news flash
I’ve made similar posts before – it fits here too:
As with any claim of extraordinary events, there are a few possibilities:
- Those making the claim are lying (hoax).
- Those making the claim are not lying, but are mistaken or deceived.
- Those making the claim are not lying, but the phenomenon has a natural explanation.
- Those making the claim are not lying and the phenomenon is real.
In any randomly selected extraordinary claim, it’s reasonable to assume that 1, 2, or 3 are far, far more likely than 4.
I see no reason why this claim is any different. It could be an elaborate hoax. It could be that the family is not lying, but someone else is deceiving them somehow. There are many other explanations that seem far, far more likely than “the kid was reincarnated”. With the evidence (such as it is) pushed forward so far, there’s no reason to stray from the assumption that 1 through 3 are much more likely than 4.
I think that’s the right way to approach this.
Yeah, good call.
Andrea’s mother suggested she look into the work of counselor and therapist Carol Bowman.
SO the question is , how good is Bowman at Googling ?
If as a little child you were the reincarnation of a person who died decades earlier, wouldn’t you know everything they knew as an adult? You wouldn’t have to learn to read or write, because the person you were reincarnated as would have known those things. Wouldn’t you amaze your teacher’s in grade school with your extensive knowledge of things you had never been taught? “My goodness, little James already knows how to read and write and I haven’t even taught him those things! He knows about history, basic science, and arithmetic! He seems to have the education of an adult person! And you should hear his stories about women!”
This description of events is very similar to Cold Reading. It can be spookily accurate when done properly. Our own ianzin wrote the book on the subject.
Not necessarily. Heck, it’s easy to forget memories of events in this current lifetime, such as replying to this thread a year ago. :o
For me, the response is to emphasize the bolded part of the quote below:
“It seems” is hardly a statement of scientific rigor.
If I say “It seems unlikely that a random person has won the lottery” and then I study every person in the US who has won the lottery… well, my study and my claim are in contradiction with each other. It is unlikely that a random person wins the lottery, but I’m not studying random people.
The same is true here. While it seems absolutely impossible… this guy has only studied 2500 children who made claims that seemed testable. How do we know that he hasn’t picked the 2500 kids who DID gain this information through normal means?
nm
Well, I’m Buddhist and don’t give a flip about reincarnation even if it is real. The head of the school I lived in of course wore orange robes and had a shaved head. Out in public the most frequent thing strangers whipped him with was reincarnation, “oh my god I knew you and was very close to you in a past life” etc… and he would get out of sorts and say something like,“well yes we were very close I was the brother who brutally murdered you, how nice you remember…”
no matter how real reincarnation is it’s just another illusion.
and everybody in college these days ought to be glad you no longer have to study Jung and pretend to take him seriously.
3-3-2015. It seems this has never been resolved. Where is the real James Leininger now? (not the dead pilot!). The reincarnated one. I would love to talk to him! I wonder if he follows this thread.