Dr. Jeffrey Long’s, God and the Afterlife, Science & Spirituality Have Collided |327|

Yes that's the study I'm referring to. I just went back and read it partially again and must admit the difference between western and japanese accounts wasn't so pronounced as I conveyed it in my earlier post. I wasn't trying to deliberately mislead anyone so sorry about that. The quote below is however the point I wanted to bring forward:

Well there are some interesting Asian NDEs in the historical record that pushed for particular religious beliefs.
It's an interesting question why NDEs were (and are) pushing for certain faiths sometimes.

Is it just cultural contamination? Desire to manipulate history? And so on.

Definitely muddies the NDE waters AFAICTell.
 
At least one way or another, the more spiritual aspects of the NDE do need to be covered. If Dr Long's contribution may be subject to criticism, that is fair enough. But I don't think that means such topics should not be raised. On the contrary, more is needed. We need to not shy away from or avoid the very obvious fact that many NDEs do extend far beyond the somewhat dry ideas of consciousness independent of the physical body. Sometimes it seems like the elephant in the room, when days are spent debating tiny details, but all the while carefully tip-toeing around to avoid mentioning the weightier issues.

That's a fair point. If consciousness discussions can include psychically generated UFOs, Universe-as-Simulation, Holograms...and "woo-woo" stuff like minds being uploaded to computers, Graziano's belief that puppets are conscious entities, or the materialist idea that thoughts and/or subjective experience are illusory then it seems unfair to exclude God & Love.
 
That's a fair point. If consciousness discussions can include psychically generated UFOs, Universe-as-Simulation, Holograms...and "woo-woo" stuff like minds being uploaded to computers, Graziano's belief that puppets are conscious entities, or the materialist idea that thoughts and/or subjective experience are illusory then it seems unfair to exclude God & Love.

Discussions about god/love are not the problem. Consciousness discussions should be open to lots of things. But I do have a problem with Long's work in terms of whether or not it is valid science.

A belief in god doesn't prove the existence of god. No matter how many people believe it. To do a scientific study on the existence of god, you need criteria for what god is so you can test for the criteria. It's OK to state that based on this work that more people believe in god after having an NDE, if that is what the data shows. I take issue with how Long suggests that this equates to proof of the existence of god.
 
Discussions about god/love are not the problem. Consciousness discussions should be open to lots of things. But I do have a problem with Long's work in terms of whether or not it is valid science.

A belief in god doesn't prove the existence of god. No matter how many people believe it. To do a scientific study on the existence of god, you need criteria for what god is so you can test for the criteria. It's OK to state that based on this work that more people believe in god after having an NDE, if that is what the data shows. I take issue with how Long suggests that this equates to proof of the existence of god.

Oh yeah, I agree that Long's conclusions are going beyond the evidence he collected.

I just also agree with Typoz that it's unscientific to ban research seeking to confirm or at least suggest the existence God. Even Nagel, an atheist, has defended the pursuit of intelligent design.
 
Oh yeah, I agree that Long's conclusions are going beyond the evidence he collected.

I just also agree with Typoz that it's unscientific to ban research seeking to confirm or at least suggest the existence God. Even Nagel, an atheist, has defended the pursuit of intelligent design.
I'm happy to see people pursue all kinds of research as well. :)

I wish Smithy would go on Skeptiko and talk to Alex about his book.
 
I think you've really nailed it, Ian. I think he's doing harm to the credibility of NDE research here.

Ultimately I think you're right. The better parapsychology is able to stand above the embarrassments facing science as practiced the better off the field will be in the long run.

Admittedly there is a temptation to meet the materialist extreme with a different sort of extreme and hope this leads to genuine, honest practice of science but more likely NDE research just gets further slammed and marginalized by sloppy work.
 
Let me give you an illustration of what Dr. Long has achieved in his study.

When I was a medical student I did eight weeks rotation in psychiatry. It was very revealing and at times frightening. I was shocked to discover that what I thought is the subject of jokes - people imagining themselves being extra-terrestrial creatures, Napoleon, paranoid and deluded in many other ways - actually wasn't exaggerated. One patient, a woman in her 70-s, believed that he was raped by her neighbour... by X-rays that he sent through the radio. It was one of my first encounters with real medical ethics as well. Going through the details of her experience at some point the woman said something so funny that my Prof barely held back a little grin. The patient noticed it and asked: "You don't believe me, do you?", to which he replied: "I think you are telling me what you are feeling". Subtle remark that I remembered forever. Never mind that.

