Why do Christians react so negatively to the concept of reincarnation?

Reacting negatively to heresy is different than just reacting to ideology that offends our personal beliefs. It seems to me that religion is a personal belief. As humans we react strongly to that which effects the way we personally view the world, especially if other humans claim our personal beliefs are wrong.

We are not to go around and personally offend others just pointing out where they are wrong. We are to proclaim the truth and the Holy Spirit convicts and does the offensive part of the process. If we have the truth, why would a lie offend us?

Normally when it comes to the act of Salvation, some are offended when told they can do nothing on their own to that end. Some are offended at the thought of just being obedient to the Word of God. Obedience can be construed as a work of Salvation. Even having Faith can be confused with working it out on our own terms.

The reason that reincarnation does not make sense is that it promotes humans procuring their own salvation on their own merit. Even evolution can be similiar in concept in that the physical is attempting to find the perfect result God is “looking for”. Except God is not “looking for” human or physical perfection. If we accept Genesis, God created the universe in a perfect way, without any thing else to make it better. However God allowed the knowledge that things can be in a less perfect state. A state that the physical cannot correct and change at all. Only God could correct the physical from any state back to a perfect state.

For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. (John 3:17)

Jesus brought the Good News for all of Humanity, not just Christians.

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (Matt 5:48)

In Genesis, God say His creation in Good. In Matthew Jesus says it needs to be perfect, not just good. This reflects perfectly evolution, a slow progression to perfection.

Being a Christian is not a religion.

Being perfect is a goal, as you pointed out, Jesus came to save the world. He did not come just to command that it happens. Changing the world does not get us into heaven. Only Christ Jesus can do that. Jesus changed the world, and provided Salvation. Not as a physical being, but as God. There is nothing more to be done. That does not mean trash the place, nor making it better allows us into heaven. Salvation just is, and is separate from the physical condition. Satan did not like God’s plan and became the father of all falshood.

Yes, it is achieving perfection AND a belief that Jesus is King that gets us to the Kingdom.
Best wishes, Shawn

A reasonable being creating imperfection, and then demanding perfection is not comprehensible. Nor does the Bible indicate, where God told humanity that if they mess up perfection, they have to get it back all on their own cognizance.

Humans were only capable of disobedience if God allowed such a chance. Humans would not on their own figure out how to mess things up. Why would they have to fix a wrong that they could never have committed on their own to begin with?

We are fed the lie that change over time makes things better because only the strong survive. That is not a perfect creation. Not even a good creation. Having the propensity to get better is not the same thing as described as a perfect creation without any errors or chance of errors.

Dear Tim,
The Christian version of Reincarnation was called “The Restoration of All Things” and which says that we were created perfect, in God’s image and then fell due to our own free will. The imperfection that currently exists is what Jesus came to restore us from, and back to perfection.

Free will did not cause the fall. The fall gave us all free will. Is there free will in not having knowledge of evil? What is the reality: evil happened but did not effect us. Or evil never happened at all before the fall?

Who is the “us” that did know about evil? Satan’s rebellion against God was that evil was not allowed to be a part of creation. How did Satan know what evil was?

All of mankind (sons of God) did not have to be restored. Only the descendants of Adam. God cannot know evil, nor participate in evil, at least not until Jesus was a human growing up knowing both Good and evil as a human. There is a difference in knowing something and knowing about something.

Correct. God did not cause the fall but He made it possible by choosing love and freedom over power and control.

Incorrect. Impossible. LDS theology. Without free will there is no possibility of a fall but also no life and no possibility for love.

Yes. The choice between good and evil is only an unfortunate side effect of free will. Evil is a converging slide down into same identical end of destruction and death, but life is an infinitely branching tree. The real purpose of free will is an exploration of all the infinite possibilities of goodness. Evil serves no good purpose.

There was no evil before the fall.

Satan was an angel, a created spirit, a servant and a tool. He could never be any more than what God made Him to be.

