The Anathemas Q-and-A: Why not Reincarnation?

It was in the quiet place that the most urgent questions came. Questions without answers that nagged until I held them up-close and personal. What if I did have previous lives? What might I have been or done? What difference would such knowledge make now? If I remembered, would I not be wiser for the previous experience? Would it explain some of those mysterious aspects of my personality that seem so random in the current context?

From “what if reincarnation?” personally, it was natural to go to “what if reincarnation?” for the human species.

After all, the eastern half of the world has held this belief for eons longer than the “one life, one death” concept has been around. Would it make any difference to a society if its people were aware, individually and collectively, of their personal predecessors and descendants? Who of us, when beyond prejudice and fear, is not curious, even eager, to know his own source and destination, and that of one’s immediate relations and the human race?

Who would not trade in the dismal declaration, Remember man that you are dust and unto dust you shall return! for a destiny more suited to man’s nobler aspirations? From “What if reincarnation?” it is a natural leap, at least theoretically, to “Why not reincarnation?”

History and tradition of little help

A venerable priest-friend, on hearing about The Anathemas, emailed me thus: “It just came to my mind that I forgot to tell you that, according to the teachings of the Catholic Church, there is no such thing as REINCARNATION.” For him, and millions across the ages, case closed. The Authority has spoken and so it is. Snarky to mention, but this same authority condemned Galileo as a heretic for observing and teaching that the earth rotated around the sun, not vice versa.

When healthy curiosity poses questions that contradict dogma, our creeds offer only further mysteries in explanation; and our sciences, excluding spirit, admit evidence only from the dust here before we came and left behind when life leaves the body, ignoring the role and effects of life itself.

Here our written history becomes a part of the problem. As Alex Haley, the author of Roots observed, “History is written by the winners.” And implied is that what is handed down is not always complete or even true. As a librarian warns the protagonist in The Anathemas: “History is no exact science. Historians, no matter how objective they try to be, are individuals with limited points of view. Even when they honestly tell what they see, they too often dishonestly claim that what they see is all there is to be seen.” (P.96)

  Click to subscribe to this site’s RSS Feed.