Old Skeptical Inquirer article deftly debunks scientific reincarnation "proof"
Ian Stevenson's conduct of the Imad Elawar investigation, considered among the strongest of his cases, fails on six fundamental grounds.
One of the most influential sources of empirical evidence for reincarnation is Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, by Ian Stevenson (1974). In recent years, my students in various philosophy of religion classes have reminded me of just how influential it has been. Their papers on the afterlife routinely quote authors persuaded by this book that reincarnation or some other paranormal hypothesis is the only plausible explanation of Stevenson's data....
It seems important, however belated, to undertake a thorough critical examination of the Twenty Cases methods and materials. I propose to begin this task. Further, I suggest that it is possible in a relatively short space to establish the presumptive unreliability of Stevenson's Twenty Cases work in general, due to gross failures in his methods of research, write-up of data, and analysis of hypotheses.
Success! I finally found this article that captivated me years ago. So the most amazing reincarnation-proof stories turn out to be (most likely) fantasies passed down and embellished. I suppose stories of quirky reincarnating - where the (often said-to-be) usual life-review and forgetting processes seem to have been bypassed - give many hope of personal (as in the personality's) survival of death. When I read THE IMPERSONAL LIFE I was happy and relieved to hear a near-echo of my longstanding understanding, that LIFE and every wave-particle of Life recycles, reincarnates, regenerates, resurrects - shapeshifts or lifeshifts - absolutely impersonally through real death (that is, 'really dead death')!
I used to marvel and wonder over the religious and spiritual teachings that suggested otherwise - or seemed to. But I marvelled in awe without any serious hope or naive notion that any of those doctrines or dogmas were - or had to be - literally true or any truer than imaginary.
Of course to me, imaginary is another way of life being real, just as voyaging the non-ordinary brings alternative ways of knowing. But I never found contentment in confusing ordinary (such as the scientific method) and non-ordinary (such as shamanic) ways of knowing. Imagining is how shamanic ways 'really work' and shift reality in mundane (measurable) to mysterious (unmeasurable) ways.
Creeping, creepy New Age fundamentalism with so much 'believing in' and then trying to 'scientifically prove' wondrous spiritual, metaphysical, and magical stories long ago began to extract the essential LIFE-FUN out of my curious questioning and child-like or foolish pondering over what happens during and after the inevitable, eventual ordinary death of extraordinary life as we or I know it. The New Age dogmas now seem to me to have become just way too much of a (used-to-be) good, thought-heart-gut freeing thing.
~ Elizabeth
