I wish I had the faith that I see in others. I wish I could believe that there was an all powerful being who created us and loves us. I would love to believe that when I die I could be taken into the arms of God and sent to heaven. Or as others believe, I will be judged when I die and brought over to a new system where I can be immortal and live amongst my family forever (well, for 1000 years, another judgement and then forever) and that scares me. I have no desire to live forever. I love life but I truly believe that life is so precious and worthwhile because you die. I can’t imagine living for a million years or a billion years or even a trillion years. Who would want to? Life is about learning and having new experiences. After a billion years what could possibly be new?

"Waiting For the Galactic Bus", Parke Godwin.

There's an afterlife I could get behind.

You see, this is what turns me off about so called "rationalists." They're as bloody dogmatic as the religious bunch. How do you presume to know what you've either not experienced, or what your senses haven't so far been able to reveal to you? What makes you as sure of your concepts of end-of-life as any Roman Catholic? What the hell is wrong with "I frankly don't know?" I've already written about that great line from Woody Allen's dad in "Hannah." I attended a Freethinker's meeting one time, and was chagrined to hear the vigor with which people of other belief systems were being excoriated. Hey, Rog, guess what. I don't know diddly about it and neither do you. In your rationalist belief system, you're ignoring scads of unexplainable events. I can understand being sick up to here with the credulous woo-woo world. I am, too. I'm uncomfortable with people who ooooh and aaaahh over every schlub who puts up a glib website with "answers." But you don't know either, and the arrogance of unearned certainly looks no better on you-you than a woo-woo. I just have to laugh. Just cuz you're eloquent don't mean you're right. :) As to Eastwood's latest, I have to anticipate it will share with his previous films the qualities of morbidness, depression, angst, violence and general alta kocker kvetchiness. But I might see this one anyone, even in the theatre at $1400 for a senior ticket to a matinee.

Ebert: How does anyone "presume to know what you've either not experienced, or what your senses haven't so far been able to reveal to you?" I don't. I think I make that pretty clear. It's the non-rationalists who presume to know.

This reminds me of an appearance Orson Welles made on a talk show where he discussed the nature of "Cold Reading", and how people can become so skilled at it that they actually trick themselves into believing they have psychic powers. The technical name for a phony psychic who truly believes they have powers is, according to him, a "shuteye". I put a link to the interview below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjPsnfysrp8

Ebert: I've embedded it. Good lord. I was viewer #2.

"All the events we can perceive take place in a rational universe governed by physical laws."

Actually there's nothing rational about the Universe at all. From what we can tell from the IMAP satellite images it began about 13 billion years ago from something weighing less than an ounce, and then for reasons unknown expanded at faster than light (Inflation Theory), symmetries fell apart under these extreme conditions forming "forces" that condensed matter into what we know and see today. But even today the very fabric of the Universe is un-rational. The very fact that electrons, for instance, are in multiple places at once around the nucleus is the only reason our bodies hold together. We can describe this but we don't know how it works.

Even if we knew how they worked, who's making them work? We describe the physical laws but who or what is executing them? In this sense then "God" as Joseph Campbell said, is a symbol of that which is beyond thought, beyond what is even possible to be thought.

"Reason," as Blake said, is simply "the bound or outward circumference of energy"

So, we may can come to "know" this mystery, but not through reason or thinking. We can study for years, for instance, a chemistry book on "how" a baby is born, but a woman's body actually executes the act without thinking.

Ebert: And everything after that first ounce followed rational rules. Had to.

Hi Roger! Can't tell you how much I have appreciated your movie reviews over the years!

I agree the universe is rational and pretty much everything work according to physical laws. My Protestant faith leads me only to say that in order for those two things to be true, that there is rationsality, that there is anything at all called laws (physical, logic, moral, etc.) God must exist. I also believe in miracles, that God is able to insert a new event into His creation that does not abide by our known physical laws. I am glad that you are writing about these things, but I would ask you to consider: My view does not belong in the arena of a "supernatural loophole," but to the arena of faith. But I would say yours does as well: faith in rationality having no need whatsoever for the supernatural. That, as well as all other positions, is from faith :)

As far as the concepts of heaven you describe, as a Christian I do not find the Biblical version there at all in your descriptions.

Thanks!

Mark

Have you considered that telepathy really does exists, and can be explained in a rational, scientific way?

It's been said humans only use about 10 percent of their brains. I'm not sure how scientifically sound that is, but let's say it's true; that means means there are many things we consider to be mumbo-jumbo that are indeed possible, and able to be studied and understood by science.

As for the need for an afterlife, it depends; some religions have a concept of eternal suffering in certain criteria aren't met. I'm sure there's a lot of people who know this, that would sleep better at night if there were convinced by someone that no afterlife exists.

You need to learn more about Michael Persinger's research. He has proved telepathy to my satisfaction, and also shown that it is a physical phenomenon, subject to the vagaries of the earth's magnetic field.

I'm convinced that full-blown psychic sessions (those not done for entertainment) are best compared to psychotherapy. They use similar methods, and some workable therapeutic techniques (hypnosis, Autogenic Training, NLP, breathwork, use of hallucinogens) were actually derived from their brand of unsystematic and unscientific efforts. Of course the relationship between psychic and client is different, largely because the psychic brings up topics where a modern therapist would almost exclusively ask the patient to bring them up. The psychic is prone to deceive clients or herself, but deception in therapy, while highly problematic, isn't exactly unheard of either. And those differences, while substantial, are outnumbered by the similarities.

And psychics do compete with therapists, on price. They will not say it out loud because it is illegal to claim medical expertise. But the fact of the matter is that their clients are quite frequently people who'd benefit from therapy. I think it is no accident that countries with universal health care seem to have way less of them.

The death of dearly loved people is an extremely common cause of psychological issues. Wouldn't it make sense for some non-professional semi-therapists to specialize on that? And might it not be reasonable to assume that the long traditions they rely on, while clearly unscientific, might have evolved towards a degree of efficacy?

I can't comment on the movie yet, without having seen it, but I must say that the Amazing Randi has long been my favorite skeptic.

Nobody calls out inconsistencies as well as he does.

My friend wants to take me to a psychic mind reader. She thinks its totally real and that I'll be a "changed person" afterwards. I have my doubts. Especially after reading this. If I do go, I might do some little tests and see if he/she can actually read my mind. Who knows, maybe this person actually is a psychic? I suspect I'm just going to hear a lot of barnum statements though...

“I expect to experience no more after death than I experienced before birth”

“In my opinion, there is no solace for these needs. We live, we die. That is not a tragedy. The tragedy would be never having been born.”

You don’t seem willing to accept the conclusions of your own argument. If you don’t expect to experience any more after death than before birth, how is not being born a tragedy? Inherent in the post-death non-existence you believe in is the fact that you don’t get to take your experiences with you. They will cease to exist right as you do. If you die, or are never born, you end up in the exact same state (or lack thereof). What difference did it make which path you took to nowhere?

Ebert: Tragedy was an imprecise word. It can only be considered tragic by one who has been born. Apart from that, it's nothing at all.

Bringing Clint Eastwood's age into the conversation is interesting.

In the last decade, Clint (Good Lord, do I have the right to call him Clint?) has put out a body of work that could be a career for another man.

But without a doubt, his age does play into these stories.

His role in Million Dollar Baby is one that can only be filled an older man; a man who has lost touch with his daughter and finds himself in an impossible position with a surrogate daughter.

His role in Grand Torino is one that can only be filled an older man; a Korean War vet whose lost his wife, and dying to boot.

For that matter, his role in 1993's In the Line of Fire showed an aging Secret Service agent, who (*** spoiler alert***) finishes ends the film in retirement.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

He's embraced his age with a style that I only hope I can achiever in my own field if God willing I live that long.

In your concluding paragraphs, you write, "We live, we die. That is not a tragedy. The tragedy would be never having been born." I'm going to predict that half the responses you get to your post will be about those few sentences. You can guess the point they will make given that you are a self-professed liberal. I await with amused curiosity your response to them, if any.

Douglas Hofstadter's book I Am a Strange Loop has an interesting take on consciousness and mortality. He sees self-awareness as a recursive operator in the brain's information processing systems, and he sees consciousness as the unique pattern that grows out of that seed, shaped by all our memories and experiences and conditioning. His take on mortality is that the imprint of your consciousness lives on in the world through the people who have known you well... or in some cases, through contributions to the arts.

He's definitely a philosopher with a solid foot in physics and mathematics. Whether he's answering the question of mortality, or just finding a creative way to dodge it, is open to debate, I guess.

Roger, you write, "The prospect of being able to read the mind of a partner during sex is as horrifying as having your own mind read at such a time."

God, your observation could be turned into a deeply wicked short story.

I have nothing to say about the afterlife because I haven't died yet. I'm an atheist, but I don't know if I'll 'return to nothing' or whatever when dead. The universe is such a vast and horribly complex place that it feels rather presumptuous to have a take on that subject from the tiny little patch of dirt we've got to make judgments from. I'll find out when I'm dead...or not, and I'll just kinda start decaying.

My personal favorite theory: we are all members of an immortal alien species. This world, maybe even this entire universe, is a sort of 'online game' in which we subsume ourselves for a time, with our memories of our real lives intentionally blotted out in order to make both the bad and the good experiences of this life all the more poignant. Then, when we go back to our old immortal forms, we can laugh and joke around about all the cool stuff we did in-game...or maybe kick the crap out of the jerks who were huge player-killers and ruined the fun for everyone.

If this theory turns out to be true, I expect a written apology in that reality's equivalent of a blog about your stance on the artistic merit of games.

There's an episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit, where they illustrate how to manipulate people with the psychic schtick. It's good stuff, those guys (Jonathan Edwards, James Van Praagh et al) are perverted.

Here's a link to the Penn and Teller episode.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se82D8cqhgk

Ebert: Embedded it below.

Very interesting. But I do think there is a problem here. The approach you seem to be taking is that belief in an afterlife is something natural to us, terrified as we are of death. But you also seem to be saying that men made of sterner stuff simply don't care about death; they accept it and get on with their lives (in a manner of speaking). The beliefs these people hold (and though I'm a Catholic, I do think phychics are basically frauds) are like those of a lost tribe deep in the amazon- understanable, given the circumstances, quaint, and even endearing, but certainly not something to be taken seriously. It thus seems doubtful whether actual sympathy is possible with portraying these kinds of beliefs.

If there is not a non-physical part of us (a "mind") then everything we are is a result of things that have occurred in the physical world. Simply physical outcomes to other physical activities that there is no control over.

If that is the case, then every thought and action a person believes themself to be having is simply a physical and electrical action based on previous input or experience. So, any belief that a person holds that they have control over their actions, is simply another thought that has been raised based on the same physical reactions that any other thought comes from. Meaning any idea of free will is an illusion in this physical world.

If the genesis of a thought is reactions in the brain, there is no free will or control over your life. I am curious how many people who don't believe in any existence beyond this physical body and world that they are currently existing in are ready to believe this.

This means that any thought or action that "you" have ever done was not a result of "you" thinking it, but instead the thought that there is a "you" is the result of the brain giving "you" a sense of self-awareness.

so where does a thought come from, does the mind create it and then the physical, calculable reactions begin to occur or is it a result of physical, calculable reactions in the brain?

"It's been said humans only use about 10 percent of their brains. I'm not sure how scientifically sound that is..."

It is not scientifically sound at all. This has been repeatedly shown to be a misnomer. There is no such quantification of our brain usage. You can read about it here:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=people-only-use-10-percent-of-brain

To be sure, this is just one source. There are other various sources and ways to poke holes in the notion, both scientific and philosophical. I wish the concept would just go away, but it seems to have a firm hold for some reason.

@Ivan:
That sounds eerily similar to many New Ageists and their view of how things work. That we are eternal beings, and we occupy these bodies for a brief time in order to either learn something, or basically revel in our hedonism. Like Andrew, I personally don't find that idea any more appealing than the one of us having immortal souls that will live for eternity. Who wants to live forever? Boredom would seem an inevitable result, and I find infinite boredom more frightening than the worst torments religions have to offer.

One term, or notion, I seldom hear brought up in these kinds of discussions (although the "Sam Harris v. Deepak Chopra" video does touch on it) is neuroplasticity, the astonishing discovery that one can physically change their own brains by thinking certain ways. The book "The Brain That Changes Itself" even talks about a mentally-handicapped woman (who was of course coherent enough to know of her handicap) who, by regimented mental exercises, actually normalized the damaged portion of her brain.

Neuroplasticity is evident in all our subjective experiences. If we think optimistically, we'll be happier. We think negatively, we'll be more pessimistic.

My question is: how does this happen? What is the impetus for changing the physical structure of the brain? What are the "fingers" that are molding and shaping this cranial clay? I realize I am a layman when it comes to neuroscience, but such an engima seems to me to subtly suggest some kind of intangible catalyst, though I feel everyone is too afraid to dare mention a term like "soul".

Astrophysicist Bernard Haisch used an apt analogy for consciousness in his book "The God Theory": that the brain is rather like the mechanics of a car. All sorts of things happen inside a car to make it drive, but they don't happen on their own. They happen because there's a driver behind the wheel.

Thanks for embedding that video, Roger. It was actually uploaded by somebody else first, but for some reason or another they took it down. I put it up on my channel after I realized how well it relates to this article.

I do believe in an afterlife, but not the conventional "floating around wherever looking on benignly." When someone dies those who knew them have memories if they are old enough to retain them. My mother died when I was twelve but even though thirty years have passed those who knew her, some younger than me, keep her alive in our memories. It is only when the last person that knew you in life is dead that you are truly dead, which means that a lot of us will exist far beyond the time when our physical bodies fail. Hell, even the people who hate your guts fall into this category. ;)

Roger,

I've been reading you with appreciation for some time. Given your passing remark on the immortality of atoms, I thought you might appreciate this, the chorus from the song Web of Love by the very talented Cat Faber:

From the time when the sun caught fire from the press of the weight it owns
From the time when the first rains fell and hissed on the scalding stones
Atoms have been dancing to a music made of light
'Til at last in the dance we meet -- and meeting, reunite.

Complete lyrics are here: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WEBLOVE.HTML

Thank you for the reviews and the essays.

Hi Roger,
Great article, as always. I've been a fan of "The Amazing Randi" since watching him bend spoons on the Tonight show to show what a fraud "magicians" really are. Maybe he seems too militant about it to you, but I tend to side with him. We are becoming a nation in which actual thought, reasoning thought, is becoming anathema to public life.

It's nearly impossible to watch late night cable without coming across 3 or 4 programs featuring someone talking to the dead to solve crimes. That fantasy has become our reality.

A significant percent of elected officials deny science in the form of evolution and most embrace superstition in many forms and use those superstitions, in the guise of "religion", to justify their bigotry and ignorance and seek to set policy and law in accord with those superstitions so as to impose the consequences of their ignorance on everyone. Any politician who appears on a news program should be introduced as "another politician who does not accept the scientific validity of evolution and chooses to pander to ignorance, so let's hear what he has to say about the new tax bill..." (now That would be "Fair and Balanced")

When I have challenged people who believe in ghosts and who believe in "the healing power of crystals" I have been told I am intolerant. Now it seems I am not just expected to tolerate ignorance but also to vote for it. Embracing ignorance in its many forms has become the "cultural revolution" of this era. I'm glad James Randi rejects it in such clear terms.

