Millions have had near death experiences, 12 million in the US alone. The trouble with pseudoskeptics is their information is wrong. Look, who does it matter so much about NDEs. What is your emotional involvement in denial that they exist and show life continues after death. God is not going to hurt you in any way, there is nothing to fear. I can’t understand it.
The research says consciousness continues after death. I didn’t make it that way, I just experienced that way like millions of others. WTF
NDE’s is not about after death. The NDE is about Near Death Experiences, comprehende? You want dead? Find a body which has grown cold, hard and stiff after days on end.
No research says anything of the sort and you are not to return to this thread with that claim until you can provide examples of actual research.
Not a handful of interviews where people said things that the interviewer wanted to hear.
Not pretty stories without a single shred of verifiable information.
Not claims by people to have heard or seen things during an event where there is no evidence that they could not have seen or heard them before or after the event.
Actual research in which a control is established that tests claims against information that can be verified by neutral observers rather than credulously recorded by true believers who have a deep need to shape reality to their own desires. Without that evidence of research, your claim is false and you have already been permitted to post it too often.
Einstein:
Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is there. 5
Marcello Truzzi, co-founder of CSIOP - he left the group because he was skeptical of investigators and debunkers who determined the validity of a claim prior to investigation. He accused CSICOP of increasingly unscientific behavior, for which he coined the term pseudoskepticism. Truzzi stated,
“They tend to block honest inquiry, in my opinion. Most of them are not agnostic toward claims of the paranormal; they are out to knock them. […] When an experiment of the paranormal meets their requirements, then they move the goal posts. Then, if the experiment is reputable, they say it’s a mere anomaly.”
Truzzi held that CSICOP researchers sometimes also put unreasonable limits on the standards for proof regarding the study of anomalies and the paranormal.
RIDICULED DISCOVERERS,
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This is a psychological fallacy of “ignoring the obvious" or pretending it isn’t there”. The responses I’ve gotten so far are along this line:
Einstein - “To the degree Einstein believes in that (see quote) he is a fool. We’ve seen this many times before (rolls eyes in head). This is a very common psych fallacy of “skirting and dismissing the point without addressing it directly.” And the point being that pseudoskeptics have a hard time addressing the issue that many far more intelligent, and much more qualified person is saying something contrary or conflicting.
Saying I’m taking him out of context. All an open minded person has to due is to read about Einstein and his perception that the universe has aspects to it the he considers mysterious and uses the word God mysterious metaphysics numerous times in his philosophical reflections. He’s not using the word, God, in a literal sense like Planck would. It’s a metaphor but it conveys the meaning of outside of and beyond what the senses perceive and outside laboratories ability to sense or perceive.
Documentary:
The Trouble with Atheism
The only response I’ve gotten is, “Too long to watch, why don’t you summarize it for me.” As far as I know, no one has said, “Yeah, yeah, we’ve see it all before.”
To save you the time and the bother, here are a couple of excerpts that are indicative of what the documentary is all about.
Q. = Rod Liddle, document producer
A. = Peter Atkins, fellow and professor of chemistry at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford
Q. Give me your views on the existence of god or otherwise.
A. It’s fairly straight forward, there isn’t one. There’s no evidence for one, no reason to believe there is one. And so I don’t believe there is one. I think it’s rather foolish of people to think there is one.
Q. Isn’t there a terrible arrogance in that certitude?
A. What’s wrong with arrogance if you’re right?
Q. But science does not know everything now.
A. It doesn’t know everything but it’s got an extrordinarilly potent method and everything it touches gives way. I mean, that’s the extraordinary thing about science. You identify a problem, you bring this, the scientific method to bear on it, and it crumbles in front of your approach. It’s a wonderful method. Humanity should be proud that it stumbled on a technique for discovering the truth.
For 3,000 years it thought it had a method of getting the truth and they called it religion, but that’s obviously impotent as a way of discovering anything about the world. Atheists don’t go out to kill for other people’s beliefs.
