Evidence of the Afterlife; I'm Skeptical - Introduction

The first part in our new in-depth book review of Evidence of the Afterlife, The Science of Near-Death Experiences by Jeffrey Long and Paul Perry.

The Introduction is, ironically, one of the longest chapters of the book (which isn't saying much; the book is only about 200 pages long and no more than 300 words per page).  It gives a very summarized overview of what Long considers to be his very strong evidence for the afterlife.  Since he goes over these arguments and evidence in much greater detail in the rest of the book, I'll just comment, briefly, on some of the most note-worthy here.

He mentions that at the time the book was published, the data was from "more than 1300 people who had a near-death experience."  Long's website now claims it has received over 2000 such testimonials.  Yes, ALL of the data used in this "research" was submitted via an electronic form and testimonials from people who simply visited his website and claim to have had a near-death experience.  Readers, expect periodic lessons on the scientific method throughout these review posts.

We can comfortably dismiss the entire book on this basis alone.  How can Long not see what a spectacular sampling bias this would create?  I'll get into this in greater detail later, as he addresses this criticism directly at one point.

Entertainingly, he moves straight from the mention of the volume of testimonials and the method by which he collected them into this interesting claim:

More than 95 percent of respondents feel their NDE was "definitely real," while virtually all of the remaining respondents feel it was "probably real."  Not one respondent has said it was "definitely not real."

Isn't it obvious why this isn't saying anything?  Sampling bias.  Everything about the website screams in very emotional language that NDEs are evidence of the afterlife.  We would absolutely expect it to attract people who have little doubt that their NDEs has showed them a glimpse of the afterlife.  If a faith-healer had a website that stated everywhere that testimonials prove his healing power, and invited people who have been healed by him to submit their testimony via the website (and the website screens out anyone who they believe to be "fake"), we would absolutely expect the vast majority of the testimony to claim that the healing was "real."  This wouldn't be evidence for the "healings" at all.  It is also deceptively worded.  Nobody is debating that there were no NDEs.  Of course there were "real" NDEs.  What we are skeptical of is the claim that this constitutes any decent evidence of an afterlife.

A considerable portion of his writing is not evidence or argument, it's Long talking about how wonderful NDEs are, how much they change people's lives, what good news the existence of an afterlife is, etc.

The "scientific" principle that Long has used to "prove" the existence of the afterlife through NDEs is:  "What is real is consistently seen among many different observations."  He frequently states outright that NDEs are incredibly consistent.  Again, I'll address this in more detail later, when he makes his full argument that consistent details prove that NDEs show us the afterlife.  For now, I'll just say that he's quite wrong about NDEs being very consistent in their detail, even using his own data, gross sampling bias and all.

He specifies that he uses a definition of "near-death" to be "so physically compromised that they would die if their condition did not improve."  That language is kind of vague, isn't it?  Next, he says that "The NDErs studied were generally unconscious and often apparently clinically dead . . ."  Sigh.  "Generally" unconscious?  "Often apparently" clinically dead?  One of his first major arguments is that people experience things during a NDE, even though they shouldn't be able to, medically speaking.  Yet he can only say that they're "generally" unconscious?

Here's a hilarious bit; he claims in the book to have nine distinct lines of evidence proving the existence of an afterlife.  He says that the convergence of nine lines of evidence builds a much stronger case than only one.  Well, yes, Dr. Long, but you haven't shown any of your evidences yet.  He even does the math for us:

For example, suppose we had only two lines of NDE evidence.  We may not be 100 percent convinced that these two lines of evidence prove an afterlife, but perhaps each line of evidence by itself is 90 percent convincing.  Combined, these two lines of evidence by mathematical calculation are 99 percent convincing that the afterlife exists.

He even gives an end-note referring us to the back of the book, where he gives us an even more simplified version of the math, reaching the same result.  The argument here is that if just two lines of evidence can give us 99 percent certainty of a claim, how convincing are nine lines of evidence?  I find this suspicious; Dr. Long hasn't even given us his evidence yet, and he's already given us a suggested percentage rate of how convincing his arguments could be, and then tried to show how (because there's nine of them) they should rationally create virtual certainty!  Let's not jump the gun here, Dr. Long.  I'll take a look at your actual evidence first.  You'll understand if I carefully mentally discard your self-serving 90 percent figure for now, right?

Next; Dr. Long talks about the twelve common attributes of NDEs, and what he's found out about them in his research.

Insufficient Christianity: 27.1

Lewis spends all of chapter 27 talking about how Jesus died for our sins, and to be honest I don't really feel as though I have anything insightful or profound to say about most of the chapter. He writes again about how dirty and filthy and worthless people are unless they are real Christians and imbued with the Holy Spirit. Suffice to say, Lewis echoes typical Christian theology about not being able to understand or be a part of god without Jesus, though he makes no mention of being unable to be drawn into the Holy Spirit unless you profess belief. I suppose that is coming though.


Lewis says that the "Natural life" which is the type of life that nonchristians necessarily have, "is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe. And especially it wants to be left to itself: to keep well away from anything better or stronger or higher than it, anything that might make it feel small. It is afraid of the light and air of the spiritual world, just as people who have been brought up to be dirty are afraid of a bath. And in a sense it is quite right. It knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that."


Couldn't we say the same thing Lewis says of "dirty people" of "clean people"? That is, people who are brought up unexposed to dirt and always kept clean are afraid to get dirty.


I can see here why some anti-evolutionists get offended at the idea that humans and other animals are descended from a common ancestor. To say that we are descended from a common ancestor is to say that we have the "natural life". It is to say that we are selfish exploiters of everything including fellow humans, that we hate things stronger than we are, that we want to be petted and admired. Perhaps it would be better to show that Lewis and others who think the way he does are mistaken about what the "natural life" means.


