Buddhists with abilities to do this have been known to see/visit some of the different hells that exist in other dimensions…there is one account where a person is rescued from a hell by Buddhist intervention in numbers…Using specific actions
[quote=FlexPenguin;39885]So, is it normal to be reincarnated with a completely different personality?
Now, if it were robbing banks and getting away with it…[/quote]
Have robbed many people in past incarnations, sorry poverty is not as pleasant in the next!
Flex, i can’t say if it is normal to reincarnate with a completely different personality everytime, what I can say is based on my experience in seeing and reliving many of my past incarnations in order to balance karmas with people I am in this life with. It seems to me that I had a different personality in each incarnation, depending on what I had to do and learn. However, I do recognise my essence as very distinct when I see myself in a vision, the same with other people, each person has a distinct essence and that stays with them from one incarnation to the next it seems. I had visions about people with me in this life where they would look completely different in another life, will be a different sex as well, but I would recognise them by their essence. Best I can describe this.
My mom always tells me that they were very worried about me when i was younger, I only started to talk at age 3 and a half and when I started one of the first things I told them apparently was that I was a train driver with my cousin between De Aar and Pretoria (a town and a city in SA) and I live now in Pretoria. I also apparently told them what I looked like etc. the more my parents told me that I wasn’t a train driver and that I don’t have a cousin old enough at that stage to be a train driver, the more I insisted that it was true. Eventually my dad told me one day to keep this to myself and to never talk about it. Since then I would keep all my visons I had about lifes to myself. Now here is the interesting fact: When I moved to Pretoria in 1991 to study here, I went to the State department that runs our train service and I asked permission to search their records and archives and I have found the records of the person I belief I was as well as his cousin’s records. It was most interesting.
For me reincarnation is a fact and very real.
[quote=thomas;39887]Is rape a sin God won’t forgive?
At any rate, I find the idea of reincarnation to be most depressing. What good is it to have another incarnation if there is no continuity or memory? It’s the same as being an entirely new person.
Regardless, I don’t believe in it, and believe we have ONE incarnation, and one lifetime in which to choose Heaven or Hell.[/quote]
Thomas,
I do not belief in the fact that anything has to be forgiven by God, he would be to busy just to forgive Christians and would have no time for the rest of the world. So I belief God has created reincarnation with karma to help us and himself along the whole evolutionary process.
There is continuity of memory, it just isn’t that obvious to us. We all have glimpses of past lifes, but most people choose not to recognise those moments and glimpses.
I am not here to convince you otherwise and I merely offer this as an alternative that there are others out there with different experiences and truths.
Fine, but I don’t see how you can reconcile reincarnation with your beliefs in Jesus and the Gospels. There’s nothing there to support reincarnation, and everything points to life, death, and then heaven or hell.
Thomas,
I respect your view and I understand it, may I ask that you respect mine as well. To explain why I can reconcile reincarnation with my christain beliefs will take more than just this forum and I really don’t have the time to go into 20 years of experience, psychic visions, readings, books and revelations I believe to be from God about reincarnation. For me it is my TRUTH and I will account for it one day in the afterlife, I therefore have no problem to reconcile other teachings with my christian faith.
Not necessarily Thomas. If you read some of the Gospels, such as the Gnostic Gospels, you do find justification for reincarnation in Christianity. It is known today that the early Christians believed in reincarnation.
[QUOTE=Surya Deva;39925]Not necessarily Thomas. If you read some of the Gospels, such as the Gnostic Gospels, you do find justification for reincarnation in Christianity. It is known today that the early Christians believed in reincarnation.[/QUOTE]
The Gnositics were a heretical sect and not Christians.
Reincarnation was denounced by the early Church Fathers.
There is ZERO support for reincarnation in the New Testament.
There is overwhelming support, and is in fact an essential part of our faith, that we have one life and one body, and that our body will die, our soul will depart for Heaven or Hell, depending upon the disposition of our soul, and that at the Resurrection, we will be given new indestructable bodies.
We will be the same people we were in our earthly lives, but somehow “glorified.”
You will search in vain for anything in Catholicism or any of the Protestant Churces which demonstrate a belief in reincarnation.
A few tiny sects might believe in it and claim some association with Christianity, but they aren’t Christian.
Yep, they were declared heretical by Constantine at the council of Nicea. Prior to that they were not heretical.