Hot dog, another slot for a favorite quote!

CLAIRVOYANT n. One who determines for her client that which he is unable to determine for himself, namely, that he is a blockhead. --Bierce

Shoot. Having moved to the boonies, will have to wait for "Hereafter" from Netflix. Am already waiting for the one about the corporate dream-manipulation adventure.

Sure there's such a thing as telepathy. Tho', the word sounds so mechanical. Half the problem is narrowing things down so much that this here is "telepathy" and that there is some fraud sending invisible tentacles into your wallet. It's not that simple.

Good to know there's a movie out about it that sounds kinda reasonable, though.

You are very right about our winning a lottery in being able to have been born Rog. An uncle of mine once complained to me that he was born when my grandfather was in his forties which surely meant this decreased his chances of having good health during his life. Truth is, if people were not to be conceived at the precise moment that they were, they would have never been born at all.
I'm sure those people who pity you over your views of the afterlife are well meaning. I certainly do not concur with them. It seems to me you are constantly searching for the truth. With a little luck you are likely to find it sooner than later.

Ebert: "To be clear: I think this is very highly unlikely indeed. But the more we learn of quantum matters, the slower we must be in declaring things impossible."

What have we learned about quantum matters that would make telepathy possible? Quantum entanglement can't be used for intelligible communication between minds (or for that matter for any kind of intelligible communication).

If you can imagine it, it can happen. Perhaps, someday, everything we've imagined will be possible, before our eyes. But there must be the physical construct to facilitate the function (mind or comparable AI for consciousness, subatomic particles for atom, atoms for molecules, molecules for matter and all its diversity.) Hope and wishes and belief don't suddenly jerk the "Gods of the Universe" aside and make them rethink just because someone doesn't like that telekinesis isn't possible, or that gravity does things they don't want it to. Gravity was there long before anybody. It's a telling analogy, Newton's falling apple. Telling because of the order in which the event occurs in relation to the idea of some invisible force. Whether it was an apple, or a quill, or a rock doesn't matter. The apple fell and then the idea came, not the other way around. And it's funny he should use apple, because that just happens to be the fruit which, according to the Bible, granted us Knowledge. To know. Some people just don't want to do the leg work and figure out what we observe, all the finery of our surroundings. It takes time, effort, and a lot more. Maybe it's just easier to convince oneself that you have it all figured out, it's all conveniently packaged in a single book, in a single faith, in a single lifetime. Easier, maybe, but not preferable. Not to me. I am no scientist, but one does have to be to wonder and to doubt and to question and seek. With religion, there is no seeking, only static. All that we have discovered of ourselves, our world and beyond, through the eyes of so many devout, is all expendable, without merit, if not completely evil. After all, in innocence, in static, we have God and His Glory, but in knowing, we have our world and all that it implies. I'll take this world, scars and all, and others can keep their fanciful, static heaven where nothing is known at all.

It's theoretically possible that telepathy might have a scientific origin as an earlier writer suggested but it couldn't have anything to do with humans only using 10% of their brains.

That's been debunked countless times (here's Snopes' version: http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percent.asp )

I know some people only seem to use ten percent but the different areas are active under different circumstances.

Aaaargh! Roger's falls for the new-age misuse of the word "quantum" and loses his skeptic card....

I've read plenty of your blog posts about similar subjects, about religion and afterlife. You are very eloquent, I'll give you that. Far more eloquent than me. And who knows, maybe you are right. But I don’t think so. In my opinion there are too many things that we cannot explain. We often know the how, but we very, very rarely truly know the why. You say it must all follow “rational rules.” But what no one seems to be able to tell me is who made those rules? Who decided that they were rational? This is where you and I differ. You seem to be think that those rules are just there, that they’re just rational because that’s the way it is. But I truly do believe that there is a being out there who decides, or at least at some point decided all of this. I choose to call him God, but that’s not the point. My explanation my be flawed and it could be fully affected by my need for comfort, but at least I have one. You just seem to choose to believe that it’s all there just because it is. Or maybe I’m wrong or I’ve interpreted your beliefs wrong.

Those were excellent videos. Psychics and supernatural events etc, always reminded me of the phrase I heard somewhere, "Magic is simply technology we don't understand."

Ebert: "I believe it possible that some few people may be able to inspire heightened transmission from another mind by touching hands or otherwise supplying a psychic jolt."

I'm surprised that you give telepathy more credence than, say, James Randi would. Are you sure you aren't influenced by sentimental feelings for the apparent new age beliefs of your wife Chaz?

Andrew said

"I love life but I truly believe that life is so precious and worthwhile because you die. I can’t imagine living for a million years or a billion years or even a trillion years. Who would want to? Life is about learning and having new experiences. After a billion years what could possibly be new?"

I'm sure the universe is big enough to offer you a lot of new things actually. At least for me, I'm sure I wouldn't be bored.

I haven't seen Hereafter yet. Anxiously awaiting it coming to my little burg.

From your description here, it sounds like it borrows heavily - or is influenced by - Stephen King's 1983 novel "the Dead Zone". Especially the handshake that gives the flash of knowledge, and the power being a curse that the gifted owner withdraws from. A great novel. So-so movie.

Roger:

In November, 1995, my grandfather, Beverly W. Suter, died at the age of 80, after a long period of ill health.

On the night he died, I was in Kansas, earning a graduate degree. My mother called me to tell me the news.

That night, I went to bed and had a dream. My grandfather was standing with me and my cousins, his grandchildren. My four aunts, his children, were there too. We were all kind of milling around, as if at a family reunion.

In the dream, my grandfather said to me, sadly, in his Virginia accent, "You all will have to get along without me from now on."

It didn't occur to me until a few months later that this might have been my grandfather's way of saying goodbye to me. Maybe it was a last message to me before he "moved on" to the next phase of existence. If I have had any personal experience that gives me evidence of an Afterlife, this was it.

Of course, the skeptics will argue that I was just thinking of my grandfather after my mother's phone call, and that was why I dreamed that dream.

I prefer to think otherwise.

I can't prove there is an Afterlife any more than I can prove that God exists. But I have Faith (coupled with a good dose of Logic and Reason) that God exists. I see evidence of His hand in the process of Evolution that creates and reshapes the natural world, and I also see His presence in the Spirit of people who follow his Word (whether they follow it as Christians, Bhuddists, Muslims, or even as Atheists or Agnostics.)

I believe in the Soul. I believe the Soul is a composite of the qualities -- intelligence, love, personality, etc. -- that make us what we are. And if the Afterlife exists, I believe it is a means for the Souls of good people to continue to exist after the body has died. There's nothing "necessary" about the Afterlife -- it just is.

But at the same time, I also think that people should not worry so much about the Afterlife, and should try to live their lives in THIS world before they move on to the next one, whatever it is.

We'll all find out someday whether or not there really is an Afterlife. Until then, we should try to live better, more productive lives, and enjoy our mortal life while it lasts.

"There is, however, one form of immortality that is guaranteed, if unrewarding. We certainly live on indefinitely in our constituent atoms, which will be recombined in dust, flowers, trees, the wind, other living beings, and eventually in cosmic stardust."

Aren't thoughts part of that fabric?

It seems pretty rewarding to me to think that I'm made of the stuff of infinity.

But back to thoughts, perhaps there's a level of thought that is made of infinity, and perhaps that is what is referred to as meaning.

So, on the converse, when people are living without meaning (as many seem to be), that would mean that they are living in a level of thought that is strictly limited.

We have history books that seem so "limited" in this sense (and perhaps education in general in this country); but when people from just a few centuries ago would learn about history, their main concern was what it all "meant." If you look at our history books, it seems so "limited." We don't get the sense of the infinite longing of the people.

So, in conclusion, if we are made of the stuff of infinity and meaning is when (or comes WHEN) our thoughts harmonize with infinity, then that's not necessarily a human construct, but is kind of the natural order of things and humanity is kind of a litany of people mostly not having the courage or fortitude or what have you do be a part of that natural order, which makes it SEEM like a human construct.

(Warning: possible rant ahead)

In other words, these "atheists" can reasonably look around and say "it's all bulls#it" because the HUMAN BEINGS are bulls*it everywhere you look almost; so it's really a kind of quantitative-deductive reasoning, which is the following: 90% of people suck, and everywhere there seems to be religion, therefore, religion is keeping back the other 90%: when really that's just the way it's been everywhere all the time: meaning it's not the religion that sucks, it's the people. 90% of people have sucked since the beginning of man. Religion is probably a way of keeping the sucks from feeling sucky while simultaneously making them realize that it's their fault for sucking and they could get out of sucking if they'd stop sucking and that perhaps they might even get to encounter one of the rare non-suckers and rub some trickled-down-non-sucky-juice in their sucky souls (no pun intended)making them feel less sucky as they roll in a puddle of non-suckiness, the good chaps, and the "atheists" suckers who are mostly dancing in their non-sucky sauce like the other 90% of humanity.

"Atheists" will you take my hand and dance in some non-sucky sauce that wasn't created by either one of us?

(Like I said, this was just a casual rant)

Hi Roger,

You seem to hold two views that just simply don't mesh. 1.) There is not a mind behind the universe and 2.) The universe is rational (i.e., based on reason).

You should clarify this. Humans may be rational. But, the universe? In order for something to be rational, it would seem to either itself be capable of reason (such as a human) or itself be the product of reason (the product of something akin to a mind or having a mind). The idea of the universe you seem to embrace is mindless and has no mind behind it. So how can you begin to say that it is rational?

In other words, you may as well have just said that the leaves on a tree are rational or the rocks in the field are rational. And I can think of few things more irrational for a human being to utter. If you wish not to believe in God, fine. That is your business. But let's not go around talking nonsense.

Furthermore, if human thinking is the result of a pocess that was unplanned, unintended, and without purpose, how can you or anyone have any certainty that the patterns it perceives and the conclusions it draws about those patterns correspond to truth and reality? I'm not sure it is wise to trust the reasoning or conclusions drawn by a mind that was produced by non-mind that wasn't even evolving with the idea of mind in mind (if you get my drift). :)

Non-sucky sauce: it's what the religionists cooked for dinner.

The likelihood of being born presents a puzzle, though. It's the same as the mind-body problem. I think; therefore, I am. Now what am I? Does life, or the soul, or the entelechy, to borrow a word, consist of an entity that can be isolated? Or is it truly a sum of parts? When I die, what really dies? If I die on the operating table but am then brought back to life, as you may have been, then am I the same life that I was before, or does discontinuity mean that I have possessed two different life forces? Can this force of life be divided? Suppose that partial brain transplants actually allow a person to live on. Suppose that parts of a brain are used more than once to transfer a human life from one body to another. Can a person's life force be preserved in two different bodies and brains at once, both being incarnations of the same person but with no link to one another? And if so, if one of them should die, has the original person then died? And while one of them lives, what consolation is that to the one that dies? And it comes back to an essential question: am I really myself and myself alone, or does my brain merely give that illusion? If I die, what is it that dies? Maybe the thing that dies is really nothing so significant at all, and if that's so, maybe eventually dying isn't so terrible.

The problem is the questions have no real answers outside a system of religion, and those answers are just guesswork anyway.

Ebert: Probably best to spend our time in relationships, useful work, pleasure, the arts, sports, poker, politics, and sloshing Butterscotch Life Savers around in our spit.

My goodness. With an official review and two blog entries dedicated to Hereafter, you're making me feel that I'll be missing an important event if I don't watch it. But that's why I love reading your work, Mister Ebert. You have quite a gift yourself for helping others get excited over cinema.

Most psychics are indeed frauds. I'm glad this has been pointed out. Taking advantage of someone's fear and emotions for personal gain is no way to live, unless of course you're an artist. The difference between artists and frauds is that artists are honest with their subjects.

But what is the right way to live? Will anything I do matter? Those are questions I've asked myself probably more times than necessary. Like you, I've been raised via religious upbringing and lost my faith after learning how to think rationally. I am however open to the idea of things that are beyond human understanding, one such thing being the possibility of an afterlife.

I would like to think that there is something pleasant awaiting us after this emotional roller coaster known as life ceases to exist. There had even been a phase where I had spent all day pondering the thought and losing sleep over it. It doesn't bother me anymore though. Mankind has been trying to discover the meaning of life since the very beginning (whatever that may be) and we're still not even close to finding the answer. Perhaps we were not meant to understand everything. Maybe that's one of the hidden wonders in life.

Those probably don't sound like the kind of words one would expect to hear from a non-believer. But it's the sort of thing that keeps my personal spirits up. I wish for people to stop acting like they have all of the answers and just be content with doubt. Easier said than done, I know. But the big questions are not easy either. If more can come to learn how to accept life for what it is, it will be easier to improve life on Earth while we're here.

Thanks for writing on this, Mister Ebert. It couldn't have come at a better time.

In thinking about subjects like these, you suddenly realize that there is a very real downside to intelligence and self awareness.

Religion, a belief in fortune telling, all of that, is ostensibly a coping mechanism for having the curse of being intelligent enough to think about the nature of consciousness and existence, something a squirrel likely does not do.

However, the tradeoff is getting to experience life, love, pursuit of happiness, all of our emotions, and the rich and comfortable life our intelligence has brought us.

I think it's important to live each day fully, and not try to think about what comes after. It's pointless because it cannot be discerned from our perspective.

However, as Robert Heinlein once said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and we may yet find that we can make our fantasies about telepathy come true, and further discern the nature of the universe, and prolong our lives and morph ourselves into something entirely different. You have to believe this has already happened to other intelligences in the universe, given enough success and resources. Perhaps this universe is an outcome of another. Who knows?

I find the best medicine for dealing with those questions is reading science fiction. It gives you a 'cosmic zoom' of new perspective. A way of looking at things from a still intelligent but non-human or non-earthbound point of view.

I'd like to commend to reader attention the Cordwainer Smith short story "Angerhelm." A Google search will reveal more than one place where it can be read for free. It is in all my reading the most fascinating, concise, realistic, and imaginative exploration of the notion of someone's consciousness persisting after death, and how that consciousness might go about making itself heard.

I was conversing with a taxi driver; apropos of nothing, I asked the him about growing up in Maryland, which surprised him--until I explained that earlier in the conversation he had pronounced "Baltimore" as "Bald'more", a telltale sign of a Marylander. Whatever the conversation, you're telling a personal story when you speak, and that story is available to any linguistically-studied person. I'm inclined to side with the skeptics: we're constantly broadcasting information about ourselves that is available to skilled or educated people.

As always, you are, Mr. Ebert, a joy to read. A question though: you seem to be insistent on the end of your consciousness at the end of this life? In a manner, isn't this as spurious (and non-scientific) a conclusion as belief in a particular outcome?

You astutely say you expect that you will receive, on death, what you had before life. But what's to say you did not experience something before life and simply have no awareness of it?

And more to the point - of what significance is the debate in our lives? We are all bound to travel off separately in our shuffling off this mortal coil. Does it even matter if we're right in our conclusions on where we are headed?

Ebert, this is from personal experience; a woman i know, a psychic, who doesn't know me from joe blow. I met her, and she speaks with a spirit guide; pulled my brother's name (an indian name,not a common western name) out of thin air, and my sister's name; also told me my wife was born in Nepal and that i had married only 5 months prior to meeting her. Then also told me the month my wife would get pregnant; we were trying very hard and it did not occur till that month. She also indicated my paternal grandfather was in the room and sent me a message from him about a conversation he and I had had a year before he passed -- a very specific conversation about my marriage.

