So, Jake, aside from quoting the wrong poster and dumping more sarcasm on the thread, you got nothin’?
Because it has nothing to be sentient WITH.
No, it wouldn’t. First because omniscience is impossible, and second because god is a fictional nonhuman, not a bunch of humans, and third because God it normally given various other attributes than omniscience. You might as well claim that “If someone wears a funny little moustache, they are by default Hitler.”
Or maybe we’ll all be rounded up and burned at the stake as unbelievers. Or the Christians will finally bring on the apocalypse they are so hungry for. Or the believers will forcibly genetically engineer all of humanity into religious fanatics. Or any number of other things.
Your definition above surely applies to those who believe in NDEs, psychics etc.
The only evidence offered in this thread for NDEs is that some people passionately believe they have had one.
Even though science has shown alternatives for these visions, the beleivers refuse to consider it.
It’s pretty hard to think of how to investigate NDes scientifically, but certainly psychics, dowsers and telepaths etc either refuse to be tested or deny the results when they fail.
By contrast, a scientists belief system is based on evidence - indeed many discoveries are made when something interesting happens.
I would like to hear about Czarcasm’s experience. There has been very little written on people who have had NDEs but who claim that they were just a dream or a hallucination. It seems that such people are actually quite uncommon, so it would be very interesting to hear that perspective (if Czar is willing to share).
Jake, I do ultimately feel that arguments like these with the skeptics end up being mere word games. To me, the New Age (of which I consider myself a part) and skeptical perspectives are like polar opposites. Actually, it’s more a war between the non-dogmatic and the dogmatic, as arguing with the skeptics is just like arguing with the evangelicals–there is this a very disciplined effort on their part to defend their worldview and make sure that nothing, absolutely nothing can threaten it. As if Smokey the Bear had cameras on every tree in the forest and was making sure that every cigarette butt was properly disposed of. I mean, it’s comical when you get right down to it, but these guys are not exactly the best at taking a step back and chuckling at their own anality. So, if I can save you the trouble of busting a vein or two trying to argue with these guys, I’ll feel I have done my good deed for the day.
It’s more a matter of no one wanting to pass such stories along. If someone has a vision of passing through a tunnel made of TV screens and meeting Gandalf, the believers are hardly going to pass it along.
Of course; the believers have nothing else to offer. No evidence; just empty assertions, and word games to try to con people into taking their empty claims seriously.
Yes; the skeptics are right and the New Agers are wrong. Just as people who make mystical claims have ALWAYS been wrong.
Talk about good old fashioned Freudian projection; you just accused the skeptics of doing what your side is doing. Dogma ? Your side has nothing BUT dogma. No evidence, just assertions coupled with a demand they be taken seriously. As for fanatically defending one’s worldview; that’s your side, not the skeptics. Your side has simply never come up with a challenge; while you respond to all challenges aimed at your worldview by going into denial.
Hey, Der, I think you need to learn what “dogma” means. Nice post, though! Made me smile.
To your first point: I think one of the most powerful arguments against NDEs would be to find a lot of people who have had them but nevertheless dismiss them as not having been real. Skeptics have done a lot of work to debunk NDEs, but they have not been able to come up with very many such people. Regardless of whether such people would be eager to “pass along” their stories, as you say, if they are out there in any numbers at all, finding them and getting them to tell their stories would seem to me to be rather low-hanging fruit for skeptics to pick.
Furthermore, atheists who have had NDEs certainly have a big incentive to say, “I had an NDE and it was bullshit.” I have done a lot of reading online and have yet to read any such account (Susan Blackmore said she had an OBE and it wasn’t real, which is fine but not to me the strong argument she seems to think it is). To the contrary, accounts of atheists who lost their atheism because of an NDE seem rather common.
Really? Which part of the argument with skeptics do you most find resembles an argument with evangelicals? Is it the part where they both demand evidence from you to back up your claims? Is it the part where they both give scientific studies showing simple, non-supernatural, explanations for the events being described? How about the part where they show the huge gaping flaws in your logic, revealing your argument to be little more than confirmation bias and wishful thinking?
Or is it the part where they show you the holy text they have and insist it’s infallible? Maybe the part where they make big unproven claims and then demand everyone else prove them wrong? I know, it must be the part where they accuse the other party of behaving the way they do.
It’s funny. You could have come in here and actually bothered to give some evidence of supernatural explanations of NDEs, thus putting the whole thing to rest, and forcing skeptics to accept the science or deny it. But you didn’t. You came in here and started in with the persecution complex and projection and ridicule, stopping only briefly to drop an interesting sounding but ultimately meaningless counter argument.
