Afterlife: Matt Take Notice!!! (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, January 10, 2012, 03:35 (4680 days ago) @ dhw

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1) “David will probably find this a cop-out, but I cannot make a judgment here.”
I also find it a cop-out, and unfortunately you do make a judgment.

2) “Having never had an experience like this myself, I can’t be anything but intensely skeptical”.
If someone obtains information by unknown means, and that information is corroborated by several witnesses, are you saying everyone concerned was a liar or was suffering from some kind of collective delusion? If not, what are you sceptical about? Do you never believe anything people report unless you’ve experienced it yourself?

Why don't you believe in the Risen Christ? There were a host of witnesses. Enough that many were willing to be brutalized in the following years than reject what they saw. Saul claimed that the "dead" Christ spoke to him on the road to Damascus. What's different about some of these NDEs from NT stories, save the source?

Amazingly however, you DO have me pegged well in the words in red. It's the core of the many disagreements I have with people all the time. If the story is relatively mundane (Salvation Army needs blankets... someone got shot in a gang dispute...) I don't spend too much time thinking about it. I accept--I don't believe. (There's a difference.) If a friend were to tell me that they had an OOB, I would be polite, most likely wouldn't even challenge it, but no, I wouldn't believe it. I would accept that they experienced something, but in no way does that commit me to their story. I lack that frame of reference--I'm hopelessly out of my element.

If you want me to state it bluntly: I reject faith. I don't think it has any place in my life and I go out of my way to kill it when I find it. Gaining information by a means that I can't myself use, means that I have to take it on faith that the other person gained information by that means. This means that when someone makes a claim like NDE/OOB, that while I won't call them fraudulent, I can never go beyond "accept."

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Are you saying that the list of verified experiences, observations, items of knowledge David and I asked you to consider were also “fantastical”? Why do you persistently focus on those aspects of such experiences that are NOT verifiable, when we are expressly asking you to consider those that ARE?

One of my programming instructors survived two parachute failures.

THAT is just as fantastical as these veridical NDE claims. Fantastical is the correct word.

The problem I have is that there is a definite "picking and choosing" going on. You want to concentrate only upon one part of NDEs, when I don't think you can really do that. It's like taking only a single petal to study a rose.

The verifiable parts rest on a bed of the unverifiable. I've always told both you and David that I'm uncomfortable talking about NDE/OBE precisely (to beat this horse some more) because I accept that we have a materialistic means to study our world. At any point where you lose those tools, you lose any amount of reliability and you are dealing squarely with stories. And I don't mean that in a degrading context, but in the context that they are: Unexplained AND unexplorable phenomenon.

If I can't find a rung, how do you expect me to climb?

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So observations of REAL events and the acquisition of VERIFIED information are not to be taken seriously?

See above. You already admitted yourself that you lack an explanation. David emphatically lacks an explanation. I lack an explanation. Where exactly do you want me to go here? It seems to me that the discussion halts here.

4) “I have a difficult time believing this story as-is. Part of it is because the only solution is Cartesian dualism. And nearly every philosophy that ever existed has extremely good arguments against dualism – Buddhism notwithstanding.”
Except, of course, those philosophers from Socrates and Plato onwards who believed in an immaterial soul, but I guess they don’t count.... That is not scepticism, it is prejudgement.

I'll say it explicitly: I don't think the stories are bullshit, but lacking any handle or frame of reference to explore them, I'm left with a ladder that has no rungs. David says I'm limiting myself, but I'm limiting myself to the tools available. If that's prejudgment, than I guess we can fit me for the inquisitor's frock.

Why do people from different cultures (including their demons!) have different experiences? I don’t know. Why is it only a small percentage of people who have these NDEs? (If dualism is correct, shouldn’t all the patients have experienced the separation of soul from body?) I don’t know. What is the source of consciousness? I don’t know. How do some people (not just during NDEs) gain access to information that is not accessible through normal channels? I don’t know. Does the brain operate the mind, or does the mind operate the brain? I don’t know. If you don’t know either, why don’t you keep your mind/brain open? Come on, Matt, take agrippan yourself!

Open to what? If I don't know, and you don't know, and David doesn't know, there is literally nothing to be open about!

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"