She also informed me that none of her abilities are 'supernatural'; they are as natural as water cascading off a cliff to create a waterfall. They are as natural as the sun shining on us and the clouds raining upon the earth. The idea of the spirit world, the soul, and psychic ability is considered 'supernatural' only because WE have come to think of it as so. Why? Important to look back thousands of years and realize that the church had an invested interest in preventing the average person from realizing that God is within, and that the potential to tap into this spiritual power is within ALL OF US and has NOTHING to do with 'woo woo' or hocus pocus. This idea of the supernatural and the discounting of psychic phenomena is man-made and it is false, and further ridiculed by the numer of frauds out there. In India, the manner in which a human being can tap into this power involves YEARS of serious 'kriya yoga meditation'; read up on it. This is knowledge that has been in the east for thousands of years and yet ridiculed by the west.

Keep an open mind. There is NOTHING supernatural about another level of existence that we have simply lost touch with and de-evolved to the point that we dont see it anymore. Our world is all about the OUTER and the outer senses, and you shoudl realize that more than anyone -- just look at the success of noisy, wham-bam movies that appeal to the ADHD generation. We are no longer quiet minds. WE have no peace. And hence we cannot hear God within our own hearts and mind. Those very rare individuals who are born with this karmic gift to do so, we label them as 'psychics' and 'supernatural' and people with gifts.

Keep an open mind! If you are open to the truth, it will find you someday in the form of a legitimate person who has this gift. You yourself are already tapped into a level of power within yourself, which is evident in the gift you have when you write. It is also not an accident that the world of the internet and blogging opened up to you just at the right time in your life, when you needed it. Your voice now is greater than it was before. This is a testament to God -- to God within you and your own level of connection to that spirit.

We have ENORMOUS potential within us. Think of the energy locked in one atom that leads to an atom bomb. That energy exists in the millions, nay billions of atoms within us. The Bhagvad Gita of India attests we are all privy to this energy via meditation and some are born with it. Thousands of years ago, we all were tapped into it to a greater degree than we are now (hence the prophets of those eras -- Krishna, Jesus, Mohammed).

There is nothing "SUPERnatural" about it.
This IS nature. It IS God.
It is the truth.
WE have forgotten. Some are remembering and so it is 'new' for them and we call it 'new age'.
A bit silly when you look at it from an eastern perspective.

When you have the kind of PERSONAL experience i've had, you will never look at these things the same way again. But you will only attract that personal experience into your life, in a legitimate way, when you are open to it.

No scientist ever discovered anything worth discovering without failing first a hundred times.

Likewise, if you have the interst, you may run across 99 frauds before you find someone who is not. i'm not suggesting you go out and talk to a 100 psychics. Just making a point about your attitude toward the subject.

With respect, as always,
self proclaimed ebert addict (SPEA),
Vikas

Regards,
Vikas

Ebert, this is from personal experience; a woman i know, a psychic, who doesn't know me from joe blow. I met her, and she speaks with a spirit guide; pulled my brother's name (an indian name,not a common western name) out of thin air, and my sister's name; also told me my wife was born in Nepal and that i had married only 5 months prior to meeting her. Then also told me the month my wife would get pregnant; we were trying very hard and it did not occur till that month. She also indicated my paternal grandfather was in the room and sent me a message from him about a conversation he and I had had a year before he passed -- a very specific conversation about my marriage.

She also informed me that none of her abilities are 'supernatural'; they are as natural as water cascading off a cliff to create a waterfall. They are as natural as the sun shining on us and the clouds raining upon the earth. The idea of the spirit world, the soul, and psychic ability is considered 'supernatural' only because WE have come to think of it as so. Why? Important to look back thousands of years and realize that the church had an invested interest in preventing the average person from realizing that God is within, and that the potential to tap into this spiritual power is within ALL OF US and has NOTHING to do with 'woo woo' or hocus pocus. This idea of the supernatural and the discounting of psychic phenomena is man-made and it is false, and further ridiculed by the numer of frauds out there. In India, the manner in which a human being can tap into this power involves YEARS of serious 'kriya yoga meditation'; read up on it. This is knowledge that has been in the east for thousands of years and yet ridiculed by the west.

Keep an open mind. There is NOTHING supernatural about another level of existence that we have simply lost touch with and de-evolved to the point that we dont see it anymore. Our world is all about the OUTER and the outer senses, and you shoudl realize that more than anyone -- just look at the success of noisy, wham-bam movies that appeal to the ADHD generation. We are no longer quiet minds. WE have no peace. And hence we cannot hear God within our own hearts and mind. Those very rare individuals who are born with this karmic gift to do so, we label them as 'psychics' and 'supernatural' and people with gifts.

Keep an open mind! If you are open to the truth, it will find you someday in the form of a legitimate person who has this gift. You yourself are already tapped into a level of power within yourself, which is evident in the gift you have when you write. It is also not an accident that the world of the internet and blogging opened up to you just at the right time in your life, when you needed it. Your voice now is greater than it was before. This is a testament to God -- to God within you and your own level of connection to that spirit.

We have ENORMOUS potential within us. Think of the energy locked in one atom that leads to an atom bomb. That energy exists in the millions, nay billions of atoms within us. The Bhagvad Gita of India attests we are all privy to this energy via meditation and some are born with it. Thousands of years ago, we all were tapped into it to a greater degree than we are now (hence the prophets of those eras -- Krishna, Jesus, Mohammed).

There is nothing "SUPERnatural" about it.
This IS nature. It IS God.
It is the truth.
WE have forgotten. Some are remembering and so it is 'new' for them and we call it 'new age'.
A bit silly when you look at it from an eastern perspective.

When you have the kind of PERSONAL experience i've had, you will never look at these things the same way again. But you will only attract that personal experience into your life, in a legitimate way, when you are open to it.

No scientist ever discovered anything worth discovering without failing first a hundred times.

Likewise, if you have the interst, you may run across 99 frauds before you find someone who is not. i'm not suggesting you go out and talk to a 100 psychics. Just making a point about your attitude toward the subject.

With respect, as always,
self proclaimed ebert addict (SPEA),
Vikas

Regards,
Vikas

One of the smartest explanations of the "psychic" world was shown in an episode of Southpark. The kids point out how psychic John Edward does his cold readings:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Biggest_Douche_in_the_Universe

"You don’t seem willing to accept the conclusions of your own argument. If you don’t expect to experience any more after death than before birth, how is not being born a tragedy? Inherent in the post-death non-existence you believe in is the fact that you don’t get to take your experiences with you. They will cease to exist right as you do. If you die, or are never born, you end up in the exact same state (or lack thereof). What difference did it make which path you took to nowhere?

Ebert: Tragedy was an imprecise word. It can only be considered tragic by one who has been born. Apart from that, it's nothing at all."
-------------------------

Excuse my picking your nits, but I've noticed a growing fondness in you for using variants of the word tragedy:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tragedy

Definition of TRAGEDY
1
a : a medieval narrative poem or tale typically describing the downfall of a great man b : a serious drama typically describing a conflict between the protagonist and a superior force (as destiny) and having a sorrowful or disastrous conclusion that elicits pity or terror c : the literary genre of tragic dramas
2
a : a disastrous event : calamity b : misfortune
3
: tragic quality or element

While I certainly don't argue that words are immutable I think the word has fallen so far from definition 1 that we use it for all manner of things.

Over in the Dan Schneider thread we were, as you know, still beating the Hitler was a great man trope to death. Great being another misunderstood word.

And I know that you agree with that. Therefore one could claim Hitler's "Downfall"--as in the film-- was a tragedy. Same with the fall of Rome or the assassination of Lincoln.

But 9/11, the Titanic, Challenger, etc.--these were merely disasters, horrific crimes, or terrible accidents, not tragedies.

Re: the tragedy of not being born, I would argue very little in life is tragic. Yes, id Einstein were cut down in pubescence you could argue that, but only if one knew his future, as we do.

Any comments?

Nonetheless, I otherwise am in full agreement with this post. Cheers.

Is there really a common human need of an afterlife? I don't think so.

Athiests lack a certain amount of humility. It's as if they refuse to consider the possiblity that there is anyone or anything greater than themselves. As a Christian, I am confident that I have nothing to lose by believing in God & Jesus. If I die and it turns out that I was wrong, I will have lost nothing & will simply take the ultimate dirt nap. If an athiest dies and finds out that he was wrong, he's screwed. Yes, God is merciful, but the Bible is very clear that the only way to know the Father is through the Son. If you don't believe in God before you die, He won't believe in you after you die. Life on Earth is short & I would rather spend it preparing myself for the best possible outcome (Heaven) than living in the moment and lacking the hope and faith that there must be something better in store for me. A life without hope and faith is not really a life at all. It's simply an existence.

Welles is the man. "F for Fake" is a new favorite for me on Netflix. What a cool film!

I gave a sermon on this general subject a couple of weeks ago at my local Unitarian Universalist church.

I'm reminded of the Albert Camus quote: "Do not wait for the Last Judgment; it happens every day." Continuity of consciousness, as a philosophical concept, makes no sense to me; unless there is some sort of eternal soul that exists outside of time, time defines the parameters of consciousness. Since time is by definition a constant process, this means that we are, at any given moment, completely annihilated and completely reborn. Continuity of consciousness becomes an illusion created by the process of memory. From a subjective point of view, "I" will be no more dead when my heart stops being than I will be by the time I finish this sentence.

I can't really take credit for this idea; Bertrand Russell said much the same thing in "A Free Man's Worship":
http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/A%20Free%20Man's%20Worship.htm

So if there's no persistent subjective self that constitutes Tom Head, what am I? I like Dawkins' idea of the extended phenotype. I like it so much that I think there is value in thinking of consciousness in much the same way—that the subjective "I" is not just what happens in the collection of cells inside my cranial vault, but rather what happens in my interaction with the rest of the cosmos.

I think we need to broaden, not narrow, our definition of consciousness, without paranormal speculation and in a manner consistent with what we can scientifically verify. And I think that if we do that, we will come to the conclusion that individualism, self-worship, the quest for personal immortality—that all of these are idolatries of the spirit, unworthy subjects on which to focus our time. Better that we focus that time on relieving human suffering, building and valuing human relationships, and creating a dignity in our lives that will be humanity's conspiracy, humanity's little secret, humanity's great in-joke. We have the privilege of building the meaning of life, brick by brick.

I can't say that death isn't tragic; I've seen too much of it to believe that. The fact that we happened to be born doesn't make us fortunate or unfortunate; it makes us as blindly and arbitrarily produced as any other collection of molecules in the universe. But we can do things with those molecules that make us instruments of our deepest values, tools with which we can carve messages out of our lives.

Here are the TRUE ANSWERS:

- God is a cat. (This explains everything. Think about it.)
- There is an afterlife, but it's just like this life. Everyone is disappointed except people who like cats.
- Supernatural phenomena are either 1) natural or 2) the Paw of God messing with you... just for the fun of it.

(That's only partially a joke. As an empiricist of sorts, I find that there is some very limited but compelling evidence towards the notion of an afterlife of some kind. However, I don't see why anyone assumes that this afterlife will be Heaven or Hell, or that people will be able to deal with it any better than they can deal with regular life. If some form of consciousness survives the death of the brain - and it's not entirely unthinkable - then that means that what we're likely to find on the other side is people like us. If that is the case, unless there's been a revolution over there, I'm guessing many of the problems faced by the living are also faced by the dead.

Oh, and if something like this does occur - which I don't claim to know - then it must, of course, also be part of the rules of the universe. Everything is. They might simply be rules we have yet to discover.

And if there is a God who created the world, I think many Native American cultures got it right - it was the Trickster.)

These are the words you wrote in an article on militant atheist Christopher Hitchens

"...I worshipped whatever there might be outside knowledge. I worship the void. The mystery."

Since you don't believe in miracles, psychics, God, ghosts, an after life and according to you any event seemingly miraculous or supernatural can be explained by natural or scientific laws etc. etc. what room remains for such mystery?

I agree that science is vastly superior to faith and that Darwin was right and Dawkins is brilliant. But I also agree with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin when he said that those who believe only what they can fully comprehend must either have a very long head or a very short creed.

Maybe there is no God. The idea does sound medieval, but there may be something within us and/or outside of us that is “God” like and for me that suffices.

I really don't desire to live forever, but the thought of non-existence terrifies me. Logically, though, the only thing that makes sense is that death is a return to wherever we were before we were born. While I don't believe in reincarnation, I wholeheartedly believe that the end goal in Buddhism -- the acceptance of non-existence -- is what we should all strive for (at least those of us who'd rather accept the grim truth than beautiful lies).

Re thoughts about minds above I see nothing strange in a brain shaping itself any more than I do in a body shaping itself. Whatever you use gets stronger. I also suspect that it's an error to assume the brain can be separated from the body without it affecting the person. A person is not a static entity living inside the brain somewhere.
As for an afterlife, it seems odd to me for people to pity someone who doesn't believe in one. There is no guarantee an afterlife is pleasant - the ancient Greeks believed the majority would have a limbo like existence, ditto many Christians have suggested most will not end up in Heaven.) Could be worse...

Damn, someone beat me to the 10% myth debunking. Ah well. here's another: the universere did not start from a point weighing an ounce, but that the entire mass of the universe was condensed down to a point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang

Personally I find the idea of immortality, or at the very least a very long extended existence somewhat appealing just because it seems the there is always something to learn or see and would be fascinating to see what happens in the next 1000 years or so.

I don't know if there is an afterlife, but I see it as highly unlikely. This isn't to say that it doesn't exist or I know that it doesn't but that due to the lack of evidence, I simply do not believe in one, any more than I believe in fairies, leprachauns, and gods.

I also think you can't revoke a person's skeptic card just because he/she made a mistake and used a potentially woo-woo definition of "Quantum." Roger Ebert may very well know exactly what quantum means within the world of physics and science and still feels that our expanding knowledge of the quantum world may suggest the possibility of providing an explanation of telepathy. I may not agree, I may think he's mistaken, but I certainly do not think he is any less of a skeptic as a result. If he did this consistently or did not couch his statements in the wrappings of skepticism, and not just token skepticism either, then I would agree with that sentiment.

The question of the afterlife is a metaphysical one. The human race has made a lot of technological progress by using the scientific method in the last 150 years, so we might be excused in thinking that it will shed light on everything, however, the greatest minds in human history, and by that I mean the great philosophers, have put the issues being discussed here into another category, one that is beyond or outside of physical reality.
That everything we can experience is made up of parts, or atoms, gives us the predisposition to believe in entropy, that everything is perishable. We are all like bananas, in our minds, starting out green and ending up as ooze. But in fact, ideas, thoughts, consciousness and many other types of human phenomenon, while having some relationship to perishable objects, are outside the physical realm. Plato's ideas haven't decayed a bit in 2000 years.
In the movie, "Hereafter", there is a child, left in this world after his twin has died. Imagine the first time that a twin experiences this phenomenon, in the world of the womb. After having been closely associating physically for 9 months, suddenly one of the twins disappears. From the perspective of the womb world this is a bereavement. From our perspective, it's a happy occasion.
The womb prepares us by giving us time to develop the organs and body parts we will need to cope with this world. Should the next world be metaphysical, and should this world be similar to the womb in being a place of preparation then what we are developing here are spiritual eyes, minds and hearts.
I do not have much ambition to live forever, but my Faith is very clear that there is a spiritual world that we go to after this one, in which time and place are very different from this world. And also, should the veil between the worlds be lifted, and should we catch a glimpse of the next world, we would immediately forsake this life for it.

