Thousands of cases of past-life memories have been documented by Dr Ian Stevenson and other researchers. When skeptics fail to explain away such cases, they resort to the fraud hypothesis.
The parental fraud explanation holds that the parents spin the entire story of a past-life memory and drill the child to perfection to play the critical part in the fraud. Stevenson, Tucker and other past-life researchers have carefully analysed this possibility, and we present here a systematised summary of their analysis.
What might the parents gain through a fraud? The possible gains can fall in three broad categories:
1. Validation of Personal Beliefs?
Might the parents be driven by the agenda to prove their personal belief in reincarnation to others? Perhaps, in some cases. But this agenda is entirely inapplicable to the many cases found in America and Europe in which the parents didn’t believe in reincarnation.
In fact, in many of these cases, the parents had been predisposed by their religious teaching and cultural upbringing to explicitly disbelieve in reincarnation and so, would have had reason to expose a fraud if it occurred and not set one up themselves. And Tucker, who has focused on investigating cases primarily in America, has found a significant number of strong cases among such disbelieving parents.
Even in the cases in Asia and other places where the parents believe in reincarnation, validating their beliefs is not particularly important for the parents for they, as well as most of the people in their social circle, believe in reincarnation implicitly. Because the parents rarely find their belief in reincarnation challenged, which is the norm in more westernised societies, they don’t feel any need to prove their belief, leave alone orchestrate a fraud to prove it.
Tom Shroder, an editor at the Washington Post, journalistically investigated the past-life research of pioneering researcher Ian Stevenson. He documented his findings in a fascinating book entitled Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives. There, Shroder wrote, “Family members admittedly interested in and open to the possibility of reincarnation had nonetheless refused to leap to any conclusions or embellish the child’s statements. If anything, they had played them down.”
Moreover, a widespread belief among Indians, especially rural Indians, is that those children who talk about their past-life will die young. Stevenson stresses that he has found no statistical basis for this belief—the mortality rate of children who remember past lives is no higher than that of those who don’t. Still, most rural parents continue to believe this and so, they often discourage their children from speaking about the earlier life even when the children want to. Therefore, it seems extremely unlikely that they would initiate a fraud that would require the child to speak about past-life memories repeatedly.
2. Monetary Benefits?
Stevenson and all subsequent past-life researchers follow a standard policy of not paying anything to the parents for conducting their interviews as they want to ensure that the case doesn’t get corrupted; that is, the parents and other interviewees don’t exaggerate or invent points in the hope of […]
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