Posted on 08/29/2009 12:07:45 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
It sounds totally beyond belief. But read the tantalising evidence from this boy's family and you may start to wonder...
The agonised screams pierced the air. 'Plane on fire! Airplane crash.' In the dark, a two-year-old boy was just visible, writhing on his bed in the grip of horror. 'He was lying there on his back, kicking and clawing at the covers like he was trying to kick his way out of a coffin,' remembers the boy's father.
'I thought, this looks like The Exorcist. I half expected his head to spin around like that little girl in the movie. But then I heard what James was saying.'
Over and over again, the tiny child screamed: 'Plane on fire! Little man can't get out.'
For his shocked parents, these nightly scenes were traumatic.
For experts, they were baffling.
As the nightmares became more terrifying, the child started screaming the name of the 'little man' who couldn't get out of the plane. It was James - like his own name. He also talked in his dreams of 'Jack Larsen', 'Natoma' and 'Corsair'.
James Leininger's father, Bruce, was flummoxed. In a desperate attempt to find an answer to his son's troubled nights, he embarked on an obsessive three-year research project, armed only with the outbursts and names his son had been shouting in his disturbed sleep.
What he discovered astonished and perplexed him, and drove him to an extraordinary conclusion.
A lifelong Christian, it was not the answer he had sought for his son's behaviour. But he came to believe James was the reincarnation of a World War II fighter pilot; a man who had been shot down in his plane and struggled to escape as it caught fire; a hero.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Is the Resurrection not a form of reincarnation?
No, reincarnation is different.
Jesus is God. He conquered death because He is God.
Through Christ’s resurrection, He conquered death and paid our sin debt, once and for all. No mortal would be able to enter into heaven since NO mortal is perfect. It is sin, even the slightest sin, that brings imperfection and death Christ laid down His life for you and took on our just punishment.
Reincarnation is the rebirth of a soul in a new body.
Christ was sinless. Christ did not have a rebirth of His soul. There was no need for a "rebirth of a soul" since Christ is perfect. Christ did not ressurect in a new body. His side was pierced with and the holes on His wrist were present (recall "doubting" Thomas).
A resurrection is simply rising from being dead - not "near death" but literally dead. Resurrection is what Christ did. Christ was not "reincarnated. So there are differences .. that are very important to note and distinguish.
I think that would have been more correct.
Ensoulment is not a natural process and its precise mechanism and timing is unknown.
My own brains are scrambled but, yeah, that makes sense.
State your argument with in the Premise statement, to introduce a totally off the wall statement is a strawman, try what happens with twins.
So, in the case I illustrated above, Man directly interfered into the “ensoulment” process.
Agree?
bump for later.
What I mentioned dealt with twinning. Except that the twinning process was artificially induced.
You have yet to convince anyone here as to why that is a strawman.
I love your optimistic thinking ;)
No, the ensoulment process is entirely in God’s domain. Sexual intercourse is a human participation in the process of creation. We may interfere with the natural conception and development of a human being, sure—e.g., IVF, cloning, Plan B, etc. Is the technique you describe morally wrong? Yes.
“For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John. And if you are willing to accept it, he is the Elijah who was to come. He who has ears, let him hear.”
Thus saith the Lord.
What is your point?
When my first wife died I had such an experience. We had been divorced for 8 years and she had remarried, but we had always kept in touch and she always signed her letters “love always”. The morning she died I had a dream that we were in our old 1981 Dodge Colt leaving Ft Myers. We had vacationed there a number of times. I wanted to go down the road to see something, but she kept insisting that we had to go home. After a few rounds she took my hand, looked me in the eye and said emphatically “no you have to take me home now”. In the dream I said okay and then woke up. It was 5:33 AM on Friday 9/26/1997 the exact moment that she died according to her mother. Say what you will, but I will always believe there are thing we do not and are not meant to understand. My dream and this story are two of those things.
I like another idea, the reality is divided between the pea-sized tiny “known”, the watermelon-sized “unknown”, and the galaxy-sized (relatively speaking) “unknowable”.
It’s funny how, when dealing with the sub-atomic, we feel immense in size. Yet in dealing with the astronomical, so minute and unimportant.
The same problem applies to time, as well as space.
The point is not about morals, but about the process of “ensoulment” itself.
You said sexual intercourse is a human participation in the process of creation. Agreed. However, the humans have little control over the process of the individual being “created” after fertilisation, which is the point, after all, that theists believe to mark the beginning of life. However, what I described is performed after fertilisation- the union of the sex cells had resulted in one individual, which, upto the blastocyst stage can be cleaved to create multiple individuals- and when this is done by direct human intervention, what should have originally been one individual, becomes many individuals.
If you claim this is some god’s plan, then you cannot say that doing this is immoral, because then it would imply that the same god’s plan was immoral, whatever that should mean.
If you would have said, "What happens in the case of Twins?" Then the argument would would have focused on the actual time that the soul is received, that would be a good argument for abortionists. As I said Metaphysics is beyond me and your argument is still a strawman.
Bingo. The little boy loved airplanes from an early age. Not unusual.
In a video of this story, I saw realistic models of all sorts of aircraft hanging on transparent lines from the ceiling. If this collection has been growing since the boy was 2 yrs. old, and that ceiling is in his room, it's not unlikely that he would lie awake in his bed after the lights were out with the shadowy images above him stirring his imagination and causing dreams, or even nightmares, involving scenarios about them. Many of his toys followed the WWII theme. Any good daddy would have primed his imagination during their playtime together with those toys.
There seems to have been an interest in the subject even before little James was born as evidenced by information revealed during the telling of this story, ie., the book given as a present to little James' grandfather (why give a book about something that doesn't interest the one receiving it?), the daddy rushing to the office to check information in a book on the subject that he had there, etc.
Some of it may have begun in the mind of the youngster, but much of it appears to have sprung from the mind, and fertile imagination, of the daddy who had the means to do extensive investigation on the subject,and the intelligence to write a book, etc., about it.
That said, I don't doubt that this family has convinced themselves of this "reincarnation", and that no one could convince them otherwise. They aren't the first,nor will they be the last, to be deceived by their own perceptions.
You have one chance at this life, no matter what your parents tell you. |
http://www.springerlink.com/content/yr44jw216t675743/
“...the production of artificial twins by nicking the chicken blastoderm.”
“Over land or sea or foam,
You can always hear me singing this song,
Show me the way to go home.”
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