To me, the implications of there being no god are that no one is special or chosen above anyone else by an ultimate power. It means that this life is the only life we have and that this life is not a stepping stone on the way to eternity or a switch that leads us to either damnation and destruction or eternal life. Because this life is the only one we have and other people's lives are the only lives they have, exploiting people or infringing on their rights is one of the highest offenses imaginable. Because this earth was not tailor-made with us in mind by a god with infinite power, we have to take care of it as best we can so that those who are born after we are long gone continue to have the best means at a fulfilling life. It means realizing we won the genetic lottery, given that so many possible combinations of DNA will never get the chance at life. It means realizing just how insignificant we are, realizing that there is no ultimate purpose in this universe and then saying, "So what? I'll make my life have a purpose even though one day all of humanity will be gone and the universe will go on ticking perfectly fine without us" rather than expecting something else to hand us some purpose that was decided for us before we were born. Being given a purpose is easy – just find out what it is and do it. Giving yourself a purpose is something I will probably wrestle with my entire life. Making a decision about my own purpose is made more difficult by people who insist that without their god life is meaningless.


Sometimes I look at something beautiful – my relationship with Flimsy, for example – and I realize that in all likelihood, relationships like that have a maximum length of 80 years or less. After that, something beautiful is lost forever. It does not return. It does not live on. We are intricate, complex, amazing creatures, and each one of us is a finite, tiny piece of the world that will one day just… cease. Even things that are more permanent cannot last forever. I look at the city I live in, and I realize that most of these buildings, these roads, these communities – will go on without me. They will stay. A building has more permanence than a human being but is still so temporary. One day, all of those buildings and streets will be gone.


If the earth is to become an inhospitable ball of charred rock, does it really matter if something is there to cry over the annihilation of life and every last visage of human existence? Honestly, I'd love to be there rather than nowhere at all, but wanting something does not make it real, so I intend to make the best of the things I know for certain that I have.


Impermanence is not grounds for exploitation. It is grounds for ensuring that in our impermanence we do not take away the ability for anyone else to make the most of their own impermanence.

Mental—in the British sense

Over at this blog, an anonymous poster quoth as follows below, and I find it strange and simultaneously amusing and disheartening that people apparently believe in this stuff, according to this reasoning.

Hi ReligionProf, I am paraklete from uncommondescent.com...
I really think that the mind-as-emergent property-of-matter view needs to be thought through some more. When we consider all the different views, from reductive materialism to dualism to emergentism, we need to bring in background information to help us determine which view makes the most sense. From what we know of matter, that it is basically "stuff" that follows natural laws, it is as you know very difficult to see how mental properties - non law like properties - could "emerge" from physical properties. This difficulty does not just appear to be our inability to imagine it, it seems to be based on the very nature of the two phenomena, mental and physical. Not only that, but there's the question of how a network of matter can unify itself into a single stream of consciousness - the "I".

Now on the flip side, when we consider dualism, I believe we have some interesting background information to consider. First, we have a virtually universal ability to conceive of minds without bodies. The vast majority of the world actually believes in minds without bodies, whether it be angels, demons, ghosts, dead ancestors, out of body experiences, and the near universal belief in life after death. Next, we have religious sources telling us about minds without bodies. From the Bible, which you cited regarding Adam, we have a consistent belief in dualism, contrary to what you stated. The psychosomatic unity conception does not at all contradict dualism, for there are forms of dualism that see a deep interweaving of the body and the soul, most notably Thomistic dualism, a view defended by J.P. Moreland in "Body and Soul." For a book that lays out the dualism found in the Bible, I recommend "Body, Soul, & Life Everlasting" by John W. Cooper. Indeed the Hebrew conception of Sheol clearly implies dualism. And Jesus himself was a dualist (e.g. Luke 16:19-31)

So in my opinion, I think the background information should lead us to a dualist view. The only criticism that I have seen against dualism is the "ghost in a box" argument, which basically asks how spiritual substances can interact with physical substances. There does not appear to be any mechansim linking the spiritual to the physical. But I think this is a weak objection, because a child has no problem conceiving of a spirit acting on the physical world, and never does a child think, "Wait, what mechanism is there for this interaction?" The demand for a mechanism is circular reasoning, I think, for a mechanism is itself a physiconcept.

Anyway, those are my thoughts, and I appreciate how you have shared your thoughts with a respectful tone.

What's wrong with this argument, then? Let's go back for a second look…

From what we know of matter, that it is basically "stuff" that follows natural laws, it is as you know very difficult to see how mental properties - non law like properties - could "emerge" from physical properties. This difficulty does not just appear to be our inability to imagine it, it seems to be based on the very nature of the two phenomena, mental and physical.

I am amazed that someone can write out an apparently thought-out argument with this sort of content. Here, he is arbitrarily and a priori assuming that mental phenomena are not physical—referring to mental properties as non law like. In fact, he is using this assumption to further his argument that—mental phenomena are not emergent properties of physical phenomena! This is a circular argument, a tautology: Because A is true, it must be the case that A is true. 

By what reasoning, that does not start with the assumption that dualism is real, can you arrive at the conclusion that it is so? What premises based on observable reality can take you there?
The rest of the stuff (to which I replied over yonder) is less interesting.

Now on the flip side, when we consider dualism, I believe we have some interesting background information to consider. First, we have a virtually universal ability to conceive of minds without bodies. The vast majority of the world actually believes in minds without bodies, whether it be angels, demons, ghosts, dead ancestors, out of body experiences, and the near universal belief in life after death.

—Which tells us that dualism is something that it is easy and tempting to believe in. That does not imply that it is therefore true: It is easy and tempting to believe in a flat earth, too.

There does not appear to be any mechansim [sic] linking the spiritual to the physical. But I think this is a weak objection, because a child has no problem conceiving of a spirit acting on the physical world, and never does a child think, "Wait, what mechanism is there for this interaction?"