Born into a contentedly religious family, surrounded by various believers and nonbelievers, and teaching today at a Jesuit university, I, nonetheless, had a disturbing moment of epiphany at age 11 that our thinking selves would utterly end one day. My first remembered headache.

Today, as a social scientist who studies and writes about how our marvelous physical brains affect our imperfect but delightful social selves, I can say that your blog expresses what I think better than any scholar-philosopher-thinker I've read to date:

"In my opinion, there is no solace for these needs. We live, we die. That is not a tragedy. The tragedy would be never having been born. The number of possible lives that have never been lived is so large that actual lives represent a vanishingly small number after a decimal point and a great many zeros. We won a cosmic lottery by being not only alive but being self-aware and able to think rationally. That is cause for joy. We should collect our winnings and feel grateful when we die." {insert sigh of solace approximately here}

I'm hanging onto the "cause for joy" part, Roger. Especially since our brains appear not to have been made to grasp not existing. Or eternity. Or ...

Thank you, Roger. {Special tip of the hat for reminding me, too, of the joy of sloshing Butterscotch Life Savers around our mouths.}

SunWolf
who occasionally tweets as @TheSocial Brain or @WordWhispers

The more I read your thoughts on the Hereafter, the more I realize you are a dying man screaming to the world "I'm right.......right?"

"We live, we die. That is not a tragedy. The tragedy would be never having been born."

So you're saying that every abortion is a tragedy?

You've seen "Secrets of the Psychics," right?

An even better argument (for me, at least) is this one: If you really could read minds or communicate with the dead, why would you be selling your gifts on late-night TV instead of working for the NSA? Anyone that could actually do this would be the most influential person since Jesus.

Some time ago I would have agreed that telepathy was possible but improbable. After all, how do ants and bee colonies seem to act as an entire organism? But after being exposed to particle physics, quantum mechanics, and the laws of thermodynamics I have a better understanding of what energy is and how it is transferred.

Without energy information cannot be transferred. Knowing that our species has developed the ability to fire one photon, observe it as a wave or particle, and detect its final resting place makes the idea of transferring energy (information) without being detected impossible within our current understanding of the sub-atomic world.

What’s left to provide a potential answer? String Theory - which is based on a math problem that has no footing in the natural world, and hasn’t produced a testable prediction in 40 years. When considering the possibility that a currently undetectable form of energy is being transferred to solve the problem of telepathy, which would also give legs to the argument of duality, I'm with you.

I would prefer non-existence over any manifestation of the afterlife promoted by religion or the notion that I could become a collection of indiscernible vibrating strings that float eternally throughout the universe.

The immortality of 'stardust' works both ways. Every single atom in your body that is not Hydrogen, was made inside a star. And the only way for those atoms to get out of stars in which they were made, were for those stars to die*. Hydrogen was made during the Big Bang, but each element in the Universe** besides Hydrogen in your body was synthesized deep within the cores of stars. When those stars got old, they bloated out blowing off their outer bodies in stellar winds. Larger stars ultimately died in furious explosions casting off their bodies while making even heavier elements like gold and uranium (and everything else heavier than iron). This was not enough, however, to create humans. This birth, synthesis, and death had to happen multiple times to create enough of the materials that we find common-place, and every-day, but are relatively rare in the Universe, things like rocks and our atmosphere and precipitation. Not only are the life choices of our ancestor rare events that led to our infinitesimally likely occurrence, we are made from the rarest elements in the Universe, produced from eons of stars being born and dieing. To which cycle, we will also, someday, return.

Food for thought,

Miles Blanton, PhD

*By the way, don't anthropomorphize stars, they hate that!

**Before there are complaints from the peanut gallery, yes, Helium is also made in the Big Bang, but there isn't any Helium in your body.

People who debate about the existence of the afterlife are barking up the wrong tree. Obviously, some part of you exists after you die, even if it's mere organic material. But that's not what the afterlife is about for most people.

The afterlife is about egotism: specifically, your desire to continue on as a distinct personality, complete with your current set of personality traits and memories. Whatever we might speculate about the existence of the afterlife in general, we can say with a very high degree of certainty that this particular notion of the afterlife is false.

Incredibly extensive research has shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, that your memories are attached to your brain. Damage the brain, and you erase part of your memory. Destroy it completely, and you would surely erase all memory. Similarly, extensive research has shown that your personality is based on your physical brain. Brain injuries have literally turned normal people into psychopaths (see the legendary case of Phineas Gage). They can make children suddenly become hyperactive. Drugs can extensively alter personality, or make someone psychotic, or make him commit suicide.

Your personality and memories, as wonderful as they are, are clearly locked into that lump of grey matter in your head. If they are not, then why can they be erased or altered through injury to that brain? Therefore, if there is such a thing as an immortal soul which leaves your body upon the moment of death, it's quite obvious that it won't take your personality or your memories with it.

I have always found the idea of unassisted telepathy extremely unlikely.

If telepathy is the reception (or perception) of some signal or emanation that we are ourselves producing, detecting a distant signal over the interference of our own, much-closer one, seems unlikely. (Unless you believe that psychic forces are unattenuated by distance, which some of the "quantum" new-agey stuff likely does. That introduces an even larger background noise problem since you have to compete with everyone in the entire universe.)

Techniques similar to active noise-cancellation systems could dampen the effect of our own thoughts interfering to some degree, perhaps, but if the point is to think what the other person is thinking, it seems like the closer you got, the less you could pick up.

Easiest analogy is body heat. I can't feel yours from across the room because mine is so much more apparent. But I could pick it up with an apparatus (IR camera, night vision scope) because those devices don't have the same makeup as we do.

Mosquitoes and some cold-blooded creatures may have heat vision (I'm not an expert- that may be popular myth). We don't because we're too warm for it. Maybe a device or creature with a very different "brain" could pick up our thoughts, but I don't we can hear each others over our own.

You pointed to that fact that the great majority of the psychics out there are frauds and charlatans as evidence that the film was even-handed, but that is the part of the film that I objected to the most.

Hereafter has Damon speak in the question and anwer format of TV psychics and get a series of positive responses. This sends the message: "There are a lot of phonies out there. Be sure to find a real psychic."

I agree that the film never technically crosses the line into having Damon bring back information from the dead. But I think that is more an example of Eastwood's and Morgan's distaste for the cornball, not an example of ambiguity in the screenplay. Do you honestly believe any audience member out there is going to sit and wonder whether Damon is actually crossing the line between life and death after the business with "June", and the baseball cap, and Bryce Dallas Howard's father?

They even bring on some sort of scientist at one point to claim that there is loads of evidence for the afterlife - an idea that I would've really liked the film to follow up on. The opposing view doesn't get a hearing at all.

So, yes, you could construct an argument that holds together as to why, strictly speaking, the film doesn't claim to endorse the idea of an afterlife. But I think that would be ingnoring the the fact that the movie plays - and will be read by a vast majority of audiences - as an endorsement of the hokiest elements of psychic culture.

I think many skeptics lose currency with people who would readily understand where they were coming from because they often ignore exactly what you talk about, the *desire* for an afterlife. The desire to be saved, to belong, to be loved.

We have been worn out by the bitterness and the cynical attempts to gain members and money by so many religious groups that many of us commit the fallacy of assuming that all religion everywhere is equally as onerous.

We all have these quirks within us, these blind spots, which we need others to help us see. But if we preach to others, people look at this as an assumption on our part that we don't have these blind spots.

I've seen many skeptics merely turn a belief in the irrational into a belief in the rational, and are blind to fallacies inherent in sources they trust simply because science allows a smaller degree of error. But there's corruption, even in the institutions that camp around the ideal of science, just as there are many such religious pup-tents charging admission around the emotions of stability and understanding.

Personal beliefs should be inviolate, as long as they don't affect others in any detrimental way. There is beauty in the irrational, in the fictional, in the mythical. It's an indirect beauty, to use rationalist speech it is an illusion, but some of us need illusions to stay sane.

To those who need no illusions, that is a great thing. I'd tell them not to assume that belief is necessarily entangled directly in the rational, in the reality that we all share, any more than each individual's mind is directly entangled in the minds of others (as you say, Roger, that would lead to madness). A heartfelt belief in the afterlife doesn't mean it's literally there, even if it feels as though it is. That belief is, in a sense, an act of creation within the self, whether or not they believe it is literally there as well.

The literal belief is self-evident, and the questioning of that is usually not why people get into arguments. It's the assault on one's inner beliefs that really hurt, the personal attack that makes people feel cornered. Skeptics have endured this since such independent-mindedness first began, and they still do endure it, which is why I tolerate them more than I do zealous believers.

Still, I think the structure of the mind is too complex for us to commit to total war on everyone's mind. Whether rational or irrational, a victory over one's inner mind is merely a destruction of someone's carefully crafted inner world.

We're all working toward something better through memetic evolution, I believe. Most of us are decent people deep down, I believe. Many people think these ideas are irrational. I hope they're not, but hope is all we have while science is still hard at work trying to make such ideas testable and concrete.

Night on the prairies,
The supper is over, the fire on the ground burns low,
The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets;
I walk by myself--I stand and look at the stars, which I think now
never realized before.
Now I absorb immortality and peace,
I admire death and test propositions.
How plenteous! how spiritual! how resume!
The same old man and soul--the same old aspirations, and the same content.
I was thinking the day most splendid till I saw what the not-day
exhibited,
I was thinking this globe enough till there sprang out so noiseless
around me myriads of other globes.
Now while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me I will
measure myself by them,
And now touch'd with the lives of other globes arrived as far along
as those of the earth,
Or waiting to arrive, or pass'd on farther than those of the earth,
I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own life,
Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or waiting to arrive.
O I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot,
I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.

--Whitman.

I am trying to visualize your expression when you find yourself still there after it happens!

Q: Does life continue after we die?
A: Rationality provides no answer.

A strict rationalist would be forced to conclude: "I don't know."

The state of art answer was given 400 years ago by the great rationalist Shakespeare. Hamlet's soliloquy is a brilliant piece of analysis about the pros and cons.

Those who believe that life continues after death (in whatever form) do so with the clarity that it is a matter of conviction, certainly not on the basis of the testimony of shamams, mediums and other quacks.

Those who do not should be equally clear that their belief is a belief and no more. Your own stand seems a little rigid.

Absence of proof is not proof of falsity. Physical and biological sciences are based on observation. We can't observe what happens to us after we die, at least not with instruments currently available in the market. Therefore the question may be outside the very purview of science.

Logic also has it's limits. Some true propositions may be "undecidable". Godel's Theorems in logic prove this (see link below). (I have no expertise about this theorem.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems#Relation_to_the_liar_paradox

Anyway some of your and other people's fear of eternity, like growing a beard a mile long, don't seem to be justified, because death, like a sweet and restful and rejuvenating respite, followed by a shower and a change of clothes, will always be with us!!

Wit was a fine movie, with it's reference to Donne's beautiful poem.

To an outside observer, my death will follow a simple timeline: One second I'll be alive, the next, I'll be dead. But to me, I imagine that the moment the light in my head turns off, I will experience an eternity of feeling and intense, unexplainable sensations. The reason for this will be the rush of exotic chemicals to my brain which will only occur during death, along with the fact that it is impossible for a person to experience his own non-existence. Therefore, I look forward to an eternity of bliss and peace, all in the space of a nanosecond.

Ebert: There seems to be some scientific speculation that you are correct.

1. This essay mentions Rorschach tests. Rorschach tests are about as reliable and scientifically based as astrology. People look at cards with inkblots on them and tell the interviewer what the vague shapes suggest to them. The interviewers come up with psychological profiles of the subjects based upon what they saw in the inkblots. There has never been any scientific basis for these interpretations and there is no evidence that the profiles are accurate. If you have any interest in this, I suggest you read Frederick C. Crew’s review of What’s Wrong with the Rorschach?: Science Confronts the Controversial Inkblot Test (Woods, et al., Jossey-Bass, 2004) in the New York Review of Books, July 14, 2004. (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jul/15/out-damned-blot/?page=1)

Among other things, the article discusses the horror story of a wife and mother who lost custody of her children in part because she said that one inkblot card reminded her of turkey leftovers, which supposedly demonstrated that she was depressed. (It was a couple days after Thanksgiving, when almost everyone is mulling over turkey leftovers.)

2. You, Mr. Ebert, believe that death is the extinction of consciousness and self. This is very possible. Other than myth and some not very strong anecdotal evidence, some of which is discussed in your essay, there is no reason to believe in any sort of an afterlife. But I suggest you have a look at The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener by Martin Gardner. Mr. Gardner was a lifelong foe of psychics and a regular contributor to Skeptical Inquirer. But he also believed in God and an afterlife. In The Whys he does not attempt to prove there is a God, but he does attempt, successfully I think, to make belief plausible.

@ R.S. Lindsay - I appreciated your comment. Especially the Grandfather story.

Roger: a brief story of my own Mother's passing 11 years ago:

A month after Mom's retirement from hard work all her life, plus raising 4 boys, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Prognosis of 3 months. She fought if for 4 years.

When the end came, she was on a bed in the living room of her home under wonderful hospice care. In the last few days, my brothers and were with my Dad at her bedside for days, in shifts. On that night I left during my shift. I walked 10 minutes away to the stadium where American Cancer Society was having their Relay for Life. I went to take an hour to pray for Mom and Dad.

My Sister-in-Law had purchased a luminary for Mom, and I went during the Luminary Cermony for those that had passed. As I was praying in the stadium, they read Mom's name over the loudspeaker. I was immediately disquieted in my soul. "No. That's not right. It's too early. She's still alive", I thought. I was sufficiently disturbed that I immediately left and walked quickly back home, agitated. Dad and my brother were on the porch waiting for the funeral home to come. Mom had passed while I was gone. Right about the time that they were reading her name in the stadium, best I can figure.

I carry some guilt still for being away from her bedside the moment that she passed. Maybe my role was to witness that moment of coincidence. Who knows.

I don't put any stock in psychics or New Age or whatever. I am a Christian and do believe in Heaven, whatever exactly it is.

God Bless your rest, Mom. Thank you for giving me life and nurture.

Just wanted to say that.

Hi Roger

I started wondering seriously about life, death, and the concept of infinity and non-existence when I was ten, because of an important loss I experienced, and I have not stopped since then. Your point of view really ressembles to mine, and I felt really identified with a quote from you in the Squire piece: "I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do."
I believe that's really the point. The fact that an expanding universe came out of nothing (or, even the notion of God is accepted, where did he/she/it come from?), and we have come to exist and be aware of that, makes me tink that the best we can do is make each other's experience in life as pleasant as possible, because it's quite prossible that's all we'll get.

Thanks for sharing so constantly your thougths about this issues with us

Pau

Ebert, Ebert, Ebert. Ebert. Stick to movie criticism and leave the metaphysics to me.

ZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzPOP! Huh? Wha? Hoozat?

Did I just write that? Geeze, I musta been really out there. I don't even know what it means.

Lucky I've got Google. I did some searching around and found the EXACT match for the voice I heard saying that. Here it is:

http://bit.ly/9FrCkI

Was gonna say,these comments aren't nearly as fun when nobody's got any stories to tell. All this "theory" dries up one's head. R.S. Lindsay has a good story to tell.