Apparently the delusion of being raped via TV, radio with all kinds of electro-magnetic waves is relatively common among old schizophrenic female patients. In order to study their experience we can come up with a questionnaire detailing their experience. How often, at what times, what kind of radio waves are used, the reasons for the perpetrators to engage in this action and so on. It won't be hard to collect the database of a few hundred cases. It is very likely that after analysing this data we will find common denominators of such experience and will be able to come up with the stats. Maybe we will even be able to discover some system and structure of the Radiowave Rape Experience and the hierarchy of the sources used for this purpose. Will anybody take me seriously if I will declare it the groundbreaking evidence of the phenomenon being real and that there is an evil force behind the phenomenon?

Please, before someone starts accusing me of disrespect - it is not intended. Every experience is real, and I am not arguing about its meaning for a particular person. Similarly, I do not disrespect patients having hallucinations or delusions of psychiatric nature; our job is to understand what's going on and come up with solutions that will reduce or eliminate suffering. My example simply illustrates the point that massaging existing data doesn't make it qualitatively different.

See, what you're doing here is comparing apples and pears. You're drawing a parallel between psychotic experiences (which seem real enough to the sufferer), and the experiences of NDEers, whom you're implying become psychotic during the period when their hearts stop beating and their EEGs flatline.

However, psychotic old ladies' hearts haven't stopped beating, and nor have their EEG's flatlined. Whatever is going on with them isn't the same as what's going on during NDEs. Moreover, if any such old ladies were ever to recover their sanity, I wonder whether they'd say their imaginings about electromagnetic rape were the most real thing they'd ever experienced? Or, would they be amazed at having believed such a foolish thing, and thank their lucky stars they'd recovered?
 
See, what you're doing here is comparing apples and pears. You're drawing a parallel between psychotic experiences (which seem real enough to the sufferer), and the experiences of NDEers, whom you're implying become psychotic during the period when their hearts stop beating and their EEGs flatline.

I get the impression that many in psychiatry would draw the same conclusion: that the whole thing was imagined and that they believe they are being respectful when they respond to the question "you don't believe me, do you?" with "I believe that you believe it happened". I imagine a patronising smile to go with it. So we should ask what it is about the experience that makes these experts believe they are hearing just another psychotic episode. Reading Small Dog's posts alongside most other sceptical theories, I can't help but conclude that there is an assumption that any kind of spiritual experience must be false because we already know that the spiritual is a product of human imagination. Trying to argue against that is a dead end because they don't recognise that assumption as a metaphysical position but rather an empirical one. They have the weight of physical and medical science behind their diagnosis.

Dr. Long is also from a medical and scientific background but is also a religious man so he does not share the physicalist assumptions. But he does appear to be making his own assumptions based upon his religious beliefs. So some of the proponents on this forum (myself included) are walking in no-man's-land between two powerful ideological camps.

Coming back to the beings of light and the idea of meeting God, I just have to say that I don't think of God as a separate entity with which we can personally interact. What I call God (and I tend to avoid doing so if I can) is everything that exists, including myself. So in a sense, the being of light could be said to be God but it isn't some higher god come down to meet us: we are already, and always have been, God. So yes, God is love because love would not exist without God (nor would anything else). At the same time, I don't think that love is merely a product of the human brain; I think it is a kind of universal impetus for evolution: it is both the impulse for and the purpose of creation. If so, one could ask: why evil? That is what appears to me to be one of the failings of humanity but those failings require free will and that is why I believe we do have free will.
 
Can it be possible that death is not the end, but another phase/transition of life? Maybe it never ends and we don't know what form our energy will take next?
 
It all depends if God is central or peripheral to the research (I am very tempted to take the word in quotes). If the conclusion of the work is waved as the evidence of God - the agenda is clear.
I think you need to put this into context, this site is far removed from a Christian point of view. Very few of us are Christian, and many, such as myself, are pretty hostile to Christianity!
Some are more abstract than others. Some are more testable than others. Check these out: Coronary circulation and its manipulation in ischaemic heart disease. Inflammation cascade in trauma. Consolidation of broken bones. Post-traumatic stress disorder, for less precise example. They are testable and can be both proven and disproven.
Well surely the point is that after a typical NDE moves on from the OBE phase, everything is subjective except in those rare cases where someone meets a person whom they didn't know had died. If psychologists can discuss subjective phenomena, why shouldn't we? I suppose PTSD is subjective, but nevertheless is assumed to be real - ditto for depression.
I did, and after the guest mentioned that he knows nothing about NDE Alex lost interest, and the interview fogged up. Though the guest could give a ,to of insight about very important and interesting questions.
It sounds as though perhaps you listened to one interview, you might like to sample a few more. However, if you have a guest who claims to be an expert on consciousness and tries to assert the standard materialist line about the brain producing consciousness, isn't it a bit unsatisfactory if he hasn't actually read any of the NDE evidence?
He already mentioned that he presented his findings to thousands of people at churches and was very welcomed.
Well just look at typical NDE experiences - the closest any of them get to judgement (there may be exceptions) is the life review, but the main message seems to be that the person is welcomed 'home'. That isn't consistent with Christian teaching!
I disagree. Many materialists put up a very good case. But it's not the point. I expect equal objectivity from the interviewer towards everyone. My mistake probably is that I expect Alex to behave like a good journalist, forgetting the fact that this is a private website with private views and agenda. Nothing wrong with this.
Well I wonder if you can find an example from the podcasts (maybe by picking an interview on the basis the guest's other writings), or suggest someone Alex should interview. A lot of people can put up a good argument for materialism if they are not being questioned.
Are you misquoting me or missing the point? Loving God and Love are two different things: the former is a human concept, that latter is a real human emotion. And the fact that it is a concept of human mind is precisely why it should be treated with caution.
Well I think you may be missing the point slightly. A lot of NDE reports contain a sense that the person is being loved very intensely. A smaller number attribute that to God - many just attribute it to the light.