A simple look on google will find a bunch of stories from people who have had NDEs and didn’t immediately leap for the supernatural to explain it. I know, I’ve done it. Besides, and I know this is a ‘stale old argument’ but for some reason it still works, it doesn’t matter how many people have NDEs and think it’s supernatural. Show us it’s not interpretation, or bias, or any of the other things that the human mind is capable of. Until you can do that, the answer to this is ‘we don’t know’, and most certainly not ’ god did it’. Until you can pony up some evidence for god, there’s no reason to argue over whether or not he like playing with people soul’s like they were yo-yos.
Science can reproduce NDEs. They can be induced. The physical causes can all be shown. Yes there are some unanswered questions, but science still has a hell of a lot more to show for it’s work than new agers do. All you have to do is look at the track records of the two. The new age has a lot of catching up to do.
Wait - why? Supposing you have a person who awakens with a fresh memory of some sort of bizzare experience in their mind; why would their subjective decision how to react to it be an argument for, well, anything at all? The question isn’t whether such bizarre experiences have the ability to effect the opinions of those who experience them; we know they have that ability, at least to some percentage of the experiencers. The question is what causes the experiences themselves.
You might as well ask people if they like the color of a car and use that information to determine whether the car was made in Japan or not. It’s irrelevent information.
Actually, the people who do not attribute their NDEs to supernatural causes have little or no incentive to report them. To someone who believes they’ve talked to God, they’ve had a singular life-changing experience that they simply must tell to other people. To the rest, they had a wacky dream, not all that different from most of their other dreams, which are a daily commonplace occurrence. Why bother telling people about something commonplace, meaningless, and unimportant?
So, it doesn’t surprise me if 99 out of 100 accounts of NDEs are from those who were converted into True Believers by them. That’s about what I would expect if 1000 people had NDEs and 99 of them were converted.
And, again, disbelievers have no incentive to collect up ‘negative testimonials’, because the average disbeliever with the interest to do such a think knows that testimonials tell you nothing about the cause of the phenomenon.
*1. a system of principles or tenets, as of a church.
2. a specific tenet or doctrine authoritatively laid down, as by a church: the dogma of the Assumption.
3. prescribed doctrine: political dogma.
4. a settled or established opinion, belief, or principle. *
Sounds like your beliefs; note the complete lack of “based on facts”. How do you know that NDEs are anything but hallucinations ? You say it’s true, so it must be so, that’s how.
No, skeptics haven’t “done a lot of work”; they’ve barely been trying. They are quite obviously just hallucinations, with no rational reason to consider them anything else, and the believers have yet to come up with any evidence otherwise. Most skeptical people consider it just another baseless loony belief to be ignored. One such belief of a horde.
Just because you think it’s something profound and important doesn’t mean that rational people think that NDEs are worth their time to debunk. The fact that there’s no evidence, that such claims violate physical laws and that mysticism has always been wrong in the past is enough to make them something to write off as a hallucination. Unless and until someone DOES come up with evidence they are something more they are about as important as claim of fairies or of seeing Elvis in a flying saucer. Some “professional skeptic” types will go to the trouble of debunking them, but most skeptics have more important things to do.
So no, there’s no horde of desperately seeking skeptics who have yet to disprove your pet delusion. There’s a bunch of irritated skeptics who occasionally point out the glaring flaws in your claims and demand evidence, but don’t expect any because such evidence never turns up.
I think you’re totally failing to understand the basic psychology of the situation. If an NDE could be experienced by a large percentage of people as “just a dream,” then there is no embarrassment or inconvenience for them just to say, as Czarcasm did, “I had a doozy of a dream.” In contrast, a lot of people had a hard time talking about their NDEs precisely because they thought they were real. They thought, you know, people like you would make fun of them.
You seem to believe that, in fact, a high percentage of NDExperiencers do perceive their NDEs as not real, dreams, hallucinations. Again, it that were the case, then I really don’t think we’d have much of phenomenon on our hands. It’s precisely because NDExperiencers insist that they had a “real” experience that we even bother to talk about these things (and the fact that they claim they are able to verify actual facts that they could not otherwise have perceived; but such claims are of course related to the fact that they consider the experiences to be “real”).
I’m really doing the skeptics a favor here; it’s not an empty challenge. Do some research and try to verify that a significant percentage of NDEs are tagged as “dreams,” etc., by their experiencers and you have a powerful argument against the phenomenon.
Nay, sir. I really think it’s the most powerful argument you have in the hearts and minds war. These days, just about everyone knows someone personally who insists that his or her NDE was real. For example, my grandmother and my father come immediately to mind. To combat such effective word-of-mouth advertising, as it were, you need to have equally credible people come forth and make the opposite claim. That may not be right (“anecdotes are not evidence,” etc. etc.), but do you want to actually convince people or just spar on a message board and be “right”?
You sell your team too short. Skeptics are constantly examining all manner of evidence of that which violates their worldview and spend a lot of time thinking about it and debunking it. Susan Blackmore, for example, has written entire books on the topic.
