Refuting a Common (and Tragic) New Age Belief

Lots of people say, I’m spiritual, not religious, but they end up just creating their own religion, usually based on new age beliefs that became popular in the 1970s, which themselves are just a repackaging of many ancient Eastern religious practices. And one of those common beliefs among the merely spiritual is belief in reincarnation. The idea that after you die, you are reborn into another body. According to the Pew Research Center, one third of all US adults believe in reincarnation, which includes 26% of Protestants and 38% of Catholics. Now, these probably aren’t the most devout members of those groups, but it’s still shocking to see because belief in reincarnation has tragic consequences. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. But before we do that, I hope you will hit the subscribe button and like this episode, not because you want good karma, but just because you’re a good viewer who enjoys our work and will even consider supporting us for as little as $5 a month at Trenthornpodcast.com.

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Now, one place where the tragedy of belief and reincarnation can be seen on full display is the nation of India, home to 94% of the world’s Hindu population, and about half the population believes in reincarnation. This belief also entails the corresponding doctrine of karma, which says basically, if you are bad in life, you’ll be reborn into a worse life. And if you’re good in life, you’ll be reborn into a better life. This has been used to defend India’s caste system, which is a social hierarchy based on your family of origin. The lowest cast are the dollt previously called the untouchables, who were treated essentially like lepers and segregated in society being relegated to jobs in areas like sanitation or dead animal disposal because they were considered the most unclean group. Discrimination against lowercaste is justified by the assumption that the members of the lower caste must have been evil in a previous life in order to be reincarnated into that caste.

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India outlawed caste discrimination in 1950, but it persists in many aspects of Indian culture. The Catholic Church was instrumental in fighting the caste system and is routinely denounced it as gravely sinful, but these prejudices have even been seen in Catholic communities. Thankfully, more positive steps seen to be taken. And in February of this year, the Indian Catholic Bishop’s Conference elected its first Dalit president. However, belief and reincarnation along with new age ideology can be found throughout the affluent Western world too. To give you an example, I want to share a sad story about a young man named Brandon Bremmer. He was a prodigy who learned to read at 18 months and completed high school by age 10. But in 2005, at the age of 14, Brandon took his own life. We don’t know why Brandon did this, but we know that having an extremely high IQ and atypical neurological patterns like autism can make someone more at risk for self-destructive thoughts.

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But what really struck out to me for Brandon’s case was the book his mother Patty wrote after his death called Guided Destiny, where she turns to new age belief and reincarnation to cope with the loss of her son. On one website, she says in the book, “The words that appeared on the paper, words that were not mine. Words I believe came through the soul of my son threw my fingers onto the keys. Most religions confirm that a soul never dies. What I learned were the many lives of souls, reincarnation. This can be seen early on in the book where Patty describes her difficult labor with Brandon and how a heartbeat was not detected so doctors feared the worst. Brandon’s mother then describes, not as an eyewitness, but more as a storyteller, how an angel named Tobias was present in the room during all of this and that the soul of her unborn child left his body and was replaced by this angel named Tobias.

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She writes,” Tobias watched the young soul leave the room. Tobias knew this soul had come to earth, not properly prepared for such a complicated human birth. He had grown frightened by the pain and the anguish that permeated the room. The young soul lacked the experience to help the family through this difficult time. Brandon’s mother then says Tobias had spent many lifetimes here on earth. With each lifetime, he acquired vast amounts of knowledge. Tobias felt the need to teach. She then says before her son was born, Tobias smiled at the parents. He looked around the room, then glanced upward from whence he had come. He condensed his form to fit into the baby. Tobias now to be called Brandon was born. You might notice that Brandon’s name and articles has two ends. In the book, Patty says Brandon added an extra end to his name one day when he was two years old and said it wasn’t a mistake.

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The memoir then narrates the event from Tobias’s perspective. My family has allowed me to change the spelling of my earthly name. I presented the change as a test of my freedom. My choice received thought and respect. I have learned my family values me and my decisions. Now, obviously this is a very tragic case and a lot of the story related to Brandon is reminiscent of the Indigo Child Fad, popular in new age circles that developed in the 1970s, but exploded in popularity in 1999 with the publication of the Indigo children the new kids have arrived. Here’s a segment on the phenomenon from CNN.