Me too. I tend to dream when a family member or close friend is gonna die. Although, however, it was a bit surprising years ago to wake up and discover John Belushi had indeed just died, after a dream where I was trying to tell him that he was gonna realize he was dead in a few days, and wasn't really a wild young actor hopeful overindulging recreational drugs living in a dirty apartment in Chicago after all.

Shit happens. Somewhere around the same time a friend from Australia wrote and said she dreamed she'd been assigned the job of informing Rainer Werner Fassbinder that he was dead. She didn't know him from Adam either and didn't know he had died. And honestly I never was nuts about John Belushi.

So as to theories, conjectures, Leonard Nimoy oo-ee-oo and scientific brow-creasing about this sort of thing, my usual thought is "fuuuuuug you. It's right under your noses. A better question is 'what in the world are you all so afraid of?'"

In that case, just watch it. I may dream about YOU next.

See also:

... it seems worth spelling out in detail the claim that parapsychological phenomena are inconsistent with the known laws of physics. The main point here is that, while there are certainly many things that modern science does not understand, there are also many things that it does understand, and those things simply do not allow for telekinesis, telepathy, etc. Which is not to say that we can prove those things aren’t real. We can’t, but that is a completely worthless statement, as science never proves anything; that’s simply not how science works. Rather, it accumulates empirical evidence for or against various hypotheses. If we can show that psychic phenomena are incompatible with the laws of physics we currently understand, then our task is to balance the relative plausibility of “some folks have fallen prey to sloppy research, unreliable testimony, confirmation bias, and wishful thinking” against “the laws of physics that have been tested by an enormous number of rigorous and high-precision experiments over the course of many years are plain wrong in some tangible macroscopic way, and nobody ever noticed.”

(Sean Carroll at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/02/18/telekinesis-and-quantum-field-theory/
- an expert in the Standard Model and General Relativity.)

Another relevant cite would be what Randi says about magic vs. the real world at the end of his great special on "Nova" (PBS), which is available on youtube and very worth watching but too long to embed here.

In short, this was another nice post and it may have convinced me to see "The Hereafter" which I otherwise would have shunned on general Randian principles.

Your view of what people think during sex is much sadder than your view about an afterlife.

In a long and storied career on the Internet, I have seen atheists come, and I have seen them go.
And it is not "pity" to observe what will likely be a running series of Ebert's View of Cosmology--and, like most Athies, an attempt to beg the sympathy of and arrogantly repel the outside world at the same time--I will say, however, your comments are Not Unique.
They never were, and they never will be, for as long as Penn Jillette has a YouTube account.

It generally follows the pattern that Misery Loves Company, and feels disgruntled when it doesn't get it.
First there's the "shock" thrill of saying it in public...
Then the "justification" that it's not mere gadfly baiting for attention, but that they've really, really put a lot of convoluted reasoning and philosophy into it. (And it's not horror stories either, they had a perfectly good childhood, despite their deludedly psychotic parents and teachers!)...
Then the "Social" justification, trying to persuade how folks don't think as deeply and openly as themselves have been fooled by evil tricksters over the last thousand years since the Crusades...
And then, finding no Company, the "Borscht-belt" routine of taking a solitary stance of reducing any deep thought to an uncomplicated one-liner about Life Savers--To be the solitary One Bad-Boy Wisenheimer in the room, just to glory in the smug persecution of it all, even if you find your phone doesn't ring as often as it used to.

In regards to your request, Mr. Ebert, I am showing no "pity". That much you probably figured out already. Just how you came by your reasoning is your own path, and you've certainly bent our collective ear about your Catholic-school upbringing over the last few months.
But it is the search to find the Company of Misery that seems to show us what Athies, deep down, truly seem to want: "I want to believe in something, I just don't want to believe what I'm TOLD to believe in--As the human being telling me it is probably an idiot anyway!"...Or, for the more open-minded, "I've heard some idea, but since I can't fathom the subtleties, the isolated word-literal parts I've grasped sounded so ridiculous, it's probably a scam...If I get 'eternal love', does that mean somebody's gonna hug me 24/7?--Eww! Who wants a bunch of white fluffy clouds, anyway?" (As noted counter-atheist CS Lewis wrote, "So afraid of being Taken In, that they cannot be Taken Out [of theirselves]")

The truth, essentially is: You don't really know what you want. The thrill of looking for Nothing has worn off--You don't know what to look for in wanting, and while it sparks a curiosity to look for it, you feel publicly embarrassed looking, want to find a "respectable" way of being adult, contemporary and fashionable in looking for it, and decide it's probably got some catch that's not worth looking for anyway. (And I prefer Wintergreen Life Savers myself, and find my own spit overrated, but that's just me.)
Here's the idea that's always worked for me--If you don't know what you want...then it's easier to let yourself be surprised with what you get. :)

I call myself a skeptic.

I am moderately skeptical about unexplained or "supernatural" phenomena. I am extremely skeptical about humans who claim to understand the phenomena and want me to agree with them, or want some of my money.

"They all need to know that life is not as bleak as it seems."
"I believe it's possible that communication can take place between two physical minds in a physical universe, with the supernatural not involved."
"There is positive therapy to be found in the process of going through a healing process..."
===
That's you and this blog, Roger. Thank you for communicating to our minds all the many wonderful posts about fall, growing up, free-range children. Life as you show us is not as bleak as it seems. :)

I've often wondered, what is the difference between believing in reincarnation, and not believing in an afterlife at all?

If reincarnation exists, then obviously memories aren't passed on. We know that much from common sense. Is it personalities, beliefs, values, what we used to call a "soul?" Maybe--but we have enough evidence now that those things are primarily influenced by genes and environment. It's kind of hard for me to believe that, once your parents have crafted your brain with genetics and your upbringing has filled it with experience, there's some mysterious third influence which was with you before your parents met and will be around long after you are dead.

OK, so all of your memories and personalities disappear when you expire. Let's say that your basic self-awareness, self-consciousness, knowledge that you exist, is what gets passed on. That's your soul. But then you get into the basic "soul debt" problem -- there are billions of people alive today but as recently as a few millenia ago, only thousands. Where did all of these souls come from?

There's another problem: there's ample evidence that self-awareness is trait of a highly developed brain, something that is also relatively recent on the evolutionary scale. Exactly when did the soul arrive? Do regular fish have it, but jellyfish don't?

See, once you've defined reincarnation down this much, it's hard to distinguish from biological fact. We've been reincarnating since our primordial ooze days. So what? Doesn't mean that it isn't lights out after we shuffle off our particular mortal coils.

I always say: I have no idea what the purpose of life and the universe is, but I'm sure after you tell me it will seem obvious in retrospect.

What we call supernatural is our view of nature filtered through our misunderstanding. What we call "God" is only a model, and a model cannot be more than a representation of our present understanding. We do not know yet the absolute nature of our universe; in fact we know more than we apparently ever have, but still in our shadowy approximations there is little true knowledge, and myriad unanswerable questions. Yet we talk about God and creation as if our feeble lights could illuminate the universe. The best that any of us can do right now is to admit that we don't know, and to find the real reasons to live together, to treat each other with kindness, respect, unconditional love. You don't have to believe in God to do this. But I suspect that anyone who knows God truly now is doing just that.

I had a friend who swore she was psychic. I'm sure most people have a friend like that. The only example I ever saw of this is when she intuitively predicted that someone was going to move a Bobcat car thingy during a summer festival. (The conversation went like this. "Why don't we split up and meet here at this Bobcat in ten minutes?" "It won't be here in ten minute." "Right, we'll just meet at this tent." And sure enough, while I was waiting, someone moved it away.) Not exactly enough to convert a skeptic, but it got my attention.

I've always heard enough people earnestly recount encounters with ghosts or poltergeist, to wonder whether or not there's something to that too.

But even if there are ghosts and telepaths, why does that confirm the existence of an afterlife or soul? As humans we're hardwired to attribute explanations a certain way. Lights in the sky must be aliens. Unexplained stuff in the night must be the result of dead people. Visions must be from the afterlife. But what reason is there to assume any of that? Isn't it just as likely that some people have unusually developed intuition, some unexplained phenomenon causes things to go bump in the night, and visions can come from any which way?

All of this comes down to the fact that our existence is baffling and at times terrifying, and we spend a lot of emotional energy trying to avoid what seems to me like the most logical and obvious conclusion: that our self-consciousness is merely a by-product of highly developed nerve centers, and whatever soul we have dies with us. I'm not happy with that conclusion--it actually scares the crap out of me--but that's the only conclusion I can reach. While I'm convinced that our cloud version of heaven is a fantasy, I can only hope that there are some things above what we humans can understand that can approximately be called God.

This is a beautiful post, and I agree with most of what you say. Nevertheless, I do think there's a need among many of us to better manage how we deal with the longing for solace about the afterlife. I wrote a post awhile back about how an obsession with how we'll judge our lives at the moment before death can materially hinder the way we live our lives. The point is that we need to manage our fear of a "bad afterlife," or of our own self-judgments at the end of life, with our need to live a life of experience and fulfillment and exploration in the here and now. Too often, that latter need gets lost in the shuffle of our longings for future solace. (As I say in the post, The Bucket List is a good example of this problem -- a story about two lives lived only for their final six months, without consideration for what they missed along the rest of the journey.)

Reincarnation was always my favorite idea. So many people have so many regrets in life; wouldn't it be nice to have another chance? Not to mention all the people who die young.

What you believe is an extremely personal subject, filled with deep exploration. I'm personally sick of people stating how religion is bad. Religion is like technology is just a morally flexible tool that can be used by people for good or evil. I'm an atheist, but I can clearly see the positive impact that religion has had on our culture. From the simple and good morals to the architectural wonders, it has influenced us all. Of course these questions need to be thought thoroughly over, yet with close friends, not over the internet.

If our belief /disbelief in anything psychic is based on the reality of professional psychics, then disbelief wins hands down. But “professionals” are not the place to learn the truth. From what I understand, genuine psychic phenomena are spontaneous and uncontrolled. And it happens all around us all the time. We know people who had these experiences. They usually happen only a few times in a lifetime, but combined are so commonplace as to be unremarkable. As for the reality of out-of-body experiences, nothing beats the documented cases of people born blind being able to see visually during a NDE. Those are pretty neat.

The most appealing depiction of the afterlife I have ever seen in a movie is in "Defending Your Life", starring Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep. In it, it is revealed that the purpose of existence is to conquer your fears, become smarter and - here's the best part - in the afterlife the food is really good and you can eat all you want without getting full. Now that's Heaven.

I'm drawn to this thinking by Clint Eastwood's new film, "Hereafter."

Ah, yes. That one particularly evocative moment in the career of the Internet Atheist:
The moment when he comes across either a movie or TV show in the mass media, or column in the intelliblogsia, that states The Opposition's case in a rational, persuasive, proactive manner inviting discussion...Thus depriving the argument of its comedy punchline, and depriving the IA of his first line of attack. (Oh, and btw, Roger, you missed a few stock movie clip-art shots of crystal balls; I was able to Google at least 52 others on various sites, and how could you miss Maria Ouspenkaya from "The Wolf Man"?? 9_9 )
Which creates an awkward dark-second-of-the-soul dilemma for the IA: If the Opposition has members that can state their views reasonably....then maybe the Opposition is reasonable.

And as the IA has found diminishing returns for his Bill-Maher-wannabe act as of late, the argument is instead "open-mindedly" opened to what we have since come to refer to as "the Bi-Curious Post"--
It usually runs, to within a +/- 7% degree of accuracy, as follows: "Okay, so I was taking my 7-yo. nephew to see the new Narnia movie--And while I'm a little too old for cartoon mice and I prefer science that tells me big CGI lions can't talk, they were going off on the book's issues of 'redemption' and 'sacrifice'. Which started getting me thinking--I'd read a few essays about that back in college, but I was doing a lot of things in college. Let's face it, when I was growing up at Our Lady of Brooklyn Heights, we were told that chewing the host was like biting Our Lord in the rear, and that when we died, there'd be St. Peter there looking like some white-bearded Mr. Natural with a big jangly key-ring who'd boot us downstairs for eternity if he caught us with a magazine when we were fourteen. I'm starting to realize that's not what people believe, so...I've always wondered what people DO believe is out there. I mean, hey, if there are Muslim nuts out there who believe they'll get forty virgins if they car-bomb an embassy, there're plenty of people who sure believe in something. But I see a lot of my friends and co-workers who seem to lead well-adjusted lives of faith without burning books or trying to gang-save me in my living room--So, just curious, some of you people of middle-of-the-road faith who manage to keep a zip-a-dee-doo-dah lifestyle in perspective, always wondered, how, y'know, how...exactly......how do you do it? :( "

In summary: First there's the Asking, and then the lame jokes about how you're not really the type of person who does go around Asking--But that you've seen people who Ask, and for some reason they don't seem to consider themselves lunatics FOR Asking...And as long as they must not mind Asking, hey, maybe for a crazy idea, you might try Asking next Saturday, just to see what kinds of mindblowing answers people get when they do Ask...IF you were Asking right now, of course.
To paraphrase Ben Stiller in "Mystery Men", "Is there some really...angry way I can say I'm sorry?" ;)

Hate to be the knife-twisting wet-blanket reducing the issue to black-and-white logic, Raj, but:
A) asking questions is the traditional pursuit of people who Don't Know Things, and
B) either you're asking, or you're NOT asking.
And thanks for asking. ^_^

Is dying really all that bad? Especially considering the alternative of living forever. Whenever I read stories about a fountain of youth or similar devices I wondered what life would be like without an ending.
Where would be the urgency, the driving force, the reason to live?

excerpt from Richard Dawkins' "Unweaving the Rainbow." It will be said at the time of his death memorial and mine:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority will never stir?

So. The War Between the States is over, and Lincoln is jawing with his Cabinet. Accustomed to his penchant for long stories with slow, aimless punchlines, they settle in for another one.

"Gentlemen, about ten days ago, I retired late. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along.

"It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me, but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully.

"‘Who is dead in the White House?’, I demanded of one of the soldiers.

" ‘The President’, was his answer, ‘He was killed by an assassin.’

"Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since."

Secretary Seward was the first to break the benumbed silence.

"Mister President," he suggested, "it has been a successful war, but a long one; and it is clear and obvious that you are a profoundly wearied man. Might I suggest you and Missus President avail yourselves of a little diversion by way of relaxation? I hear there is a good comedy playing at the Ford Theater -- to-night!"

"Hear, hear," suggested Secretary Howells. The rest of the cabinet muttered in assent, hoping for an early dismissal that day.

At least that's how I heard it.

