We have a winner!!!

But don’t scroll down and see who it is yet, if you can control yourself.

Here’s the answer to why I, as a Catholic, do not believe in reincarnation: Because Jesus says so.

For your convenience, I offer the following negative response for you to cut and paste into the combox, complete with lots of words in ALL CAPITALS, so you don’t have to waste anymore of your valuable time:

“What what WHAT?!! What kind of crummy answer is THAT?! Boy, what a disappointment—blind DOGMATISM from a guy who’s supposed to KNOW better. Dan Lord, you stink. Would you believe in a FLAT EARTH if Jesus said so?”

O.K., now for a wee explanation of my answer.

First, there is one thing that probably ought to be stated even though it looks like most of you are already aware of it, which is the fact that there are two fundamentally opposed views of reincarnation. At the risk of sounding like a Waffle House menu, we can call one kind “Eastern style”, and the other “Western style.”

Western style reincarnationists like the idea of reincarnation but cannot let go of a certain notion that has always been taught by the Judaeo-Christian culture in which they were raised: namely, that each person has a unique individual relationship with a personal God. In other words: God made you, and there is no substitute for you, and God wants you (yeah, you, kid!) to live forever with Him in heaven.

Eastern style reincarnationists, on the other hand, reject personal identity as an illusion.* There is nothing like a “self” as we understand it that is transferred in reincarnation—only a kind of stored up “tendency” toward selflessness.

The author of the CBS article  from my previous post makes no such distinction between the two types, but it is clear that the people at that conference in New York are “Western style”; they cling to the belief that they as individuals survive fundamentally intact from one life to another—that would explain why they are sometimes able to bring along some memories from past lives.

Only, I’m not buying it. I know some of you are favorable to it, but hear me out.

When I say “Jesus says so,” it’s a mouthful. It denotes an entire structure of causality that breaks down roughly like this:

1. Jesus is God, the Truth Incarnate. Why do we think that? For the following reasons, all of which can be strongly backed up with logic and empirical evidence:
1. Because He said so, and to back it up…
2. He did and said things no mere mortal could do or say, culminating in the fact that…
3. After he died he brought himself gloriously back to life.
2. Jesus taught his chosen dudes, the Apostles, truth.
3. He gave them an actual (not just a symbolic or analogical) share in his power, including the ability to express infallibly the truth about certain things. Remember, for instance, Luke 10:16: “He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me…”
4. They proceeded to teach the truth and elaborate on it as necessary.
5. They passed their power on to other methodically chosen dudes.
6. One of those dudes, Paul, wrote this: “men die only once, and after that comes judgment” (Heb. 9:27).
7. The methodically chosen and similarly gifted dudes who came after him for the next 2K years upheld the same teaching.

The thing is, Jesus tells us many things about who we are, why we’re here, and where we’re going. A lot of it really puts our brains to work—stuff that involves a lot of theological reasoning or deduction from the natural law. But some of it asks us to rely entirely on our faith in Jesus.

Ummm...I don't get it.

For instance: the Holy Trinity. Nobody before Jesus saw that one coming. Three Persons in one Godhead? Are you crazy? And you can’t demonstrate it, either. Shamrocks are vaguely helpful, I guess, for teaching it to 1^st graders, but we have to remember that we are talking about something that exists beyond our ordinary powers of reason. We believe that God is Three Persons in One Godhead because Jesus said so.

You cannot demonstrate exactly what happens after you die, either—some of you already pointed that out in the combox. Our powers of logic and deduction start to break down when it comes to exactly what happens after death. Instead, we trust in what Jesus has revealed to us through the Church he personally established—which speaks with His voice, so to speak, His authority, when she tells us universally applicable things about our faith or morals.

Someone might tell you differently than Jesus about what happens when we die. Maybe it’s someone we trust and love, someone whose opinion we value. Let’s go ahead and say it’s the Buddha himself, Siddhartha Gautama, one of the holiest, most trustworthy representatives of reincarnation EVER—but he’s not God, see? By his own insistence. He’s just a man, so his knowledge is flawed and limited. Jesus has no such limitations. The question we all have to ask is: do I really believe Jesus is God?

