the soul is not dependent on brain activity

[Glaurung]

NDEs and OBEs do not happen to people who have died. All of them went on to describe their experiences, and there is good reason to believe that these experiences are normal in brains that undergo certain types of physical trauma.

I agree that people who have come back to tell their tales have not crossed the threshold of no return. (A threshold sometimes mentioned by NDEers). I disagree with the claim that all NDEs and OBEs are a consequence of dying brain activity. The experiences are too real, too coherent and share too many features to be hallucinatory. I suspect NDEs are a consequence of a premature separation of the consciousness from the body.

Everyone has experienced dreams that seem so real that when we wake we're sometimes shocked that we were dreaming. The visual and auditory experience in a dream doesn't rely on the eyes or ears.

This is something many NDEers mention as well. The conscious experience of the NDE is said to be more real than the conscious experience of this physical reality. The physical is but a very convincing illusion. The spiritual is the true reality. We are in a virtual reality program and many have become incredulous that anything could exist outside this program.

 

[Copernicus]

Everyone has experienced dreams that seem so real that when we wake we're sometimes shocked that we were dreaming. The visual and auditory experience in a dream doesn't rely on the eyes or ears.

That's correct, because the perception of experience takes place in the central nervous system. Hallucinations and dreams are generated by brain activity independently of sensory input from the peripheral nervous system. NDEs and OBEs are allegedly interactions with external physical reality and, therefore, not the same thing.

There have been documented cases where someone had an out of body experience in the hospital and while out of their body they went down the hall to a room where doctors were talking about them and they repeated the discussion verbatim to the doctors when they revived to the doctor's amazement. Michael Talbot's, The Holographic Universe, documents many hard to explain phenomena that make it pretty clear we don't know as much as we think we do about such things.

Like accounts of miracles and sightings of flying saucers, there is no shortage of such stories in the popular media, and Talbot's book certainly counts as an example of such speculation. However, nothing he has written has been empirically verified. It is a collection of anecdotes. Moreover, there is the problem that you are no longer talking about dreaming, but allegations of direct interaction between a disembodied spirit with physical reality in a way that suggests the disembodied spirit still possesses the embodied powers of physical sensory equipment.

See: Quora review of The Holographic Universe

I agree that people who come back to tell their tales have not crossed the threshold of no return (a threshold sometimes mentioned by NDEers). I disagree with the claim that NDEs and OBEs are a consequence of dying brain activity. I suspect NDEs are a consequence of a premature separation of the consciousness from the body. Most people in a near death situation will experience nothing until they have well and truly died.

Or they could be states of semi-consciousness in which the body hears conversations but doesn't recall being conscious while doing so. Or they are simply hallucinations brought on by chemical changes in the brain. The fact that the people survive to report them suggests that they really did not undergo dying brain activity, as you point out.

This is something many NDEers mention as well. The conscious experience of the NDE is said to be more real than the conscious experience of this physical reality. The physical is but a very convincing illusion. The spiritual is the true reality. We are in a virtual reality program and many have become incredulous that anything could exist outside this program.

It is well known that psychological perception is active rather than passive. That is, sense data from the peripheral nervous system are matched against expected perceptual experiences. It is possible for the brain to imagine or dream those experiences without any sensory input to match them against. What it means to make sense of our senses is to integrate them with past experiences that we use to build up models reality. That is, bodily sensations are linked to a web of other experiences in a vast network of associations. Ultimately, all thought is grounded in sensory-motor activities--the way our bodies interact with physical reality. Also, NDEs can be chemically induced in experimental settings.

See: Embodied Cognition (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

But Neanderthal had no need for God-belief or religion. Lizards, toads, and serpents, have no religion, or prayer books. All of that is the purview of the new brain not the old, atheist, mammalian, Neanderthal brain.

The newest brain reasons critically, and critical thought, which includes skepticism and empiricism, tells us that we have no reason to pray to the gods uncritical minds have invented.

Atheists are under the miss-impression that belief in God is childish, or outdated; that it's something evolutionary advancement weeds out.

Misimpression? I consider what you wrote correct.

