No. Rather, that you, Steve and myself do not know. We have not been dead, so we do not have the experience of an afterlife with our god, or a lack of such an experience. Nor were we there when the entire universe either exploded forth from a tiny dot of matter or didn't do so at all. Many of us take things as a matter of wishful thinking, whether religious or not. To ridicule something to which no answer can be given is a foolish thing.

Well, that wasn't very nice.

Nah, I have friends who work as designers, they'll understand. I for myself have too much respect for art to call my little attempts of creativity at work "design" :cool:

But, the real question, which comes to my mind, reading only the written communication, is: what you did you mean by the words "intelligent design". I mean uncapitalized do the words not stand for this wacko temple of thought which goes by the name of "Intelligent Design". If you do really believe in this stuff, check out my answer to crank.

Ah, I see, it was all about word games and mockery. I should have spelled it out right off the bat. My bad.

I believe that our world, it's ecosystems, the symbiotic relationship of organism and the universe by extension is so perfectly balanced and intricate in both it's micro and macro design that it almost certainly could not have happened by chance. This would almost be akin to a room of monkeys typing out a novel. As such, I see it only as logical that the mechanics of life and evolution of species occur only through the divine intervention of a creator, or at the very least a mind greater than mine.

I do hope that my pitiful words were able to at least make my intended statement discernable.

It is not my intention to ridicule; it is a simple satement of fact that no one has "come back from the grave" with a definitive answer. As Sailor Steve pointed out, there is no conclusive evidence to support either a creation story or an afterlife condition. There are so many differing creation theories and so many afterlife beliefs (an empty void, reincarnation [in several different scenarios], heaven-or-hell juudgement, etc.) given by so many cultures over so many millenia, the only way to rationally approach the question is to simply ask "Where is your conclusive proof". Asking if someone was ever dead is not an argument, it is simply trying to place the onus pf proof on the other party while sidestepping the need to provide proof one's self. This tactic can be seen in itself as a mockery or ridicule of the core topic and the arguments for or against. So the question is, Takeda,...

Where is your conclusive proof?...

Asking if someone had died is an excellent argument. It places emphasis on the purpose of any religion or science, for that matter; namely the explaination of the unknown. In that vein, death is the ultimate unknown. None who have ventured into it's bonds have ever returned. The afterlife, as the central theme of any religion, therefore remains a mystery to all. It is a matter to be taken on faith, much like the bulk of the theoretical sciences, most especially pertaining the the beginnings of our universe.

Proof? I'm not attempting to convince you of anything, vienna. I simply stated, in general fashion, what my view was. I made no attempt to place it above your own; only asking that it recieve the very same respect that I afford to your's and others. However, I have been on GT long enough to know that I should not hold my breath waiting for this to happen.

So, basically, you're saying the subject is, after all, "wishful thinking"...


(Oh, and yes, I do respect yours or anyone else views; I merely wanted to point out the shift of onus...)

Yup, it's all more clear to me now :yep:. There might be also our different cultural background involved. Here, we tend to throw Creationism and ID all into the same bowl. An interesting point of view about this question is presented in the film "Religulous" by Bill Maher. Here he asks the original old-school Christians, the Vatican, namely a guy who works in the Vaticanian planetarium, about Creationism. As backwards as those guys are often, even this guy wipes such unscientific believes and doesn't find it even worth discussing.

Your thoughts are something different. I can relate to this. I am overwhelmed by the complexity and weirdness when we leave our human (Newtonian) physics and watch how the laws of physics are in the micro and the very macro size: strange, complex, overwhelming and presumably random.
Same when I see some breathtaking things on Earth, in nature: the mind-blowing complexity of an ecosystem or just the breathtaking awesomeness of a waterfall.

This is something where I have discussions about; with people who are believers. They see it as a proof for the awesomeness and big brains of a creator. However they have the ability to link scientific findings and their belief in god - which is ok for them and to me. But the desperate search for some dino prints next to some human footprints we see in the US looks laughable, even to them. Hell, why do some people do not seem to be able to bring together faith and science? This is what looks so strange, from the European POV - like I mentioned before: it's all about a political agenda, not a philosophical question.