Alright, so there you have it—surely, food for thought, if nothing else, right?

And now, without further ado, the winner of this little contest, the one whose answer most closely matches the one I just gave, is:

Jen Ambrose AND Mary Kruger!!!!

Yes, a tie!! They both picked up on the passage from Hebrews, from which can be inferred (along with 2,000 years of consistent Church teaching which is guaranteed by the Holy Spirit) the reality of one earthly life, followed by eternal happiness (or eternal suckage, depending—actually, “suckage” may not be the right term—I’ll check on that…)

Thanks for the great discussion, everybody! God bless!

* For instance, according to the Mahatanhasankhaya-sutta of the Majjhima-Nikaya, as quoted in Buddhism, ed. by Richard Gard (George Braziller, 1962) our “consciousness” is one of the basic contributors to nirodha, or “anguish,” in the universe, and must be removed in order to attain Enlightenment.

According to a CBS news story from this past May, “about one in five Americans believes in reincarnation, and roughly one in ten remembers a past life.” Those are huge numbers, and I’m guessing they are up a bit from a few decades ago, when a similar poll would have yielded that four in five Americans believed reincarnation was a brand of evaporated milk. (For assistance with that joke, see picture on left)

As a Catholic, I don’t believe in reincarnation, though I can understand part of its appeal.

What appeal is that, Dan? Good question, imaginary conversation partner.

Part of the appeal lies in the definition, as quoted in that CBS story: “…when we die physically, a part of us goes on…and we have lessons to learn here. And…if you haven’t learned all of these lessons, then that soul, that consciousness, that spirit comes back into a baby’s body.”

That’s appealing, don’t you think? Not the “repeating lives” part. The “starting over with a clean slate” part. That’s an appealing idea, to everybody, whether you believe in reincarnation or not: starting fresh, being made new so you can try again to be a better person.

Not to gloat, but a Catholic has that experience every time he makes a sincere sacramental Confession. Like a priest once said to me in his thick Irish accent after I had just poured out a particularly noxious batch of sins and been absolved: “There y’are…just like a new born baby.” That process of improving oneself, botching it, and being cleaned off and renewed in order to try again is the pattern of every genuine Catholic life. “Therefore, my beloved…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for God is at work in you…”(cf. Phil 2:12-13)

Having said that, it is still a fair question to ask: why not believe in reincarnation?

First, let’s look at the reasons why reincarnation might be true:

          1.     Many cultures and societies throughout human history have and continue to believe in it. That’s not insignificant. I believe in “the democracy of the dead,” to borrow from Chesterton, and many, many people have voted in favor of reincarnation.

          2.     There is evidence in nature. Our entire world is filled with ongoing cycles of birth, death and rebirth. Spring comes, then goes away, everything dies, and then spring comes back again. Plants grow, bear fruit and flowers, wither and die, and later come back again. A man is born, grows up, dies—might not he come back again, too, somewhere else, to repeat the process?

          3.     Some people insist that they carry memories of past lives. Shirley Maclaine is famous for that. The CBS article reports numbers of people who all claim the same thing.

There you have it. Those are the three reasons I can think of for believing in reincarnation. So, why would I not believe in it?

CONTEST TIME!!!

I’ll let YOU, O reader of TSOW, answer the question! Go ahead…don’t be shy! Mosey on down to the comment box and tell me why you think that the Catholic explanation of life after death is stronger than the reincarnationist’s explanation. The first person to give an answer that most closely matches the one I have in mind wins a FREE copy of my full length CD, “Thumbwrestle,” which I will ship to you completely free of any charge to you! Plus, I’ll compose a follow-up post that goes over the answer and, more importantly, exalts you as the genius you always knew you were! That’s right! This is Theology made FUN!

So, come on. Take a crack at it! Why not believe in reincarnation? See you in the combox!