Q. Stalin killed 20,000,000 million people!
Q. Forgive me for mentioning Hitler, Stalin, Mao –
A. No they weren’t.
A. He was a Confusian.
Q. Oh, come on, that is ridiculous coming – that’s ludicrous. It was an atheistic system.
A. Yes, but they don’t go out to kill in the name of atheism, that’s really the point.
Q. What do you say to pretty eminent scientists who have a belief in God?
A. That they’re wrong, first of all.
Q. Well, you don’t – again, let’s go back again. You don’t actually think that, do you, because you cannot –
A. Well, I think they’re wrong. I can think that.
Q. You can think that, yes.
A. But might ask what the psychology is behind my thinking that. That’s an interesting meta-question, and so on. But if it’s like a (unintelligible) clearly the reason these very emmenint people, some of whom you’ve no doubt been talking to, are only half scientists, really.
Also:
Ellen Johnson, President of the American Atheists, host of Atheists’ Viewpoint
A. The ordinary Christian will do, for the most part – they will – they’re not called followers for nothing.
Q. So do you think they’re stupid?
A. I would never, never attack someone – make an ad hominem attack against somebody.
Q. You just did. I’m sorry, Ellen Johnson, you’ve just said that they’ll follow whatever rubbish you put in front of them
A. You want to be rude about it, that’s being rude about it. I’m trying to be polite about it. But what I will say is that their ideas are stupid. Their beliefs are stupid. Their theology is stupid. And boy that half hour goes fast, doesn’t it, folks? I want to thank Rod……
What this documentary is show is the rigid, fundamentalist mind set in neo-atheists that gives off the sulfurous whiff of the true believer, just like the people they so vehemently attack.’
Me thinks they protesteth too loudly.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the rationale for these acerbic, shrill, polemic attacks from Dawkins, et al, seem to be based on the assumption that religion has either caused all the wars or at least the overwhelming majority of them. There seems to be this implication that if you could convert everyone to atheism, then you would have far fewer wars.
Now contrast all of that with this, by Sir John Paulkinghorne, retired theoretical physicist, now an Anglican priest who believes God stands apart from physics, says in the same documentary.
“I don’t think that God is scientifically knowable or the non-existence of God would be scientifically would be scientifically knowable. The character of the world is supportive of the idea that there is a divine mind or purpose behind it, but I don’t think it can amount to proof that that’s so. I think that none of us have access to knock-down proofs of that character whether theists or atheists.”
Here’s a guy that has been a particle physicist and a priest that is showing more an openmindedness that is completely lacking in the neo-atheist.
Marcello Truzzi, co-founder of CSICOP
Truzzi’s form of skepticism was pyrrhonism, as opposed to the tradition strictly adhering to the established scientific method, which is followed by most scientific skeptics.[3]
Truzzi was skeptical of investigators and debunkers who determined the validity of a claim prior to investigation. He accused CSICOP of increasingly unscientific behavior, for which he coined the term pseudoskepticism. Truzzi stated,
n science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. He asserts that the claimant has not borne the burden of proof and that science must continue to build its cognitive map of reality without incorporating the extraordinary claim as a new “fact.” Since the true skeptic does not assert a claim, he has no burden to prove anything. He just goes on using the established theories of “conventional science” as usual. But if a critic asserts that there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis --saying, for instance, that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact–he is making a claim and therefore also has to bear a burden of proof.
– Marcello Truzzi, On Pseudo-Skepticism, Zetetic Scholar, 12/13, pp3-4, 1987
I anticipated the Einstein comments. They employ the psychological ‘shielding and deflect’ tactic as a way to not have to deal with the issue head on.
I fully expected the lack of non-response about the documentary ‘The Trouble with Atheism’. It was the psychological fallacy of ‘Contempt prior to investigation. I think the silence surrounding is thunderous.
The response to the Marcello Truzzi post, while scant, surprised me. I fully expected people to rip into him saying something to the effect of: He didn’t leave, he got kicked out for being a woo woo fruitcake. Oh, well, two out of three ain’t bad.
What I have found interesting throughout this thread is when it comes to non-personal issues like something dealing with cut and dried science the posters on this site are very intelligent and well thought out. But when it comes to issues that are psychological/emotional hot buttons like religion, supernatural, mystical, etc., a lot of these same posters resort to polemics and actually attack rather than rebut.
***If you remember, this started out as a straightforward question in the General Questions section and was very quickly attacked by harsh, strident polemics and pulled into the Great Debate forum by a mod. My accusations of narrow mindedness are in direct response to the ad ad hominem attacks that use the words ‘fool(s)’ and ‘garbage’. These have been ‘hurled frequently throughout the thread’ with a general tone of sarcasm and condescendence. I have the right to respond accordingly.
