Sorry. I’m not going to have time to go back through the threads to find the incidents. The point was made in the context you pulled the sentence you objected to from.
It is made further in toms post to gonzo#192
I don’t believe anybody builds their personal belief system on only objective evidence. Atheists have demonstrated this to be true. That being the case, for an atheist to argue that it’s incorrect for theists to hold beliefs without objective evidence is somewhat empty and pointless since it’s a human experience shared by everyone.
I only mentioned it because of the tone of gonzo’s post.
Not that I believe you, but for example, the effects of brain damage are evidence against an afterlife. If someone suffers brain damage, they lose part of their mind, while they are still alive. It’s a straightforward extropolation that if you lose all of your brain, you lose all of your mind. As well, all of the evidence that the mind is a function of the brain argues against an afterlife.
And since we are speaking about science view of it, it’s the job of whoever is claiming something exists to come up with evidence that it exists, or is at least possible; there’s no evidence that an afterlife is either real, or possible.
I’m not overlooking that at all; indeed, that’s part of my point. Let me try saying it another way:
To solve a murder, you gotta find the weapon, the motive, and the opportunity, right? Lacking any one of these three, the murder isn’t committed.
Religion provides the motive. Science provides the weapon.
I’m not saying that science is a belief system, just as I’m not saying religion is a tool. They’re different, but both can contribute in their own way to human suffering.
Of course, both can also contribute in their own way to alleviating human suffering. BUt I think some hard-core atheists forget that religion contributes to alleviating suffering.
As I understand it, there’s a simple mathematical proof showing that any closed belief system necessarily has at least one axiom which cannot be proved within the system. IF that’s correct, then of course every atheist has at least one belief that’s believed without any evidence ot support it.
For example, if you believe that empirical evidence can support opinions, or that similar causes produce similar results, or that you do not exist as a brain in a jar, you qualify. If you do not hold one of those beliefs, then necessarily you hold another.
By no means all hard-core atheists forget that. When Marx called religion “the opiate of the people,” he did not mean, as is commonly assumed, that religion is a drug the ruling class peddles to the workers to keep them docile; he meant it is a drug the workers themselves cook up to relieve the pain of their lives. (This was before it was clear that opiates can be dangerous and addictive.)
It is not our institutions that contribute to our suffering, it is us. People harm people, institutions merely provide them a place to meet and gather strength. There is no religion on earth that condoles the harming of others, not one. Again people do the dasterdly deed. They misinterpret, manupulate, and lie so they can have an excuse to harm others. We need to quit blaming others and look at ourselves to make sure we are part of the solution and not part of the problem.
Not true. The brain loses a function due to brain damage, that function can be reestablished in another part of the brain. Who or what reestablishes the function, you do, by training. We are not hard wired. Now as for brain loss, check this out:
You are quoting what a skeptic wrote that may, could, maybe, have happened to her. The skeptic was not there, and didn’t know anything about the procedure. You would have us believe that the surgical team lowered the temperature of her body then stopped all bodily functions, withdrew the blood from her brain, repaired the aneurism, put the blood back into her brain, then brought her temperature back up and started her heart all in 10 minutes. I don’t think so, you can’t get a tooth pulled in 10 minutes.
As for hallucinations, they have been ruled out in near death experiences for obvious reasons. Read the characterists of a near death experience again. You have no logical ground to stand on. You have no time line approved by the surgical staff present, and furthermore Pam is not the only near death experiencer that has been tested and studied. There are hundreds of these cases and scientific evidence that clearly shows consciousness continues to live after the death of the brain. I am finished with this and unless you come up with some real evidence of what you say I will not continue to discuss it with you. I hope you can get over your obsession with it. I suggest you start reading the literature of near death experiences along with a couple of hundred experiences.
Agreed–I’m referring specifically to a couple of the hard-core atheists in this thread.
lekatt, our institutions are just convenient fictions to describe our own behaviors. Drawing a distinction between the two–suggesting that it is us, not our institutions, that do harm–is not meaningful, inasmuch as we are the institutions.
My religious education, at least, has made very clear distinctions between body, mind, and spirit. To a large extent, this gets to the core of the issue. From a religious perspective, life is not the same as a functioning biological system; rather, the basic core of life is the soul. From a scientific perspective, the soul cannot be measured, so it does not play into any definition of life. In my original response, I agreed that I could not prove the existence of God, that it really is a belief based on faith. Here again, I have no proof that a soul exists. On the other hand, scientific experiments have not proven that it cannot exist, either (granted, it’s exceedingly difficult to prove a negative).
I am in complete agreement that there is no scientific evidence that an afterlife exists. That is, after all, the point. Religion has faith, but no proof, that there is an afterlife. Faith is the essence of religion. If you don’t believe, then that’s up to you. I realize that there are far too many people who feel differently - that if you don’t believe, then you should be punished until you do believe (the beatings will stop when morale improves).
