Quote:
Originally Posted by ForrestPascal2024
What would your opinion be on NDE's, pre-birth memories and research done by Ian Stevenson on children that have memories of past lives?
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NEAR death experiences are not death experiences, so they have no bearing on existence after death.
Children less than age about 10 are well known to have difficulty separating fact from fantasy and the younger they are the more highly suggestible they are. Very young children are talented mimics and eager to please adults and elicit amazed reactions.
Some adults also are more suggestible than others, and are known to engage in motivated reasoning.
I think it's telling that quite often people who describe past lives tend not to describe just ordinary, prosaic, boring lives (which most lives are); they tend to describe romantic hero's quests and such like, or imagine themselves as influential, powerful, involved with or related to famous historical figures, etc.
Personally, I buy Ernest Becker's thesis: an individual's character is essentially formed around the process of denying one's own mortality. We humans make everything into an immortality project. In reaching for "proof" of "something more", we'll latch onto anything at hand.
Anecdotes, alas, do not constitute evidence, and given this strong motivation / need for us to believe ourselves to be immortals, it's doubly suspect.
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