If we have a need to believe there is an afterlife, why do we have that need? If all is explainable rationally, then there must be an answer to that question. Perhaps it as an evolutionary adaptation meaning that it is helpful to our survival. If that is true, is there any reason to believe that it would be helpful only to our species? We are not the only biped, the only species with two hands with 5 fingers on each, forward facing eyes, etc. We are as it turns out not the only species to use tools, nor the only one to use deception, nor the only one prone to altruism at times. Perhaps not even the only one posessing speech. So, perhaps other species believe in an afterlife, too. Do they believe they might come back as a human? Or do they even have a concept of time: past, present, future? Or perhaps a non-linear concept of time. There are human cultures that view time as non-linear or that do not even have a word for time. Without a concept of time, what does the "after" in afterlife mean? Would there be any difference between now and forever? To a profoundly color-blind person, there may be no distinction between red and green, but most of us can certainly see it. I cannot see ultraviolet without tools, but a bee can. A fish may never discover the concept of water, but I still get wet. And the fish drowns in air and I in water. I'm not sure we have to get into the mysteries of quantum mechanics to consider that some of us may be able to perceive things that not all of us can. But maybe we have to go there to explain it or prove it. And maybe none of us can truly perceive some things because they do not exist. But it is likewise not hard to believe that some of us or many of us or most of us believe in things that do not and never will exist. Nor that such a belief is not only healthy but, on the whole, responsible to some degree for our continued existence as a species. Maybe we have a compulsion to believe in a possible route to individual immortality in order to assure that as a species we won't succumb to collective mortality. In that view, it would be rational that successful cultures would develop concepts of good and evil, with reinforcing ethical systems, rituals, and enforcement mechanisms. It might also be rational that cultures might meet and clash where their beliefs did not align -- each culture implicity wanting to perpetuate that which led to its own success. So, a rational explanation for irrational actions such as war. And maybe that's why it seems so hard for us to get along even though many of us profess to believe that we should, that we must.

Or not.

For those who, like Ted, argue that a belief in a purely physical world eliminates free will and reduces humans to so many pool balls bouncing around in causal chains, I have two thoughts. The first is that, given that the some scientific theories of reality point at a certain randomness at the smallest levels of physics, there's still the possibility that, at some level, pure causality is impossible. That doesn't mean that any causality is impossible, but it does open the door, potentially, to something more than an endless string of direct cause and effect.
But, more importantly, if there is no randomness, no free will, just a ruthlessly natural universe... So what? If my own consciousness is an illusion, it's certainly a convincing one. What I mistakenly perceive to be my thoughts seem very much to lead to my actions, and what I mistakenly see as my own decisions seem to affect my future. The illusion is so perfect that I have no choice but to embrace it.
We know that the idea of "colour" is just a trick of the mind, not a property of the physical universe, but knowing that I'm really just experiencing an interpretation of reflected wavelengths of light doesn't mean I can't enjoy a beautiful painting. We know that "sound" is just a vibration in a fluid, but that doesn't make music any less wonderful. Understanding the nature of reality may expose the convincing illusions that dominate our lives, but that doesn't take away from reality, it adds to understanding. And so long as my illusory free will seems to correlate so strongly with my present and future well-being, I'll treat it as if it is real.
What other choice do I have?

It's only a matter of time until the word "woo-woo" gets assimilated in the common lexicon.

Throw your hands up!

Now, throw your woo-woo up!

In honor of this thread and the last, I picked "Knowing" out of Redbox for my viewing pleasure tonight. Wow me, Nick Cage, with a little woo-woo.

Oh, uh, Dave van Dyke, in answer to your question, the gov't IS using psychic stuff, or trying to, and has been for decades. The DoD has a "remote viewing pool," according to a guy I know who was in psyops there. Their trainer was a famous beehive hairdo type psychic named Sylvia Browne.

He said the pool viewers were "100% accurate." They could pinpoint enemy activity wherever better than a satellite.

My question was, if that's the case, then howcum we're still getting our asses kicked?

Also I know a Lockheed Engineer who was in such a program for the gov't. Lockheed abandoned it, she said.

Oh. And Roger. I read that "A Course In Miracles" was written by some CIA people. Looking it over as I have, I don't doubt it. It does appear to be a mishmash of purloined ideas out of a bunch of other books. Your tax dollars at work.

Good story, Vikas.

PS the Lincoln dream tale is true, except for my one little alteration at the bottom, which... I read from the Akashic records. I've read he told it to his Cabinet, and elsewhere, to a wife and a friend or two.

There is of course a loophole in my reasoning.

Of course. A BIG one.
Namely that of falling into the Athie trap caused by a fear and terror of the Outside World, that generally leads one to take one aspect of news they read in the headlines, blur the line that lets normal people take incidents on an isolated basis, and pronounce Sweeping Statements of Our Modern Life.
You question the practices of whether a medium is genuine or bogus, and use this to get to the "real" heart of the matter, ie., Is Our Entire Concept of the Afterlife a Deluded Sham We Have Labored Under For Most Of Our Civilization?

...Hey, slow down, I'm still working on whether George was fake or not! ;)

The Hindi poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar writes something similar.
I especially loved this part, which expresses my problem with any rationalist who wishes he believed.

Somebody may ask me if they are feeling better, if they are getting peace then what is your problem. It reminds me of a story that I have read. It's an old Indian story told by a sage, that a hungry dog finds a dry bone and tries to eat it and in the process bites its own tongue. And the tongue is bleeding and the dog ...feels that he is getting nourishment from the bone.
I feel sad. I don't want them, these adults, to behave like this because I respect them. Drugs and alcohol are also supposed to give mental peace and serenity, but is that kind of piece or serenity desirable or advisable? The answer is no. Any mental peace that is not anchored in rational thoughts is nothing but self-deception. Any serenity that takes you away from truth is just an illusion - a mirage. I know that there is a kind of a security in this which is like the security of a tri-cycle. If you are riding a tri-cycle you can't fall. But adults do not ride tricycles. They ride bi-cycles. They can even fall. It is a part of life.

And, you also have Randall Munroe (incidentally, I read this webcomic five minutes before your blog post): http://xkcd.com/808/

It's kind of amazing and endearing that even if the human race does eventually answer the biggest questions about the physical Universe, we'll simply never, ever know where our consciousness goes after we enter the next Act of our cosmic adventure...

- Do we reboot into another person to learn anew? After all, we need chemicals and brain matter to have consciousness and self-awareness. If both are lost, are we a blank slate- a grouping of undiscovered particles floating around- just waiting to coalesce near a man and woman in the throws of passion? The Large Hadron Collider worries me a bit here; who knows what that thing will do to undiscovered particles.

- Maybe we can we fly around the Universe in the blink of an eye! Oh, but we don't have eyes at that point, so it's a bit unclear as to how we're going to see it.

I've got a headache now; my mind simply can't see beyond the unknown.

Clint Eastwood usually deals with subject matter that is interesting to me.

"Million Dollar Baby" I suppose had to do with being "frozen"; "Mystic River" dealt with pedophilia; "Parker" with drug addiction (and Charlie Parker)....and now this one.

I'd just like to mention something that made me laugh this morning on the news, which was a women shot a trespasser in her home in Oklahoma because of the "Make My Day" law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_My_Day_Law

I don't want to come back as an insect

Then be good.

There is, however, one form of immortality that is guaranteed, if unrewarding. We certainly live on indefinitely in our constituent atoms, which will be recombined in dust, flowers, trees, the wind, other living beings, and eventually in cosmic stardust.

The truth is even more unrewarding; all the stars will eventually die out, never to return again. Life will never be possible again. A big dark crypt will remain. Fact is, there's no solace in anything. But of course one can take solace in there being no solace. A meaningless universe feels kind of nice. Less oppressive. Yea, if something goes wrong in your life, if you foul up royally, it still sucks, because it's the only life you get - but existence only gets one life too, and it's programmed to foul up royally itself, and anyway after it's all over no one's going to make these distinctions anyway. So. We all ought to take solace in that.

As for telepathy and all that, there's intrinsic interest in these kinds of things, and presumably always will be. We live in a world that by now has been completely charted - and a charted world is a controlled and limited world. Men used to learn how to draw maps, and they used to have use for the skill. Now any teenager can go on Google Earth and instantly see a satellite photo of places generations of men died trying to explore. Knowledge in general has suffered in this way. Everything is charted and controlled. Even the ostensibly "open" subjects are only open in the sense editing Wikipedia is open. These fields proceed by slow steps so carefully guarded and regulated as to make them practically settled affairs already. It's all so damned oppressive. It's the death of mystery. And without mystery, or the hope of mystery, wonder and the hope of it are gone too.

So these few things that science can not yet either confirm nor deny nor quite explain, but for which there is some reason to hope that they exist, are tremendously attractive to certain people. And not just rubes, either. I think of William James and Aldous Huxley's fascination with mysticism and mystical insights, and altered states of consciousness generally. Both (more so Huxley) were interested in paranormal stuff. I think it's significant that these were two men who lived at the dawn of the high technology, highly-controlled age of knowledge - and who knew all the knowledge of their respective times. They knew, and they wanted out, or at least to have some reason to hope for something, anything, more interesting than the cold, mathematical workings of this dull, doomed universe.

And what's wrong with that, really? And what's the difference?

Mistake:

The name of the Eastwood film was "Bird" (not "Parker", which I knew was wrong).

That film always did the same car-scene kind of lighting as "Million Dollar Baby", which was described in Roger's review:

"Look at the way the cinematographer, Tom Stern, uses the light in this scene. Instead of using the usual "dashboard lights" that mysteriously seem to illuminate the whole front seat, watch how he has their faces slide in and out of shadow, how sometimes we can't see them at all, only hear them. Watch how the rhythm of this lighting matches the tone and pacing of the words, as if the visuals are caressing the conversation."

Yep, they do the exact same thing in "Bird."

Mistake (again):

The name of the Eastwood film was "Bird" (not "Parker", which I knew was wrong).

That film also did the same car-scene kind of lighting as "Million Dollar Baby", which was described in Roger's review:

"Look at the way the cinematographer, Tom Stern, uses the light in this scene. Instead of using the usual "dashboard lights" that mysteriously seem to illuminate the whole front seat, watch how he has their faces slide in and out of shadow, how sometimes we can't see them at all, only hear them. Watch how the rhythm of this lighting matches the tone and pacing of the words, as if the visuals are caressing the conversation."

Yep, they do the exact same thing in "Bird."

Roger, been thinking for a couple days on this:

Most events called "psychic" do not take place at all, but only seem to.

First thought was "I know that idea. Where'd he get that idea?" I dunno, so you'll have to tell us.

It's true, events called "psychic" don't take place at all (usually), but only seem to. Still, even when they do in "the rational universe" (read "before your very eyes," so as not to presume to know how things are going on Antares), there is this "seem" quality that outweighs what the senses have seen.

Well, you know that, you mentioned it in a review a few months ago. I'm trying to reach a point where we can gather what "psychic" means, THEN get to "a psychic event."

So let's take a big one, if old. Jesus the Christ (the wonderful wonderful Christ, whenever he gets in a fix...) went and got himself whupped repeatedly, nailed to a cross, smothered with vinegar, stabbed with a spear in the heart, blood (and water) poured out, and was pronounced dead, dead, dead. Three days later he was up and at it, saying, "think I'm a ghost? Stick your fingers right here." Then, the story goes, he flew up into the sky and disappeared.

There are various not-discountable historical inaccuracies involved in this story. The Romans didn't use crosses, for instance. He must've been tied to a stake. Also, there are apocryphal stories that haven't been discounted, where the guy didn't get crucified anyhow, they used a substitute to make it seem that literal prophecy had been fulfilled.

So, let's say that didn't happen; despite any vehement protests, we have rational reasons as good as any to say none of that stuff ever happened. In pure "ratiocination" we must say it only "seemed" to have happened.

Don't prolong weariness by dickering with me, this event was the core around which a whole civilization was organized, re-organized, dis-organized, and, gathering all sorts of other previous ideas with it like a staggering magnet, fairly caused the crumbling mess we call "home" today, the Western World.

So that must have been "a psychic event." We can say rationally that it didn't happen. People don't much wrap themselves around it these days (no matter what they'll tell you), but it captured billions of imaginations over time and people responded to it in quite material ways, every day, and to a high crinkum-crankum extent they still do. They tried to create a "heaven on earth," say, corresponding to "the kingdom of heaven." And on and on, down to the industrial revolution and deodorants.

(Don't get wise on me. Perfumes are one thing, "de-odorants" quite another, meant to pluck the evil smell from that devil's playground, the body)

So, what is "psychic," as deduced from this rather blaring example? It can't be just hacks in beehive hairdos making guesses at peoples' futures and pretending to phone their dead relatives (and pets, as I have seen).

We have to get basic. "Psychic" means merely "of the psyche." So what is the psyche, that forms "psychic events"?

Huh?

Okay, let's hear more psychic stories, people. They're fun.

apropo - http://xkcd.com/808/

About ten years ago i spent a week working for the "psychic hotline." i got the job in an interesting way.

i was bored, and began spending a lot of time in the old AOL chat rooms, finding one called "psychic readings." i was amazed at the fools who both gave and accepted the readings, so i decided to play along. i began by telling the "room" that i had a great revelation: that there would be a great, fiery light in the morning sky. that light would slowly move across the sky, greatly increasing temperatures, until finally, late in the day, that light would softly fizzle out, thus rendering the air colder again.

someone from a psychic phone company was following along, contacted me, and asked if i were interested in working for them. i very quickly said, "i don't believe in this stuff. it's a joke." but they said they weren't interested in that. they wanted someone who had enough verbal ability to keep people on the phone for a long time. they were also willing to pay me $12/hour to wait at home for my phone to ring and then talk to people. i accepted.

one notable phone call was from a woman who was trying to decide whether or not to take a new job. i asked her questions about the difference in pay, how long the commute was, health benefits, vacation time, work hours, etc. after about 15 minutes i suggested which job she should take. she thought for a moment and said, "well, that's not psychic. that's just common sense." i said, "yeah, i know."

i quit the job after an evening in which i spent almost an hour speaking with a rather lonely woman somewhere in the mid-west. her husband had died about a year ago, and she wanted to know how he was doing. i had no clue, and turning over tarot cards wasn't going to help. instead, i started asking questions about him. she told me everything in the world about a wonderful husband, father, and guy with whom she'd spent most of her life.

at one point she said, "we've been on the phone for about 45 minutes. i can't imagine what this is going to cost me." all i could say was, "i know, and i'm sorry."

after that, i was done. when i got my check for that one week of work, i threw it away.

Speaking of supernatural occurrences, it seems to me, Roger, that you've selected a rather disquieting screenshot for your review of Paranormal Activity 2. Do mine eyes deceive me, or has the dog in the picture not left a rather gigantic pile on the floor beside the baby's crib? No wonder the poor toddler looks so flabbergasted. In my mind, events like this do much to explain the "strange odors" which are said to accompany ghostly visitation. Perhaps, instead of turning to psychic detectives and mediums for answers, people should simply begin paying more attention to their pets.

About ten years ago i spent a week working for the "psychic hotline." i got the job in an interesting way.

Calls to mind Lloyd Alexander's children's story of "The Fortune-Tellers":
In which our hero visits a fortune-teller who predicts "If you find a girl and ask her, you will soon be married...And once you find money, you shall become a rich man, and you shall live a long life, as long as you do not die."
Later on, he returns to the fortune-teller's shop, is cornered by another client, and has to pass himself off as the fortune-teller: "And you shall be very happy, as long as you do not make yourself miserable..." :)

The thing about the Psychic Friends was, if you watched the the long version of their entire half-hour informercial at 3am, you saw they were giving the exact same predictions to their clients over and over in the exact same order: "So when's the baby arriving?" "Congratulations on that new job!" "He's cheating on you, hon, didn't you know?"--All ambiguously able to be customized and adapted to accuracy as needed.
Except for Miss Cleo, of course, who would often get bored with the routine, and might creatively (if rather indulgently) embellish "He's cheatin' on ya, hon" into "He's wanted in six states, call the police!", shortly before the craze folded.