Man's religious phase represents the period of time between when he first began to wonder in words, to speak to one another, and attempted to control his environment with prayer and sacrifices to thunder gods or crows or whatever they imagined was their superior, until he outgrew that. If you gave language and symbolic thought to chimps today, they'd be worshiping man by tomorrow.

There is a spectrum of humanity from more religious to less, with less growing and more diminishing (see the rise of the "nones" - people without a religious affiliation). That's the measure of the present state of this transformation. It begins in the most intellectually advanced cultures in the most intellectually advanced individuals and gradually becomes more prevalent as time passes.

I understand that the faithful bristle at this, but there's a reason many denominations object to their children going to public schools and universities. It's the same reason the church bristles at losing access to the children whose parents don't teach them religion or bring them to a church because of laws banning state-led prayer and creationism in public schools. Education has a way of preventing or changing indoctrination.

And it's only since reaching God consciousness that man has reached the moon, Mars, and is peering out into the stars:

Yes. I suppose you think that one led to the other. It's the opposite. Abrahamic theism has been an anchor on Western intellectual progress, which made its greatest advances before the rise of Christianity and then again later following the rise of humanism, Enlightenment values, and the Age of Reason, when science and the modern liberal, secular, democratic state with guaranteed individual rights began replacing the old order of superstition (alchemy, astrology, creationism) and kings claiming a divine right to be kings. In between were the Middle Ages, or the Age of Faith.

Faith is no more a good or bad thing than consciousness is a good or bad thing.

Consciousness is a good thing. Faith is a logical error. It generates non sequiturs and has no value in the pursuit of knowledge.

without faith there is no God, in which case there could, would, be no self-consciousness able to distinguish good from bad except in the most banal animal atheistic way.

There's more of your view of atheism as primitive. It's interesting that we see one another - theist and atheist - as engaging in relatively primitive thinking. You see theism as an improvement over atheism, and I see it the other way around. I see humanist values as more evolved than Christian ones where they differ.

Humanism has been reshaping Christianity for several centuries now. You can see the effect when you compare it to the Islamic world, which has seen much less of these Western Enlightenment ideas. The religions are roughly the same on paper - brutal, judgmental, angry, semitic homophobic, misogynistic god requiring fealty in the form of worship and submission.

Humanism took the power of the church to torture people for alleged impiety away, but before it did, Christians were just as brutal as the people who still cut off hands, burn people alive in cages, and push them off high towers, and just as misogynistic as the Muslims who want to keep girls and women out of schools and disempowered. As I said, they're roughly the same religion on paper, but rendered differently in the parts of the world where they flourish because one has been conditioned by humanist values for more than four centuries now, so no more inquisitions or witch hangings for the church, and a relative acceptance of democracy and secular government, both antithetical to Christianity.

 

[John D. Brey]

That's correct, because the perception of experience takes place in the central nervous system. Hallucinations and dreams are generated by brain activity independently of sensory input from the peripheral nervous system. NDEs and OBEs are allegedly interactions with external physical reality and, therefore, not the same thing.

. . . Unless "external physical reality" isn't exactly what we think it is. The fact that there's a limit to how many times you can halve something (Zeno's paradox) before it loses its locality (quantum fuzziness) seems to prove that our "external physical reality" isn't as physically real as we take it to be. Add to that the problem of qualia (the fact that the "experience" of physical reality is unhinged from so-called physical signals), and the educated person realizes he's living in some kind of matrix run by some kind of agent, or agents, who are clearly trying to pull a fast one on all of us.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.​

​

Ephesians 6:12.​

John

 

[Copernicus]

. . . Unless "external physical reality" isn't exactly what we think it is. The fact that there's a limit to how many times you can halve something (Zeno's paradox) before it loses its locality (quantum fuzziness) seems to prove that our "external physical reality" isn't as physically real as we take it to be. Add to that the problem of qualia (the fact that the "experience" of physical reality is unhinged from so-called physical signals), and the educated person realizes he's living in some kind of matrix run by some kind of agent, or agents, who are clearly trying to pull a fast one on all of us.