Teens like Sandy claim they’re part of a special generation born after 1978, known as Indigo children. For the deep blue auras that psychics say they see around them. Indigo children of high IQs intend to be rebellious and oversensitive. They’re often also said to share special gifts, heightened intuition and psychic abilities.

She’s one of them, isn’t she?

Excuse me.

An indigo like my son.

In recent years, the Indigo phenomenon has made its way into movies, books, websites, and even to the therapist’s office.

They will say, “I’ve heard that you deal with Indigo children or children who are highly sensitive. Can you help me with my child?” You think? I don’t know.

Psychotherapist Julie Rosenshein says parents seek her help with kids, they believe her indigos. Many of whom have trouble socializing and paying attention in school.

Usually I’ll get an email that will say, “My child is having meltdowns. She can’t sleep at night. She says that she sees things in her room. Can you help me? “

And what do you say?

I usually say, “Wow, you’re seeing something at night? Do you know that sometimes angels visit at night?” And their eyes will sometimes cloud up with tears even maybe because it’s the first time that anybody really affirmed for them that what they saw was not crazy, did not make them crazy.

Many new agers believe Indigo children are the reincarnated forms of advanced beings like angels or aliens. This webpage gives helpful tips to distinguish an Indigo child from other children like Starseeds who quote, “Feel like they don’t belong on earth because their souls originate from higher dimensional planes or other star systems. They often experience strange dreams, past life memories of other worlds and a deep knowing that they have a cosmic purpose.” Now, this may seem like harmless kookiness, but it has real consequences. For example, I did a previous episode on how when weird things happen, it’s not always demons, but sometimes it is demons. And it seems clear that if someone encounters a so- called spiritual being that leads them to belief in a lie like reincarnation, then they’re dealing with a fallen angel or a demon and not a true messenger of God. Second, childhood, and especially the teenage years, is hard enough to navigate and learn how to socially adapt to without thinking that you’re a reincarnated angel or alien.

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This isn’t helpful to accomplish those goals of maturing through these years, and it’s probably going to exacerbate other things like mental illness or clinical depression. Third, belief and reincarnation robs people of the joy God wants us to have in Jesus Christ. As a parent, it gives me a heavy heart to read a book written by someone who lost a child. But one of the hopes we have in Christ is that our loved ones are not gone forever. They also aren’t shuffled off into some other life we don’t know about. We can still express love for that person by praying for him or her as they await the resurrection of the dead, where we have a hope of being reunited with them in the life to come. Finally, reincarnation fools us into thinking that we have unlimited time to work our way into heaven, but heaven is not something we can merit solely through our own human works.

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It is the gift of God and we each have one life in which to accept or reject it. That’s why I don’t get the fascination with Andy Wire’s short story, The Egg, which describes a person dying and finding out that they have been reincarnated thousands of times and everybody else in the universe is just another reincarnated version of them. As science fiction, it’s a neat concept and helpful to teach people empathy and to ask the question, “What if I had been born into other circumstances, what would my life be like? ” But some people get wrapped up into the story so much thinking that it’s real and how beautiful that would be when in reality, if this were true, it would be totally nihilistic. It wouldn’t matter what choices you made in life because you have to live out every good and every evil person’s life, as if that was the only way to attain knowledge.

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And you couldn’t truly love others because reality would just be a diluted kind of self-love if you think God made the whole universe just for you and you are all that matters. As I said, it’s an interesting story, but when it comes to the way the world actually works, the catechism of the Catholic Church says, “Death is the end of man’s earthly pilgrimage of the time of grace and mercy which God offers him so as to work out his earthly life and keeping with the divine plan and to decide his ultimate destiny. When the single course of our earthly life is completed, we shall not return to other earthly lives. It is appointed for men to die once, Hebrews 9:27. There is no reincarnation after death. In the third century, the ecclesial writer origin wrote that reincarnation, which he called transmigration, was foreign to the church of God and not handed down by the apostles, nor anywhere set forth in the scriptures.

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In that passage, origin discusses how people misinterpret Matthew 17:12- 13 as saying John the Baptist was a reincarnated Elijah. This is a verse modern new agers also misunderstand, and is clarified in Luke 1:16- 17, where the angel tells John the Baptist Father Zachariah that his future son will turn many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, meaning he will carry on Elijah’s legacy, not actually be Elijah. Reincarnation was debated in the early church because gnostic heretics believed it was part of the process of releasing the soul from the physical prison of the body. Gnostics believed the spiritual was good and the material was bad, and are probably the people St. Paul refers to in one Timothy four: three, who forbid marriage and enjoyed abstinence from foods since those things represent material pleasure.

