Believe it or not, the topic of my most recent atheist discussion group was reincarnation.  Huh?  The person who presented came to the group with copious evidence of people who appeared to have come into this life with precise and detailed memories of a person in a life that preceded it.  In study after study, researchers identified people, mostly young, who seemed to know, often intimately and extensively, everything about a person who had already passed from this life.  In some instances, the connection was singularly striking:  the characteristics of a deceased person were displayed exactly in a person now alive.  And the living person had no apparent connection with the person who had died.

    Predictably, many people in the discussion were skeptical.  Perhaps, they said, this is the result of small children making things up:  they're imagining, they're dreaming.  Others rebutted by saying that there's another side to the picture, that they had found companion research results that asserted these tests to be fraudulent.  Still another, insisting that he was a "materialist," could not see how a supernatural explanation for such things was possible.  On the other hand, many lauded this "evidenced based" research and noted that the cumulative weight of the research was difficult to dismiss.

    What puzzled me about these responses, besides the ones that found the evidence to be convincing, was that these folks appeared to be unwilling to step outside their worldview to consider that, well, maybe there is another way to look at this evidence.  So set in their perspective on the world that they could not see outside of it.  At first glance, I do not know what to do with this voluminous evidence:  it's very persuasive.  Perhaps this is because I am open to the factuality of the supernatural.  Nonetheless, the well documented evidence for these "rebirth" memories of the past ought to be enough to motivate even the most hardened materialist to at least consider that there is another way to see reality.

    Even if they do not readily understand it.  For that is the central point:  we must get used to confronting things we may never fully understand in order to live in a way that enables us to deal intelligently with our existence.  That's just being a finite human being.

    Maybe someone else really is knocking at the door.