John, none of the above addresses the question of whether NDEs and OBEs represent evidence of that disembodied spirits can exist. If physical reality isn't what I think it is, that doesn't support your contention that it is what you think it is. Similarly, Zeno's paradox isn't solved by positing the existence of disembodied souls that interact with physical reality. AFAICT, the concept of qualia is about how the mind perceives actual physical signals from the peripheral nervous system. The truly educated person does not "know" that he is living in some kind of matrix. What he knows is that The Matrix is a movie based on a very common theme in science fiction stories, not support for the claim that disembodied souls can exist independently of brain activity.

 

[Sgt. Pepper]

I also believe consciousness survies death. My reading into various deathbed phenomena has given me sufficient grounds to maintain hope that consciousness continues after the demise of the physical body. Everyone knows about NDEs, but there are also many reports of terminal lucidity and veridical deathbed visions. Not to mention phenomena such as OBEs, apparitions, past life memories and so on.

People who insist that physical death extinguishes consciousness are pushing a dogma. I do not claim to know with certainty that an afterlife definitely exists, but I think looking into these phenomena gives us real hope that there may indeed be something there.

I agree that people who have come back to tell their tales have not crossed the threshold of no return. (A threshold sometimes mentioned by NDEers). I disagree with the claim that all NDEs and OBEs are a consequence of dying brain activity. The experiences are too real, too coherent and share too many features to be hallucinatory. I suspect NDEs are a consequence of a premature separation of the consciousness from the body.

This is something many NDEers mention as well. The conscious experience of the NDE is said to be more real than the conscious experience of this physical reality. The physical is but a very convincing illusion. The spiritual is the true reality. We are in a virtual reality program and many have become incredulous that anything could exist outside this program.

The following article appeared in my Facebook newsfeed yesterday, and I thought that you would also find it very interesting.

Near-Death Experiences Research Has Doctor Convinced of Afterlife

FYI, the article has a link to the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation.

 

[John D. Brey]

John, none of the above addresses the question of whether NDEs and OBEs represent evidence of that disembodied spirits can exist.

. . . I think you might be misrepresenting my argument? I never addressed evidence that disembodied spirits can or do exist. I addressed your statement that since the eyes and ears that transform the signals from the physical world are left in the physical body during an OBE, how can the disembodied soul be seeing the world the same way as if the soul possessed eyes and ears like the body it left behind (presumably the OBE doesn't come through organs like the physical eyes and ears)?

My argument is less about proving that disembodied souls can exist, and more about trying to debunk your reasons for why they can't. I was deconstructing your argument against disembodied souls, without offering any evidence or argumentation for the existence of disembodied souls.

If physical reality isn't what I think it is, that doesn't support your contention that it is what you think it is.

Right. I never implied anything of the sort. I tried to show that your arguments, based on orthodox conceptions of reality, aren't really as sound as orthodoxy likes to think they are. I never even posited a vision or version of reality outside yours. I merely argued some of the weaknesses of the orthodoxy you implied discredited OBE's.



John

 

[Twilight Hue]

I know several people who look conscious, yet seem to have no brain.

Ciao

- viole

I can't resist....

 

[Copernicus]

. . . I think you might be misrepresenting my argument? I never addressed evidence that disembodied spirits can or do exist. I addressed your statement that since the eyes and ears that transform the signals from the physical world are left in the physical body during an OBE, how can the disembodied soul be seeing the world the same way as if the soul possessed eyes and ears like the body it left behind (presumably the OBE doesn't come through organs like the physical eyes and ears)?

My argument is less about proving that disembodied souls can exist, and more about trying to debunk your reasons for why they can't. I was deconstructing your argument against disembodied souls, without offering any evidence or argumentation for the existence of disembodied souls.

John, you actually appear to agree with me that it is implausible to believe that a disembodied soul could see or hear the physical world in the same way that a physical body could. That is actually you trying to argue that disembodied souls can exist, even though you have somehow come to think you weren't arguing that position. You appear to want to have it both ways--that you disagree with me without actually disagreeing with me. Moreover, you set up a straw man by claiming that I was saying disembodied souls can't exist. My argument is that their existence is implausible, not impossible. If disembodied souls can interact with the world in the same way as embodied souls, then what do they need bodies for? All you are doing here is assuming that disembodied souls can exist somehow but, as you admit, "without offering any evidence or argumentation for the existence of disembodied souls." IOW, we have no good reason to believe that they exist.

