In Reply to: "Touchy Feely" posted by Thinker on August 10, 2004 at 11:35:29:
I posted on reincarnation as Madame Mestophiles, which is the part of me that has an interest in New Age ideas. I used Madame because I also didn't want to give the impression that Carol is a big believer in reincarnation. I personally wouldn't put reincarnation into the New Age category, but a lot of people do, so I let the Madame handle it.
I studied the question of reincarnation from a Biblical perspective after leaving The Family and learned some very interesting things about how this belief actually appears in scripture and was expunged from the teachings of the early Church. I also read a lot of stuff by the Christian psychic Edgar Cayce back in the late 1970s after leaving TF.
Nowadays I put reincarnation and anything else that has to do with the hope of personal survival after death into that category: hope. As such, I see discussion about reincarnation as speculative, which is totally OK with the part of my head that's trained to do science. I was sorry that the discussion didn't get off the ground further, and as ridiculous as my speculation about The Family being gassed Jews & gypsies from the Holocaust may sound, that's actually a speculation I entertain from time to time to explain spiritual things about The Family (and by extension, Ex-Family) that I cannot explain with a social science theory or conventional theological reasoning.