However, as the good agnostic that I am :know:, I still challenge you to bring an example why a complex system could not be created by randomness rather than by planned design.

Theoretical science does not require faith, just the opposite actually, real science demands skepticism which is the implacable enemy of faith.

It also requires the ability to analyze empirical information and draw logical conclusions from the data. Science also make predictions that are backed up by empirical data whereas religion can offer only ritual and magic.

Comparing the two is disingenuous in the extreme.

Regarding the question of death: in my eyes the burden of proof lies upon the people who believe to have an answer. I go with Steve in this topic: I don't know and I don't have a better theory than you guys, but if you claim something to be true: bring on the arguments for it.

I have heard different stories of people who were declared dead by medicine. Some came back, being angry at the people who took them back to life, as if those suckers took them away from something beautiful - the proverbal light, together with a peaceful feeling; others were happy to be revived because they felt awful things, fear and pain. I had a friend who even did both: he wanted to off himself, was saved and came back fighting at the doctors who revived him, but he was happy to come back, as he felt (saw?) terrible stuff - he didn't want to go. Maybe those near death experiences are only caused by the body's very own drugs, maybe a they show something like "a spirit of life" - meh, hope I don't sound to hippy-ish :DL - fact is I don't know, and neither does anybody who believes in a higher being.


(Btw: I think an awesomely interesting discussion derived from a topic about a less-than-mediocre presidential candidate :up:)

The greatest mystery to me still is that something exists at all: this cosmos, life, reality, space, my mind perceiving all this, computing the electrons racing in the neurons forming my brain. Why exists not simply nothing? and does it all really exist in the way I believe it does, just because my senses produce input to my brain in exactly those functioning patterns their biological design allows and orders them to function in? In the end, the world is just neural electric micro-potentials in my brain - I do not be in contact with anything "real" out there, but I deal with my mental expression, my idealistic eqiuvalents of the things and subjects I refer to and that I believe to perceive - I form images which I then take as "reality". And I think this maybe could be a big mistake, causing a lot of human suffering, and fear about death and limited lifespan of all things being.

I agree with you that it all seems unlikely to have come by random chance only. However, we only are able to figure about this small fraction of the universe that is referred to by our sciences as the observable part of the cosmos - that part that light had time since the last big Bang to travel thrpugh and reach us. There must be more than just saying "It was a Big Bang happening", or "it'S all just an accident", or "luck; random chance".

However, the imagined deities established by religions currently present as a theoretic dogma, offer me neither satisfying answers, nor any condolences when sometimes my mind dares to surf this unbelievable abyss the cosmos is at both directions of the dimension scale: the astronomical and the subatomic level.

And the older I get, the more I think both the question and the answer have been given form and existence in one singularity, by the mere fact that here this thing I call "me" is sitting and thinking about all this, stunned, amazed, with wide open eyes and a wide open mouth, gazing at a miracle that maybe it has formed and created all by itself. Maybe the question - already is the answer, and the two are not really different and are not two different things at all.

Maybe it all is about nothing else than the cosmos becoming aware of itself.

But that still does not answer the question from the beginning: why are there things, cosmos, existence? Why isn'T there simply nothing? How is all this possible?

:salute:

The fault maybe already starts with that we think. The boundaries of our thinking patterns, of our languages, already filter our perceptions and plans, and decide on how we create conditions for new experiences emerging. A glimpose of the truth we maybe only can gain at the cost of going beyond our-selves, forgetting our-selves, transcending our-selves. Seen that way, any lecture given and any book written about these thoughts, already is one lecture and one book too much, and all labelled religion is a sacrileg.

We are leaving Bachman.

My problem with her and others like her is trying to legislate morality. Usually done with a gun. [Taliban.]
Free thinkers, regardless of beliefs on creation and design can't and won't accept it.

Believing or not believing in any thing does not make it true or not. That's magic. It works the other way round. It's up to us to choose,or not. Nothing we do changes the facts. If there was definite proof there is no discussion.

