“Behold, God does all these things,
twice, three times, with a man,
to bring back his soul from the pit,
that he may be lighted with the light of life.”— Bible, Book of Job 33:29-30
Theological Weirdos
In the Bible there are some tantalizing hints that pre-Christian Jews believed in reincarnation. This is, of course, something of a problem because, as a general rule, Abrahamic faiths aren’t supposed to dabble in such things. Kabbalistic Jews do, sure, but they’re a small minority of the Abrahamic whole and possibly the exception that proves the rule. Traditionally, Islam, Christianity, and Mainstream Judaism have flatly held to the one life, one try rule.
That’s weird.
So weird, in fact, that I would say that the rejection of reincarnation, more than anything else, is what sets Abrahamic faiths apart from all the other religions, both historically, and in modern day. The major fault line between Abraham and Buddha, or Abraham and Shinto, or Abraham and The Cult of Dionysus, is not Jesus. It’s not Mohammed. It’s not even The Torah or The Quran or monotheism. No. Instead, what separates Abrahamists from Everybody Else is this:
Followers of Abraham think they get one shot at life.
Everyone else?
As many go rounds as you need.
Like I say, ancient Greek paganism? Reincarnation. Celtic paganism? Reincarnation. Shinto? Yep, reincarnation. Buddhism and Hinduism? Of course. That’s like their whole deal. Native American spirituality? You betcha. In fact, the highest ambition of many of The Aztecs was to be born again as hummingbirds. The consensus of Humanity, of all religious history, apart from Abraham, is that, when we die, our souls get recycled. We are born again into new bodies to learn new lessons and have new adventures and to make amends for bad karma.
Abrahamic Faiths are the outlier.
The lone, solitary voice of disagreement.
Socially, this has had massive implications.
One of the reasons, in my opinion, for the horrendous state of inequality and poverty in places like India, is due to their belief in the transmigration of souls, in reincarnation. Think about it. If karma, or something like it, is real, then whatever station or circumstance you get born into is kinda your fault. It has to be. Hinduism is of course large and endlessly complex but, on the ground, socially, it tends to work out to this notion that the poor are poor because they were bad in a past life and the rich are rich because they weren’t. Those are the practical implications of the religion, socially, at the level of governance and culture.
Born as a man? Well, you must have been righteous. Born as a woman? You must’ve done something to deserve it. The entire caste system is really nothing other than a boots-on-the-ground distillation of Hindu philosophy and, further, it is unjust to try and do anything to change it. I mean, if someone is poor because it is their punishment for faults in a previous life, and some American charity or NGO comes over, feeding that person and giving him medicine, they are denying the poor man the opportunity to work out his karma and attain a better birth on the next go. The practical implication of a system based on karmic reincarnation is such that, in many cases, charity actually becomes kind of evil, the rich stealing the poor’s chance to be born into a higher station.
Pretty crazy.
Theology has consequences.
YOLO is a life philosophy that could only have been birthed in a culture steeped in Abrahamism and is, maybe, why European cultures have historically been so reckless. Afterall, if YOLO, then, you know, really, what have you got to lose? You’re going to be dead soon anyway and there are no do-overs… may as well live on the bleeding edge while you can. On another level though, the belief that this is, for each of us, our first time being alive, means that we really can’t see any sort of justification for things being the way they are. YOLO breeds social change. Grand, sweeping movements. Abrahamists do not have the luxury of looking at a man born with a deformity and thinking to ourselves, “Huh… must’ve deserved it.” No. Instead, we tend to view such a man as the victim of a bad dice roll. “Luck of the draw,” we say. His deformity might’ve happened to anyone. To you or to me. Just random bad luck. Under such a metaphysics, we cannot look at such a man and feel satisfaction, confident that he is getting the just deserts of his karma. No, rather, we look on him with pity. We see him as an equal who simply got a bad turn. We are therefore driven to build wheelchair ramps, and to have sign language interpreters at every function, and to put braille on every sign in our office buildings… even if we seldom, if ever, see a blind man using them.
The difference in worldviews could not be sharper.
To the Reincarnationist, the world is, more or less, fair.
To the Abrahamist, it isn’t… and we strangely feel it our duty to correct that.
Kind of an awkward position.
Afterall, we followers of Moses or Mohammed or Jesus, are, all of us, claiming a deity far more pure and holy and good than any claimed by the pagans or the Eastern religions. There is no darkness in Yahweh. Allah is perfectly pure. Christ was sinless and so, too, is his Father.
And yet… for some reason… they’re not fair.
All the power in the universe, all the omnis, all knowing, all powerful, all present… and yet for some reason each conception of the Abrahamic God lets some babies be born in a hovel with cystic fibrosis and some be born blonde-haired, blue-eyed millionaires who get free rides to Harvard.
Strange thing for an omnipowerful God to do.
But, as I say, even more strange that we feel compelled to correct it. Right? I mean, when we seek to level the playing field and make up for the inequalities of the accident of birth, are we not, implicitly, trying to “fix” what God has made? Are we not, more or less, putting ourselves above God? Saying to him, “Well… you almost got it right. But no worries though. We’ll handle it from here.”
