Can you believe in certain things without being religious?

[FortunaMaximus]

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Ok so since i'm the idiot and your the genius, WHY is it reincarnation research should be avoided? Of course some of the cases aren't perfect, and it's hard to draw a conclusions, but there is enough data there to suggest something is going on. It is research like this which challenges the modern scientific viewpoint, and to be honest a lot of skeptics and scientists are uncomfortable because it does just that. So of course the only the way around it, is to berate the research that way it's easier to ignore. Which is essentially the case here, for some unstated reason i'm a crackpot because i support this research. Anyways i doubt i'm going to get an explanation, but if i do, i'll gladly admit i'm wrong, but of course it has to be valid one.

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It isn't discomfort but disbelief. There's an university research department basically practicing pseudoscience trying to prove that people are reborn?

That's far out of the realm of practical science and the research is diverting funds that could go somewhere more valuable to medicine or science that has the potential to contribute to day to day life.

Even within the field, you could allocate the man-hours or funding to researching how memory works instead of reincarnation, which may be a dead end. And that would basically accomplish the same goals.

So it isn't that scientists are uncomfortable with the idea that this may be valid research, it's just that it is likely to yield any practical use.

If you want to challenge modern science, focus on how the process of memory works instead, and if reincarnation is valid, a more focused research approach would yield it as a matter of course anyway.