Lots of interesting stuff. Great read

I have often considered the differing descriptions of 'near-death' (and some 'out-of body') experiences in the same way; the body's generating of substances in response to a very critical situation, something akin to flooding an unknown infection with a very broad antibiotic. In the case of the afterlife 'experiences', maybe it is the result of the brain crashing, like a hard disk in a computer; maybe what those people are seeing is the 'life flashing before your eyes' sort of thing as a flood of data (memories, ideas, etc.) as unleashed by a brain trying to sort out the wheat from the chaff as it struggles to set the situation right. It could very well be like the varying reaction of people taking LSD; those who have psychological issues will tend to a "bad trip" while those for whom life is sunshine and kittens will tend to have a "good trip". There is a belief in some cultures that the thoughts one has at the time of dying follows them into the afterlife. Someone who had a traumatic cause to their near fatal condition may be still trying to process the cause and the rush of chemicals in the brain trying to sort out the situation may distort or warp the process and the 'conscious' perceptions one has coming out of the near fatal experience may be colored by the brain's processes. On the other hand, someone who has come back from an experience caused by a non-traumatic situation (prolonged illness, reovery from a coma, etc.) may tend to a "beautiful light" experince. Add to the brain's processes at the tine of the 'near death' the subconscious influence of one's faith beliefs, philosophies, or expectations in life of an afterlife, there is further 'coloring' to push the 'experience' to the good or to the bad... :hmmm:

Thanathology was kind of a "hobby" for me in my university days, and I had read a lot, probably all of the mjaor empirical studies that had been done until then, amongst them the comparisons and descriptions by Kübler-Ross who focussed on the individual experience of the single subject, and the immense empirical, inter-cultural comparisons done by Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldson who examined hundreds and hundreds of NDEs from various cultures, including India, America, and Europe. One of their preliminary conclusions was that dying experiences follow the same basic format in structure, but differ in culture-depending content. In other words: the ride is taken in the same car model, always, and on the same road, but the car's colour varies depending on the place the person lived in.

However, thanatology of this kind - maybe necessarily - is purely descriptive and empirically collective, due to the subject it examines: and that is not death itself, but interrupted, reversed dying processes. The attempts done in this direction in the 60s and 70s have been followed by a considerable wave of medical doctors angrily writing books in the 80s and 90s that tried to declare that NDE are folly and nonsense, isisting on that death has to be understood as final and nihilistic, and that dying is a lonely dirty thing in the hospital, and the brain drugs itself to make life - that comes to an end in death - at least can bear the fact that it exists, and then gets deleted.

In the end, I do not find both movements that much helpful. Neither NDE-writers and medical sceptics can work around the fact that we simply do not know anything more about death than before. But for the NDE-pros I can feel at least an emotional sympathy. For the sceptics in the medical field, and the nihilistic attitude their broadsides against NDE research have defended, I feel only icy desinterest.

Maybe the fact that organ donations are needed/wanted, but can only be had at the price of not waiting until the person indeed is organically dead, but that the organs must be taken from a body still alive, has something to do with these doctors aversions against NDE research. The death criterions like heart death, brain death, etc differ from time to time and from country to country, and over the past four decades the time at which a dying person already is declared as "medically dead", has been antedated more and more. It even is like that "braindead" means something slightly different by medical details in Germany than in the United States, and there are more such differences between nations. The criterions in general have been tailored over the past couple of decades to declare somebody dead earlier and earlier, to improve the opportunity to take usable organs from the body.

What do we know more about death from all this, having been feeded by NDE romatics as well as medical sceptics and organ donation advocates?

Not one bit.

I'm not trying to ridicule. It's true that if we haven't been dead then we can't know, and if we haven't been alive again we can't tell anyone. My tenet is that if you don't know whether there is an afterlife then to believe in one is indeed wishful thinking, even if it turns out to be true. I don't disbelieve in an afterlife or a creator, I simply state that there is no real evidence. Speculating is fun, concluding one way or the other is useless. If it can't be tested, then it's only a guess at best. Ergo, wishful thinking.