Rebirth PART ONE: evidence in young children (Agnosticism)

by David Turell , Wednesday, May 15, 2024, 15:40 (73 days ago) @ xeno6696

Matt: To the extent that there is a final mystery in Buddhism, it's this.

Confusing in a way but thank you. I did not know of Sheol as a concept after death. As for consciousness invading another person, as in the kids, my wife has dreams of older ancestors she has never met. But then, again, she has some definite psychic abilities.

I'm not familiar with the canonical status of it, but the Catholic concept of purgatory is directly descended from the idea of Sheol. I remember distinctly that the word "sheol" appears 66 times in the Hebrew Bible, always in relationship with death, and that the purification concept arose in my research on Hell, it was in midrashic literature.

In my research, its essentially a place your soul migrates to undergo purification before some sort of ascendance. However in Isaiah and Ezekiel it starts to sound more like the Christian idea of Hell, though in the history of Hell, the place of Gehenna (essentially a trash pit for refuse outside of Jerusalem) is where most references were made in the leadup to Christ.

I have to point out that there's reason to believe that reincarnation was a perfectly acceptable Jewish belief at the time of Christ and that the idea of rebirth was actively redacted from early Christian bibles because it contradicted the doctrines of the church fathers.

I'm not a huge expert here, I've done some research on this for my novel--and that was over 10yrs ago. I'll be revisiting it the next couple years however as I get those juices flowing again.

Thank you for this review. As a modern Reform Jew we were taught there is no Hell or Heaven. So then what? "God will care for us, trust in God". Quite nebulous, but it fits into the Jewish concept of the loving, caring God.