If physical reality isn't what I think it is, that doesn't support your contention that it is what you think it is.​

Right. I never implied anything of the sort. I tried to show that your arguments, based on orthodox conceptions of reality, aren't really as sound as orthodoxy likes to think they are. I never even posited a vision or version of reality outside yours. I merely argued some of the weaknesses of the orthodoxy you implied discredited OBE's.

My argument is sound, because the argument is about the plausibility of the existence of disembodied souls, not the logical possibility. Do you understand the difference between a logical argument and an empirical argument? It is not a weakness in my argument that I choose not to believe in things that we have no reason to believe in. It is pure sophistry to argue otherwise. You might as well try to argue that there is an invisible pink elephant sitting on your keyboard and anyone who tries to argue otherwise is making an unorthodox, unsound argument.

 

[John D. Brey]

Man's religious phase represents the period of time between when he first began to wonder in words, to speak to one another, and attempted to control his environment with prayer and sacrifices to thunder gods or crows or whatever they imagined was their superior, until he outgrew that. If you gave language and symbolic thought to chimps today, they'd be worshiping man by tomorrow.

Aside from God, there is only one other being that is invisible and imperceptible to the senses, but whose individual reality and personal existence are nevertheless absolutely certain to each one of us. That being is our soul, our נפש. The soul that reflects on itself is capable of grasping the real, personal existence of an invisible, imperceptible Being; aware of itself, it also knows God. Just as we are sure of our own existence, so we are sure of God’s existence.​

​

Rabbi Samson R. Hirsch, The Hirsch Chumash, Deuteronomy 4:15.​

Yes. If chimps were fitted with a Chomskyesque language-module capable of harnessing the self-reflections of self-conscious soul-life they would, just like us, look for a creator, or someone or thing to worship, since it's precisly at that level of self-conscious knowledge that soul-life comes pre-packaged with consciousness of an invisible God who's the source of invisible soul-life. Since the soul can't die ---it's not mortal --- death becomes a dark thing, and everlasting life becomes a genuine motivation for proper thought and action.

First there is a `preconscious phase' where people do not possess free will but act directly and without reflection upon the gods' commands. A `socially conscious phase' follows, in which free will is regulated via a social contract (the Ten Commandments) pronounced by a human being (Moses) with special abilities to hear God; focus is on the community and ceremonies. In the third phase, a `personally conscious phase', the relationship between man and God is again internal (as in the preconscious phase) but now is conscious: Free will implies the possibility of sin in mind as well as deed. Polytheistic religions all belong in the first phase, while Judaism and in part, Roman Catholicism belong to the second; Protestantism is a pure cultivation of the third phase.​

​

Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion.​

​

The true evolution starts with the atheism which is universal in the early life-forms right up until man reaches the point where his brain and mind are capable of accommodating the incarnation of invisible soul life, at which point God consciousness arrives. While it's true that early on, mankind is confused by this God-consciousness, nevertheless, as the idea evolves and man gains greater understanding, he moves from somewhat simplistic god ideas to the more developed theologies of Judaism and Christianity, and eventually to the Protestant theology we have today.

There is a spectrum of humanity from more religious to less, with less growing and more diminishing (see the rise of the "nones" - people without a religious affiliation). That's the measure of the present state of this transformation. It begins in the most intellectually advanced cultures in the most intellectually advanced individuals and gradually becomes more prevalent as time passes.

Two forces meet head-to-head in the evolution of life: life strives against the second law of thermodynamics which is literally the Sea of Lethe from which life crawled, and which sends hurricanes and gale force winds to try and wash life away with the time and tides of the fallen world. Even as life rises up and builds up cathedrals designed to denigrate the second law, the second law baptizes its own priesthood, its own priests, who, human atheists, use the very product that will eventually overturn the second law, the human mind, in a hopeless and hapless attempt to defeat life. The forces of death and destruction have their own servants even in the human race, the atheists, who are double-agents, who've sold their soul to defeat the soul, at the expense of their own immortality. Dark are the secrets of iniquity.

I understand that the faithful bristle at this, but there's a reason many denominations object to their children going to public schools and universities. It's the same reason the church bristles at losing access to the children whose parents don't teach them religion or bring them to a church because of laws banning state-led prayer and creationism in public schools. Education has a way of preventing or changing indoctrination.