Nor does the child think Wait, how can Santa Claus visit all the world's children in a single night? (Well, eventually the child will; it's called growing up. Chew on that one…)

How can you seriously use "children believe it" as an argument for the truth of a statement?
Never mind the religious and supernatural implications. The true tragedy is that this is apparently what to some people passes for intellectual discourse.

Near-Death Experiences

I don't get the popularity of the NDE "evidence". I had a friend once who told me that he had the most awesome experience on 'shrooms — he'd melted into a purple puddle that soaked into the earth, and he had spiritual sex with tree roots. I'm pretty sure that didn't actually happen, and I wouldn't use it to argue that human beings were capable of phase changes into a fluid state or that intimate congress with plants was fun and rewarding, but people use the same logic all the time in arguing that while they were in a brain-damaged state, befuddled by anoxia, their perception of the hallucinatory state afterwards is evidence that there is a heaven.

P.Z. Myers, Pharyngula

My own objection is, perhaps, a little more subtle. Some people claim that their experiences cannot have been natural because they were clinically dead while they had the experiences. Of course, if you were temporarily brain dead, any experience you had at the time cannot have been due to brain activity…but this is a non sequitur, because the experience such a person relates is not the experience he had while clinically dead, but rather the experience he recalls as having happened while he was clinically dead.

What we must determine is, therefore, whether this experience did in fact transpire during the blank period, or whether the recollection may be flawed.

Memory is notoriously fallible (c.f. confabulation and false memory syndrome); my claim is not that the NDE is naturally explicable in terms of what happened while the person was dead, but rather in terms of what the brain does to sort out the experience of dying, —, reviving and fill in the gap.

Applying Occam’s razor (we know that false memories do occur disturbingly often; we know that the brain doesn’t fare so well under anoxic conditions; we don’t have any evidence of the purported reality experienced in NDEs), the obvious conclusion is that NDEs are most likely phenomena of living brains at times surrounding the traumatic events causing temporary brain death.

P.Z.’s version is much more pithy than mine, though.

Aweism

Spirituality is (unfortunately, I think) a dirty word to a lot of atheists.

We like to talk about what amazes us - looking at the night sky and knowing how fascinatingly small we are compared to its expanse, pondering how our long evolutionary origins moved from bacteria to entities capable of building computers,

The other day at an atheist meetup in St. Louis, we talked about using the term "aweism" to refer to our own wonder and awe at experiencing the world around us.

Phil Zuckerman was the first to publicize the idea, in an edition of Free Inquiry magazine. He writes:

Yes, I am an atheist. Yes I am an agnostic- at least the version that suspects that there may be limits to human knowledge. Yes, I support and advocate the sane and noble goals of secular humanism. But I am something more. I am often full of a profound feeling. And the word that comes closest to describing that profound feeling is awe...

Aweism
Aweism is the belief that existence is ultimately a beautiful mystery, that being alive is a wellspring of wonder, and that the deepest questions of life, death, time, and space are so powerful as to inspire deep feelings of joy, poignancy, and sublime awe... There are literally hundreds of words to describe the religious... and yet when we consider the labels and self-designations available to secular folk we can count them on one or two hands... We should not shy away from articulating the various shades of secularity that we may experience, for it is important to others as well as to ourselves, to accurately describe the numerous ways in which one can be godless..."

Lack of belief in gods does not render the universe more mundane than it was before. I like to think that the universe is more amazing and inspiring, given that the life here on earth arose due to entirely natural (rather than supernatural) processes.  I am amazed that every one of the molecules in my body was at one time part of a star, part of the big bang, part of the origins of the universe. In a way, when we feel a subjective feeling of connection to the universe, I ponder if this is part of what we are feeling - it's an emotional response brought on by rational understanding. We are connected, and it's impossible to escape.

Skepticism and wonder

I thought for a while about what my first post as a real contributor here should be. I had a whole array of candidates lined up in my mind, pointing out the fallacy of this, the error of that, or the stupidity of those people, over there…and make no mistake, I’m likely to post a whole lot of that. But as I glanced over my writings, I realised that I had the opportunity to set a more positive tone by re-posting something I wrote on this subject a couple of months back. I didn’t write this with Ziztur.com in mind—I hadn’t discovered it yet!—but hopefully, it will stand on its own.

---

Strange and floaty day, very much the day after a party. I got up late, had a leisurely breakfast, and went out for coffee with a friend (it wasn’t pre-planned, but as we were talking over IMs we simultaneously expressed a need to go out for coffee, and given how close we both are to the Drive—). It ended up rather a lengthy excursion, covering both coffee and a late lunch. We talked about a great many things, one of which was physics. I explained qualitatively some of the basic or notable features of relativity and quantum physics (as best I could, given my pedagogical limitations and my own limited understanding). I drew figures in the sand, and by this means I (a non-physicist) was able to explain quantitatively the phenomenon of time dilation, and how it can be proved to exist, to someone with no background in mathematics. It was nice, and not only because I enjoy explaining things to people who have the intelligence and curiosity to listen and understand (regardless of mathematical background).

It was also nice because as someone who comes off as a hard-headed skeptic because I am a hard-headed skeptic, it’s very easy to also come off as a grouchy cynic who delights in nothing more than demolishing the beliefs in which others find a sense of wonder; as though my world-view and philosophy are nothing but negative and dismissive. That’s not true at all, though—if I find the wonder of castles in the air dissatisfactory, that has much to do with the fact that there are other castles, on solid foundations, and if they are less fantastic they gain a separate sort of beauty and wonder precisely because they are real—demonstrably real.
An example of this sort of thing is the nature of coincidence. I’m sure I’ve told this story before: Once, many years ago, I was playing a role playing game with a friend; it was a sci fi, superhero sort of setting, and when a player character fired some warning shots into the air, I (as a game master and, frankly, just to be a minor pain) declared that You accidentally shoot out a streetlight. He just about had time to complain about it when, with a sharp crack, the light bulb in my desk lamp shattered. This effect—a hairline crack from manufacturing error gradually working its way ’round the bulb due to heat expansion and cooling contraction over hundreds and hundreds of uses, until the bulk of the bulb detached from the base to smash against the desk—is extremely uncommon, and I’ve only seen it happen once in my life. The timing, of course, was pretty amazing. You shoot out a streetlight—crack.