The Eastern religions and paganism do not have such problems. Indeed, in this regard they have a double out. On the one, as mentioned, their tendency is to assume that our present life is the direct result of our actions in a former one, so, you know, fair’s fair. On the two, most of them have just as many “evil” or “dark” deities as they have good and nice ones, so the problem of “Why would God allow this to happen?” sort of answers itself. The Problem of Evil is only a problem for the God of Abraham, a deity who claims extraordinary and truly all encompassing power… yet doesn’t seem over bothered with fixing problems.
But…
What if it isn’t so?
What if the Eastern and Pagan perspective is not as foreign to Abraham as it might seem?
Glimmers of an Alternate Metaphysics
“As a child I was blessed with natural gifts,
and a good soul was my heritage,
or rather, being good, I had entered into an undefiled body.”— Bible (Disputed), Wisdom 8:19-20
I did not read any of the apocryphal books until I was well into adulthood and had converted to Catholicism. Without getting too much into religious Inside Baseball, for those unaware, Catholic Bibles have 73 “books” and Protestant Bibles only 66.
This causes a lot of arguments.
The seven books making up the difference between the two totals are part of what’s been called “the apocrypha”, a word meaning, in Greek, “the hidden”, which refers to a set of Biblical books of disputed infallibility. Catholics throw a lot of accusations at Protestants about how “Martin Luther removed parts of the Bible” and Protestants, likewise, accuse the Catholics of having “non-inspired scriptures.” The reality is though that the books in question were hotly contested for centuries and the Biblical canon wasn’t “closed” until after The Reformation was over. Luther, by publishing his Bible with these books regulated to a kind of appendix, sort of forced the issue, and The Catholic Church, in response, finally made a decision that these books were, indeed, to be considered canonical.
Anyway, all of that to say that I never read the above verse until I was an adult because Wisdom, also called The Wisdom of Solomon, simply wasn’t in the Bible I’d carried up to that point.
For whatever reason, when at last I did read it, that verse simply jumped out at me.
In hindsight the fact that it did seems kind of silly because now, with the eyes to see it, the hints that The Israelites, and even The Apostles, thought some kind of reincarnation at least possible, are plain as day in the rest of the Bible but, until I read that passage, I’d somehow always missed them. Maybe it’s because this verse seems so unambiguous? I mean, here’s Solomon, supposedly the wisest man who’s ever lived, and he’s more or less saying, point blank, “I got a healthy body because my soul was good.” That’s not reincarnation, per se, I grant you, and might simply refer to the pre-existence of the soul in the Heavenly realms (also weird), but, it’s in the same vein as reincarnation, surely.
Here’s another:
As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” — Bible, The Gospel of John, 9:1-2
Okay. How could the man have sinned before he was born? Unless we are discussing the possibility of in utero sin (how?) we seem to be talking about sinning in a former life. Specifically, we are talking about sin in a former life appearing to cause a bad birth.
So, karma, basically.
The disciples are discussing karma.
I grant you, Jesus refutes the premise of their question, telling them that it was not for any sin, either the man’s or his parents, that he was born blind, but rather, “that the works of God might be displayed in him.” Sure. But, a) that doesn’t dismiss the disciple’s apparent assumption that reincarnation is possible and, b) is an answer that raises a lot of problems on its own. You know… What? God harmed this man simply so that Jesus can display his power by healing him?
…
Is that ethical?
Shall the pot complain to the potter who formed it?
I digress.
The point is, whether or not Jesus thought it was a valid opinion, his disciples seemed to think some kind of karmic reincarnation was possible, and Jesus never directly refuted them on it.
Quite the contrary, actually.
And as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, “Tell no one the vision, until the Son of Man is raised from the dead.” And the disciples asked him, “Then why do the scribes say that first Elijah must come?” He answered, “Elijah does come, and he will restore all things. But I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but did to him whatever they pleased. So also the Son of Man will certainly suffer at their hands.” Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist.
— Bible, The Gospel of Matthew 17:9-13
After the transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor, three of the apostles, Peter, James, and John, ask Jesus how he can be The Messiah since the teachers of their religion claim the prophet Elijah must come back first before Messiah can come. After all, they’d been paying pretty close attention, to the religious scene in Jerusalem for a long time and, far as they knew, nobody claiming to be Elijah returned from Heaven had ever shown up. In answer Christ surprises them. He says, essentially, “I am the Messiah and Elijah did come back to herald my arrival. It’s just that you didn’t recognize him. He was John the Baptist.”
Look.
It sounds like reincarnation, okay?
Don’t blame me. It’s not my fault. Did I write the gospels? It’s just the plain reading of the text. That’s what it sounds like at first blush. Maybe that’s not what it means but, if you read that passage to 100 people, Family Feud style, and surveyed their responses, “He’s talking about reincarnation” would be the number one answer and Steve Harvey would nod and say “There we go!” as he pointed at the board.
Again, importantly, Christ’s answer…
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