The public schools are succumbing to the second law of thermodynamics. They were originally the product of Luther's command to educate all the young ---male and female ---so that they can read the Bible and overcome the lies of the atheists and their god, the second law of thermodynamics. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, all universities began as divinity schools, as seminaries; they're the products of Calvin and Luther. It's only with the disintegration taking place in these latter days of the current epoch of humanity (just prior to the Rapture of the Church ---the believer's golden parachute) that the seminaries, and divinity schools (which is what every school once was) have taken to teaching atheistic humanism and attacking the source of their very existence. . . Here, read Harvard's Professor of Evolution, Joseph Henrich:

If we want to explain these [advanced] aspects of brains and psychology as they appear in modern societies, we need to understand the origins and spread of high rates of literacy---when and why did most people start reading? . . . It began late in 1517, just after Halloween, in the small German charter town of Wittenberg. A monk and professor named Martin Luther had produced his famous Ninety-Five Theses. . . Luther's Ninety-Five Theses marked the eruption of the Protestant Reformation. . . Embedded deep in Protestantism is the notion that individuals should develop a personal relationship with God and Jesus. To accomplish this, both men and women needed to read and interpret the sacred scripture ---the Bible ----for themselves, and not rely primarily on the authority of supposed experts, priests, or institutional authorities like the Church. . . Protestantism spread from Wittenberg like the ripples created by tossing a stone in a pond. . . Thus we can take proximity to ground zero of the Reformation ---Wittenberg ---as a cause of . . . raised literacy and schooling in its wake.​

​

Joseph Henrich, Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.​

Jews and Christians are the source of higher education. And it's for that reason that up until very recently, 99% of all Nobel Prizes were awarded to Jews and Christians. Ninety-nine percent. That's not a typo.

Yes. I suppose you think that one led to the other. It's the opposite. Abrahamic theism has been an anchor on Western intellectual progress, which made its greatest advances before the rise of Christianity and then again later following the rise of humanism, Enlightenment values, and the Age of Reason, when science and the modern liberal, secular, democratic state with guaranteed individual rights began replacing the old order of superstition (alchemy, astrology, creationism) and kings claiming a divine right to be kings. In between were the Middle Ages, or the Age of Faith.

That's the falsehood being taught and preached today.

Christianity is the root and source of Western Civilization, the Industrial Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution. Though it's not taught today, if anyone cared to look, they would see that behind almost every early scientific achievement of note, was a Christian or a Jew, not an atheist.

Yes, the organized churches, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, used some questionable means to keep people in line. Nevertheless, the historian Will Durant said that measured by almost any objective standard, the Catholic Church proves to be the most successful organism that has ever existed on planet earth. Regarding the dissolution of the once glorious Roman Empire, from which the Roman Church grew, Durant says this:

Moral decay contributed to the dissolution. The virile character that had been formed by arduous simplicities and a supporting faith relaxed in the sunshine of wealth and the freedom of belief; men had now, in the middle and upper classes, the means to yield to temptation, and only expediency to restrain them . . . Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed.​

Sounds like what we see happening before our very eyes today. That only people of faith seem even to notice it lends itself to the proposition that the reptilian brain of atheists is cold-blooded; it doesn't even notice the temperature rising until it's too late.

The End is Very Near.




John

 

[John D. Brey]

John, you actually appear to agree with me that it is implausible to believe that a disembodied soul could see or hear the physical world in the same way that a physical body could. That is actually you trying to argue that disembodied souls can exist, even though you have somehow come to think you weren't arguing that position. You appear to want to have it both ways--that you disagree with me without actually disagreeing with me. Moreover, you set up a straw man by claiming that I was saying disembodied souls can't exist. My argument is that their existence is implausible, not impossible. If disembodied souls can interact with the world in the same way as embodied souls, then what do they need bodies for? All you are doing here is assuming that disembodied souls can exist somehow but, as you admit, "without offering any evidence or argumentation for the existence of disembodied souls." IOW, we have no good reason to believe that they exist.

I agree with most of what you say above. Most importantly, I agree with your logic about the strangeness (or unlikeliness) of disembodied souls allegedly perceiving things precisely as the soul's body did. How, or why, would the disembodied soul have the same phenomenology as that which came packaged in the physiology of the soul's former body?

