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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Reincarnation On Trial
analogies illustrate but cannot offer proof
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Some reincarnationists say this:
"Proof of reincarnation is everywhere. Just look around you. Everything is a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth! What could be more obvious? Look at the four seasons; the water cycle; the acorn that becomes the oak and then the acorn again; the planted seed dies only to sprout as wheat, to produce more seeds. Proof of reincarnation is all around us."
In my youth, before I learned how to think, I found this line of argument rather convincing. It has a certain logic to it; but closer examination reveals many flaws.
Is a planted seed, its germination, growth, and maturation, evidence of reincarnation? If so, that's strange, because, in the Christian tradition, this metaphor is employed to picture - not reincarnation - but the death and resurrection of Christ.
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John 12: 24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."
So which one is it? evidence for reincarnation or resurrection? - or neither?
the pitfalls of analogy
Any skillful debater will tell you that you cannot use analogies to prove anything. You get a penalty-flag for trying that.
Analogies are very helpful in illustrating an abstraction, quite useful as teaching devices - but only after the fact of the matter has been substantiated.
Once we know for sure that the Earth orbits the Sun, we can use any metaphor we like to make this clear and plain; but don't come to me and say, "Oh, but, each day and night is like a birth and death - and that's how we know the Sun dies each night, hides somewhere in the heavens for a few hours, and is reborn in the morning."
You can't do that. You can't use analogy as proof of what you want to believe.
It's like this.
Let's say that the theory of reincarnation contains five essential elements: A, B, C, D, and E.
Someone comes along and says, "a seed that is planted and bears fruit is just like reincarnation, as it contains elements A, B, and C."
But D and E are conveniently missing from the "seed" analogy. This embarrassing lack of corroboration, however, is glossed over and the existence of D and E is not even mentioned while the "proof" of A, B, and C is widely promoted.
And by this kind of sloppy reasoning we can use the seed analogy, or a cycles-of-nature analogy, to "prove" reincarnation; or, with a little massaging, anything else we might want to promote.
I hate to be so impolite to mention this, but the acorn that germinates is not the same acorn that originally spawned the parent-tree.
Shocking, but you heard it here first.
My amazing acorn-insight is just one more example of leaving out C, D, and E, while attempting to "prove" A and B.
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Editor's last word:
In that time of youth I mentioned - a period of "Gullible's Travels" for me - I belonged to a church which heavily emphasized "last-days prophecies" of the Bible. There was a certain peripatetic evangelist who would make the rounds, congregation to congregation, wowing the crowds with sensational claims of dystopian future, sermons based on "analogy as proof."
And, boy, did he have an array of fantastic stories. We were offered "solid proof" that "the Beast Power" would rise in Europe in just a few years; that, the party-faithful would be wafted away to a "place of safety" during a time of world war; that, only our church had the "one true set of doctrines" and the "one true leader" at the helm - I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
Funny thing was, I was really convinced at the time. It was all so reasonable-sounding. Everything he said made sense and followed a good logic; that is, if you accept "analogy as proof" (along with other slips of coherent argumentation).
This ecclesiastical prosecuting-attorney for "biblical truth" used the same kind of disingenuous disputation tactics as we see in the argument, "reincarnation is true because we see proof for it in seeds that die and winters that turn to spring."
Editor's note: Regarding those prophecies of "the Beast rising in Europe," everything changed for me when I found a book that offered four different interpretations of Revelation; some of which, I would begin to see, were much better thought-out, and more loyal to the context, than what I'd been fed. This, truly, was the beginning of the "last days" for me -- the end of my time in Big Religion, with its stultifying and pompous "infallible" doctrines and gurus.
Today, decades removed from it all, I shake my head - at myself - to realize how credulous, how uncritical, how servile, I was in my thinking in those early days. I might even say, how embarrassed I am to see what I was then; and yet, that's no good either, as we must never condemn ourselves for times of immaturity. We were what we were at the time, and could not have been more. Nevertheless, how strange it all seems to me now; so provincial and one-dimensional was I in my world-view then. I didn't even understand, or couldn't accept, that there were other viewpoints, other studied opinions, other competing interpretations -- not just of Revelation but of any topic worthy of consideration.
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