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Christianity in contrast taught that matter is a good thing that God made and that people have a right to marry unless they’ve given up that right to pursue a celibate life to serve the church like St. Paul did. And Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians about the importance of the body, referring to it as a tent, saying, “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Here indeed we groan and long to put on our heavenly dwelling so that by putting it on, we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we sigh with anxiety. Not that we should be unclothed, but that we should be further clothed so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.

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He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the spirit as a guarantee. This means that when we die, we don’t become angels, as some people think. Our souls go to be with God or go to be apart from God. However, that disembodied existence is not meant to be permanent. That would be like being locked out of your house without any clothes on forever. So St. Paul is confident that in the next life, we will eventually be fully clothed in a glorious, resurrected body. So scripture tells us it is appointed for men to die once and then a judgment that has eternal consequences. The church fathers also made several arguments against reincarnation that still hold up today. First, humans don’t behave as if they possess souls that lived before the birth of their bodies. Turtolian put it this way.

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If souls depart at different ages of human life, how is it that they come back again at one uniform age? For all men are imbued with an infant soul at their birth. But how happens it that a man who dies in old age returns to life as an infant? I asked then how the same souls are resumed, which can offer no proof of their identity, either by their disposition or habits or living. So the absence of infants and children who act like mature adults is evidence against the theory of reincarnation. Of course, a defender of reincarnation would probably say that although a person’s soul inhabits a new body, his memories and personality don’t. But this makes reincarnation the practical equivalent of not surviving death. And it defeats the purpose of learning from your past mistakes in past lives in order to be reincarnated. Also, Saint Erinadus noted this argument saying that Plato invented this response to get around rebuttals.

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He then basically asked in response,” How do you even know you were reincarnated if you lose all your memories after death? “Another argument against reincarnation is called the population argument. It relies on the claim made by proponents of reincarnation that new souls are never created or destroyed. Instead, souls are only reborn into other bodies, but in Turtolian’s words,” If the living come from the dead, just as the dead proceed from the living, then there must always remain unchanged, one in the self-same number of mankind. “Tertolian noted and modern science has confirmed that there has been “a gradual growth of the human population.” This growth can be explained only by new souls coming into existence and conflicts with the notion of the perpetual reincarnation of the same souls in a different bodies. As the catechism says, the church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God.

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It is not produced by the parents and also that it is immortal. It does not perish when it separates from the body at death and it will be reunited with the body at the final resurrection. Other defenders of reincarnation claim to offer empirical evidence in the form of past lives testimony or testimony of alleged lives of previous reincarnations the person had. These testimonies, such as those gathered among children by the late psychiatrist, Ian Stevenson are not convincing. For example, many of the subjects of Stevenson’s interviews were children who lived in places like India where reincarnation is widely accepted. This suggests that their stories were more likely the products of social conditioning than actual memories of past lives. Also, although the children in these studies were not thought to be capable of deceiving the interviewers, they were capable of confusing fantasy with reality, telling stories about imaginary friends or imaginary adventures, for example.

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In fact, many of the anecdotes Stevenson shares rely on ambiguous details that are better explained by a child’s imperfect grasp of reality. Skeptic Robert Carroll offers the following example. One case involved an Idaho girl who at age two would point to photographs of her sister dead from a car accident three years before she was born and say, “That was me. ” The believer thinks the two-year-old meant I was my sister in a previous life. The skeptic thinks she meant, “That’s a picture of me. ” The skeptic sees the two-year-old as making a mistake. The believer sees her as trying to communicate a message about reincarnation. Of course, we can make all kinds of philosophical arguments about what happens after death, but the best evidence would be an authoritative teaching from someone who not only died and came back to life, but holds authority over death itself.

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As our Lord says in the Book of Revelation, “I am the first and the last and the living one. I was dead and see, I’m alive forever and ever, and I have the keys of death and of Hades. For more on this topic, see my 20 answers booklet on death and judgment and for a defense of what the true Jesus would say about these issues, see my book Counterfeit Christ and my previous episode on the New Age Beliefs of Deepak Chopra. Thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.