I find that question extremely interesting since I experienced an OBE myself under circumstances that convinced me it wasn't a dream or merely some element of my brain causing the experience (it occurred during a temporary cessation of breathing and normal consciousness). Because of the strength of your logical question about a soul sharing its body's physiological phenomenology I've always wondered why when I hovered above my body I seemed to see it through a phenomenological lens that seemingly would require a physiology like that found in my body? It's illogical; such that I have one of those sometimes fruitful contradictions that can lead to a thoughtful breakthrough: seeing my body below me as though I was seeing it with the eyes of my body makes no logical sense. And yet I experienced it in a way that makes me willing to look beyond the fact that it makes no sense.

Because I'm not really into such things too much I never worried about solving the conundrum. But when you mentioned it, some of the things Karl Popper said in his book, The Self and Its Brain, got me thinking about a viable solution to the conundrum. It was that solution I was interested in pursuing and not really an argument or justification for OBE's in the aggregate since I don't really care too much if they're real or not even though I experienced one. It wouldn't bother me if my OBE was a phenomenon of my brain playing a trick on me.



John

 

[John D. Brey]

My argument is sound, because the argument is about the plausibility of the existence of disembodied souls, not the logical possibility. Do you understand the difference between a logical argument and an empirical argument? It is not a weakness in my argument that I choose not to believe in things that we have no reason to believe in. It is pure sophistry to argue otherwise. You might as well try to argue that there is an invisible pink elephant sitting on your keyboard and anyone who tries to argue otherwise is making an unorthodox, unsound argument.

I agree that your argument is sound. And I didn't mean to imply that there's anything wrong with your belief. I was just pointing out that though your belief and its foundation are sound, they can be shown to be based on some orthodox concepts of reality that aren't set in stone.



John

 

[Copernicus]

I agree with most of what you say above. Most importantly, I agree with your logic about the strangeness (or unlikeliness) of disembodied souls allegedly perceiving things precisely as the soul's body did. How, or why, would the disembodied soul have the same phenomenology as that which came packaged in the physiology of the soul's former body?

I find that question extremely interesting since I experienced an OBE myself under circumstances that convinced me it wasn't a dream or merely some element of my brain causing the experience (it occurred during a temporary cessation of breathing and normal consciousness). Because of the strength of your logical question about a soul sharing its body's physiological phenomenology I've always wondered why when I hovered above my body I seemed to see it through a phenomenological lens that seemingly would require a physiology like that found in my body? It's illogical; such that I have one of those sometimes fruitful contradictions that can lead to a thoughtful breakthrough: seeing my body below me as though I was seeing it with the eyes of my body makes no logical sense. And yet I experienced it in a way that makes me willing to look beyond the fact that it makes no sense.

Because I'm not really into such things too much I never worried about solving the conundrum. But when you mentioned it, some of the things Karl Popper said in his book, The Self and Its Brain, got me thinking about a viable solution to the conundrum. It was that solution I was interested in pursuing and not really an argument or justification for OBE's in the aggregate since I don't really care too much if they're real or not even though I experienced one. It wouldn't bother me if my OBE was a phenomenon of my brain playing a trick on me.

Fair enough. I didn't know that you had had that experience, but there does seem to be fairly good evidence that the OBE phenomenon, like the NDE one, can be experimentally induced. So the most likely explanation is that some physical change in brain activity is what causes it. The Wikipedia page, as usual, gives a lot of information on the subject. If you scroll down somewhat, you'll find material about experimentally induced instances.

Wikipedia: Out-of-body experience

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Yes. If chimps were fitted with a Chomskyesque language-module capable of harnessing the self-reflections of self-conscious soul-life they would, just like us, look for a creator, or someone or thing to worship, since it's precisly at that level of self-conscious knowledge that soul-life comes pre-packaged with consciousness of an invisible God who's the source of invisible soul-life.

You've identified what you call the soul and what Abrahamic believers thinks elevates them above the beasts - the speech and symbolic reasoning center. Give one to chimps and suddenly, they're also these things man call himself. You're romanticizing it with the metaphor of a ghost.

