Another Way of Looking at Eternal Life,

[MineralMan]

from this atheist's perspective:

"We are all eaters until we become food."

Graphic Warning: The video is not for the squeamish, despite this being a traditional children's song. Watch at your peril:

[Binkie The Clown]

1. O.K. I know this puts me in a persectuted minority, but...

I'm a staunch atheist, AND I believe in reincarnation.

Process that in any way you see fit.

[trotsky]

2. You can believe in it if you want.

There's just as much evidence for it as there is for gods, and lots of people believe in those!

[Binkie The Clown]

7. See reply #6 below nt

[MineralMan]

4. Everyone believes what they can.

[Binkie The Clown]

8. See reply #6 below nt

[Voltaire2]

5. What exactly gets reincarnated?

And how does this process work?

[Binkie The Clown]

6. Permit me to quote Carl Sagan

“There are three claims in the parapsychology field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study,” ... (including) “that young children sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.” --Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World

[MineralMan]

10. Has that further study been done?

There are many reports of many things. Rarely is there any follow-up of them. Where that exists, it can be examined. Where it does not, there's little than be taken from such reports.

Skepticism is my response..

[Binkie The Clown]

11. Permit me to quote Scientific American Magazine

Ian Stevenson’s Case for the Afterlife: Are We ‘Skeptics’ Really Just Cynics?

If you’re anything like me, with eyes that roll over to the back of your head whenever you hear words like “reincarnation” or “parapsychology,” if you suffer great paroxysms of despair for human intelligence whenever you catch a glimpse of that dandelion-colored cover of Heaven Is For Real or other such books, and become angry when hearing about an overly Botoxed charlatan telling a poor grieving mother how her daughter’s spirit is standing behind her, then keep reading, because you’re precisely the type of person who should be aware of the late Professor Ian Stevenson’s research on children’s memories of previous lives.

Stevenson, who died in 2007, was a psychiatrist by training—and a prominent one at that. In 1957, at the still academically tender age of 38, he’d been named Chair of psychiatry at the University of Virginia. After arriving in Charlottesville, however, his hobbyhorse in the paranormal began turning into a full-grown steed. As you can imagine, investigating apparitions and reincarnation is not something the college administrators were expecting of the head of their mental health program. But in 1968, Chester Carlson, the wealthy inventor of the Xerox copying process who’d been introduced to Stevenson’s interests in reincarnation by his spiritualist wife, dropped dead of a heart attack in a Manhattan movie theatre, leaving a million dollars to UVA on the condition it be used to fund Stevenson’s paranormal investigations. That money enabled Stevenson to devote himself full-time to studying the minds of the dead, and over the next four decades, Stevenson’s discoveries as a parapsychologist served to sway more than a few skeptics and to lead his blushing acolytes to compare him to the likes of Darwin and Galileo.

Stevenson’s main claim to fame was his meticulous studies of children’s memories of previous lives. Here’s one of thousands of cases. In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to. The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground. Stevenson was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a flower vendor in Kataragama who ran a stall near the Buddhist stupa whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while the girl played with her mentally challenged brother. The man lived in a house where the neighbors threw meat to dogs tied up in their backyard, and it was adjacent to the main temple where devotees practiced a religious ritual of smashing coconuts on the ground. The little girl did get a few items wrong, however. For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were) and his name wasn’t “Herath”—that was the name, rather, of the dead girl’s cousin. Otherwise, 27 of the 30 idiosyncratic, verifiable statements she made panned out. The two families never met, nor did they have any friends, coworkers, or other acquaintances in common, so if you take it all at face value, the details couldn’t have been acquired in any obvious way.

More at the link.

[MineralMan]

15. Interesting, but anecdotal.

I think I remember reading something about that. It's a blog piece on the Sci Am site.

[Binkie The Clown]

16. I have never, personally performed the Millikan oil drop experiment, so

to me, the charge on an electron is anecdotal. Granted, an awful lot of books and teachers have told me the same anecdote, namely that Millikan was right, but the plural of "anecdote", I'm told, is not "evidence". Or is it?

When it comes right down to it there are two kinds of evidence: anecdote and personal experience. But what about repeatable experiments? Well, I've been told (by professors, i.e., "argument from authority" ) they are repeatable (which claim, itself, is "anecdotal" ), and in a very few cases in college, I've repeated a few of them myself (that's personal experience).

