In a very good book written by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, titled The Spiritual Brain, (I would give it five stars, if I rated books with stars at my website) there is a chapter called "The Strange Case of the God Helmet" which describes a physical device that "scientists" place on their head so that low-powered magnets can stimulate the temporal lobes of the test subject. Seriously. The tin-foil hat crowd now has legitimate competition. Only a person who doesn't believe God exists and has apparently become desperate to prove it would deliberately try to artificially simulate the effect that belief in God has on people of faith. About neuroscientist Michael Persinger (co-inventor of the God helmet) Beauregard wrote: Echoing Dawkins, Persinger has called religion "an artifact of the brain" and a "cognitive virus." (page 81) Speaking of Richard Dawkins, he had to try the helmet himself, of course, but he didn't experience any of the hallucinations the helmet can allegedly sometimes cause. Persinger attributed the failure of Dawkins to "experience God" using the helmet was due to his "well below average" score in temporal lobe sensitivity to magnetic fields, whatever that means. Of course, Persinger had to publish the results of his 2002 "study" in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders. Beauregard (and O'Leary) wrote: Persinger concluded two things: that the experience of a sensed presence can be manipulated by experiment, and that such an experience "may be the fundamental source for phenomena attributed to visitations by gods, spirits, and … [Read more...]
Atheism and life after death
Why are atheists so adamantly opposed to the idea that consciousness could possibly survive physical death of the human brain? For several years now, I've conducted personal research mostly to satisfy my own curiosity about what might happen when we die. I've read dozens, if not hundreds of articles describing various scientific studies of the near death experience to learn what doctors and scientists think they have discovered about this phenomena. I've personally interviewed people making NDE claims. I seen enough and read enough to believe that the mind and brain separate at death. The spiritual mind survives; the physical brain does not. Dr. Bruce Greyson established what is now called the Greyson NDE scale of 16 specific attributes many alleged NDE claims share in common. These attributes include seeing a bright light at the end of a tunnel, reuniting with dead relatives, the sensation of leaving their physical body, etc. My atheist friends have vehemently argued that these events are hallucinogenic in nature, originating from chemicals produced by the dying brain to make the transition to death more pleasant and less traumatic. However, the typical atheist's arguments are fatally flawed, for two reasons. First of all, not every NDE is a pleasant or euphoric experience. Some are quite terrifying. After learning about his experience from the television program I Survived: Beyond and Back, the reason I sought to interview Matthew Botsford in particular was because he was by every account an innocent bystander accidentally gunned down in a drive-by shooting … [Read more...]