I am more than willing to agree with you that the people in this situation may attach the label 'God' rather indiscriminately, but love is mentioned over and over again in NDE accounts.
This is a different discussion altogether. I could argue that there is a point: for those who survived to tell stories of their visions of eternal life so that others will be less afraid to do risky stuff when necessary for the advancement of their tribe. There are more functions in animal organisms that do not lead to the immediate evolutionary advantage.
Well you could argue that, but I think you would have a hard point justifying the development of special death circuitry on the basis of survival of the fittest! Remember that once you postulate things that can't really be explained by standard evolution, you are starting to slip outside the materialist tent (BTW, I am not sure you are actually in that tent, but you often talk that way).
Once again, I only wish that all guests were treated the same way, independently of their point of view.
I do agree, Alex could usefully try to adopt a more neutral position!
A priori assumption of NDE being proof of afterlife and God is as harmful to finding the truth as the alternative. Long's research demonstrates several things: that people have lucid visions during NDE, these visions share similar qualities and these visions seem very real.
The best you can do as a researcher is to discuss the results, consider various interpretations of the data and discus shortcomings of your study.

However, as I said, this is a private site with private views and agenda, and therefore I am wrong when I question "groundbreaking conclusions" of the study conducted by the person for whom the host has sympathy. Fuck it, I am taking all this way too seriously. The view here is one-sided, and the outcomes of the interviews are determined before the start. No argument against the survivalism is good enough, and because very little is known about consciousness one can come up with any ideas about it, never mind how wild and far fetched. Once again, nothing wrong with it. Unless you pretend to be a researcher looking for the truth.
You are never wrong to question things on Skeptiko (which is just one reason why we are not a religious site - try joining a Christian discussion and asking if Jesus really came back from the dead!). However, you are wrong to swear. Swear words don't worry me personally, but some of the people who come here, really dislike them.

Finally, I would like to point out that everyone listens to the podcasts here and takes on board some ideas and rejects others. A lot of evidence about NDE's comes from interviews with people who have had them, and since they talk a lot about love, and fairly often about god, that has to figure in the results.

Scientists don't just collect data, they also try to speculate about the bigger picture. Nobody was there at the time of the Big Bang (if indeed it ever took place), but plenty of astronomers are willing to discuss it. I would argue that in some areas of science this speculation goes way beyond the data, but some speculation is essential, otherwise how would we ever even know what data to collect?

David
 
To be honest, I am not sure what part of my post is your reply aimed at. But if the use of the word God is not indicative of religion I don't know what is.
Of course the word "God" does not denote religion. The fact people can't unravel their own preconceptions from the potential within the idea is extraordinary. Most religions insist God is ineffable, and that we can only ascribe certain values to him based on reflections of our selves. So when someone has a heart attack and says they encountered a being of complete love and knowledge, what other word are they going to use, and what comparison but their own modest love and knowledge? Do they really think they'll meet a grumpy old dude with a long beard FFS?

These things are merely faces people have tried to put to God, not a literal representation. If God exists, all ideas and images of him except ineffability must be lacking, and lacking to an indescribable degree. Dr Long is a working oncologist, his day job is dealing with people who may well die from their medical condition. I would imagine God is a pressing issue in that career, and the word as good as any on which to place hope. You're saying nothing more profound than Ben Mitchell-Yellin, if they encounter such a being their wiring is screwed. You seem unable to see your own prejudice and myopia.
 
But I do have a problem with Long's work in terms of whether or not it is valid science.

A belief in god doesn't prove the existence of god. No matter how many people believe it. To do a scientific study on the existence of god, you need criteria for what god is so you can test for the criteria. It's OK to state that based on this work that more people believe in god after having an NDE, if that is what the data shows. I take issue with how Long suggests that this equates to proof of the existence of god.