This sort of remarkable coincidence is precisely the sort of thing that makes many people think there must be something to it (substitute my role playing game decision for a thought of a friend or relative, and the cracking bulb with a phone call for or about said person, and you have a real-world example). But I take a skeptic’s view of it: Given all the opportunities for remarkable coincidences to happen, every day of your life, it isn’t very surprising that some of them come true. Every day you think about a great many people, and it’s not that strange if one of them should, at some point, call you sufficiently close to the incident that it strikes you as remarkable. Every time you make any remark whatsoever, there’s a possibility that something in the world will coincide remarkably with it. Of course, every such coincidence is, in itself, very unlikely, but you surely experience dozens or hundreds of moments with potential coincidences every day—most of which never do occur.

Is that sort of thinking a buzz-kill? Maybe it is, if you need psychic connections or arcane meanings in everyday life to get your buzz. But I don’t. I find the reality of these phenomena fascinating. I start thinking about questions like: How improbable is this? What is the sum of probability of this combined with all the different, equally or more improbable things that might have happened, but didn’t? What are the odds that someone will go through a lifetime and not experience something at least this unlikely? If you play a lottery with a 1/1000 chance of winning every day, you’ll win on average about every three years, and if you do it all your life, it will be strange if you never win—even though the odds of winning on any specific day are very small. We might find that someone who goes through life and never experience this coincidental weirdness is unusual! —And even then, there are surely some people, again purely by chance, who really do happen to experience remarkably few astonishing coincidences.

I get a buzz from thinking about that.

And I get a buzz from reading about science, not scientific facts ex cathedra, but the reasons why we know them to be true, and sometimes the history of how we did come to know; to hell with all soothsayers, dowsers, and ‘psychics’: I am impressed by the mind of Eratosthenes, who measured the circumference of the Earth fairly accurately with nothing more than a hole in the ground, a stick, and the mathematics of a people who didn’t have a concept of ‘zero’. I am astonished by the genius of Sir Isaac Newton who, misanthropic bastard that he was, developed a system of mechanics so accurate that NASA can land spacecraft on other worlds without needing more than perhaps a brief nod in the direction of Einstein’s improved physics. And I am captivated by these things because we don’t need the crutch of ‘faith’, because we know these things and can verify them; because they reveal not merely astonishing things about the universe, but represent tremendous intellectual achievements on the parts of humans—discoveries by bipedal chemical factories, produced in fantastically complex lumps of flesh in the skulls of animals evolved ultimately from inorganic chemicals, many of whose component elements were forged in the crucibles of dying stars.

I can look at religious imagery and icons, and feel a detached appreciation for the artistic merit, but while I’m never entirely sure what someone means by a spiritual experience, I know that no picture I have ever seen has ever filled me with such awe as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, where human ingenuity has managed to give us a photograph of a patch of the universe 13 billion—13 thousand million—13,000,000,000 light years away!—and 13,000,000,000 years into the past; at an age that, compared to the current age of the universe, is as the age of a toddler is to mine right now.

Being a skeptic does not mean that I have a barren and impoverished world view, and it is tragic that so many skeptics, like myself, come off merely as negative because circumstances tend to get us going mostly when there is something that we object to, that we want to correct. But nature is full of wonder, and the universe is full of mysteries no less interesting because we avoid postulating supernatural explanations, no less fascinating because we find regular laws to explain them when we do figure them out. And who needs a creation myth when Hubble lets us look at the aftermath of natural creation, and the cosmic microwave background radiation lets us listen to the cooling radio hiss of the Big Bang itself?

Ray a Day: 14

Today's question from Comfort's book is not a question, but a statement that using faith in science, or science in faith demeans them both. For once, Comfort and I agree (!!!) , but for completely different reasons.

Comfort's response is that every scientific experiment is done in "faith". He writes:

If a scientist had the results in front of him where he could see them, why would he experiment? He conducts the test because he doesn't yet see the results ... Edison kept experimenting over and over because he believed he would eventually see the light. It was because of his faith that he got a result.

He continues by saying that people have a disdain for faith because of the religious connotations of faith, and that religion is not "blind" faith because God has given us infallible proofs, and that just because some don't recognize the evidence doesn't mean it's not there. He writes that faith is not intellectual acknowledgment that he exists, ("we all know that"), but rather an "implicit trust in His person and His promises".

If a scientist had results in front of him, why would he experiment? This question is meant to be rhetorical, but there is actually an answer: to get repeatable results. Perhaps Comfort has forgotten that it is not the results of an experiment that matter, but the repeatability of results. Scientists very often have results right in front of them, but they repeat the experiment anyway, over and over again, in order to establish their results as credible. 

Scientists absolutely do not conduct a test because they have faith that they will have results. They know, experimentally, that experiments yield some kind of result (this is simple causation), and conduct the experiment with a falsifiable hypothesis, knowing full well that their experiment could yield results that either falsify the hypothesis, or do not falsify the hypothesis.

It was not due to Edison's faith that he got a result - it was due to his persistence. Persistent experimenting is not based on faith - it's based on evidence that people who do things with persistence often solve problems or get the results they were looking for. Persistent experimentation is also conducted knowing full well that some people will persist and fail. Faith in success is not part of this equation at all - all you need is hope for success. Comfort is basically asserting that any scientist who acts persistently is acting on faith. We don't know without evidence what our results will be, we have an inkling - a hypothesis - of what our results will be, and we use experimentation to gather the evidence.