(...Is this a Sweeping Indictment Against All Unreasonable Thought, And Naive Reliance On Superstition To Cover The Weakness In Our Own Daily Lives?
Nah. Just giggling at a short-lived 80's craze.) ;)

Oh dear, I was thinking of seeing this movie to see Eastwood's take on paranormal matters but since you and he have explained the numerous near death experiences of others as wishful thinking, well now that's been settled.

I do tarot readings and if "cold readings " are a trick than the trick is on me too. I have no idea how I get the information I do with readings since 99% of the time the clients are strangers and I rarely know their name or their question until after the reading. The information I give them makes sense to them and that's all that matters. I am bemused by the explantion that telepathy, which a mere ten years ago wwas scoffed at as improbable is now offered as a rationale for most paranormal experience.

What annoys me Mr.Ebert is the confidence people use to dismiss the unknown, explainable event as whimsy. I am just as skeptical as the next person about the paranormal but I accept that the universe is a strange unknowable thing. You can't seem to bear the idea.

Non-supernatural woo-woo in the rational universe is still woo-woo. Roger, I'm starting to wonder if you should be considered a potential President.

"Ebert: There seems to be some scientific speculation that you are correct."

If time is relative, then the life I lived will be less than the blink of an eye compared to that nanosecond. Makes you appreciate the whole philosophy about Heaven and Hell as reflections of your moral character, doesn't it?

One man's "woo-woo" is his friend Oprah Winfrey's bread and butter. Some people seek comfort from psychics. Some from THE SECRET.

Sure, it's all nonsense to anyone with critical thinking skills and a developed view of the real world, but the shiny-happies of our culture are ALL charlatans. I really see no reason to demonize one group of them.

When you gave me a thumbs up on our United Flight and then flashed that smile at me it really lifted my spirits. I still haven't figured out how you did the smile, but it was so adorable it made the rest of my trip home.

While I am uncertain about life after death I do hope that when my time comes that we will bump into each other again. There are also a few long lost pets and friends I would love to see, but who really knows?

I am in a documentary I would love for you to see, it's called "Flight From Death", if you can let me know how to get a copy to you it will be sent with love and a smile in return. My only regret is I kept being referred to as "Cancer Patient" in the film. I want to be remembered as something more than that. I think of myself as being "incurably alive" and while my cancer may eventually kill me it will never kill my spirit.

Your kindness on that red eye flight really touched me. Cancer seems to really scare people and it was nice to feel like there is a friend out there who isn't afraid of me. Thank you for understanding what this experience is like and for giving me encouragement, too. And Chaz, well she was just amazing to talk to.

I have no regrets that I had a double mastectomy, that my reconstruction failed and that I have lived 12 years with metastatic disease. I am a blessed woman in that my journey has brought some wonderful people into my life. Thank you for reaching out, you gave me a gift I will always remember.

Toni

Ebert: Dear Toni, Chaz said she had a nice chat with you, and so of course I smiled. And you have me some warmth. And that's good.

Ebert on "Hereafter": You may have absorbed the idea that it's about the afterlife. It would be fairer to say it's about the common human need for there to be an afterlife.

I agree with you that "Hereafter" is not what it's about. I have this little quirk that I like for a movie to be about what's it's purported to be about, and "Hereafter" misses the mark on that.

The hereafter is dealt with not seriously at all in this serious movie by Clint Eastwood. It is merely a plot device, dealt with tangentially, to service the happening of a CHANCE MEETING of the three principal characters. I love chance meeting movies, and always admire the skill of the writer and director in pulling them together in a believable manner, as the do here. Well done. I could see that it was coming, but couldn't predict where and how it would come together. That draws me along in the story and I like being drawn along for two hours. That's why I came to a movie in the first place.

No. This movie is not about the hereafter. What it is properly about is loss.

It's about the struggle of the three leads to live HERE - AFTER they experience the loss of their lives as they knew them.

They are isolated in their struggles though surrounded by others their lives. Families & friends that could not relate to their loss. By themselves until the chance meeting that is. I could extrapolate on that, but only with spoilers.

Some of the best movies for me are empathetic. Those which take you into the emotions of the characters who you will spend two hours with. Eastwood does that masterfully here drawing us into the sadness of inconsolable loss. We, the audience, are the ones that get it and empathize with the psychic and the star and the little boy even if those around them don't.

Go see it. Well worth the money. But don't go see it to learn about the afterlife. It's not about that.

I fly a starship across the Universe divide
And when I reach the other side
I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
Perhaps I may become a highwayman again
Or I may simply be a single drop of rain
But I will remain
And I'll be back again, and again and again and again and again..

Jimmy webb knew what it was all about.

I must agree with Vikas, whose comment is so outstanding in this culturally-constrained modern Western discussion. And I speak not as a Hindu but as a church-free Quaker farmer follower of Jesus.

I will not try to explain here how, over my long lifetime, I came to be certain that God is real and to be trusted, and finally entered into relationship with Him. I will just say that I was extremely tough-minded and am satisfied. Beyond satisfied, for now my relationship with the great Person is like breathing, like Love breathing, and when I am too much with people I must seek solitude as one who thirsts would seek clear water. And there are many, many people like me. Many began as Billy Graham's harvest.

I accept that my ordinary consciousness cannot comprehend much of our greater reality -- we are mostly programmed for mere survival and we are dimensional creatures. My mind cannot conceive a universe that goes on for ever and ever, nor alternatively can it conceive a universe that has boundaries. Yet one must be true, it seems. So that conundrum means I'd be a fool to rely on what we call reason in thinking of the greater questions. It's comical, really, that we cannot imagine how "something" can arise from nothing, nor do we know why we find it more comfortable to try to imagine infinite "nothing" than infinite "something" going on forever. We cannot even understand what time is. Funny little us, full of such big questions, like little kids.

So, if we choose, we can enter the Cloud of Unknowing, Plato's "uncomfortable place", and there find deeper ways of knowing, taking clues from those who have gone before, using discipline and tough-mindedness to keep from falling into illusion. Seeking not objective knowledge but relationship-knowledge.

PERSON is an element of the universe. It is real not only in human beings but also in animals, and we will expect its presence in an alien race if we ever meet one. We know it is one of the universals. What is "person", that focus of complexity that arises out of chaos and calls itself a self? PERSON emerges from the universe like the paisley beauty that arises within Mandelbrot's chaos. It is an emergent phenomena, beyond the sum of its parts. How then can we assert there is no great Person, no great friend who is our parent? Who is to say Person is not underlying all? Who is to say we are not evolving toward fulfillment of that relationship? Go ahead and doubt if you must, and thrash it out, that's ok, but don't hide in the little god of Reason.

And take a clue from what our teachers said.

Ebert, you are thinking as if you are a leaf on a great tree, and accepting that in autumn you must fall. But Jesus said you are the branch, not the leaf. Which means you are part of the whole, not just this season's manifestation, and there will be another season, another leaf.

What happens to us after death is well known. Brain functions cease. The heart stops beating. The lifeless body turns cold and stiff. The skin loosens; apply pressure and the top layer comes off in large sheets. The hair, nails and teeth loosen. Bacteria that played an important role in digestion during life now begin to feast on the corpse. Foul-smelling gas bloats the body, turns the skin from pale to green to purple to black, makes the tongue protrude and the eyes bulge out, and pushes the rotting intestines out through the rectum. Large amounts of blood-stained fluid exudes from the nose, mouth and other orifices. The abdomen, scrotum, breasts and tongue swell to twice their normal size. The grossly swollen internal organs rupture and liquify. Finally, the distended belly bursts with a ripping sound, followed by a long hiss, spilling its reeking contents in a final loathesome purge. (No wonder the "soul" wants to get the hell out of there).

That's what happens after death. The rest is speculation and wishful thinking.

Mat

Ebert: I kept trying to stop reading this.

Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Ooooooooooh, the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms crawl over and through your snout! They invite their friends and their friends' friends too, it's a heck of a mess they make of you!

There. After-death bodily disposition described more succinctly -- and in child's rhyme! But "the rest is speculation and wishful thinking" is merely popular scare bullshit. It's far more woo-woo than the stuff those imbeciles puff out about spirits'n'gods'n'shit.

Notice what happens to your head while you are concentrating on the idea of your nose slowly suppurating and your shoes curling in your coffin and so on. If that isn't woo-woo, there's no such thing as woo-woo.

Old folks who still think this childishly about it are in deep trouble. I imagine they'd be quite a pain in the ass to have to deal with. I've never met any. Every old folk I've ever met is looking forward to turning in those weary old bones. They don't care if there is a god or isn't, a heaven or hell, or any of that fine-haired epistomology. I'm going. Seeya.

Going where? Hullo? When you are 10, do you worry about "where you're going" when you're 20? Why should we? We have professional guidance counselors to do that kind of useless worrying for us. You'll cross your bridges when you come to 'em.

Like the 80 year old I met at the apartment laundromat one day, mentioned some blogs back here. "I'm gonna die in a few weeks," he told me. He'd gone off kidney dialysis, had enough of it. Called his kids to pay him one last visit. He and I had a good old time. One final drunk together, then he was gone and glad of it.

Ah yes, and where do leaves go after they turn all pretty colors and die? Do they just lie there resenting every foot tromping on them and every scrape of the rake? Do they think being burned is being sent to the fires of hell for being bad leaves?

The whole thing is so encrusted with oaths of artificiality, it's quite a trick to manage to scrape such barnacles off one's ship of life made near rudderless by the sloshing intellectual bilge. But it's my observation that people largely can do that when the time comes.

Snap snap, chop chop, clap clap! More true personal psychic stories, people. You scoffers are boring. ."

Ebert: I think in fact:

The worms play pinochle on your snout.

Ooooooooooh, the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms crawl over and through your snout! They invite their friends and their friends' friends too, it's a heck of a mess they make of you!

There. After-death bodily disposition described more succinctly -- and in child's rhyme! But "the rest is speculation and wishful thinking" is merely popular scare bullshit. It's far more woo-woo than the stuff those imbeciles puff out about spirits'n'gods'n'shit.

Notice what happens to your head while you are concentrating on the idea of your nose slowly suppurating and your shoes curling in your coffin and so on. If that isn't woo-woo, there's no such thing as woo-woo.

Old folks who still think this childishly about it are in deep trouble. I imagine they'd be quite a pain in the ass to have to deal with. I've never met any. Every old folk I've ever met is looking forward to turning in those weary old bones. They don't care if there is a god or isn't, a heaven or hell, or any of that fine-haired epistomology. I'm going. Seeya.

Going where? Hullo? When you are 10, do you worry about "where you're going" when you're 20? Why should we? We have professional guidance counselors to do that kind of useless worrying for us. You'll cross your bridges when you come to 'em.

Like the 80 year old I met at the apartment laundromat one day, mentioned some blogs back here. "I'm gonna die in a few weeks," he told me. He'd gone off kidney dialysis, had enough of it. Called his kids to pay him one last visit. He and I had a good old time. One final drunk together, then he was gone and glad of it.

Ah yes, and where do leaves go after they turn all pretty colors and die? Do they just lie there resenting every foot tromping on them and every scrape of the rake? Do they think being burned is being sent to the fires of hell for being bad leaves?

The whole thing is so encrusted with oaths of artificiality, it's quite a trick to manage to scrape such barnacles off one's ship of life made near rudderless by the sloshing intellectual bilge. But it's my observation that people largely can do that when the time comes.

Snap snap, chop chop, clap clap! More true personal psychic stories, people. You scoffers are boring.

Ebert: Tom, Tom, Tom.

"...the worms play pinochle on your snout."

We had a dog who seemed to know when we were going to take him to the vet, or he understood English. Whenever we planned to take him to the vet he would cower in the bedroom closet, shaking and shivering and we had a hard time getting him into the car. But, when we were off on a joy ride somewhere and we brought our dog along, he hopped readily into the car, wagging his tail happily behind him. Telepathy or our dog understood English, or perhaps there were other signs? Imponderable.

To put it simple, no one knows what's going happen after they die, unless, of course, they died, and they took a small vacation over there in the afterlife, then came back to talk about it. No Popes have done this. No Bishops, No other Clergy has done this either. James Randi? Nope. Other skeptics? Nope.

We can give our opinions to what might happen. In fact, all of the beliefs in the world are just opinions. Heaven is an opinion, reincarnation is an opinion, the LIGHTS OUT FOREVER theory, that's an opinion too. Your writings above Mr. Ebert, those are just opinions.

Without getting deep into religion, religion is, simply, a comfortable pillow in life. People fear death, where do they go? Church. People need strength, they somehow can't get strength from within themselves, so they seek a church for the "easy" way to get strength.

That last paragraph, are just my opinions.

So, do we have the answer as to where we go after we die? No.

Will we ever? Possibly not.

We can form many opinions on it, but none of it, any lil part of it will be fact, unless, of course, we take a vacation into the afterlife & come back to tell about it.

Can I first say that I find "athie" rude and evidence of dismissing an argument based on the beliefs of the person who said it, not the argument itself?

Yes, Lincoln is supposed to have had that dream, though certainly not the night before his death. However, it's not actually surprising, if you look at what actually happened to the man over the course of his Presidency. Remember that he had to be smuggled though Baltimore before his first inauguration because there was already a conspiracy to kill him. What's much more interesting is that, if you look at the crowd photograph of the second inauguration, you can see John Wilkes Booth in the crowd. Even more interesting than that is that Edwin Booth once saved Robert Todd Lincoln's life.

Coincidences happen. We only pay attention when they mean what we want them to.

Toni Riss (Waving from First Class on United) on October 23, 2010 9:13 PM

"I am in a documentary I would love for you to see, it's called "Flight From Death", if you can let me know how to get a copy to you it will be sent with love and a smile in return. My only regret is I kept being referred to as "Cancer Patient" in the film. I want to be remembered as something more than that. I think of myself as being "incurably alive" and while my cancer may eventually kill me it will never kill my spirit."

That's the Ernest Becker film! I've been wanting to see that. I'll probably fork over the $20 to see it eventually (or hopefully get lucky and see it for free perhaps), although I pretty much know there will be a limitation that Toni Riss touched upon, which is a kind of gloomy certainty about it all that reeks of cynicism (if that's the right word), ironically, in a film that no doubt means well in its pro-religion stance.

I think perhaps there might be a real psychic power of seeing the future that might be real in a subconscious way, which is to say, perhaps, our collective thoughts can join together and make it real; so furthermore, adding onto this, the psychic, themselves, whose power perhaps starts this chain of collective thoughts, will also have arrived at their vision or what have you subconsciously; they kind of stumbled upon their vision accidentally.

Okay, so it's not necessarily a skill anymore: and who knows what it is anymore?

But okay, let's say there is a collective subconscious going on underneath the surface of everything (as of course there is) and it has its own kind of language; I suppose you could call this the language of truth and that is the actual language that is being spoken, as Woody Allen said: "The heart wants what the heart wants."

So, perhaps this language of the heart going on under the surface is the very same impulse as man or woman had that generated language and our self-awareness.

So whatever it was that sparked self-awareness, with it perhaps came the thing that created language which came from a language of the heart.

So, there's this other language going on and it's perhaps having kind of instinctual conversations.

So, let's say someone has a kind of vision that someone will die....and then it comes true.