To be a son requires an inheritance to be passed from parent to child. Genetically we are the descendents of apes and all life on the planet are our brethren. So what inheritance makes us the children of God? It is an inheritance of the mind which we have from God through Adam – a memetic inheritance. This was corrupted in the fall by the self-destructive habits of sin. Thus, all of mankind had to be restored and this was accomplished by renewed inheritance from God through Jesus, the second Adam.

But notice that Jesus had no children. Just like with the first Adam, genetic descent is irrelevant.

No. Our separation from God is not a genetic problem.

Ah… a theology seeking to enslave God. Of course God knows all about evil. He certainly can participate in evil but chooses not to. If it is not a matter of choice then there is no real goodness or love at all, but only the goodness of an inanimate object like the sun. A theology enslaving God thus replaces God with a inanimate object – nothing more than a tool of rhetoric for the purpose of power and manipulation.

There is a difference between knowing something and experiencing or doing it, but it does not follow that experiencing or doing it is necessarily the superior of the two. One can experience or do something without knowing or understanding it at all. Those who do evil certainly do not have a superior understanding of evil. The opposite tends to be the case.

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Dear Tim,
Regardless of which Fall you are talking about, they both were caused by free will. Adam and Eve chose the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil over the fruit of the Tree of Life. Prior to that, 1/3 of Heaven chose to follow Lucifer in his bid to become the second king of Heaven.

As @mitchellmckain says, God knows the possibility of evil, but He chooses to be good. The confusion that you are highlighting is a result of the roman churches rejection of early Christian wisdom. When Justinian declared Origen’s anathema, he allowed the head of the church to do evil in the name of God. Early Christians believed that God’s power is limited - limited to only goodness.

Lacking experience is not turning God into a slave or inanimate object.

The God you are describing is one who does not know all, but is learning as it goes. As seen in the process of evolution. The God I am describing, knows all, but created humans so God could experience creation by being part of creation.

As for all this spiritual fall business, that is all human imagination without the truth. As it comes from Satan the father of all lies. I do not think that Satan was created as a spiritual being or angel any more or less than humanity. You all say humans evolved, but yet make Satan a special created being. From ANE accounts The race of Satan beings and human beings happened at the same time, and both had control over a planet that made up a twin planet combination and the moon was at one time that other planet. Satan was given charge over the earth when that planet became the moon and uninhabitable. The Greeks sanitized the event and turned it into their own science fiction narrative. Except all the science information was left out, and we only heard about divine beings, and the underworld. Humans and their religions were allowed to believe they had to keep re-incarnating to get it right. If we accept that the Bible was not preserved by God as the factual truth to this very day, then God is just another player, and not God.

So you have that first sentence backward. You are the one describing a God who is learning as he goes since you think God has to experience things in order to “know” them rather than simply “know about” them. We are the ones saying God already knows so it is absurd to cast God in the role of a scientist performing experiments like the Deists suggest.

Angels like all tools are a product of design and made for an end. We are God’s children made as an end in ourselves for an eternal relationship with God – and like all children we are a product of growth and learning not design.

I have no interest the fictional stories of the ANE and do not believe they have any more to do with reality than the demiurge theology of the Gnostics.

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. Rev 12:7-9

Dear Tim, you can think anything you want, but the Bible clearly says the opposite.

The role of humanity as sons of God is just that, a child parent relationship. Trying to claim that God produced children over billions of years of evolution is the scientific explanation. If there is not a difference in knowing something via experience and just plain knowing, we seem to be going out of our way to acknowledge the difference.

I do not claim to have any knowledge of the other third of heaven beings. Humans are one part, Satan is another. By the logic of math, there is a third led by Michael. But information on Michael’s role is not stated except in a few places, as quoted in one of the passages given. The apostle Paul was given all that information, but chose for reasons unknown to us, not to go into detail. We are not to focus on that part other than to declare the “fight” was spiritual, but we only had to focus on being like Christ and not to concern ourselves with the “spiritual” aspect. We are even told to sacrifice the physical on a daily basis. So dying to ourselves daily is Paul’s version of reincarnation. It seems most humans have an aversion to giving up their desires and will for the most part.

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