>>171379Having read a decent amount on Near-Death Experiences, Out-of-Body Experiences, and other "woo" material, I tend to believe in both reincarnation and that we have afterlife experiences that are shaped by the nature of our thoughts and beliefs. Whether there's anything like karma I can't say, but I don't really think so. Maybe there's some kind of polarization that our soul goes through in its incarnations to choose between Service to Others or Service to Self like the Law of One believers say, but I don't think there's any objective moral code to the universe or that there's some chasm dividing the divine from ourselves. When you get down to it, I think we're just Mr. God playing with himself. I also don't think linear time exists in the way we tend to interpret it, so any other lives we're potentially living are really happening at the same time as our "current" ones. And depending on how much you identify with the character you're playing in the lifetime versus the actor playing the characters, you might say that they're not us at all. And if the idea of endless parallel selves and all possible realities being preexistent is true, then that complicates things even more. People like to make all sorts of claims purportedly based on quantum physics. But since I have a childlike understanding of subjects like math and science, I can't evaluate them one way or the other. I just try to take a fuzzy big picture view of the reported paranormal experiences and try to find explanations than can accommodate them in a satisfactory way. I don't necessarily reject the accounts of Christians who claim they died and saw characters like Jesus, for example, but I think that even aside from all its other flaws Christianity fails by not having a good way to account for all the other types of spiritual experiences people have that don't fit neatly inside the usual Christian metaphysics. Saying anything else must be "satanic" deception is just lazy motivated reasoning. Idealist philosophy seems to me to be the most satisfying and inclusive explanation of the body of reported spiritual experiences, but it's one that would throw Biblical literalists into a tizzy. While I imagine it would comport well with esoteric forms of Christianity, they tend to be considered heretics by the average Christian. I also don't think there's any convincing reason to follow Christianity from when there's no threat of divine punishment hanging over your head and haven't seen a compelling argument for the Biblical narratives being purely symbolic. It just seems that they're following the age-old tradition of midrashic reinterpretation of the Bible.
Looking too deep into the paranormal as a teenager was actually what led me to throw in the towel on Christianity. Once I lost my fear of Hell, I was open to looking at many of the countless problems with the Bible. I didn't even understand the Jewish Question at the time and would have just thought the Semitic angle was kooky, but now that I understand that aspect better I can't unsee it.