Past-Life Regression
 

1. Do you believe in reincarnation?

2. Do you theorize that you've had several lives before the one you're in?

3. Please explain.

4. Have you ever seen a mystic/psychic to be more in-touch with your past life/lives?

4a. Please share the results of this/these visit(s).

5. If you don't believe in reincarnation, please explain your stance.

1. Absolutely not.

That pretty much answers the rest of the poll.

I believe that the belief in reincarnation is similar to the belief in an afterlife, in that both are understandable attempts to grasp to any immortality that can't be disproven.I accept that this is the one and only sentient time I get, and that after I die is exactly like before I was born.

Nope. Can't say I'm worried or interested. I am living for now.

Not something I believe is real. The main reason I think that is that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest it's real. There's also the issue of how rapidly the number of people on earth is growing. Since there are so many more people now that there were a few generations ago that means, even if reincarnation were real, most people would not have had any previous human lives.

Reincarnation assumes that this is the only world. I believe that there are things beyond here we can't begin to comprehend. We'll essentially dimension hop, in death, for a time before we hit eternity.

Logical fallacy. If you can't disprove something then you can't claim to know that it isn't true. You can not believe in it, you can even claim to actively believe that it isn't true, but to claim to know that it isn't true crosses the line of logic. It's simply logically impossible to claim to know with 100% certainty that something that can't be disproven isn't true. 99.999% sure perhaps, but that last .001% is the difference between believing and knowing. So the four people who voted for the first option are wrong. Straight up. Option two is as far as you can go.

The burden of proof is on those purporting the theory, not the other way around.

Consider for a minute that perhaps not every living being has had a past life in order to harbor memories in their subconscious (and not every person alive, today, is a result of reincarnation) but once in a while it may happen.

I remember watching this cool video on youtube, some years back, about a well-constructed theory that there are at least 10 dimensions. (It's really hard to understand so you have to focus in order to sort of wrap your head around it.)

That goes back to my primary point, which is that there's no evidence of such a thing.

But if you're actively claiming something doesn't exist then you're the one purporting the theory. If all you're saying is that you don't believe something then you're not making any kind of claim, but claiming that something actually doesn't exist is a claim and you have to provide proof.

If I say I don't believe there is a unicorn living on a particular undiscovered island in the South Pacific then I don't have to prove that. I simply don't believe it. If I claim that it isn't there then I actually have to prove that the unicorn doesn't live there.

Lack of evidence is proof enough that something isn't true until that evidence comes forward. That's not to mention that claiming something doesn't exist is commonly in response to someone saying that it does.

There's no solid evidence but there's been a few people in this world (even children) who claim to have some sort of extrasensory perception or some memory of being somewhere else. I'm a tiny bit skeptical of this case but I will admit if she's not bullshitting everyone, her soul has had a terrific journey. Someone in the comment section in the video I'll post below makes a good point about Ms. Karlen: she seems to have no concern for Otto Frank; if her soul belonged to Anne in a past life, she would have been chiefly concerned with being reunited with her father while he was still alive. HOWEVER. There are probably several reasons this didn't happen, and I'm not going to split hairs over it.

No. A lack of evidence is merely a lack of proof of something's existence, not proof that it doesn't exist. I'm an atheist who is perfectly comfortable with actively believing that god doesn't exist. I think human psychology's penchant for inventing gods anywhere and everywhere regardless of how absurd it may sound is evidence enough for me that god is nonsense, but I would never go so far as to claim to know that he doesn't exist. No matter how much I believe that he doesn't exist, I can't know that he doesn't. Same with reincarnation.

The fact that so many people who claim to have past lives also seem to believe that they were someone significant in their previous life, despite the statistical improbability of that being the case, is actually more of an argument against reincarnation to me than an argument in favor of it.

We can't truly, unequivocally know anything for sure. So either we can eliminate the word "know" from the English language or we can recognize it as meaning "I believe to an extremely high degree of certainty".

I feel that the theory that these people have (the "I was someone important in my past life" thing) sort of discredit their claims. I don't know who I was. I was probably a nobody, but I know that there's something beyond my comprehension that has filled my life with a constant discomfort and longing for a time I hadn't lived in (during this particular lifetime anyway).

True. But to claim knowledge, even a negative claim that something doesn't exist, is still making a claim that something is true. And to make a claim requires proof. A lack of proof for reincarnation only proves that reincarnation hasn't been proved. Nothing more. It may be evidence for its unlikelihood, but not for its nonexistence.

And you can't claim to know something that hasn't been proved with sufficient evidence, only that you believe.

You can't prove a negative though. So you're basically arguing here that one can never know that anything is untrue.

Well, yeah. Aside from math you can't actually prove anything. That's just the nature of science and the world in general. In the strict sense of the word you can't actually "know" much of anything. You can be sure beyond a reasonable doubt, but that's not the same thing as knowing something.

And just because you can't prove a negative (at least not a vague negative like that) doesn't mean you can make a claim and not have to prove it. If you claim that reincarnation doesn't exist you have to back it up.

You just acknowledged that you can't prove a negative but you still want proof that reincarnation doesn't exist?

I'm saying that if you're making a negative claim that doesn't relieve you of your obligation to back up what you're saying. So if you're saying there is no such thing as reincarnation you have to provide evidence the same as if you're saying that it does exist.

I would say making a "negative claim" about something for which there's no evidence is a perfectly acceptable position.

That doesn't make any sense. Can I then prove that there is no god by saying there is no evidence for him and not providing any other reasons?

Oh, and Wikipedia says you're wrong too.

And this random site too.

And that's after two minutes of Googling. There seem to be many more such sites backing me up that just happen to be far too long winded for me to bother with ATM.

Looks like you're making my case for me there.