If someone claims to be reincarnated and provides specific details about their past life, including their previous social security number, should they be allowed to immigrate freely to the country that they claim they were a citizen of in their past life?
By immigrating freely, I mean having full citizenship rights or at least permanent residency without having to apply for a temporary visa. Let’s say the country in question is the United States.
This isn’t exactly a great-debate of all time, but this isn’t a simple ask and answer discussion either.
Well, the question is, if we could somehow establish that reincarnation is a scientific fact, and also establish that certain people are the reincarnation of other people, what legal changes should therefore result?
If you were married in your past life, are you still married in your new life? If you owned property in your past life, do you still own that property? If you had a medical license in your past life, do you still have a medical license? If you were convicted of a crime and sentenced to 99 years in prison, but died after only serving 9 years, do you still have to serve out the remaining 90 years?
The question I have, is that since in the normal course of things people don’t remember their past lives, what exactly would it mean for the past person and the current person to be the same person? In what sense are they the same person? I went through all that time and effort to get a medical degree and then I die and I’m reincarnated as a baby and have to start all over again? What exactly is the continuity between the past person and the current person? The soul? What’s that, exactly?
It doesn’t seem to me that we should establish any legal link between the old life and the new life, even if it were established to be true. Even in places that believe in reincarnation don’t do that. They tend to believe that your past life was just to prepare you for your current life, and looking back and trying to recover your past life is counterproductive, you’re supposed to live this life, not relive your last life.
So just because you were a citizen of Germany in a past life doesn’t mean you should be a citizen of Germany today. Like, do you speak German anymore? If you really were connected to Germany, why didn’t your soul reincarnate as a German baby? And what if you’re Hitler? Should we put you on trial?
I think that main change might be that if connection between old and new lives could be established, people would start writing wills that leave everything to their future selves. (of course the act of doing so may cause you to get hit hard by the karma hammer and spend the next four hundred yearsas a clam.)
Yes, on the condition that they also stay where they are at the same time, and that they pay their taxes double (or triple, or more, depending on how many other lives the no-longer-an-individual has). If they protest that reincarnation actually doesn’t work that way, the response is “Neither does anything else”.
And if 3 people do it, 3, can you imagine, 3 people walking in and providing details and walking out? They may think it’s an organization.
And can you, can you imagine 50 people a day — I said 50 people a day — walking in and providing details and walking out? Friends, they may think it’s a movement.
It is kind of funny how people somehow think that if you know someone’s social security number, you must be that person.
Folks, social security numbers are not secrets. I know that sometimes people on the phone ask you to prove your identity by giving them the last four digits of yours social security number, but when you do that, how does the person on the other end of the phone know you answered the question correctly? They do it because your social security number is right there on their computer screen.
It’s not the fault of the people asking the question, they didn’t make up this ridiculous method of identity verification. But it is the fault of the person who designed the test. It’s fucking farcical. When I feel like screaming at the person on the phone asking the question, I stifle myself, because screaming won’t do any good.
In any case, knowing someone’s social security and details about their life is not a sufficient method of identifying yourself as that person. Because, for the same reason, if you can identify yourself by knowing someone’s social security number, how does the person you’re identifying yourself to know you got the correct answer? They do it by knowing your social security number. So if that person knows your social security number, does that make them you? No it doesn’t. So we’ve established that knowing a person’s social security number doesn’t make you that person. Same thing with other details of their life. How does the person who is testing you by quizzing you about the personal details of your life know the personal details of your life? And if he knows those details, does that make him you?
Anyway, of course knowing the details from the life of a dead person wouldn’t be much evidence that you were the reincarnation of that person. That’s ridiculous. You could be using clairvoyance, or spirit channeling, or dowsing. There are lots of perfectly logical explanations other than reincarnation.
And the thing is, even people who believe in reincarnation think that in the general course of things you don’t remember your past lives. It’s a fluke if you do. So if there is such a thing as reincarnation, remembering your past lives isn’t something that is going to happen very often. So identifying your past incarnations is a mug’s game.
My previous thread is if the person should re-live who they claimed to once be. This thread is different because I’m also asking that shouldn’t knowledge alone be enough to allow someone to live as a citizen?
Also, does anyone agree with “you are your memories.”
If you were married in your past life, are you still married to that person in your current life? If you were serving a 99 year prison sentence, but died after serving 9 years, do you still have to serve the remaining 90 years? If you owed someone $50, and then died, do you still owe them $50? If you were Adolf Hitler in a previous life, should you be put on trial of Hitler’s crimes? If you were put on trial for being Hitler in a previous life, and you got the death sentence, wouldn’t that be getting away with your crimes?
Immigration is the least of it.
Obviously I don’t actually believe in reincarnation, but I’m trying to take your “what if” seriously. If we seriously had proof of reincarnation, and not just in general, but enough to match currently living people with their past lives, what would that mean? What responsibility do people have for their actions in a past life? Lots of believers in reincarnation believe that the universe itself deals out the karma for your past credits and discredits, and your current life is a natural consequence of your conduct in your past lives. If so, what’s the point of human beings trying to impose more consequences? What would be the point?
Why do eternal souls care about such temporal and banal matters like citizenship in nations that are naught but dust in the wind? What’s the point in proclaiming LOOK UPON MY PASSPORT YE MIGHTY AND DESPAIR?
As others have already pointed out, being able to relate details of your alleged past life is very poor evidence of your reincarnation (though it may be evidence of your ability to do some research on details of a dead person’s life).
Also, as has been discussed in numerous threads on this board (most notably the threads in Cafe Society in which people have insisted that they saw an alternate ending to the film “Big”), human memory is extremely elastic, and notably unreliable. We believe that our memories are infallible, but they are, very often, surprisingly inaccurate. Even if someone truly, truly believes that they have extensive memories of a “past life,” that alone is not evidence of it, and it’s more likely to be evidence of a substantial delusion, if not outright mental illness.
Especially when the only way you can prove your identity by reciting your social security number is if somebody else knows it as well and can verify that you got it right. Which, according to the OP’s logic, must mean that other person is also you.
My motherfucking university used it as the student ID#, which is how my boyfriend got hold of it and eventually used it to open a bank account he never touched again, thus fucking my credit score. Any university worker could make off with lists of hundreds of SSNs real easily.
As did mine, though they appended a single “control digit” at the end of the SSN for the university ID number (which, of course, would do nothing to prevent ID theft). That was 30 years ago; my understanding is that they’ve gotten wiser since then, and student ID numbers there are now completely unrelated to SSNs.
The matter of identity theft via SSN brings up another point, regarding the OP’s question:
Let’s say that, for the sake of debate, the U.S. were to decide that, yes, if someone can somehow “prove,” via a “remembered” SSN and other details of their past life, that they are a reincarnated U.S. citizen, that person would be granted U.S. citizenship.
Obviously, the U.S. government would need to cross-check the provided information with historical records; “I remember that my late wife and I went to see ‘From Here to Eternity’ on our first date” would be virtually impossible to prove, so they’d have to rely on things like education records, employment records, birth records, marriage records, etc.
The issue becomes that, if the government has access to that information, a lot of other people could get access to it, as well. There’s already a huge black market for stolen identities; I could easily foresee a very brisk business in hackers providing potential immigrants with the key bits of information about a deceased person that they’d need in order to “prove” that they were reincarnated U.S. citizens.
