China Regulates Re-incarnation

[Joanne98]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227400/site/newsweek/

BeliefWatch: Reincarnate

Aug. 20-27, 2007 issue - In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation." But beyond the irony lies China's true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region's Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.

At 72, the Dalai Lama, who has lived in India since 1959, is beginning to plan his succession, saying that he refuses to be reborn in Tibet so long as it's under Chinese control. Assuming he's able to master the feat of controlling his rebirth, as Dalai Lamas supposedly have for the last 600 years, the situation is shaping up in which there could be two Dalai Lamas: one picked by the Chinese government, the other by Buddhist monks. "It will be a very hot issue," says Paul Harrison, a Buddhism scholar at Stanford. "The Dalai Lama has been the prime symbol of unity and national identity in Tibet, and so it's quite likely the battle for his incarnation will be a lot more important than the others."

So where in the world will the next Dalai Lama be born? Harrison and other Buddhism scholars agree that it will likely be from within the 130,000 Tibetan exiles spread throughout India, Europe and North America. With an estimated 8,000 Tibetans living in the United States, could the next Dalai Lama be American-born? "You'll have to ask him," says Harrison. If so, he'll likely be welcomed into a culture that has increasingly embraced reincarnation over the years. According to a 2005 Gallup poll, 20 percent of all U.S. adults believe in reincarnation. Recent surveys by the Barna Group, a Christian research nonprofit, have found that a quarter of U.S. Christians, including 10 percent of all born-again Christians, embrace it as their favored end-of-life view. A non-Tibetan Dalai Lama, experts say, is probably out of the question.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227400/site/newsweek/

[porphyrian]

1. Well, you can't just let people go around reincarnating all willy nilly. - n/t

[malaise]

2. In one of history's more absurd acts

It's hardly more absurd than the notion of reincarnation? :rofl: :rofl:

[Speck Tater]

3. On the other hand,

those who have personal experience of reincarnation would regard the notion of denying it even more absurd.

There is strong evidence in favor of the hypothesis, and no way to disprove it. As Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia Medical School concluded, given the quality and quantity of the evidence currently available is it rational to accept reincarnation AND it is rational to doubt reincarnation. The evidence is suggestive, but not conclusive.

Flat denial, however, it a pretty radical stand to take, given that such denial is not at all based on evidence, but follows from given a priori axioms of the kind of materialistic monism assumed by science as its philosophical basis. Belief in the possibility of such things, however, is not incompatible with science, as a process, only with scientism as a dogmatic belief system, which, of course, is not really "science" at all.

That coupled with the fact that surveys have shown that the only reincarnation deniers left are those who have yet to carefully examine the serious evidence. (NOT the mass market paperback garbage about nonsense like hypnotic regression and Bridey Murphy, but serious work published by serious university presses around the world.)

[Posteritatis]

4. More 'strong evidence,' less pomo science strawmen, please? (nt)

[BlackVelvet04]

5. Well, at least it's nice to know

there are governments more delusional than ours.