When I said that science requires faith as well, this is a perfect example of that. Scientific measurements show that biological activity has ceased, therefore the conclusion is made that life has ceased. Because a soul cannot be measured, it must not exist. The conclusion that something does not exist because of a lack of ability to measure it has been shown to be wrong countless times. Again, there is a distinct possibility that there is nothing to measure. But to draw that conclusion under the current state of knowledge is nothing other than a statement of faith that nothing will be found. The correct conclusion is that we do not know from a scientific basis whether there is or is not a soul or an afterlife.
No, I am taking my facts directly from the book “Light & Death” by Michael Sabom, the book YOU declared was THE reliable authority on the case. The one YOU asserted was well researched and scientific enough to satisfy you and anyone else that asked.
The complete process to do all that took more than 10 minutes, but you insisted that the key was her brain response that mattered: that was what was only gone for a matter of minutes. Even full cardiac arrest was for less than an hour (though she got an arrhythmia halfway through the process of warming her back up, sometime between 11:20 and noon, and had to be shocked with paddles).
No, they haven’t: you just claim so. There are no obvious reasons: hallucinations are capable of producing virtually any sensation one can imagine and incorporating elements from sensory experience. If your “obvious reason” is that people cannot do it while brain flatline, then this case is even more relevant, because it shows that in fact the ONLY experiences we CAN nail down on the timeline that correspond to actual O.R. events all happened when she was NOT flatline at all!
Again, the time when they were putting tubes in her veins (hooking her up to the machines) NECESSARILY came from before they induced cardiac arrest because those machines were part of inducing the arrest and bringing her back, and in fact the timeline given in Sabom’s book confirms this. The discussion she heard about those veins came before they had put her into arrest. If they had canceled the surgery at that point, Pam Reynolds never would have died at all, and yet the first half of her supposed experience of death had already taken place.
Again, the times in question are taken from the book YOU declared was an authority, which involved interviews with the surgical staff.
You’ve over and over made a big deal out of this case. You can’t just spin around and say it doesn’t matter.
Maybe, maybe not. What if they are all as full of flaws and misrepresentations as this case has turned out to be?
Light and Death is not “real” evidence? As far as YOU were concerned, it was the ONLY evidence of any worth considering on this case!
I guess I am a little obsessed with it lekatt, because honestly I can’t understand how you manage to weasel around things like this without conceding some pretty glaring errors on your part, and their implications for all your assertions. First you declare this case to be seminal and a particular source to be the unquestionable authority on it. Now you say it doesn’t matter, and that there is nothing but opinions.
What’s really maddening is that I’ve actually seen people tell you this before. You’ve ALREADY been caught claiming that Pam Reynolds was brain dead for 2 hours on other board discussions and yet you STILL came here to the dope and made the same false claim.
It sounds like you may be referring to some piece of the pseudophilosophical detritus floating around Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem, but probably not one of the few pieces which is sound in its understanding of the theorem.
Although, your wording makes it a bit odd for me to know exactly what you’re saying. Every axiom of the system can easily be proved within the system, since the system has already adopted it as an axiom; thus, it can be proven from itself. Of course, that’s not very convincing to anyone else who has not already adopted your system and its axioms. So maybe you’re saying that, no matter what your beliefs are, if they extend beyond mere tautologies, then by tracing down through the chain of reasoning that led you to them, you eventually find yourself at a premise which cannot be proven on its own (that is, proven without assuming one of your other beliefs). Which is obvious and doesn’t need any invocation of Goedel at all. All reasoning must come to an end at some point (or, perhaps I should say, a beginning).
I don’t know what “it” you are referring to, but here Left Hand of Dorkness is invoking a Humean skepticism: just because something has repeated many times before doesn’t, in itself, logically entail that it will occur again, or even that it is likely to occur again. You need to make additional assumptions to allow yourself to make those inductive leaps, something like “The universe will probably go on being in the future pretty much the way it was in the past”, and those assumptions of yours will be, LHOD is saying, unproven and unfounded.
You know I don’t care who wrote it, this timeline is opinion only. No one, and I mean no one could know when she experienced her NDE. She could not even have known because there is no time at all in the spirit world. You have not discovered something. When she tells the story there is no breaks in the experience, it is one long experience. Now hallucinations have been ruled out in NDE by those who research the experiences.
No lekatt, it’s based on the actual notes and times stated by the surgical team, which your own source related.
Nevertheless, all the details from the O.R. she recalls happened when she was merely sedated, not dead. You can of course imagine that she somehow “heard” something someone said half an hour after they actually said it, but the fact remains that when they said it, she was not dead, which strongly suggests that much of the first part of her “NDE” was merely under the influence of drugs. You certainly can no longer rule that out.
So? You’re arguing against yourself here: if people can’t have or remember experiences when they are unconscious, then there would be no breaks. Her hallucinatory dreams would have simply stopped when her brain went dead, and then began again when it started up again.
When I have dreams, even vivid ones, there are no “breaks” between consciousness and dreams or in between dreams. We have no memory at all of any time of pure dreamless unconsciousness and hence no experience of it.