Sure, I'll take the word of authorities in almost all cases. I concede that Michelson and Morley were probably correct that there is no luminiferous ether (and Feynman's argument was awfully convincing), and that the Earth is roughly spherical rather than flat. In those cases the shear weight of corroborating anecdotes is such that I assume that the plural of "anecdote" might, indeed, be called "evidence" when the anecdotes are given weight by virtue of their source, i.e., "argument from authority". In other words, if enough people of high credibility (or authority) tell me the same anecdote I'm inclined to simply accept it as very probably true.

[trotsky]

17. The nature of claims is important.

You may not have performed the Millikan oil drop experiment, but you could. I got a chance to in college. The neat thing is, everyone who has performed that experiment has gotten the same results. The same can't be said for the anecdotes people claim are evidence for reincarnation, or similar supernatural phenomena. The nature of the claim is different, and the nature of the evidence is too. A child reports knowing names or details or whatnot, generally to a parent. The parent then brings these incidents to someone else. At that point it's no longer an anecdote, but hearsay. How do you know the child wasn't coached or provided with information? Is there any way to confirm or deny that interference?

You might start by defining what reincarnation means. Is there a soul? When someone dies, does their soul actually go into someone else's body? Is everyone born with someone else's soul? Are "new" souls ever made, or is everyone reincarnated from someone else? Or is there no such thing as a soul, but certain memories can somehow be transferred from a dying person to someone else? If that's the case, is that truly "reincarnation"? I.e., the dead person did not "come back" into a new person, just a few memories did.

Finally, there's the problem of confirmation bias. Most kids have an active, healthy imagination. Many of them create imaginary friends for themselves, or make up fantastic tales. Certainly by random chance we might expect a few of these tales to roughly match up with some real-life events or details. But how many don't? And do you consider those misses evidence AGAINST reincarnation, or do you simply discard that data because it doesn't support what you believe?

[Binkie The Clown]

18. "The neat thing is, everyone who has performed that experiment has gotten the same results."

Or so you say. That's an anecdote.

Finally, there's the problem of confirmation bias. Most kids have an active, healthy imagination. Many of them create imaginary friends for themselves, or make up fantastic tales. Certainly by random chance we might expect a few of these tales to roughly match up with some real-life events or details. But how many don't? And do you consider those misses evidence AGAINST reincarnation, or do you simply discard that data because it doesn't support what you believe?

Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.

If I'm searching for a rare, elusive butterfly do I count every butterfly of a different species as evidence AGAINST the existence of the rare butterfly I'm searching for? If, while searching for that butterfly, I discard observations of squirrels, is that confirmation bias? If something happens only rarely, do non-occurances of that thing count as evidence against the reality of that thing? Of course not.

If I'm told that a seven year old child in China played a Mozart violin concerto like a master do I falsify that claim by handing violins to randomly selected seven year old children and observing their failure to replicate that feat?

Certainly by random chance we might expect a few of these tales to roughly match up with some real-life events or details.

That you could so glibly say, "roughly match up", is evidence enough to me that you have not read any of Dr. Ian Stevenson's work. There's a word for passing judgement before examining the evidence. What was that word?

I'm a staunch atheist because as far as I'm concerned no evidence supports the existence of any kind of supreme being. I'm a staunch non-believer in astrology because I studied the subject in depth and found no evidence whatsoever for the claims it made. I didn't reject it because I assumed, a priori, that it was impossible. I rejected it because that's where the evidence lead me. I'm a staunch believer in reincarnation because as far as I'm concerned the evidence supports the possibility of the existence of a phenomenon that might properly be called "reincarnation". I go where the evidence leads.

[Mariana]

20. Dr. Stevensons's work is very interesting.

Has anyone else investigated these claims and come up with similar results? If the phenomenon is real, then it should not be difficult to duplicate his study with different individuals in different places and different times.

[Binkie The Clown]

21. Yes, the work has been replicated. Ultimately, however, the burden of proof...

...is on whoever wants to follow the evidence and decide for themselves. Some people will be interested enough to follow up on it, and some people will not. And that's O.K.

I don't recall the exact quote, but Dr. Stevenson said something to the effect that the evidence for reincarnation is weak enough that to reject it is a rational choice, but on the other hand, the evidence for reincarnation is strong enough that to accept it is a rational choice.