Edison was obviously a very driven and persistent sort of gentleman - he had over 1000 patents to his name. And, Edison said that what other people call God, he calls Nature:

Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me—the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love—He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us—nature did it all—not the gods of the religions.

Edison was a religious naturalist - and I am too. 

The whole idea that "just because some don't recognize the evidence doesn't mean it it's not there" is true, if there is actual evidence for a phenomenon, but by itself is not even an argument. It's really a statement that says, "People make Type II validity errors", which is obviously true, but has no bearing whatsoever on the truth-value of the phenomenon being debated and does nothing to add to the evidence for a phenomenon. I could also say, "Just because you believe it's true does not mean it's really true" (A Type I validity error). We might, in fact, be making one of these two errors - among others. How do we find out if we're making one of these two errors? By determining the extent of the evidence for a phenomenon. But the fact that people can make Type I and Type II validity errors with regard to evidence for something does not give us any additional information. In simpler terms, it pretty much is a slightly more complicated way of saying, "you might be wrong!"

Science can study questions that are usually answered by faith. If a phenomenon has an observable effect on the universe, there is no reason why we cannot test this effect. Science is not something that some observable phenomena are immune from, which is why it annoys me when any given phenomenon is said to "defy science!" which is just another way of saying, "we don't have any evidence, but want so bad for it to be true!" Faith can be used in science, so long as it does not undermine science or infringe upon people's lives - if your faith somehow helps you be a better scientist, then go for it!

Disbelief 101: A thorough review, part 1

After reading all of Disbelief 101: A Young Person's Guide to Atheism by S.C. Hitchcock (author) and Tom Flynn (who wrote the preface), I have to echo the sentiments of Flynn in his preface, who told the story of his transformation from Catholic schoolboy to atheist, lamenting that he wished a book like this had been around while he was "deconverting". To have a book aimed at young people just beginning to question their faith, a book that states plainly, "There is no God" and lets them know they are not wrong to doubt and question religion, is necessary.

This book is also a good book for atheists to hand over to theists who are new to the god-debate.  It lacks political polarizing. It is simple, and the ideas presented within are not clouded with unnecessary vocabulary. It's straightforward and clear. I'd say that pre-teens and teens are the intended audience, though I found it an enjoyable (albeit quick) read myself.

I think it's worth mentioning that the two authors are using pseudonyms. It is interesting that atheists (especially those who write books on atheism) are often described (by theists and non-theists alike) as shrill and hostile. If you want to know true hostility from the opposing viewpoint, try attaching the A-word to yourself. The author lives in middle America and has received anonymous death threats after writing letters to the local paper opposing the Iraq war. Both the author and the illustrator have small children, and the pseudonyms were used at the instance of the publisher. I have seen what happens to children who are atheist, and to the parents of atheist children when Mr and Mrs. Smith find out that Johnny's classmate told Johnny there is no god. Sure, we can be hostile, but you'd be hostile too if large groups of people openly and repeatedly smacked you (figuratively) in the face.

Chapter 1 of this book is simple enough: It starts with the premise that people often used fear-based arguments for God. Since God often conjures up a feeling of fear in people, the author tells the reader to substitute the phrase "God" for, "Invisible Flying Clown", which is a lot funnier. The author then recreates what might be one type of conversation between a young non-believer and a young Christian, substituting the phrase, "Invisible Flying Clown" for "God". If you do this for all religions, the author says, one can see how absurd they are.

In Chapter 1, the author specifically appeals to children in the identity/role confusion, superego stage, by telling the reader that it is not his  fault that religious ideas have been stuffed down his throat, and that the reader deserves better than the indoctrination forced upon him.  If I were a Christian and discovered my daughter reading this book, I might be offended by this. I realize this book is not meant for religious parents of questioning children, and I also agree that religion is stuffed down the throats of children, but I can't help but wonder if there might be a better way to put this. On the one hand, the idea that one's parents stuffed ideas down one's throat is appealing, especially to the intended audience of this book. I was more than happy to reject my parents' ideals when I was a teenager simply because they were my parents' ideals.

This book also stands in stark contrast to the mysticism and new age religious thought that is very common during teenage years. I know it is stereotypical of me to say that many teens come to Wicca and New Age Mysticism or Spirituality because it is alternative and hip, but there is a lot of truth to that stereotype. This book, rather than advocate some sort of hip mystical religion, advocates just the opposite - it plants seeds of skepticism and critical thinking.

That's it. Chapter one is actually only 8 pages long. In the following days I will review more chapters.

How I became an Atheist, Pt.6

If you've been reading along, you'll note that I have taken five blog posts to explain how I came to atheism, and yet I am not there yet! By now you might want me to just get to the point.

By the time I got to grad school, I had decided I was agnostic. God was just too big and complicated and illogical for me to presume that my puny little brain could get a handle on it. I had decided that god probably did not exist (depending on the definition of god, of course) but if he did I was certain that god had to be some kind of impersonal force. I was leaning toward atheism, but like most people out there, had some serious misconceptions about what it actually means to be an atheist. I can't even remember now why I was afraid of calling myself an atheist

I was sitting in neurology class one afternoon getting a lecture on the peripheral nervous system - specifically, the brachial plexus (Suck it, Brachial Plexus!) and realizing that among all of the other trillion tidbits of information  had to stuff in my brain this semester, I would have to memorize in very minute detail the brachial plexus. I was pissed. Sitting there in neurology, I wondered What The Fucking Point Of It All Was. The brachial plexus doesn't make any goddamned sense. It's more poorly laid out than the streets of Saint Louis City. At least the streets of St. Louis City had a (drunk) designer. Someone is to blame for that mess. Not the brachial plexus. Oh no. It made me sort of angry that since there was no evidence for the afterlife, I was going to spend all of my time learning this stuff, and for what?

