Jim Riley was a fine old fellow who lived with his wife in Douglas. That is, Jim lived there when he wasn’t out breaking rock.
One morning Mrs. Riley knocked on the door. We invited her in.
She says, ‘Jim went into Mexico to his mine a month ago and I haven’t heard from him since, though he should have been home before now.’
‘Yesterday evening as I was sitting in the twilight, Jim came to the door. He had the saddest expression on his face I’ve ever seen on a mortal man. His hands were down by his sides and a long rope was wound round and round his arms and body.
‘When I spoke to him he vanished. I know he’s dead and something has happened. But you’ll think this is old woman stuff. You won’t believe me.
On the contrary, Mrs. Riley, I do believe you and I’ll go look.’
…
Coming down the mountains we noticed buzzards and hawks circling. After searching round they found poor old Jim Riley’s body, his legs sticking out of some brush covering. When they pulled away the brush his arms were bound to his body with a rope wrapped round and round him, just as Mrs. Riley had seen.
Thomas H. Rynning. Gun Notches. chapter xxxiii
The materialist view explains that conciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter. That is, the mind is established on the body. The body is the physical mechanism. This is a general assumption under the scientific worldview; all phenomena can be explained by physical mechanism quantified as matter or energy.
The trouble with this is that the world abounds with evidence that defies it - where the mind perceives events well beyond the bounds of the body’s five senses. The story of the Riley’s above is one example drawn from countless. Sometimes people get visits from loved ones, often at death - or know with certainty things have happened far from them. Memories of past lives is fairly common enough in human experience. In a modern scientific context Ian Stevenson studied the phenomena of past live memories in small children and makes enough of it for more than a passing interest. The concept of reincarnation of mind/conciousness also makes sense as an explanation of animal instinct. On top of that are other phenomena commonly enough experienced like out of body experiences or premonition. All of these add up to a reasonable conclusion the conscious mind exists beyond the physical body; logically conciousness cannot be born of the body if the mind’s perceptions are not limited to the body’s senses and if the mind’s awareness is not limited to the body’s location. Were it otherwise such widespread experiences would simply not be possible.
The preacher’s voice came thru the radio loud and clear. A voice timbred by conviction says that Jesus died for your sins. What the hey does that even mean? To some it means you get out of hell. The promise of Christianity may also be described as a liberation from the cycle birth and rebirth caused by karma, or sin. The Greeks believed in reincarnation, as did the Vedic civilization before them. The Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes describes a cyclical nature to our ephemeral realities like reincarnation, so the concepts are not foreign. To consider this angle of Christianity - that the idea about Jesus paid your sin/karma is a liberation from rebirth cycle. If the idea is that we are born again and again as our soul accrues and discharges sin and that through that process of dharma we can discharge all sins and liberate our soul from rebirth then Jesus dying for all sin makes a different sense. In Hindu texts revered sages are referred to as once or twice born - meaning they took only one or two lives as humans to transcend material incarnation of rebirth and ascend to heaven. Hindus understand Karmic sins to be what drives souls to incarnate in new bodies again and again after death. Within this belief, absolving all one’s sins would allow the soul to escape the endless cycle of birth and rebirth and go on to experience the heavens. Each life may be a chance for the soul to grow or diminish, but maybe by just a little bit. Thus, life on earth is rendered as a sort of workshop for souls to iterate over lifetimes. Seen this way, the advantage of being born human may be that we can continually direct our consciousness toward growth through habituated institutions. Swami Prabhupada describes a human being as a platform for the soul. The Gita explains the three modes of human being as gunas - warning that for a human to pass in tamas (darkness) a soul may fall from incarnating as human to a beast in its next life. Such ideas tend to twist around a bit outside raising questions like, is this you first time being human? Or is it a rematch? Or your last?
When war came, they were all swept away, one by one except for him. He was invalid. Soon the invaders won. His aged father asked him to protect the manuscripts they kept stored in their tumbledown cottage on his deathbed. They were a precious store of religious knowledge their family had sworn to protect with their lives. Once they were in a temple before the temple’s destruction by invaders. He could not read them. He didn’t study or learn to read like his brothers, like he should have. After his father passed there was no one left who could read. He heard they were searching homes to find and destroy these things. He knew that to be found hiding them he would be tortured and put to the sword. Living with them grew fear. One day he simply hauled the stacks of paper and sheep skins and burnt them all in a pile. No one ever came to search his home. Only once he saw a small troop of invaders. Only once he saw them. A small group of riders came galloping past the hermitage on the dusty road. They paid him no mind and were gone as soon as they’d come.