the things that scare you the most ? What is fear if not the suspicion that something might kill you ?
How did Ian control for these potential interferences from his results ? We don’t know. I can’t find any information about that, not in the article, nor on their website.
We also don’t know how many of the 2000 children had marks that matched lethal wounds (besides the 3 examples given in the article). The fact they could be matched to just about anyone that ever died, and that despite this, the single most convincing example of the girl who claimed to have drowned after being pushed by her brother had several elements contradicting her best match. They’re most likely all coincidences, unless there are enough cases to be significant, but if it was the case they would say as much instead of listing the 3 cases. Whether among a total sample size of 2000 or 150 000, 3 instances of it happening isn’t statistically significant.
As for the third point, how did they notice those strong reactions to their alleged killers ? Did they cross them in the street and catch the murderers this way ? Did they visit the murderers in jail ? How did they safely expose the children to convicted murderers without telling them those were murderers ? Wouldn’t the children be scared of strangers locked up in a jail cell anyway ?
How did Ian control for these problems ? And how many of the 2000 kids reacted this way ? Again, we don’t know. Without further information, it all sounds… if not made up, skewed to fit a preexisting expectation
And i’m not the only one who thought that, even among his peers. According to Ian’s wikipedia page, several people criticized his work including fellow philosopher Paul Edwards. Paul was anti-reincarnationist and might have looked to fit his own preexisting expectations, but it’s not the case of another philosopher and “psi researcher” C.T.K. Chari (who was head of department of philosophy a Madras Christian College in India).
They pointed out instances where Ian asked the children leading questions, the fact that some children or the children’s parents might have lied to him, that he often relied on translators to communicate with the children who might have inaccurately translated his questions or the children’s answers, and that Ian didn’t count children who didn’t fit his theory as evidence against it.
They reached the conclusion that Ian fell victim to motivated reasoning/confirmation bias driven by his personal belief that reincarnation was real without considering the possibility that it might not happen at all.
Overall, i commend his work as professor of psychiatry, but i wouldn’t qualify his work on reincarnation as coming “from the point of view of a materialist skeptic”, far from it.
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