In my opinion this is one aspect of science where the question of it being valid or not is no longer useful. If I were Dr Long, I'd probably recognise this, so possibly wouldn't really care so much about being true to 'science'. Many people have suggested that conventional science just isn't capable of dealing with subjective topics, it needs to be expanded.

Surely there's something strange about proponents being so strongly attached to science as it now exists? After all is science not mainstream materialists toy, designed to follow their worldview? I'm asking this as a layman, not a scientist, but surely it's a valid question?

I don't think science can even begin to prove the existance of God as it stands, thinking about it, maybe science can't prove anything. Is everything subjective?

I think Science is a very useful tool for some things, but like Newton's mechanics it has very definite limitations. Maybe the study of consciousness can be likened to quantum physics, and won't be truly served by this paradigm.
 
I think Science is a very useful tool for some things, but like Newton's mechanics it has very definite limitations.
Indeed, it has limitations. I started to draft a reply earlier where I considered the sphere of arts in its broad sense, whether visual art, music, or other forms of creative expression. These are things which can have great value, significance and meaning for people, but we rightly don't try to assess them according to the scientific method. That may seem like a distraction in this discussion. However my point is that we should not expect science to be the only filter through which we view the world, there are other ways of determining what is important which fall outside its scope. It is also important to emphasise that these things which are important are not given value because of some hypothetical future manifestation, but because they are of value and consequence right now, here, today.

I think perhaps too often even the non-religious get caught up in something they heard from somewhere which implies that ideas of God and so on are relevant only after we have passed, and thus can be ignored completely until that time comes. And it is true that there is freedom to do just that. But maybe we should be open to the possibility that such ideas might have relevance for us right now, at this very instant.

I should add that when I use the word God I don't have a particular concept in mind and it isn't necessarily the most suitable way to express my meaning, but has the advantage of being concise.
 
I don't think science can even begin to prove the existance of God as it stands, thinking about it, maybe science can't prove anything.

What if science itself is proof of God? Same old questions: why is there anything at all? Why are there laws of physics and mathematics? Why does the universe seem to be fine tuned? Seems to me there are two options: pure chance and the manifestations of a creative mind (God). The former throws out parsimony in order to throw out God. The latter seems to answer all of the questions but one: how did mind originate? Hell, I don't know but maybe it is the one absolute: no beginning or end, it just is.
 
What if science itself is proof of God?

I think it is! I agree with you, I feel that it's all god.

Does feeling trump believing? :eek:

The latter seems to answer all of the questions but one: how did mind originate? Hell, I don't know but maybe it is the one absolute: no beginning or end, it just is.

I'm happy with that for now. :)

By the way I think I've found 'an answer' to your earlier question: 'Why evil'. In any case, one that makes sense to me, in that I think it provides the start of an opening to the pathway where details can be found. Intuition is what I go on - it may be nonsense or quite clever, I don't know or care very much to be honest.
 
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I get the impression that many in psychiatry would draw the same conclusion: that the whole thing was imagined and that they believe they are being respectful when they respond to the question "you don't believe me, do you?" with "I believe that you believe it happened". I imagine a patronising smile to go with it. So we should ask what it is about the experience that makes these experts believe they are hearing just another psychotic episode. Reading Small Dog's posts alongside most other sceptical theories, I can't help but conclude that there is an assumption that any kind of spiritual experience must be false because we already know that the spiritual is a product of human imagination. Trying to argue against that is a dead end because they don't recognise that assumption as a metaphysical position but rather an empirical one. They have the weight of physical and medical science behind their diagnosis.

Dr. Long is also from a medical and scientific background but is also a religious man so he does not share the physicalist assumptions. But he does appear to be making his own assumptions based upon his religious beliefs. So some of the proponents on this forum (myself included) are walking in no-man's-land between two powerful ideological camps.

Coming back to the beings of light and the idea of meeting God, I just have to say that I don't think of God as a separate entity with which we can personally interact.
Keep in mind God made God's presence undeniably certain in the Old Testament through direct intervention. Interaction God did do.
 
Keep in mind God made God's presence undeniably certain in the Old Testament through direct intervention. Interaction God did do.

If I'm understanding your comment correctly, you are doing what so many atheists often do: reduce the concept of God to the Old Testament Jehova figure. Do we have to put a disclaimer under all of our posts to make it clear that we are not fundamentalists? When are you going to drop this straw god?
 
See, what you're doing here is comparing apples and pears. You're drawing a parallel between psychotic experiences (which seem real enough to the sufferer), and the experiences of NDEers, whom you're implying become psychotic during the period when their hearts stop beating and their EEGs flatline.

No, I am giving an example of massaging the data in order to get seemingly more meaningful result.
 
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