To ask if you believe in past lives?

[Sayhellolikethis]

Name changed, as I’ve told MIL and DSis about this already…

Putting my little boy (just turned 4) to bed and he told me “I built 60 bridges during the war and I also built a bomb”. I asked him why he built a bomb and he said “I put 2 bombs on each of my bridges to protect them”. He also said “the factories were covered in camouflage”.

He then added “and a fighter jet plane falled to the ground”.

It was such a ramble of words and then he just wanted to snuggle down and go to sleep.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with their little ones? He won’t talk about it any further. Puzzled!!

If you want to convince people of a viewpoint, you need to present evidence otherwise you are just relying on blind faith and as such have no right or ability at all to attempt to change people's minds or mock them for their apparent lack fo faith.

It is not my intention to mock anyone - apologies if it has come across that way. Nor am I trying to convince anyone of my point of view.

I am just questioning people to encourage them to reconsider how entrenched and illogical their own view might be.

@Frabbits do your own research. Keep an open mind. Why expect others to do it for you? What evidence do you have that past lives do not exist?

It's not "in direct contradiction to how all our brain and memories work" ...

Scientists have studied and proven inherited memories, and there's examples in the animal kingdom - for example cats are born with the "memory" of how to hunt, they don't need to be taught by their mothers. All instinctive responses are memories pasted down through generations which another animal learnt at one time or another and then their offspring inherits this taught memory.

Just had to point that out as there's lots of people saying memories can't be inherited, but actually it's common among animals - proven in science - and happens all the time. It's not such a stretch to think over memories could be inherited

‘Do your own research’ is utter nonsense. Nobody on here is equipped to do a proper scientific study with all the safeguards. Nobody has even attempted the first step of a literature review. ‘Research’ is not the same as using google. This is where all the daft anti vax and covid denial stuff came from.

Well, for a start all religions except Buddhism would have been proven to be false. You can only imagine the effects that would have on fervent believers. There would be a much different opinion around death if you KNEW it isn't permanent. You could imagine changes in sentencing for murder if it turned out to be only a temporary condition. Attitudes to the death penalty would also change. Inheritance laws would have to change if you could show you were back again and wanted your original wealth. Our entire belief in how everything works would be completely overthrown!

I explained earlier in the thread how human memory works. Being able to recall a past life doesn’t fit with what we know. There is also no evidence for souls, which is what your theory requires.

as I said upthread, just because there are new discoveries being made doesn’t mean that the things that are known and understood can be thrown in the bin.

a lack of critical and scientific thinking is harmful to society as a whole

I don't need to disprove something for which there is no evidence. It's just the default position.

Equally, why should I waste my time looking for evidence of something just because you believe I it? Having blind faith in something is the opposite of being open-minded.

If you are sure that something extraordinary exists, then prove it. Shouldn't be hard if you have actual evidence for it. If you can't then you absolutely cannot expect anyone to accept it just because you think it's true.

A past life specialist 😂😂where do you study to become one of those? The University of Narnia?

I accept things as true when they are shown to be. That's pretty logical.

Having blind faith in woo is not logical.

The skeptics on this thread strike me as lazy thinkers that want everyone else to bend over backwards trying to prove things to their very closed and made up minds.

There is also no evidence for souls, which is what your theory requires.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
There is no evidence that 'souls' don't exist.

Having blind faith in woo is not logical.

Having blind faith in anything is not logical.
I am not in favour of blind faith, although I recognise that many (most?) people need it for emotional and psychological reasons.

Now this is an interesting discussion.

I imagine that fervent believers would just refuse to believe the new evidence. After all, religion is just a matter of choosing what to believe. I don't think it would have much effect on religion.

Why would sentences for murder change? Do you mean that courts would opt for life imprisonment instead?

Inheritance would not change - it would be widely accepted, as it is now, that you 'can't take it with you' so to speak. Death ends all property ownership, and marriage, and all relationships, notwithstanding reincarnation.
So next time round you could marry someone who used to be a close blood relative, as they are not related in the next life.

