One of the world’s great myths holds that our souls travel through many lifetimes in different bodies. People call this idea…Reincarnation.
To give the benefit of the doubt to all the people who have believed in this, and the millions who still do: I, for one, can see why the myth might arise. In fact, I can see two solid reasons why people might come to believe in reincarnation.
1. We human beings have a natural tendency to revere the perfect justice of Almighty God. But we live in a world which we clearly see is not perfectly just. Therefore, God must have a means by which He restores justice in the end. If I do not know about the sacrifice of Christ, which has reconciled the human race to God in one perfectly just act—if I don’t know about this, then I will inevitably try to imagine other ways in which justice might be restored. I will imagine some other means by which a human being might reach purity, uprightness, godliness. I see that this does not generally happen in the course of one given human lifetime. But I might imagine that over an enormous array of well-lived lifetimes, a soul might actually reach union with God.
But: Reincarnation is impossible, as many skilled philosophers have shown. St. Thomas Aquinas argues the point with characteristic clarity and simplicity.
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Father Mark White Blog 