There is ZERO support for reincarnation in the New Testament.
This is debatable, however, depending on how you interpret it. I have seen scholars interpret reincarnation in the NT before. Moreover, the NT only includes a selection of the gospels, not all of them.
A few tiny sects might believe in it and claim some association with Christianity, but they aren’t Christian.
They would disagree.
[QUOTE=Surya Deva;39936]Yep, they were declared heretical by Constantine at the council of Nicea. Prior to that they were not heretical.
This is debatable, however, depending on how you interpret it. I have seen scholars interpret reincarnation in the NT before. Moreover, the NT only includes a selection of the gospels, not all of them.
They would disagree.[/QUOTE]
I don’t have time to dig up Church history, but the Gnostics would always have been heretical. Being declared so at a certain point in time doesn’t mean they were not prior to that.
At any rate, Catholicsm, the largest “denomination” of Christians rejects reincarnation as do all the mainstream Protestant denominations.
Christianity does not teach reincarnation.
I don’t have time to dig up Church history, but the Gnostics would always have been heretical. Being declared so at a certain point in time doesn’t mean they were not prior to that.
Obviously they were not always heretical, else there would be no need to declare them a heresy later on. It is understood that it was quite a common belief prior in Christian sects
Josephus, the Jewish historian who lived during most of the first century AD, records in his Jewish War (3, 8, 5) and in his Antiquities of the Jews (18, 1, 3) that reincarnation was taught widely in his day, while his contemporary in Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, in various of his writings, also refers to reimbodiment in one or another form.
After the original generations of Christians, we find the early Church Fathers, such as Justin Martyr (AD 100-l65), St. Clement of Alexandria ( AD 150-220), and Origen ( AD 185-254) teaching the pre-existence of souls, taking up reincarnation or one or another aspect of reimbodiment. Examples are scattered through Origen’s works, especially Contra Celsum (1, xxxii), where he asks: “Is it not rational that souls should be introduced into bodies, in accordance with their merits and previous deeds . . . ?” And in De Principiis he says that “the soul has neither beginning nor end.” St. Jerome (AD 340-420), translator of the Latin version of the Bible known as the Vulgate, in his Letter to Demetrias (a Roman matron), states that some Christian sects in his day taught a form of reincarnation as an esoteric doctrine, imparting it to a few “as a traditional truth which was not to be divulged.”
Source: http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/reincar/re-imo.htm
I don’t have time to dredge up Church history and the works of apologits to respond to quotes from internet detractors, which are endless in their distortions and misrepresentations of Catholicism.
For now, it is sufficient to say that reincarnation is not taught by Catholicism in any shape or form or in any mainstream Protestant church.
The soul is created on or about the time of conception, departs from the body at death, and will be reunited with the body at the Resurrection.
This is our faith. We get one incarnation.
You have your own faith and are free to believe as you see fit, but you are in error about Christianity and often misrepresent it.
This is not really a question of faith, it is a question of whether it is a historical fact that early Christians believed in reincarnation. According to historical records and the teachings of early Church fathers, yes they did. Therefore Christian gnostics are a legitimate sect of Christianity. They may not represent the Roman catholic stream of Chriastianity which you follow, but they represent other streams and this you will have to accept, lest you want to look like a bigot to others here saying only your branch of Christianity is Christianity.
In any case what you state on the grounds of faith is completely illogical to any rational person. You claim the say is created at conception with the body, which therefore means the soul has to be something which exists in the physical world, as it is part of created things. If it is in the body, we should be able to open the body and see the soul. Then you claim that the created soul departs at death, but if it is created with the body it should die with the body. Then you claim that on an appointed day the soul will be reunited with the body, but the atoms of the body will be long gone and recycled by nature.
The final problem with your belief is that you believe something which has been created and is finite will have eternal life in an eternal body after an appointed time. This goes against facts which show us that all created things perish, whether they be plants, animals, humans, rocks, suns, solar systems, nothing created endures. Even the universe has its cycles. I am reminded of what Krishna says, “Whatever is born, will surely perish”
This is why orthodox Christianity is an irrational religion. We Hindus got the good end of the stick when it came to giving out religion.
A thing that bothers me about the bible is that a council of men, … …had a number of books to choose from, so they sat and selected which books to include and which books to leave out of the bible…how can we be sure that what these men selected are the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? After all, they were just a council of men.