Yes I do.
Watch Barra boys AMAZING!! Total eye opener

I don’t not believe it but how could a person build 60 bridges and 120 bombs in the space of a war? Maybe he was overseeing it rather than building himself. Seems like a lot of work to do all that.

I imagine that fervent believers would just refuse to believe the new evidence. After all, religion is just a matter of choosing what to believe. I don't think it would have much effect on religion.

No. At the moment ALL religions exist despite no evidence for any of them This time you have proof that one is right and the rest are wrong. That's going to shake things up!

Why would sentences for murder change? Do you mean that courts would opt for life imprisonment instead?
No, I mean that because murder is only a temporary condition, it may not be treated as seriously as it is now.

Inheritance would not change - it would be widely accepted, as it is now, that you 'can't take it with you' so to speak. Death ends all property ownership, and marriage, and all relationships, notwithstanding reincarnation.

Really? You think if Donald Trump dies and cones back he won't want his millions again? He'll happily accept starting from scratch again?

So next time round you could marry someone who used to be a close blood relative, as they are not related in the next life.
I'm not touching that one! 😀

I didn't. Then DC spoke repeatedly about where they used to live, their old family etc. I just used to nod along and not know what to say, just listened.
I'm not so sure after that, I don't know what to believe. It all seemed so real and some topics toddlers shouldn't know about.

See, it seems to me that believers in woo are the lazy thinkers. Just accepting stuff with no reason or logic requires no effort at all.

I doubt we have an immortal soul that re-inhabits another body at death. Other things could explain this stuff. Jung believed that we inherit a collective unconscious, which he described as a ‘million year old man’. For him, it was a kind of collective memory. When a child dreams about ‘monsters’, for example, maybe he’s seeing the reptiles and snakes that hunted our mammalian ancestors. Even Freud thought there was some truth to this.

I’ve got a hunch that we inherit the memories of out ancestors - especially the traumatic ones. People who experiment with LSD, for example (I mean those who do it carefully and seriously, under laboratory conditions) claim they have travelled into their DNA and ‘seen’ incidents from their ancestral past. Then there is epigenetics, which may cast some light on it. All this is way beyond me, but I have a hunch that is what we’re really seeing in past life regression. I’m convinced we somehow inherit memories and traumas, not just of our great grandparents, but of our species, and even our genus.

I think no one will truly ever know.

But if we are alive now, why is it impossible to consider that we might have lived before?

There's a difference between 'just accepting something' - and believing in possibilities.

It seems likely that there is an abundance of things still to be discovered and understood. So saying its not real just because science hasn't developed to a point where it can pinpoint and prove or disprove it yet...doesn't make sense.

We all have things we may think are more likely or less likely. But really we're all just tiny little specks in the cosmos, looking up at the stars, thinking that because we now understand how gravity works, we know all the secrets of the universe.

Science is ever evolving too. New techniques and theories all the time. New avenues to explore. Its also not full proof. And, plenty of scientists also have faith. We could argue that all faith belongs in the realm of imagination too. But we usually don't. Because that would make us pretentious cunts.

If someone tells me they believe in healing crystals I might disagree and even think they are a bit nutty. But the same thing goes for people who tell me that nothing 'woo' is real because they don't see proof of it. Because how arrogant do you need to be to think you know all the secrets of the universe! Hell, give me crazy crystal lady any day. At least she's probably not a killjoy.

With kindness OP the logical explanation is he’s overheard something on telly, as the PP says.

Literally everything you can think of is a possibility. How do you decide which "possibilities" you believe in because there is an infinite number of things which are possibilities that you, personally, do not believe in and yet can't disprove? I mean, I can say literally anything and say "oh, but you can't disprove that trees walk around at nighttime and go to Starbucks" and call you closed minded for not believing it.

The fact its, it's not arrogant to not immediately accept something that another person believes in. It's arrogant to thing that people should accept something without giving them any reason to do so.