Your posting style needs a little more care and discipline, if I may be so bold as to say so, lest you discredit your side, which needs all the help it can get. Buck up. You can do it!
I suppose I might as well respond to this, despite it not being directed at me. 
I know the universe isn’t sentient the same way I know that there isn’t an elephant here in my cubicle with me. I look: no elephant. I look at the universe: no brain. This isn’t exactly complicated.
And the reason that God can’t be ruled out is because he supposedly exists somewhere we can’t look. So he could, in theory, be hiding there, cowering away from all observation.
The universe, however, is something that can be observed. Which means the exception doesn’t apply. Which means your thinking universe theory does have a zero probability of being true - unless you can figure out some way to make it consistent with the universe that we observe. You can’t. End of story.
I look at the universe: no driver. And also, no mechanical way for some teeny tiny hidden driver to actually drive anything. So your theory not only doesn’t have a leg to stand on, it doesn’t even have the nervous system in place to tell the leg not to collapse like a wet noodle if it had a leg.
First, the TOE is a far cry from “everything there is to know about life, the universe and everything”. Second, that’s 42. Third, even knowing 42 would not make us gods. Or A God. Fourth, the scientific method does not “send back data” like a router.
The holes in this chunk of swiss cheese are so large, it’s nothing but air.
See, now, notice the difference. These words describe actual philosophical differences among atheists. Your word doen’t describe any philosophical distinctions. That is why these words are good and useful, and your “Neoatheism”" word is meaningless and worthless garbage that you made up just so you could ad-hominem people. Get it now?
No, it won’t make things perfect, smartass. But it will make the world a little tiny bit safer and more efficient for everybody, and every little bit helps.
All this assuming that some twit doesn’t kill us all first.
Why yes, lekatt has always struck me as very concerned about the mockery of others. He’s barely able to bring himself to mention NDEs for fear of shame, and would never, ever post about them on a board that is predominantly atheist or skeptical.
I think you are failing to understand the psychology here. Literally everything you hear about NDEs comes from True Believers. Not from ‘shamed’ believers, or the inevitable indifferent disbeliever. It’s not about lack of fear of shame, it’s about fervor. Some believers have it; no disbeleivers have it (at least, not as a result of their experiences).
Granted you may find people willing to step up and argue the opposing side, like myself, but this pretty much only happens in response to fervent believers. We line up to shoot down the stale old claims, again, is all.
Naw. It doesn’t matter what percentage of people believe. It matters what percentage of people believe and keep bringing it up. Necessarily this selects for believers, so the percentage of noisy people that believe is, truly, irrelevent.
A crappy, meaningless argument, you mean.
First, I don’t believe for one hairy second that “just about everyone knows someone personally who insists that his or her NDE was real”. I don’t know anybody (offline) who’s had an NDE, period. Heck, I’d bet most people have never been introduced to somebody who’s been so much as temporarily dead, NDE or not.
I repeat: it’s not a lot of people who believe this garbage. It’s a very very small group of very LOUD people.
Secondly, you are basically telling anti-gun activists to win their argument by using guns to shoot all their opposition. The idea is not to brainwash the populace into believing it, just because it happens to be true. (Especially not for NDEs, where in actual fact nobody really gives a crap what people think about it anyway.) The idea is to get people to think critically and realize for themself which of their beliefs are spun out of cobwebs instead of shored up with steel. To make out point with convincing word of mouth by paid celebrity advertisers would completely undermine our point.
I want to actually convince people to use their brains for something other than to collect fanciful stories with. Your proposal won’t help. Arguing on a message board might…though not to the people I’m actually arguing with, of course. It’s for the lurkers.
Okay, it’s actually for fun. Though, I’m not “right”. I’m right.
Actually, no they aren’t. There’s a few people who make a hobby of it, a few more who feel it’s their duty to do so. But it’s not some major endeavour. And it’s not their “worldview” that is violated but the laws of physics. Given the fact that you mystical types have throughout history ALWAYS been wrong, I doubt any of the skeptics are worried your side is going to after all these millennia come up with something real. Personally, I think quite a few would be perfectly happy to find a pin of truth in the haystack of delusion, but it doesn’t happen.
Just for fun, something you don’t think about.
I canna be watching videos at work (and have no sound here, regardless). So, unless you’d prefer I ignore this, short summary?
Just ignore it.
No, you.
Is that the 99.9%+ of the population that is not evangelical atheist? Also, is that a brand name? I don’t want to get sued here.
In contrast to your very very very small group of LOUD LOUD people?
No, I am telling anti-gun activists to get shot at.
Wait a sec, I read somewhere that, pound for pound, spider web is actually stronger than steel. WIN?!
Aren’t Dawkins and Hitchens essentially “paid celebrity advertisers”?!
Failing to convince… one person at a time?
Which are you, hobbyist or dutyist?