Since the soul can't die ---it's not mortal --- death becomes a dark thing, and everlasting life becomes a genuine motivation for proper thought and action.

Or, there is no soul, just prefrontal neocortex.

Even as life rises up and builds up cathedrals designed to denigrate the second law, the second law baptizes its own priesthood, its own priests, who, human atheists, use the very product that will eventually overturn the second law, the human mind, in a hopeless and hapless attempt to defeat life. The forces of death and destruction have their own servants even in the human race, the atheists, who are double-agents, who've sold their soul to defeat the soul, at the expense of their own immortality. Dark are the secrets of iniquity.

What?

Jews and Christians are the source of higher education. Christianity is the root and source of Western Civilization, the Industrial Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution

No. The source of the Western intellectual tradition was classical antiquity - the ancient Greeks and Romans. That went into hibernation in Western culture during the Middle Ages, but was acquired by the Muslim world, where it waited centuries for the rebirth of reason and skepticism, and the development of an empirical epistemology - the Enlightenment, where humanist philosophy had a rebirth (renaissance) and invented the scientific method, the modern liberal arts curriculum, and the modern, liberal, secular, democratic state with guaranteed personal freedoms. Christianity is antithetical to both of those. It fights science trying to find a gap for its god to occupy in a "creation" story that doesn't seem to need one. It fights schools and their curricula trying to insert state-led prayer into publics schools and creationism into their curricula, and is now banning books in schools. And it presently working to constrict reproductive and marital freedoms.

It's theft to credit an ism like Christianity for what Christians or anybody else do if it isn't a result of Christian doctrine. Humanism deserves that credit. It's the source of the scientific revolution and the turn to empiricism rather than holy books for answers about reality.

In Newton's Principia, which was groundbreaking science, he describes the celestial mechanics of the solar system in a way any equally talented atheist would - a way atheists still point to as good science. But none of that came from his Bible or his belief in original sin or the resurrection of Christ - Christian contributions to the Western intellectual tradition.

However, when Newton reached the limits of his knowledge, which predicted that Earth should have been thrown into the sun or out of the solar system by now, here's where Newton's Christianity takes over. He inserts the hand of God to nudge the smaller planets back into their orbits. That's when science became religion and useful became useless. LaPlace came along a century later and supplied the mathematics Newton was missing - perturbation theory - the religion was replaced with science and the god of the gaps lost yet another job to blind nature.

 

[John D. Brey]

You've identified what you call the soul and what Abrahamic believers thinks elevates them above the beasts - the speech and symbolic reasoning center. Give one to chimps and suddenly, they're also these things man call himself. You're romanticizing it with the metaphor of a ghost.

Or, there is no soul, just prefrontal neocortex.

What?

No. The source of the Western intellectual tradition was classical antiquity - the ancient Greeks and Romans. That went into hibernation in Western culture during the Middle Ages, but was acquired by the Muslim world, where it waited centuries for the rebirth of reason and skepticism, and the development of an empirical epistemology - the Enlightenment, where humanist philosophy had a rebirth (renaissance) and invented the scientific method, the modern liberal arts curriculum, and the modern, liberal, secular, democratic state with guaranteed personal freedoms. Christianity is antithetical to both of those. It fights science trying to find a gap for its god to occupy in a "creation" story that doesn't seem to need one. It fights schools and their curricula trying to insert state-led prayer into publics schools and creationism into their curricula, and is now banning books in schools. And it presently working to constrict reproductive and marital freedoms.

It's theft to credit an ism like Christianity for what Christians or anybody else do if it isn't a result of Christian doctrine. Humanism deserves that credit. It's the source of the scientific revolution and the turn to empiricism rather than holy books for answers about reality.

In Newton's Principia, which was groundbreaking science, he describes the celestial mechanics of the solar system in a way any equally talented atheist would - a way atheists still point to as good science. But none of that came from his Bible or his belief in original sin or the resurrection of Christ - Christian contributions to the Western intellectual tradition.

However, when Newton reached the limits of his knowledge, which predicted that Earth should have been thrown into the sun or out of the solar system by now, here's where Newton's Christianity takes over. He inserts the hand of God to nudge the smaller planets back into their orbits. That's when science became religion and useful became useless. LaPlace came along a century later and supplied the mathematics Newton was missing - perturbation theory - the religion was replaced with science and the god of the gaps lost yet another job to blind nature.

