---In [email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
From: salyavin808 <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2014 8:26 AM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: What are the *benefits* of believing in God? ---In [email protected], <steve.sundur@...> wrote : Seems to me that knowledge of previous lives would be immensely useful, why do we forget it? Why do you think it would be so helpful? I think it could be counter productive. Putting it in an evolutionary context, the vast majority of people that ever lived were hunter gatherers. I think it would be highly useful to automatically know how to find water, how to avoid leopards etc. we are born as we are with minimal instincts and mental development (compared to other animals) because evolution favoured a more sophisticated culture which our brains need to learn from our parents. Any extra help would make this so much easier surely? Just to play Deva's Advocate, no reincarnation is necessary for useful skills to be passed along to the next generation. Unless you believe that each new chicken contains the reincarnated soul of another chicken, that is. Biologist Konrad Lorenz has proved that baby chicks just out of the egg run for cover when they see a silhouette of a falcon—even a plywood model. Nowadays, if evolution were known to be true we still had the skill and remembered everything we could bury a pot of cash and pick it up in our next life. Or get revenge on whoever it was that ran us over thus ending this one. You might say it just isn't set up to work like that but you'd just be multiplying entities beyond neccessity again. Occams razor. Anyway the burden of proof is always on the people with radical ideas so I'll wait until someone figures out a way of proving it. But not in denial though. Even though I happen to suspect that there may be something to the reincarnation thang, I see no need to provide "proof" of it because it's just a belief, and I don't much give a shit what others believe about my beliefs. As I've stated here several times, I won't know whether it's an accurate belief until I kick the bucket, and if the folks who believe that we just wink out like a light bulb turned off are right, I won't even be around to be disappointed. So I figure mine is a "no down sides" belief. That said, I would never presume to try to sell it to anyone else or feel the need to "defend" it. IT'S JUST A BELIEF. I think the world would be a better place if more people felt similarly about their beliefs. :-) I have no real sympathy for it but the stories of the children that do remember things are fascinating. The Scottish boy who thought he lived on an island was taken there and behaved very oddly when they took him into what he thought was his house. It was quite upsetting to watch. I can see why anyone would have a job doubting his story. Lots of people wanted to get all James Randi on it and that would probably be impossible given the unpredictability and rarity of the phenomenon, not to mention it being potentially unfair on a three year old. I always look for the ways in which things can't work but remain curious as it's one of those things that I'd take to be sure-fire proof that we don't know anything about what's going on here at all. And that would be cool indeed.