Later that same day, I was sitting in an evidence-based practice class, still rather annoyed at the supposed futility of it all and just generally overwhelmed. The whole point of the class was to pour over journal articles, learn how to decide if the article's conclusions were accurate or justified, and critique the articles for soundness. We applied evidence and reasoning to one article a week while discussing different topics such as how to create a scientifically robust hypothesis, and the difference between sound science and not-so-sound science.

In the OT world, insurance will not fund treatments unless they are evidence-based. Evidence is the end-all-be all of your treatment. Why do it if it doesn't work? Why pay for a treatment if the outcome is the same? We also were given assignments to find research on certain therapies so that we could determine if they were evidence-based or not. So search we did. Which got me thinking: We gather evidence by observation, experimentation, and rational thinking. We can only observe phenomena that have an observable effect on the world. God either falls under two categories: he has an observable effect on the world, or he doesn't. If he doesn't, there is no reason to conclude he exists. Even if he does exist, since he has no observable effect on the world, his existence is meaningless and irrelevant.

I wondered then, if I might be an atheist after all. I was reluctant to attach that label to myself without some further research. I decided that evidence-based practice should not stop when I went home for the day or checked out of OT-Student mode. Evidence-based practice should apply everywhere, especially to important questions like whether or not there is a god. I considered myself agnostic because I didn't have enough information. I decided it was time to get some.

So, I went to the bookstore and picked up a copy of "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris. I read it, and it absolutely described how I had come to see religion and god. That was the tipping point. I was an atheist before without the label. After reading that book, I was no longer afraid of the label. I was proud of it. In fact, the first day of my second semester of grad school, I wore a shirt saying, "Have you hugged an atheist today?" I got lots of hugs.

I read more books from both sides just to be sure (I next read the God Delusion and then Natural Atheism). I went to newsgroups, to message boards, watched videos, and had conversations. I still do. My collection of books on atheism rivals any library, though they probably have me beat on apologetics books.

Afterward, I went through a period of depression. There was no way out of it - there is no evidence whatsoever for any type of afterlife. I was sad knowing I would one day lose everything I had worked for, everyone I had known. there would be no eternity, no continuing on after my physical body ceased to function. Lights out, the end. No eternal Truth with a capital T.  It's a terrible idea when you first stumble onto it after 20-something years of thinking there was something beyond one's 80-ish years.  80 years is nothing compared to eternity. It's over in less than a blink. Then you're gone. I hear it's a lot like how it was before you were born.

I think part of the reason I did not want to admit I was an atheist was because I hated this idea of losing everything. I wanted to believe that there was some mystical life after death. I wanted to believe that my consciousness would not cease to exist like the unceremonious unplugging of a television from the wall. It's so hard for us to understand nonexistence, which is odd considering the fact that we don't understand existence either. For some reason we have it in our head that nonexistence is more natural than existence - hence positing a god to make that existence happen. I've heard a lot of people tell me this. They think that if there is no afterlife and if the universe doesn't care about you or even care at all, then life is meaningless and purposeless. To that assertion I say: how do you come to that conclusion? Is it meaningless because we lose it all? Is it meaningless because it is temporary? We're a species that is absolutely obsessed with permenance. But there is the rub. Just because we can't stand the idea of losing everything does not mean that we won't lose everything.

Madonna of Orgasm Church

Flimsy and I should absolutely perform a Faith Infiltration on this church:

The Madonna of Orgasm Church (Orgasmens Madonnas kyrka) took an important step toward official recognition in Sweden last week when a court ruled it had the right to be registered as a faith community.

Originally, the Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency (Kammarkollegiet) had refused the church’s registration application on the grounds that its name may offend Christians.

But the church’s founder, artist Carlos Bebeacua from Lövestad in southern Sweden, won his appeal to the county administrative court.

If the agency does not appeal the court’s decision within three weeks, then it must process Bebeacua’s application to register the church, which he founded in the early 1990s.

According to the Skånska Dagbladet newspaper, the idea for the church came to Bebeacua, who is the church’s self-appointed cardinal, after a painting of his entitled 'The Madonna of Orgasm' sparked protests requiring police action during the 1992 World’s Fair in Seville, Spain.

“The orgasm is God, the orgasm should be worshiped,” Bebeacua told the Kvällsposten newspaper.

“The orgasm is the ultimate feeling of lust, it shouldn’t be limited to ejaculation. You can reach it through art or by looking at a landscape and thinking ‘Wow!’”

According to Bebeacua, the church has a few hundred followers, and he hopes that registering the Madonna of Orgasm Church will get more people to consider the orgasm as God.

The church only has priestesses and its scriptures are called the Catechism of the Orgasm. The only gospel peached is the gospel of sex.

“It’s so we do what we know is right and good,” Bebeacua told Kvällsposten.

During ceremonies, the priestesses read verses and eat fruit and drink juice. Sex isn’t the focus, but it’s not forbidden either.

“It’s never happened. I don’t know how we’d react if it happened,” said Bebeacua.

He deflects allegations that his church is all about orgies and sex, claiming its purpose is to help people see orgasms as a metaphor for a love of life.

“There’s nothing dangerous in what we say, we’re harmless. It’s just that we have our doubts about established religions,” he told the TT news agency

 Obviously I don't think the orgasm is god, but I like that this church recognizes the fundamental spirituality of sex.

I know a few people in this world who think they are somehow "above" sex. They think that sex is some kind of animalistic instinct they have risen up above, and so they are better people for not wanting or needing or partaking in sex. I'm not making a blanket statement about people who are Asexual, I completely understand asexuality - someone who does not experience sexual attraction or desire for sex - but I do not understand explaining or justifying asexuality in terms of having risen above or being too good for sex. If you don't like sex, that's perfectly fine, and I totally get it. My friend The Alien is Asexual, and I find myself defending her all the time - I don't get why people care so much that she doesn't want sex. Pretending you've evolved above sex, and thinking that you are better than the sexual people around you because you don't need sex - I don't get that.