Given that both acceptance of the evidence, and rejection of it are both rational choices, it comes down to how one feels about the evidence personally.

[trotsky]

23. It's an anecdote until you try it.

Go ahead and try that experiment. The neat thing is, you can. There is absolutely nothing stopping you. But how can I "try" reincarnation, or study a claimed occurrence myself? There is absolutely no way other than reading someone else's account of it. You're creating a false equivalence with the word "anecdote."

Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.

Except when it is. Like when I claim that I have a dragon in my garage. You come to inspect and find no dragon. Sure I could change my claim and say the dragon is only there at night. You come back at night, no dragon. I say he's invisible. You throw powder in the air but it all lands on the ground. Etc. At a certain point it's on me to prove my dragon exists, and not you to prove it doesn't.

If I'm searching for a rare, elusive butterfly do I count every butterfly of a different species as evidence AGAINST the existence of the rare butterfly I'm searching for? If, while searching for that butterfly, I discard observations of squirrels, is that confirmation bias? If something happens only rarely, do non-occurances of that thing count as evidence against the reality of that thing? Of course not.

See that's not the same type of investigation. You are trying to equate two things that aren't similar.

In the case of reincarnation, it matters when you have so many people who DON'T display these signs of having memories of a previous life. Why do only certain people? Or why do other children invent memories or characters that have no bearing on people who lived previously? These actually ARE data points that go against the reincarnation theory and must be accounted for.

If I'm told that a seven year old child in China played a Mozart violin concerto like a master do I falsify that claim by handing violins to randomly selected seven year old children and observing their failure to replicate that feat?

We're right back to depending on the nature of the claim. You can go observe that seven year old in China. You could find out how they learned to play it, and duplicate those methods with other children to see which might have the talent to become a master. There are ways to verify the claim.

How do we truly verify a claim of reincarnation?

That you could so glibly say, "roughly match up", is evidence enough to me that you have not read any of Dr. Ian Stevenson's work. There's a word for passing judgement before examining the evidence. What was that word?

How much detail did Dr. Stevenson confirm *couldn't possibly have come from anywhere else*, including parent prompting, etc.?

I'm a staunch believer in reincarnation because as far as I'm concerned the evidence supports the possibility of the existence of a phenomenon that might properly be called "reincarnation". I go where the evidence leads.

We just have different standards of what we call evidence, I guess. I'm not looking to change your mind - you don't need to get so defensive. I'm just explaining the problems I see, and how I'm not satisfied with your rationalizations for them.

[Binkie The Clown]

24. Ultimately we each have our own standards of evidence.

To paraphrase Dr. Stevenson, the evidence for reincarnation is weak enough that to reject is a rational choice, but the evidence for reincarnation is strong enough that to accept it is also a rational choice. Kind of like the evidence for dark matter. Some cosmologists accept it, some reject it. They are both behaving rationally.

I cannot question your opinion in the matter since I consider it to be a rational choice. I do, however, reject people like the flat earthers who seem to completely abandon rationality. I also reject charlatans who write popular books on past lives and hypnotic regressions. Those are, in my considered opinion, utter nonsense.

[Voltaire2]

12. Which answers neither of my questions.

[Binkie The Clown]

19. The answers are both "I don't know".

Perhaps science should not ask any questions until after it knows all the answers.

[Voltaire2]

22. Uh no. Science should ask how and then

proceed to test theories of how.

[guillaumeb]

14. Perhaps you will be a theist in the next incarnation.

[yonder]

3. Thanks, I've not heard that before.

It does sound like a kids song--they have an honest way of looking at life and the world. Here's another take for the pile, from a much larger and older kid:

If I should die before I wake,
All my bones and sinew take;
Put me in the compost pile,
And decompose me for a while.

Wind, water, rain will have their way,
Returning me to common clay!
All that I am will feed the trees,
and little fishes in the seas.

On radishes and corn you munch--
You might be having me for lunch!
And then excrete me with a grin--
Chortling, "There goes Lee again!!

From Lee Hays (The Weavers)

[SCantiGOP]

9. I love that

And love the Weavers.

[mia]

13. Reminds me of being initiated into our neighborhood childhood club.

You had to eat a little dirt to be accepted. Then prick your finger and mix blood with other members. I remember learning this song from the neighborhood kids I grew up with - back in the days when you left the house at dusk and didn't have to be home until dark.