That’s interesting, can you tell us more about your background?
Absolutely, method is only a helper, nothing more. We’re still thrown back on our own fallible consciousness. No map is perfect, but when we’re lost in the wilderness, who would throw away even an imperfect map?
I agree that faith and experience are as important, maybe even more important, than concepts when it comes to something like rebirth. But it’s also true that different people have different tendencies. In the suttas, they speak of the “Dhamma follower” who arrives at their convictions by inquiry into the teachings, and a “faith-follower” who is moved primarily by faith. For myself, I’m a Dhamma follower (obviously!), but I also have a lot of faith, I’m not quite sure why. It just happened.
Obviously in practice, both these things are important. And nothing is certain until we have the direct experience.
See the thing is, I have a lot of sympathy for people who don’t believe in rebirth. I mean, there are lots of reasons to be skeptical! Medically, we see that life and consciousness are overwhelmingly dependent on the physical body. Any evidence for life after death is debatable. And religions have a long history of selling silliness as truth. I get it!
One of my problems is that I see people from a skeptical background, who are quite rightly insisting on evidence and reason. Great, that’s super-important, and it can be a valuable contribution to traditions that sometimes over-value deference to authority.
But when they step into my area of expertise, AKA the Suttas, they fall into such bad mistakes again and again. And when this is pointed out, which it has been, many times, by many people, they don’t seem to change their tune. To me this is really the litmus test of genuine rationality: will you change your beliefs if the facts change?