Sexuality, to me, is fundamentally spiritual. It's also an expression of ubuntu. I know sex may seem like a basic instinctual function, and they may think that rising above one's own instincts is a way to be a more evolved person, but I think that recognizing that sex is instinctual and thus embracing it as part of being human is being much more true to oneself. I'm not talking about raping and being unsafe, I am talking about accepting one's own innate sexual drives as being healthy.  Obviously, there is a point when sexual drives can be unhealthy - say, if you endanger yourself or infringe upon the rights of others. Sexual instincts themselves are not unhealthy. They don't prevent people from attaining spiritual fulfillment or enlightenment. On the contrary, I think healthy sex can be used to obtain spiritual fulfillment.

Sex to me is more about trust and intensity of knowing than anything else. It is about letting go of walls and fears. Of course, it's also about pleasure - being able to pleasure someone else, having someone else give you pleasure, and experiencing mutual pleasure.

Our society, especially the religious half of it, has this idea that denying yourself pleasure is somehow a good thing. Do religious people really think they can know god intimately without knowing another human intimately first? To me, it seems like breaking down the walls between other human beings is the first step in breaking down the walls between yourself and some universal transcendent entity.

In addition to the population of people who think they have risen above sex, there is a population of people who society somehow thinks are below sex. Why is it that society thinks people with disabilities are somehow innately asexual or that they don't need or want sex? Why is it that able-bodied society thinks people with disabilities are "being exploited" when they engage in sex or internet pornography? It absolutely blows my mind that I even have to bring this up - people with disabilities are people, and as such they have the same sexual drive as anyone else. If you think people with disabilities don't desire sex and are incapable of making their own descitions with regard to sex, that says a lot more about your perception of people with disabilities than it says about the people themselves.

Atheism makes life meaningless

If you're an atheist, you've heard it before. How can life have meaning and purpose if there is no god? Most people who believe in a god also believe that such god has a higher purpose of some kind. Maybe your god has a higher purpose especially for you - he specifically put you on this planet to accomplish X. Maybe he has a plan - he let you survive that horrific car accident with merely scratches because it's his plan. Maybe he is everything and everything is him - but you're still working toward some ultimate spiritual goal - to learn from this life so you can learn more in the next, to eventually become one with god, whatever.

The point is, you see an order to things - a universal outline with a zillion subdivisions containing zillions of subdivisions, all meticulously crafted for a certain outcome. It makes you comfortable knowing someone knows what the hell is going on. It may not make sense now, but it will soon be revealed.

Or maybe if you don't see order to things, you see an ultimate purpose. This life on earth is the penultimate purpose of your soul, or some such.

You get atheism - it makes rational, logical sense. There just isn't any evidence for a higher power/god/creator/FSM. You get it, but you can't stand it. You hate it. So you refuse it. Why do you hate it?

does it have something to do with lack of meaning and purpose, with a smattering of life after death?

I know a lot of theists and fence-sitting atheists who say that life is meaningless without god. There is no purpose, no reason: we're all just hurtling through an abysmally, unfathomably huge universe on an insignificant planet in an insignificant solar system, so inconsequential we can't even understand just how absurdly, inescapably nonessential it actually is. Hell, we can barely understand how big our own planet is: did you know that the earth is smoother than a billiard ball if you shrank it down to the same size? (Though no one would want to play with an earth-shaped billiard ball because it is flattened from top to bottom, so it is an ellipsoid, not a sphere)

Here is my question: Why exactly is life more meaningful and full of purpose if there is a god?

Most people believe their god is the ultimate higher power and as such, there is no power higher than god. This means, by definition, that god can't believe in a  higher power. Does that make his life meaningless and purposeless? All god is doing is creating his own reality and messing around with it in whatever way theists happen to believe he messes around with it. He doesn't have a higher purpose, just himself and his creation. How come that doesn't work for me and the world I create?

Why does your life have more meaning if god chose you to have purpose X and chose everyone else to have whatever purpose they have? That's like the kindergartner thinking he is so special and important because this week his name was drawn to be the line leader on the way to lunch, while everyone else is doing whatever else they got their name drawn for. Does the kindergartner really have that much more meaningful and purposeful a life because the teacher drew his name this week for line-leader?

Why is a life chosen by god meaningful, but a life chosen by me meaningless? Is it because I am a finite being and god is infinite and thus way bigger? Does cosmic size matter?

If some other being is imposing it's purpose on your life, doesn't that make you a slave - a pawn in some cosmic tabletop wargame with 106 billion people and so many other organisms we aren't capable of counting them? Why is your life so much more meaningful if you are one of the 106 billion who have been given a special purpose than if there is no god? Is your purpose really even all that special?

It would seem to me that if you are competing for value and meaning with 106 billion people (that's the approximate number of all humans to have ever lived or are living) plus all of the humans that are yet to be born, you're life has less meaning than if you're only competing with, say, all the humans than are alive now. Even if god has some special place for you, he also has a special place for everyone else.

One might say that I could find some meaning and purpose in my life as an atheist if I had some impact on the world. But how big does that impact need to be to be meaningful?

Is my life meaningful because I hugged my friend when she felt bad?
How about if I hug 100 friends when they feel bad? Is my life meaningful now?
What about if I invent a new kind of glue? How about now?
How about if I invent a new ind of painkiller? How about now?
What if I cure cancer? Now?
How about if I eradicate racism? Now?
What if I cure all human suffering? Now?
How about if I cure all human suffering and make everyone live to be 300? Now?

I suppose one might say that my life is still meaningless and without purpose even if I cure all human suffering and make everyone live to be 300, because in the end we will still one day be gone. So meaning and purpose still somehow seems to reflect on non-gone-ness. 

