Life after death OR Consciousness after death?

by Space Madness 65 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  cofty

  There speaks somebody who won't let facts get in the way of beliefs.

  This is a discussion forum. You don't get to dismiss people who raise evidence you don't like.

  Just to review...

  1. Stevenson started with a belief he inherited from his mother and then spent the rest of his life gathering anecdotes that he could use to confirm it.

  2. Stevenson belived that some illness cannot be explained by genes or infection but only by reference to past lives. Similarily he postulated that birth marks and defects are signs of wounds sufferd in previous lifetimes.

  3. He went to India and other countries where belief in reincarnation was already rife and started interviewing children via interpreters.

  4. When children talk about their past lives they are almost always of a higher class and lived and died in dramatic circumstances.

  5. Nothing could possibly be allowed to count against his beliefs. Any time a child's story didn't check out it was simply discarded. Any time he found a connection between what a child said and some historical reality, however tenuous, it was marked up as evidence.

  6. Stevenson never proposed any mechanism for how injuries experienced in one life could physically impact on the next.
• 

  Violia

  I accept that this physical world exists and a spiritual ( heavenly, spirit ) world exists. I am not sure if we ever cross paths, but the Bible does say that we shall be changed in a twinkling of an eye at death. Of course jws would have you believe this only applies to the 144,000. There is no proof of that unless you accept the WT as inspired and use it in place of the Bible.

  This is a fairly commonly held belief among mainstream Christan's. The rest of the beliefs about reincarnation and spirit guides and new agey stuff, well, keep on going down that rabbit hole. It really gets confusing. I think the simple beliefs that we live now and can get a heavenly reward at death are not too complicated and do not interfere with my life now. ( ie I am not waiting for the end ).
• 

  Seraphim23

  I have an issue with Susan Blackmore in that certain aspects of NDEs and actual death experiences is evidence that gets edited out of consideration, or that evidence that doesn’t meet testable criteria is dismissed. One of the evidential aspects of this whole topic is the occurrences of phenomena of relatives to someone who has just died. The appearance of a light, or the feeling that someone close has just died at the exact time of death. Also with NDEs the reporting of conversations and details non local to the patient who was out of it and so on. These aspects challenge the scientific world view because it cannot be tested for or controlled for in experiments. So it is either put down to coincidence or anecdote. It is hard for anecdotal evidence to be taken seriously if one believes that science can in theory describe all that exists if such anecdotes cannot be tested because they deal in non-physical phenomenon. If ones world view doesn’t permit the existence of non-physical phenomena, no amount of anecdotal evidence will be allowed into the debate even if many people say they have the experiences.

  It’s a problem I recognise even though I myself have experienced such things. I also recognise that because religions often claim things that are untrue, and many people believe these things, it makes it even harder for anecdotal evidence that challenges the paradigm of materialistic science to make any headway with those whose world view doesn’t allow for the existence of nonphysical phenomena.

  How do claims that are not testable from a material point of view make headway? The issue to me is the idea that anything that exists has to be physical or material. I think it is a false view, but because we live in a material world, those like me are at a disadvantage in being able to prove it. It’s conceivable that other realms exist that are the opposite way round as with a realm of mentality but there would be no way to prove it of course. Some even think that experience itself is an illusion of the brain, and one who thinks this cannot be persuaded otherwise despite themselves.

  Clash of the world views is what I call it, because the world view one has informs how one interprets evidence and even what is allowed to be called evidence. I think that some anecdotal evidence is of better quality than other forms of anecdotal evidence and this must be considered but it will always probably be anecdotal to some unless such things happen to those who think all it really is are mistaken stories. The fact that different world views exist should give some pause because paradigms tend to shift no matter what they are, or deemed to be.
• 

  cofty

  I have an issue with Susan Blackmore in that certain aspects of NDEs and actual death experiences is evidence that gets edited out of consideration

  Really? Have you read her thorough scientific research on NDE? Go to google scholar and look for papers by Susan Blackmore on NDE and you will get thousands of hits that will keep you busy for years.

  The issue to me is the idea that anything that exists has to be physical or material

  It has to be testable or it's just pink unicorns.

  paradigms tend to shift no matter what they are, or deemed to be

  Do you mean like The Enlightenment when superstition was replaced by science and we actually began to make progress?
• 

  Seraphim23

  1 Not read through everything she has written but I have an understanding of her position. I could ask you if you have read thoroughly through the work of any number of a select panel of experts who have high qualifications as she does, but who have the opposite view as her but I won’t play that game. If you have a point to make make it, after all you did say it was a discussion forum.

  2 Your pink unicorn point is not really a point. After all the absence of a test doesn’t preclude a reality outside the domain of testing by itself, or the reality of such things to those who say they saw or experienced it or the possibility that in some cases such anecdotal reports correspond to something true, yet outside science.

  3 I didn’t really have the enlightenment in mind, or the falsie Whig history version of the enlightenment that pits science as triumphant over the forces of ignorant spirituality. The actual history is far more complex than that if you ask historians that it.

  I do wonder how you manage 9181 posts in 3 years.
• 

  Cold Steel

  William Barnes, who firmly believes that he's the reincarnation of Thomas Andrews, tells a wonderful story. But there's one point in his story, where he and Bruce Ismay butt heads over whether Titanic and Olympia should have double hulls or not. In the room was also Andrew's uncle and was very fond of Tommie. Anyway, when Tommie stormed out, his uncle stood up for him to Ismay. The first time I heard the story, I didn't notice it, but the second time it hit me. How would Tommie have known about the conversation that took place after he left? That wouldn't have been part of his memory. He was already half way out the building and he would have had no memory of what took place in the room after he had it.

  That is a major problem for me. Andrews' family insists there are numerous errors in Barnes' account and are highly critical of Barne's claims; however, I found it extremely entertaining. Then when I heard of the young boy (who now is a young man) had had the same experience that Barnes had. Same story of the little kid who drew pictures of ships with four smokestacks and who knew the last smokestack was a faux-smokestack, and only built for cosmetic reasons. He drew the ship and the "little boats" (lifeboats) and that he, Andrews, had tried to not cut corners but had been overruled by the evil Ismay. They can't both be reincarnations of Andrews.

  In my own view, reincarnation is a horrible prospect and I'd hate to think that we'd have to pass through many mortal lives. I don't think the principle is compatible with the Bible's teachings, which states that it is given once for man to die. I'm 60 years old and I feel like I've lived forever. I'd hate to go through it again. How Barnes and the other fellow obtained their knowledge about shipbuilding and were able to describe the cold days with the smell of coal in the air, the shipyard, the morning whistle, the making of rivits and how the men would drop hot rivits on each other for sport. It seems like genuine memories, so who knows?

  .