| by Ishara de Silva
( March 12, 2013, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) The Sinhala-Tamil conflict was particularly unusual because both sides, religiously, believe in Rebirth, the idea that we are born again life after life until it ends, if it does at all. The Sinhalese are predominantly Buddhist and Tamils Hindu, so Rebirth is deeply entrenched in both cultures.
The United Nations did very little to intervene in that conflict, leaving thousands to die on both sides of the conflict, which is understandable given that the UN is composed of states, not sub-state actors which challenge the status quo, whatever our views of them.
The United Nations has decided not to comment on whether the scientific proof of the theory of Rebirth could help end world war for good, saying no one in the organisation could answer questions related to this subject.
Part of the questions we put forward, included whether or not the UN would consider its own department dedicated to finding out whether Rebirth is true on scientific, not religious, grounds.
The scientific proof of Rebirth theory, the theory of reincarnation, could end war in an instant because moral action is central to where we are reborn into in the next life. This is evident as the United Nations, which is granted the role of fostering world peace, however shaky its efforts so far, had not been able to sustain itself previously, as the League of Nations first, before becoming the UN after successive failures. Something much more powerful is required.
The League of Nations was born of the disillusionment arising from World War One, and was the most ambitious attempt that had ever been made to construct a peaceful world order. It was rooted in a liberal critique of the pre-war international system, widely believed to have been the cause of the carnage of 1914-18.
Before this, the closest approach to an international political structure had been the Congress System, in which the top European powers held occasional summit meetings to discuss issues they found urgent.
The surviving victorious powers at the end of the “Great War” - Britain and France - would have preferred to go no further than regularising the old Congress System. The spirit of the times, however, which was overbearingly personified in the president of the USA, Woodrow Wilson, pushed towards the creation of a more comprehensive global organisation, which would include all independent states, and in which even the smallest state would “have a voice”.
By contrast, the history of the United Nations, which replaced it, as an international organization, has its origins in World War II. Since then, its aims and activities have expanded to make it the archetypal international body in the early 21st century. US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt first suggested using the name United Nations to refer to the Allies of World War II.
Roosevelt suggested the term to Winston Churchill who cited Byron's use of the phrase "united nations" in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which referred to the Allies at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Franklin Roosevelt adopted the name shortly afterwards.
But the UN remains inadequate to help solve most modern day wars, many of which are taking place “within states”. The theory of Rebirth, however, promises to be different. If Rebirth can be proved, then wars would be less likely. Which is why the UN should pay for scientific research along these lines - now.
Probably the best known, if not most respected, collection of scientific data that appears to prove scientifically, that reincarnation is real, is the life's work of Dr. Ian Stevenson.
Instead of relying on hypnosis to verify that an individual has had a previous life, he instead chose to collect thousands of cases of children who spontaneously (without hypnosis) remember a past life.
Dr. Ian Stevenson uses this approach because spontaneous past life memories in a child can be investigated using strict scientific protocols. Hypnosis, while useful in researching into past lives, is less reliable from a purely scientific perspective.
In order to collect his data, Dr. Stevenson methodically documents the child's statements of a previous life. Then he identifies the deceased person the child remembers being, and verifies the facts of the deceased person's life that match the child's memory.
He even matches birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records. His strict methods systematically rule out all possible "normal" explanations for the child’s memories.
Dr. Stevenson had devoted forty years to the scientific documentation of past life memories of children from all over the world. He had over 3000 cases in his files. Many people, including skeptics and scholars, agree that these cases offer the best evidence yet for reincarnation.
But it is not enough. If the UN wants to see the end of war, totally, then Rebirth theory would go a long way to achieving this. A systematic approach, or even a UN department dedicated to its proof, would go a long way to seeing global world peace materialise.
Lets hope the UN sees it also – and helps to make Rebirth Theory a scientific fact rather than just, as is now the case, a religious insight.
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