Supernatural Claim:
Belief in reincarnation is the belief that the soul, which departs from the body at death, re-enters at birth in another body (human or animal).
Defining terms
Supernatural- pertaining to, or being above or beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena; abnormal; supernatural beings, behavior, and occurrences collectively.
Reincarnation- the belief that the soul, upon death of the body, comes back to earth in another body or form; rebirth of the soul in a new body; a new incarnation or embodiment, as of a person.
Spiritual Being- an incorporeal being believed to have powers to affect the course of human events.
Soul- the principle of life, feeling, thought, and action in humans, regarded as a distinct entity separate from the body, and commonly held to be separable in existence from the body; the spiritual part of humans as distinct from the physical part; the spiritual part of humans regarded in its moral aspect, or as believed to survive death and be subject to happiness or misery in a life to come: arguing the immortality of the soul. A human being; person.
Scientific Proof of Reincarnation
http://reluctant-messenger.com/reincarnation-proof.htm
Dr. Ian Stevenson. Instead of relying on hypnosis to verify that an individual has had a previous life, he instead chose to collect thousands of cases of children who spontaneously (without hypnosis) remember a past life. Dr. Ian Stevenson uses this approach because spontaneous past life memories in a child can be investigated using strict scientific protocols.
Dr. Stevenson's credentials are impeccable. He is a medical doctor and had many scholarly papers to his credit before he began paranormal research. He is the former head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and now is Director of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia.
The video above is a detailed response on Robert Almeder, Ph. D (Department of Philosophy, GSU) on Dr. Stevenson's work and credibility of his claims.
By Shioban Ambriz
------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Ian Stevenson, M.D. is best known for his Reincarnation research.
EDUCATION: He studied medicine at St. Andrews University in Scotland, and at McGill University in Montreal, receiving a BSc in 1942 and a degree in medicine in 1943, graduating top of his class. After training as a psychiatrist, Stevenson taught at Louisiana State University.EXPERIENCE: Following graduation, Stevenson took a series of jobs in hospitals as an intern or resident, before embarking on research at Tulane University focusing on biochemical tissue oxidation. He became interested in finding explanations for psychosomatic illnesses and in the late 1940s he worked at New York Hospital as part of a team exploring psychosomatic medicine, a theme that persisted throughout his later research. This work persuaded him that the reductionism of biochemistry rendered it inadequate as an explanatory tool, and he chose to pursue psychiatry over internal medicine. In the 1950s, inspired by a meeting with Aldous Huxley, he was involved in the early medical study of the effects of LSD and mescaline. He experimented with LSD himself, describing three days of "perfect serenity". Stevenson traveled extensively to conduct field research into reincarnation and investigated cases in Africa, Alaska, Europe, India and both North and South America, logging around 55,000 miles a year between 1966 and 1971.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Stevenson was one of the founders of the Society for Scientific Exploration and its Journal of Scientific Exploration. In 1957, he became head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Virginia (UVa) School of Medicine. In 1960, Dr. Stevenson published two articles in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research about children who remembered past lives. In 1961, he began investigating past-life experiences (PLEs) and began collecting the first of some 2,500 stories, mostly coming from children, that he thought indicated memories of past lives. He left mainstream psychiatry in 1967 and established the Division of Personality Studies (now the Division of Perceptual Studies) at UVa. In 1974, he published his book, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, and became well known wherever this book appeared by those people who already had a long-standing interest in this subject.
POSITION: He was the former head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and also, Director of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia. He retired in 2002, but not before logging in over a million miles to conduct his investigations.
REPUTATION: He devoted the last 40 years to the scientific documentation of past life memories of children from all over the world and has over 3000 cases in his files. Many people, including skeptics and scholars, agree that these cases offer the best evidence yet for reincarnation. Stevenson felt his long-stated goal of getting science to consider reincarnation as a possibility was not going to be realized in this lifetime. According to his University of Virginia obituary, his greatest frustration was not that people dismissed his theories, but that in his opinion most did so without even reading the evidence he had assembled. Stevenson died of pneumonia at the Blue Ridge Retirement community in Charlottesville, Virginia, on February 8, 2007 at the age of 88.
Assessment: Dr. Stevens thought that the best evidence for reincarnation is the number of "cases of subjects who have birthmarks or birth defects that seem to derive from previous lives. These marks and defects correspond closely in size and location to wounds (occasionally other marks) on the deceased person whose life the child later claims to remember." Although Dr. Stevenson’s research mainly involves children, his expertise on other cases is no different. Someone with his background and expertise would look at all possible angles for answers and/or solutions to all things paranormal. No one can disprove the possibility of reincarnation. We either choose to believe or not believe based on theory, religious beliefs, evidence, education, and experiences. Our textbook has many statements regarding evidence and possibilities and the one that most reflects this claim is: Just because a claim hasn’t been conclusively proven doesn’t mean that it’s false.
Posted by: G. Fields
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More evidence about reincarnation from expert, Ernest Valea.
http://www.comparativereligion.com/reincarnation.html
This article discusses the concept of reincarnation as an attractive perspective from which to judge the meaning of life, as well as a source of great comfort for those who might fear the end of life. Valea states that reincarntaion is tricky since it is a rejection of the monotheheistic teaching of the final judgment by a holy God. He goes over reincarnation as an explaination of one's current life. The article is an examination of A)Reincarnation in world religions; B)Past life recall as proof of Reincarnation: C)Reincarnation and the cosmic justice; D)Reincarnation and Christianity.
The author, Ernest Valea is a Christian aplogist with a BD in theology, a world religions scholar and author.
posted by Cassandra Strange