It seems to me though that an everlasting life would not really make this life more meaningful than an ever-gone life. We're still comparing your mere 80-ish years with infinity. Anything you do in this life will be meager to the point in inanity in your everlasting life, unless it has some consequence on your everlasting life. If when you're dead you're dead, there are no eternal consequences to worry about, only the consequences you leave behind for the living.

So maybe you're right. If there is no afterlife, there is no cosmic or ultimate meaning or purpose. Why is this so bad? Why do you need a cosmic or ultimate meaning or purpose to have a meaningful and purposeful life? Why does something have to last forever or never be lost to be meaningful and purposeful? If it's all about touching something outside of your self, you can do that plenty easily within the confines of something you might be able to comprehend.

I think the problem we have here is a problem of ratio: The things we do look meaningless in a cosmic context. But if you shrink it down to everyday life, things can be very meaningful. My life is surely meaningful to the spider I chose to let live in my apartment instead of killing. My life surely is meaningful to the countless bacteria that live inside of me and depend on my life for theirs.

This is the same argument some people make for not voting. Why bother to vote when your single vote will not matter? So maybe it won't change the outcome of the election. But it will change you. It can change the people around you. It can change the conversation at the dinner table for the night. Why isn't that enough?
 Why does pretending we have some huge cosmic goal make people feel better about themselves? Why do they hate the idea of no afterlife so much that they will pretend it is impossible? It's probably the way things are, and that's not so bad.

Atheism, spirituality, religion, disability and healthcare

Spirituality is arguably an essential component to the daily lives of human beings, and it is one of the things that separate the human animal from other kinds of animals. Spirituality can be very loosely defined as a personal search for transcendent understanding (Yuen, 2007), where transcendent means beyond the world, beyond human understanding, or beyond the self. It is the essential search and understanding of and for meaning and purpose in ones life through relationships with entities outside the self (McColl 2000), and the search for meaning and purpose of the individual. Spirituality was defined by Johnstone (2006) as an internal experience of cultivation motivated by interest in experience of meaning, purpose and significance.

Individuals with traumatic chronic disabling conditions (such as a stroke, spinal cord injury, etc) are thrust into unanticipated life-changing events. Traumatic disability is a unique experience which brings forth a unique dimension to spirituality. Five themes of spirituality and disability according to McColl (2000) are: Awareness and appreciation, closeness and intimacy, trust as related to the need to depend on others, purpose and life and purpose of the injury itself, and vulnerability and awareness of one’s own mortality. Many people with chronic disabling conditions report changes in their sense of spirituality after the onset of their disability.

While a sense of spirituality can and does exist without religion and the supernatural, religion is inseparable from spirituality. Polls and surveys consistently show that most people (89%) indicate that religion is fairly or very important in their lives (Johnstone, 2006). As such, an understanding of the ways religion can influence one’s sense of spirituality must be taken into account in general, but especially in the light of disability. There are many studies indicating that people who are religious have better mental health, greater social support, and less substance abuse (Johnstone, 2006). This is largely related to the social support network associated with religious practice. As such, if an individual is already religious, the social support network they have built up around their religious community may be able to help them cope with their disabling condition.

As individuals try to make sense of their own disabling conditions, they often question not only their own purpose after acquiring a disability, but the purpose of the disability itself. Virtually all people with chronic disabilities use some type of spiritual coping method. (Matheis, 2006). In this study, of 75 participants who were interviewed by telephone, quality of life was highest among participants who used a more secular spiritual coping rather than a religious spiritual coping.

Because spirituality is so essential in the coping and adjusting process for people with disabilities, it is important for those in the healthcare field to recognize the spiritual changes and spiritual issues that an individual may have. Disability raises many questions about order and purpose in the universe, reminding individuals that they are not in control, and challenging concepts about higher powers. Disability may cause spiritual issues to go unaddressed because disability often removes people from their social support systems and other resources for dealing with spiritual crises. (Ross, 1995). At the same time, disability can open up an individual’s life to meditation and new kinds of relationships with others. (Young, 1993)

It is important to note that while at times it is hard to separate spirituality from religion and belief in the supernatural, the two are not intrinsically connected. While a healthcare practitioner (such as an occupational therapist) might feel that a devoutly religious individuals needs might be best met by clergy or religious figures, he or she may be in the best position to meet the spiritual needs of the non-religious. People without religion such as atheists, agnostics and humanists have an equally deep need for meaning and purpose in their lives. (Kier, 2004). They may have similar sets of unanswered questions regarding spirituality. The fact that atheists and agnostics have been shown to have unaddressed spiritual needs in the healthcare field points to the fact that spiritual needs are universal in the human animal, and traumatic disabling conditions almost universally causes questions regarding spirituality to arise, and new ideas about spirituality to be formulated.

References:

Johnstone, B., Glass, B., Oliver, R. Religion and disability: Clinical, research and training considerations for rehabilitation professionals. Disability and Rehabilitation (2006) 29(15) 1153-1163

Kier, F. Unaddressed Problems in the Study of Spirituality and Health. American Psychologist (2004) 53-54

Matheis, R., Tulsky, D., Matheis, R. The Relation Between Spirituality and Quality of Life Among Individuals With Spinal Cord Injury. Rehabilitation Psychology (2006) 51:265-271

McColl, M., Bickenbach, J., Johnston, J., Nishihama, S., Schumaker, M., Smith, K., Smitsh, M., Yealland, B. Changes in Spiritual Beliefs After Traumatic Disability. Arch Phys Med Rehabil (2000) 81:817-23

Ross L. The spiritual dimension: its importance to patients’ health, well-being and quality of life and its implications for nursing practice. bit J N&s Stud 1995;32:457-68.

Young C. Spirituality and the chronically ill Christian elderly. Geriatr Nurs 1993; 14:298-303.

Yuen, E. Spirituality, Religion and Health. American Journal of Medical Quality (2007) 22:77