Shawn,

Your papers defend reincarnation, but they do not state what you believe it is. Before we go further, I ask you to put your position on the record. A short answer to each question is enough.

When answering, please distinguish between your personal beliefs, the teachings of the traditions you reference, and conclusions you believe scientific research establishes. I am interested in your actual position, not merely the range of possible interpretations.

What kind of claim is this?

In “Reconsidering the Evidential and Historical Boundaries of Reincarnation” (p. 1), you describe survival and reincarnation as “serious explanatory options, not a laboratory deduction.” Is that your position today: that reincarnation is an option under consideration, or that it is an established fact?

Is your claim scientific, religious, or metaphysical? If it is more than one, which part rests on evidence and which part rests on revelation?

You wrote that the missing falsifier is “a real weakness in the model’s scientific presentation” (p. 7). Have you found a falsifier since? If so, state it. If not, is the weakness in the presentation only, or in the model?

What is reborn?

Hindu teaching says a permanent soul passes from body to body. Buddhist teaching denies a permanent soul and affirms only a causal stream. Which do you hold, or do you hold a third view?

If the same soul returns, is the reborn person the same person as the deceased, or a new person with an old soul?

If he is the same person, why do nearly all people remember nothing? If he is a new person, in what sense did anyone return?

What is inherited?

A man dies leaving a wife and a son. He is reborn. Is she still his wife? Is the boy still his son?

Does the reborn person owe the debts or own the property of the deceased? If not, why not, if he is the same person?

In some Tibetan Buddhist institutions, a recognized reincarnated lama succeeds to his predecessor’s religious office and associated institutional responsibilities. If identity carries over well enough to transfer an office, why does it not transfer ordinary family relationships, property, or debts?

Does guilt carry over? If a man dies unrepentant of murder, is the child who receives his soul guilty of it?

Stevenson reported cases of a claimed past life as the opposite sex. Do you hold that sex and orientation are fixed to the soul, or assigned with each body?

Where does the teaching come from?

The Upanishads contain some of the earliest surviving textual discussions of rebirth in India, and the Pythagorean and Platonic traditions contain ancient Greek teachings on transmigration. Do you agree that the earliest surviving written teaching of rebirth is found in Indian and Greek sources and not in Moses, the prophets, or the apostles?

If you say the apostles taught it, name the passage in which one of them does.

In Commentary on Matthew XIII.1, Origen calls transmigration foreign to the church, not handed down by the apostles, and nowhere set forth in Scripture. Do you accept that he rejected it, yes or no?

When does it end, and by whose authority?

Hindus say the cycle ends in moksha, Buddhists in nirvana. You say it ends in universal restoration. What ends the cycle in your system: the work of Christ, the soul’s own progress over many lives, or both?

If it is the soul’s own progress, what did the cross accomplish that additional lifetimes would not?

Hebrews 9:27 says it is appointed for men to die once, and after this the judgment. State how you read “once.”

When Greber, Brunner, or Vale Owen conflicts with Scripture, which governs?

By what test do you distinguish a true spirit communication from a false one, given 1 John 4:1?

What would change your mind?

Name one finding, text, or argument that would lead you to conclude reincarnation is false. If nothing could, say so plainly, so readers know what kind of claim they are evaluating.

Charles Mason, Ph.D.