The purpose(s) served by believing in life after death (original) (raw)
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Perspectives on Reincarnation: Hindu, Christian, and Scientific (January 2019, MDPI)
Religions, MDPI, 2019
A volume of essays on the topic of rebirth, or reincarnation, which explore this topic from theological, philosophical, historical, and literary perspectives, with a primary focus on Hindu, Christian, and scientific claims about this topic.
The questions about life after death existed itself even before the time of the Buddha. Many scholars, philosophers, religious persons, including scientists have tried to answer this question. All the answers are not heartily accepted. However, religions from the past until now have answered this question in three ways i.e., (i) annihilation, (ii) eternal retribution in heaven or hell, and (iii) transmigration. We may say that two-third accept the phenomenon of life after death. Buddhism believes in transmigration or another word " rebirth ". The Buddha confirms this by narrating his own experiences in his former rebirths as mentioned in the Jātaka or Stories of the Buddha's Former Birth. The Jātaka is not the only Buddhist text that mentions about life after death, but also the Vimānavatthu, the Petavatthu, and so on. These books can be read for pleasure and at the same time, the reader may gain knowledge about the Law of Kamma, Vipāka, and life after death. This work under the topic " The Concept of Life after Death as Depicted in the Vimānavatthu and the Petavatthu " is based on the Law of Kamma and Rebirth, which speaks of the joyousness in Vimāna or heavenly Mansion, and the suffering in the Petaloka as the result of merit and demerit respectively. There are two aspects of Kamma-Vipāka discussed therein. The Vimānavatthu narrates the meritorious deeds that the Devatās did in their former lives, and the rewards they gained from those particular deeds to enjoy themselves in heaven. The Petavatthu narrates the demeritorious deeds resulting either in hell or in the Petaloka and also narrates the misery lives of the Petas. In modern time, it is difficult to believe in the concrete perpetuation of a nomadic supra-atomic spiritual substance through endless births and death. Thus, 2 present work throws light on concept of life after death during Buddhist, Pre-and Post-Buddhist era. In the present work, the requisite details are provided to prove this point of view.
Reincarnation research: In search of the most parsimonious sufficient hypothesis
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In this article, an attempt is made to explain the so-called Cases of the Reincarnation Type (CORTs), studied by researchers all over the world. The author stresses in general that a good scholarly interpretation is both parsimonious and exhaustive. Thus, although many cases can be explained by normal processes such as self-deception and fantasy, some of them definitely need a parapsychological explanation. Similarly, although ESP appears to be a more parsimonious hypothesis, it doesn't satisfactorily explain those cases that defy normal hypotheses. In contrast, reincarnation does fulfill both conditions. Finally, the author mentions some topics for further research, which go beyond a mere demonstration of reincarnation.
2020
Reincarnation is a trado-religious concept, by which a living being starts a new life in a different physical body or form after each biological death. For centuries the phenomenon of Reincarnation has been debated but science has it that it is the dominant expression of phenotypic and genotypic characteristics. Some religious beliefs and cultural practices hold tenaciously that human beings reincarnate. However, this paper, via hermeneutics and duly informed by Biological Education submits on the possibility of reincarnation and concludes on such scientific possibility as such.
Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory by James Matlock
Journal of Scientific Exploration
James Matlock’s Signs of Reincarnation discusses important issues related to the belief in reincarnation. These include the historical and social prominence of this belief in various cultures around the world, especially its place in spiritual and religious communities. Matlock also explores data seemly suggestive of reincarnation and attempts to develop a theory of reincarnation that can account for the data collected by parapsychological investigators and researchers. In this way, Matlock aims to show that belief in reincarnation is defensible as a conclusion drawn from what he calls “signs” of reincarnation. Matlock does a good job mapping out the wide range of beliefs about reincarnation across time and culture. His description of various case studies and their salient features is highly informative. And his effort to develop a theory of reincarnation—what he calls a “processual soul theory”—is a laudable attempt at trying to accommodate the various details of intere...
Ian Stevenson's "Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation": An Historical Review and Assessment
Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2011
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (first published in 1966) is a classic of 20th-century parapsychology that can still be read with profit. Along with Children Who Remember Previous Lives (2001), it is an ideal introduction to Stevenson. The latter work, intended for the educated general reader, provides an overview of 40 years of research and includes capsule summaries of several cases, but Twenty Cases contains detailed reports that illustrate reincarnation-type cases much more fully. The cases reported in Twenty Cases come from India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Lebanon, Brazil, and the United States (the Tlingit Indians of Alaska). They were selected from about 200 personally investigated by Stevenson in order to show the variety of features this type of case presents. The subjects of all were young children at the time they claimed to have lived before. Collectively these twenty cases help define "cases of the reincarnation type," as Stevenson came to call them, th...
A brief study and a quick analysis of reincarnation, especially on the basis of Ian Stevenson's research, the research work that came closest to academic and scientific recognition; also includes a selected collection of arguments for and against the possibility of the existence of reincarnation drawn from different authors.
Death, After-Life and Rebirth: Cultural Transfusion of Ideas
Funes. Journal of Narratives and Social sciences, 2018
On the basis of a cross-cultural comparative analysis this paper studies the ideas of death and rebirth in two cultures -India and Bulgaria. The results of the empirical research show that there is a significant shift in the perception of religion in the two countries. In Hinduism the phenomenon of death is tightly intertwined with the concepts of karma and reincarnation. Although it has been an ancient tradition in India there are many people nowadays who do not share the belief in reincarnation. While in Bulgaria, where the Christian church has officially denied the existence of rebirth, this concept is not so unusual. Thus, in postmodernity there is a process of cultural transfusion of ideas, in which new beliefs are incorporated into old traditional systems. In this way, the old systems of thought are rejuvenated, so that individuals gain sense, meaning and purpose in their lives. The paper also investigates the interrelation between the concepts of fate/karma, on the one hand, and death, on the other. In outlining the postmodern thinking, the paper also introduces the concept of "cultural transfusion", designating with this term the incorporation of new ideas into old belief systems without the latter to undergo significant or major transformations.
Although parapsychology traditionally has been concerned with the ques tion of whether some aspect of the human being survives bodily death, research on reincarnation, as one form survival might take, is a comparatively recent development. Myers, seemingly unaware of the one important case (Hearn, 1897) that had been published at the time he wrote, concluded in 1903 that “for reincarnation there is at present no valid evidence” (v. 2, p. 134). This situation began to change only in 1960 with the appearance of Ian Stevenson’s paper, “The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarna tions,” in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. In the first part of that paper, Stevenson (1960a) reviewed cases of claimed past life memory and reported having found 44 in which the person described as the previous incarnation was traced and identified. In the second part of the paper (Stevenson, 1960b) he considered possible interpretations of the cases and made...