I have set forth my position a number of times but there seems to be an unwillingness to accept anything that is not totalized polarized one way or another. Again, I have said in different ways that I am an agnostic skeptic that does not close the door on anything until the door closes itself.
Actually, you do not. If a poster attacks you, personally, you may use the Report function to call attention to that action for moderator correction. If you simply attack other posters, personally, for generalized comments they make, then you are the one in the wrong.
Regardless, while I certainly agree that there are a number of posters whose absolutist positions regarding anything that is not mechanistic are amusing, (if grating), your replies have been little more than long winded tu quoques filled with your own errors–such as your rather silly characterization of atheism as a religion.
“Your position,” in this case, is not the position that others have sought that you explain, however. After dismissing every proposed explanation for your NDE, responding as rudely to those who were polite as to those who were rude, you changed the topic and wandered into your long harangue against “pseudoskepticism.” You have repeatedly refused to put forth an explanation for what you experienced while denying any other poster’s proferred explanations.
If you actually have no proposed explanation, (which is fine: the world is filled with mysteries), and you are unwilling to accept any other poster’s conjectures, then this discussion has reached an impasse and we can safely close it as nothing more than an ongoing irritant to all sides.
I have shown experiential evidence in the from of videos. I have shown research being done by the scientific method in universities across the nation and the world. They are good scientific research. Now I have noticed that the better the evidence is that I show the more upset the regulars get, and the more likely you are to come running to censor me. To bad you can’t censor reality. Now I see you are cersoring the other spiritual posters as well. Let me offer a suggestion. Just ban the discussion of spiritual things on this board, since they can’t be debated without censorship anyway. In that manner the regulars would not be upset with the real evidence to the contrary of their beliefs.
lekatt, not one of the things you have ever posted has been scientific research. I never objected to youi posting your little anecdotes, (although I found your ability to spin them to say way more than could be justified by what was presented to be irritating), but despite your claims to have cited “science,” a couple of people talking on tape about an incident long after it happened, even with tapes of surgeries spliced in), is not “science” or research.
(And I would not have to ban nonsense if posters did not kep posting nonsense.)
None of your videos depicts an NDE as it happens. They are all interviews with people who claim they had an NDE, or people who claim they know someone who had an NDE. As such, they are not falsifiable, and are not evidence; they are anecdotes.
No, they aren’t.
Considering you claim to have left your body and floated around the spirit world, your observations are suspect.
To bad you are divorced from it.
Bring some real evidence, that can be tested and repeated, and the debate will begin. You have not offered anything that could remotely be called debate.
What may be nonsense to you, may be sacred beliefs to others, who appointed you judge on the quality of the material posted in the debates.
Of course they are scientific research done in accredited universities by accredited researchers and published in scientific journals. It don’t get more real than that.
Are you saying these researchers are not scientists or that their research is faulty which would be nothing but a judgement call on your part. Are you qualified to judge scientists doing research in universities. Do you not believe the posters on this board have the right to all information available.
Of course I am; any thinking, rational person is capable of judging whether evidence conforms to the scientific method.
All of your cites are collections of anecdotes. Even when collected by scientists, they are not scientific evidence. None of your cites are double-blinded, peer reviewed studies. Sacred beliefs are not evidence.
You’ve posted this link up many times and I thought someone should respond to it (even though the last time it was linked was a couple of pages ago).
This is one of the silliest documentaries I’ve ever seen on any topic. Usually, when making a documentary about a group of people, you let said group speak, or you at least give facts about the group.
Rod Liddle does neither; the film is one long monologue, as Rod works his way through an impressively long list of misconceptions and straw men.
Occasionally atheists are shown, but you can hardly call them ‘interviews’: just one or two lines blatantly taken out of context. Often Rod asks the ‘interviewees’ a loaded question, and they don’t get a chance to answer; the film just cuts to the next part of Rod’s monologue.
Frankly it makes “What the bleep do we know?” seem like a work of genius by comparison.
You have just pointed to the problem. You and some others posting on this board believe you are more intelligent, more knowledgable, more scientific, than anyone else and have the right to put down anything they don’t want to believe in as if they were selling good science. Got news for you. You are not, it is just arrogance and ego speaking. Why don’t you contact these researchers at their respective universities and tell them they don’t know what they are doing. I would love to see their reaction. You live in a fantasy world.