Can someone answer please?
You’re very disrespectful of other religions and their followers SD.
I will accept that you know your own faith, and would not presume to teach you about it, unless I did a very thorough study, and I think you should do likewise. Your understanding of Christianity is shallow.
And the soul is immaterial and not “in” the body, but united to it.
Hi I would like to add that its not that I am questioning the contents necessarily, just the selected for the readers?
Surya This is why orthodox Christianity is an irrational religion. We Hindus got the good end of the stick when it came to giving out religion.
This is tactless Surya x
Thomas, you are not exactly a shining example of religious tolerance yourself.
I do not believe something can be justified by faith. If you believe in something irrational, I am going to say it. You believe that the soul is created at conception alongside with the body, but then the body dies, but the soul lives on in an afterlife. Why? Why should the soul live on if it was created with the body? Then you say the soul comes back one day and its body is resurrected and made immortal. How? How can your body be physically resurrected when its decomposed into the ground, the atoms have been recycled and transformed into other things. How can there be an immortal body, when everything in the world decays? How does something which has a beginning in time, become timeless?
Don’t give me the faith crap. You clearly do not question your beliefs. This is why I said we Hindus got the better end of the stick when religion was being given out, because we have absolute freedom to question our religion and what it teaches, and reject it if it does not pass the test of reason.
Reincarnation vs resurrection? Which is more likely that the soul merely takes on a new body like a garment from life to life under the influence of karma until it has completed all its lessons or all dead people are magically assembled out of dust and given immortal bodies one day or skeletons rise from the grave and become people 
Surya…to Thomas…You clearly do not question your beliefs. This is why I said we Hindus got the better end of the stick when religion was being given out, because we have absolute freedom to question our religion and what it teaches, and reject it if it does not pass the test of reason.
Surya to Thomas …This is why I said we Hindus got the better end of the stick when religion was being given out, because we have absolute freedom to question our religion and what it teaches, and reject it if it does not pass the test of reason.
Crucially missing …now I understand
In Buddhism, Buddha states "Do not believe what I say, question whatever it is, yourself "
[QUOTE=Surya Deva;40198]Thomas, you are not exactly a shining example of religious tolerance yourself.
I do not believe something can be justified by faith. If you believe in something irrational, I am going to say it. You believe that the soul is created at conception alongside with the body, but then the body dies, but the soul lives on in an afterlife. Why? Why should the soul live on if it was created with the body? Then you say the soul comes back one day and its body is resurrected and made immortal. How? How can your body be physically resurrected when its decomposed into the ground, the atoms have been recycled and transformed into other things. How can there be an immortal body, when everything in the world decays? How does something which has a beginning in time, become timeless?
Don’t give me the faith crap. You clearly do not question your beliefs. This is why I said we Hindus got the better end of the stick when religion was being given out, because we have absolute freedom to question our religion and what it teaches, and reject it if it does not pass the test of reason.
Reincarnation vs resurrection? Which is more likely that the soul merely takes on a new body like a garment from life to life under the influence of karma until it has completed all its lessons or all dead people are magically assembled out of dust and given immortal bodies one day or skeletons rise from the grave and become people :D[/QUOTE]
I am tolerant of other religions, and respect what is good a true in all faiths. I especially respect the good intent and sincerity of other believers in all faiths, and would do my best to demonstrate that respect and not insult them.
I believe my religion is true, but that’s how it should be. I do not impose my religion, and my only reason for entering into this disagreement with you was not to debate my religion or yours, but to set the record straight–Christianity does not embrace reincarnation.
If Christianity is not logical to you, then you shouldn’t be a Chiristian. To me, it’s perfectly logical, and there is no other faith that I would ever consider embracing.
But don’t you accept the idea of an immaterial soul? You said that between incarnations the “soul” was in some other plane of existence waiting for a new body. This would be the same as an immaterial and disembodied soul.
Lastly, being “truthful” doesn’t mean you have to be rude.
If there is an ugly woman in the room, you would say, “Boy are you ugly,” but I would remain silent and try to find some inward beauty.
Yes, you would be telling the truth, but in a way that was unnecessary and hurtful.
You need to learn some manners, dude.
Thomas to Surya…If there is an ugly woman in the room, you would say, “Boy are you ugly,” but I would remain silent and try to find some inward beauty.
What would say Surya?