History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v7.c95.360

v7.c95.360

Some of the objections raised by Western thinkers and writers against the doctrine of Karma and re-incarnation will now be mentioned and briefly dealt with. One or two preliminary matters have to be emphasized. Many in the West regard our life after the death of the bodies as certain, but hardly anyone of them regards our life before our present bodies as a possibility. The explanation of this attitude of many Western thinkers lies in the fact that in modern Western thought the great support of the belief in immortality of the soul has been the Christian religion, which is supposed not to recognize the pre-existence of the soul. Besides, Christian writers from Augustine onwards firmly believed that religious truths outside the revelation in the Bible as interpreted by them were a work of the devil. McTaggart in 'Some Dogmas of religion' (London, 1930) attacks this attitude. He holds (p. 113) that any evidence which will prove immortality will also prove pre-existence and that there is nothing in pre-existence that is incompatible with any of the dogmas that are generally accepted as fundamental to Christianity.' L. P. Jacks in 'Near the brink' (Allen and Unwin, London, 1952, pp. 10-11) holds the same opinion (at the age of 92) as McTaggart's. Wordsworth in his famous Ode appears to agree that the present life is preceded by another existence when he says 'Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, the soul that rises with us, our life's star, had elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar' L. P. Jacks in the work mentioned above remarks (on p 9) that an endless punishment is not, strictly speaking, a punishment at all but an exercise of cruelty or vengeance and that the same is true of an endless reward.