As you noted in an earlier message, it's fascinating to see how different people can interpret the same information in ways that justify their own particular, or even peculiar, worldview. In two of the Newton biographies I've read, White's, The Last Sorcerer, pages 157-162 . . .and Westfall's, The Life of Isaac Newton, pages 301-305, the biographers claim that Newton appears to have got his theory of gravity from his study of Solomon's temple. When John Maynard Keynes examined Newton's library he called him the last sorcerer and noted that Newton had actually written more about biblical exegesis and prophesy (over a million words in his own hand) than he had about science. Newton was firstly a theologian, and only secondarily a scientist. He started out his scientific journey as a journeyman alchemist trying to force his biblical exegesis onto the material world.

Most serious historians concerning the cause and evolution of modern science attribute the first instances of the scientific-method to Christian alchemists ---Newton being one of them ---- who were the first quasi-moderns to begin to do serious experimentation in an attempt to change the current order of things in the world. It was the alchemists who used experimentation to attempt to force mother nature to give up her secrets. And it's this attempt to transmute, or transform nature, that led to things like electricity, atomic energy, space travel, heart transplants, etc.

In my personal opinion, the most authoritative explanation of science, its beginning, its source, and evolution, is Karl Popper's, Conjectures and Refutations. In that book Popper soundly refutes your conjecture concerning the source and development of modern science.




John

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Westfall's, The Life of Isaac Newton, pages 301-305, the biographers claim that Newton appears to have got his theory of gravity from his study of Solomon's temple.

It doesn't appear that way to me, but why would that matter even if correct?

When John Maynard Keynes examined Newton's library he called him the last sorcerer and noted that Newton had actually written more about biblical exegesis and prophesy (over a million words in his own hand) than he had about science. Newton was firstly a theologian, and only secondarily a scientist. He started out his scientific journey as a journeyman alchemist trying to force his biblical exegesis onto the material world.

And there a lesson to be learned there. Yes, Newton lived on the cusp of modernity with one foot in the superstitious past and another in the scientific future. His work in the latter comprises a lasting gift to humanity unrelated to his religious beliefs, and his work in alchemy and his hand of a god pushing planets is now relegated to history along with most other faith-based isms, none of which are productive. Those millions of words of theology are not read today. Sorry, but no religion gets credit for skepticism or empiricism. Those were the fruits of putting away faith-based beliefs and so-called received wisdom.

Most serious historians concerning the cause and evolution of modern science attribute the first instances of the scientific-method to Christian alchemists ---Newton being one of them

Alchemy is no more the scientific method than any other magical, faith-based system of thought, nor is it part of Christianity. Also, Christianity is no part of the scientific method, and is found nowhere in it or its laws and scientific theories.

Furthermore, the history of science predates Christianity:

Aristotle: The First Real Scientist

Christianity wants credit for moral progress, science, and the US Constitution, but its legacy is actually to serve as an impediment to all of those. Humanism - the rejection of faith - gets credit for every good idea man has had. Religion gives us animal sacrifices and inquisitions and crusades and jihads and bigotries. Religion gave us Jonestown, Waco, 9/11, and Heaven's Gate. Religion gave us the Taliban.

Popper soundly refutes your conjecture concerning the source and development of modern science.

No, he doesn't. He explains why religious beliefs are irrelevant to science. They're unfalsifiable.

 

[Fool]

I believe consciousness (the soul) is not dependent on brain activity

I believe your soul is the real you. Your body is the vehicle that enables your soul to do its work in this world. Just as a driver controls a car through its control mechanisms while sitting in the driver's seat, the soul uses the brain to control the body.

the soul control the nervous system and, through it, various organs in the body.

Soul is the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal and eternal. the body is only temporary

Any thoughts?

there is no soul after death. a soul is a living person on earth. that personality doesn't exist without a body even if the consciousness does. when the spirit/consciousness disconnects from that body, that person/personality. a spirit/consciousness doesn't come into being or go out of being but the individual self must discard it's outward garments. the bible tells you this in eccleasiaste. the spirit returns to god who gave it and the body to the dust/clay it was formed by the spirit