Maybe, through this kind of communication of hearts, that message is sent out to all the other hearts by the recipient, which is to say, the person who dies, sends out a message that says "I'm going to die", whether by self-induced means or by natural causes (although I suppose it's always a combination of the two, but I mean by a human inclination to tilt the ratio more towards one side of the scale than the other, subconsciously; such as a drug addict who can't stop himself from doing the drugs gets a feeling that the next fix is the last one, but mechanically goes through with it).

So, let's say that in our heart, we announce to the hearts of the rest of the world that "I'm going to die" and presumably even knows accurately WHEN.

So, I think that perhaps that there may be a real reason why some people might be able to see the future: because perhaps our subconscious knows quite a bit ahead of time and perhaps because we can read each other, which means we all know a little bit about the future all the time, more than just the "gimmahbeer" sense, but perhaps days or years ahead of time: and perhaps we tilt the scale as it were, sometimes consciously, perhaps to give us some sense that we are control of things. We might accurately predict our own deaths just to give ourselves a sense of control, which is then delivered to us by all the "gimmahbeer"s.

So, it's not really psychic, but just, you know, one "gimmahbeer" to another.

That there is a "Unified Field" is obvious. That all events (physical, mental, or causal) occur within this field is also obvious. That everything happening within the field (including thoughts) is, or can be, known is patently obvious. Whether it is worth being known to any particular point in the Field is the determinant factor. That you don't realize these things and still believe there is some controversy about it speaks to an incredibly low level of evolution on your part, especially after all this time supposedly contemplating the subject. The universe is much more than merely "rational," and your belief in its overriding rationality is as much a form of comfort food to your mind as believing we're going to have a picnic with our ancestors after death is mac and cheese to others. You merely parrot the fashionable lines proffered by popular materialists of the day. I do not write to gratuitously insult you. Were it for the sophomoric level of your reasoning, there would be no cause but you exhibit the same rote certainties that others who don't know what they're talking about exhibit on the other side of the argument. THAT sense of certainty is the stumbling block barring experiential growth, in which you have no apparent interest because, obviously, you are quite satisfied with being "right."

Reply to: will not try to explain here how, over my long lifetime, I came to be certain that God is real and to be trusted, and finally entered into relationship with Him. I will just say that I was extremely tough-minded and am satisfied. Beyond satisfied, for now my relationship with the great Person is like breathing, like Love breathing,

Delusional state.

As infants, we slowly become aware that we have parents.

For many infants, our parents fail us. They don't pay enough attention. They try to dictate how we eat and poop, without understanding the process.

How much better... if we could simply erase our parents, and replace them with Imaginary Parents, who seem to understand our needs telepathically and instantly....

Who love us totally, and without judgment....

... but...

I was just reading about the Ames Moot Court competition at Harvard Law School, and it struck me that getting feedback and even criticism from real judges and Supreme court justices help us to grow.

The delusional "like Love breathing" Imaginary Friend never helps you to become more than you are. Never helps you to understand that you don't know everything, and the Joys of Atheism are far more compelling.

We have the internet. We have so much knowledge available online. and yet, stupidity grows by leaps and bounds.

The Associated Press via ABC News
TEHRAN, Iran October 24, 2010 (AP)

Iranian authorities have amputated the hand of a convicted thief in front of other prisoners, state radio reported Sunday, in a possible step toward restoring the punishment to common use and carrying it out in public.

Cutting off the hands of thieves — allowed for by the Iranian judiciary's strict reading of Islamic law — has been rare in Iran in recent years, but the amputation reported Sunday was the second this month. And a week ago, a judge ordered the same punishment for a man who stole from a candy shop.
Sunday's report said the 32-year-old convict, whose hand was cut off at a prison in the central city of Yazd, had committed four robberies and other crimes.
... An audience of fellow inmates was assembled to witness the amputation, which could be a sign that such punishments will be done before the public in the future.
The punishment has been part of Iran's penal code since 1980, a year after the country's clerical leaders came to power in the revolution that toppled the U.S.-backed shah. (end)

Using terror... cutting off hands while prisoners watch, many of them cheering "This is the will of Allah as recording in our Holy Qur'an...."

How much nonsense do I read every day, claiming to be "in the name of our religion"? Too much.

You say you believe that telepathy, though unlikely, may exist and then refer to "quantum matters". My impression from the scattered reading I've done on the web is that physicists don't at all support theories that try to link things like psychic phenomena to quantum theory. In fact they tend to hold such notions in contempt. Murray Gell-Mann, who won the Nobel prize for his work in particle physics, once famously referred to this sort of thing as "quantum flapdoodle".

Given the kind of thinking you demonstrate when you defend evolution against creationism, I have to wonder why you would consider the idea of telepathy seriously, even if you do think it unlikely. Perhaps the term "physical mind" is at the root of it. Mind is hard to define, but one thing you can say that it's not is physical. The brain, with it's materials, chemistry, and electrical properties is, and it along with human behavior can be observed, but not the mind.

I thought of this from Charlotte's Web (which, to be fair, I think of a lot):

" After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that."

This morning I came upon a video on the CNN.com site in which Yoko Ono is interviewed by Anderson Cooper and both discuss how they had experiences surrounding the death of loved ones (John Lennon and Cooper's brother) in which, on the hours priored to the events, they could feel there was clearly "something wrong in the air", something palpable.
Can this be true? I have no idea but from listening to them I have no doubt they are both sincere and clearly believe it themselves.

http://www.cnn.com/video/

Roger, you wrote "We live, we die. That is not a tragedy. The tragedy would be never having been born... We won a cosmic lottery by being not only alive but being self-aware and able to think rationally. That is cause for joy. We should collect our winnings and feel grateful when we die."

But there is a HUGE disconnect between what you say here, and what every atheist says. And not a single atheist, except full on nihilists, deals with this issue head on. The issue is, when you die, THAT IS IT. And not only is that it, but you have NO CONSCIOUSNESS anymore. You, and your MEMORIES, all cease to be. It's not as if you sit in a back room and can remember back to the past on where you've been before. CONSCIOUSNESS ITSELF ceases to be.

And if that is the case, then what is the point of the lottery, and of living a full life? We have no winnings to collect.

I recently had a relationship end. She didn't leave me at the altar, but she was close enough to doing that. Still, I would not erase our time together. I still have those memories, and I have all that growth as a person that I can take with me into the future.

But death without anything after DOES erase those memories. It erases that growth. And the only memories that exist get passed on to the next generation, until their existence and memories and consciousness are wiped.

And if that's the case, then all death and suffering on earth isn't all that bad, and all joy is meaningless, because in the end it is all erased. All life is just a stall, a procrastination, of consciousness ending.

I may sound nihilistic, but I am not. I am a borderline Agnostic, who believes that God is necessary, whether real or imaginary. I just believe Atheism is full on Nihilism, but most times the nihilists are deluding themselves of the natural implications of their dogmatic thought.

Ebert: It's far from meaningless. It is all there is.

And again, hardly any Atheists have engaged in the thought of Consciousness ending, likely because they are too frightened of the nihilism that would result.

Ebert: Tom, Tom, Tom.

"...the worms play pinochle on your snout."

---Aaargh. Don't ever think that Roger Ebert is not the severest of editors.

For those who keep pushing the woo-woo, consider this: if there was any truth to supernatural phenomena such telekinetics or telepathy (or "remote viewing" or any of the other nonsense being promoted on late-night TV), then various industries and militaries would be employing them for profit right now.

Do you think that corporations and militaries are not ruthless enough to use woo-woo, if it works? They have no ideology but the desire for profit and/or victory. If there was ANY truth to this nonsense, they would be using it.

Instead, we find that the only people using it for profit are the people convincing lowly members of the public that they can use it on their behalf, for small pittances of money at a time.

Patrick writes: "And again, hardly any Atheists have engaged in the thought of Consciousness ending, likely because they are too frightened of the nihilism that would result."
_________________

Actually, it is religious people who are frightened of the idea of death. So frightened, in fact, that they will choose to believe in anything.

The atheist is the only one who is strong enough to confront the possibility of death head-on, and refuse to choose beliefs based on wishful thinking.

The religious man chooses his belief because he wishes to believe he can live forever. You pretty much admit that openly, Patrick.

If there is all there is, and I'm not doubting that as a likely possibility, it's not as if you will be able to hold onto this life.

Absence of an afterlife doesn't mean you get to still look back and remember this one.

What makes life meaningful is experiencing the here and now first and foremost, yes. But it's also the ability to look back and remember what was great, and to take that with you forward as you grow.

Absence of anything "Hereafter" means not only does a rainbow afterlife not exist, but effectively, your time here, and everyone else's, is wiped as well.

It's as if a bunch of people got together to make a film. In the end, they edit it all and they're near completion. But their film in some freak accident is all erased. And everyone who worked on the film gets amnesia. Some people may have seen the film before it got wiped, but in a couple years, they all get amnesia too. So all record of the film never existed, including the memory of it.

Was it worth making? Because that's life, or at least one without a Hereafter. And I would just like an atheist to admit to these implications and engage in discussion of them.

"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death."...WS

Not to be scared of death seems unnatural and irreverential, so universal and deep rooted is the fear, and a tall brash claim, based on ignorance and rationalization more than courage. Even insects have sense enough to be scared. Remember Tim Roth in Reservoir Dogs squirming and screaming after being shot. The Sonderkommando. As Nichiren says, "The most terrible things in the world are the pain of fire, the flashing of knives and the shadow of death. Even horses and cattle fear death, how much more a person in his prime." Rare indeed must be the guy who can face it squarely and say he's not scared. Most of us keep driving the thought to the back of the mind and suck the candies while they last.

Michael, the atheist is just as frightened and just as delusional, if not more so, since he admits to a viewpoint with the implication of Consciousness ending yet refuses to tackle those implications. He hides behind the certainty of science even though the idea of consciousness ending is beyond human comprehension, and thus is inherently uncertain.

Again, it is not just a stopping in progression, but a complete erasure of everything.

It would take me a long while to get into a full discussion of why concepts of God and the afterlife are important, whether real or imaginary, and furthermore how all human existence is built on a blur between the imaginary and the real (as is all human creation, all art, etc). But it would be getting off topic, especially since all psychics (the topic of this blog) are not only hocus pocus, but exploit that for money and fame, so its pretty obvious they are in the wrong.

Suffice to say that the creators of South Park got it right when they said "Imaginary things are Real." And I think Roger largely understands what I'm getting at, or else he wouldn't have enjoyed Hereafter.

But I took issue with his "Collect our winnings" line, which insinuates that somehow we will be able to still hold onto this life after death, and with his weird attack on calling people and optomistic outcomes "Miracles" last week.

Mr. Ebert
The main foundation for your worldview is the assumption that there is no supernatural. Or another way of putting it is that this universe is all there is. Or another way of putting is if there is a god this "god" must be part of the universe.

But what if there is a supernatural deity that created the universe separate from Himself?

Or another way of asking this question: What makes you convinced that there is no supernatural?

Sometime you need to write on this because all of your post about religion, and other spiritual matters revolve around this presupposition.

This is not a presupposition to ignore.

Ebert: I presuppose that the universe is all there is. If there is something outside our universe, must it not be irrelevant to us?

Roger, Roger, you artful dodger.

Hey Roger got a question for you...For the last several years, as the last week of October rolls around, my friends and I have sought out the very scariest and most frightening movies of all time to watch nightly as the calendar marches towards Halloween. I ask everyone I know just exactly what are the very scariest, most disturbing, straight up nightmare inducing bits of cinema they've ever had the privilege (or hopefully the misfortune) of watching, in hopes of discovering obscure and deeply frightening films... I've certainly had mixed results over the years. So, I thought to myself who is the very biggest, most knowledgeable movie connoisseur I know that can help me in my scary movie seeking endeavors...Roger Ebert, of course! I can't believe I haven't come to you before. I know that you despise "best of lists", but as an avid follower of your wry, witty, and wonderfully well written film reviews and opinions over the years, I would be greatly interested in knowing what you and all your vast cinematic experience find to be the very scariest films you have ever seen. Perhaps a blog post even! It is that time of year, after all. :) Thanks, Rog.

@Roger

But that's not what life *is* like. You live, you interact with people, you affect them. You build, what you build lives after you.

On a human scale, every life matters. And it's the only scale we have. Even if you believe in God and afterlife it's all we have. Think the insights of your life would come as a revelation to God? Think afterlife means staying as you are at the point of death?

We don't know what comes next. From the point of view of day to day life, it doesn't matter.

I've decided to quit "Wuthering heights" (as per your advice to someone else) at chapter VIII because I'm not enjoying it and, hey, I'm not going to live forever. It cost me some effort to reach this point. I switched to "Til we have faces" by C.S. Lewis and when my copy of "The composition of Tender is the night" by Matthew Bruccoli arrives via post I'll switch to that. I'm happier already.

When I was sixteen I dreamt that I held my soulmate's hand. I couldn't see her, I could just feel her hand. I felt an overwhelming emotion, positive but somewhat melancholy. All the next day I could feel my hand tingling and began to search for her, wondering if every random stranger might be her. It was powerful and I believed it. I am older and I no longer believe it.

I would give her names. It used to be Amy, then Emily.

I once wrote the words: "No soul may speak for another soul but lover's may hold each others' hands in the dark." on a piece of paper, intending to hand it in instead of a university assignment on advocacy. Instead I left it on the ground somewhere.

I still sometimes speak to the Goddess, who, whether she exists or not, treats me with a somewhat wry amusement. I am intensely curious about my fate after death and find oblivion no more or less believable than that I have an immortal soul.

Actually, it is religious people who are frightened of the idea of death. So frightened, in fact, that they will choose to believe in anything.
The atheist is the only one who is strong enough to confront the possibility of death head-on, and refuse to choose beliefs based on wishful thinking.

However--as Rod Serling once memorably pointed out (and with the benefit of Burgess Meredith and Fritz Weaver to boot)--put a person of secure faith and an unrepentant atheist in a locked room with a loudly ticking time bomb....
And see which one of the two is the FIRST to soil his diapers, cry like a little girl, and chew through the door trying to get out. :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBiSvW-wEFw

An atheist worships himself, and will do everything to protect himself.
Someone of the basic principles of faith has no such foolish ties to anything so trivial in the longrun.
(But, y'know, death, man...WOOOO.) ;)

Hi Roger,

Just an interesting anecdote to share.

When I was getting my degree in Psychology, I ended up with a research project on 'constitutional theories of personality.' The idea with these theories is simply that a person's physical attributes would determine their personality and thus their behavior. These theories cover a range of paradigms: from body types (endomorphs, etc), to blood types, to bumps on a person's head. My project involved palmistry, and I had the good fortune to get first hand data by working as a fortune teller at a college fair.

Now, this was a research project, and I set out with two controls that I would try out at the fair: tell some of the clients their fortune according to some book on palmistry, and tell the other clients the opposite of what their fortune should have been as prescribed by my book.

To make the long story short, I got the same responses from my 'clients' at that time: regardless of either case, they eventually ended up agreeing with my reading. Agreeing with what Barnum said, I could see how eventually, the clients were the ones driving the session, and I was only there to trigger their responses.

What was freaky for me was that clients were bringing up the most personal things, and I was thinking to myself how they should be going to a counselor versus a fortune teller.

I like the point about the Rorschach inkblot, but I would be inclined to pose the opposite perspective: could it not be that the fortune teller is like the Rorschach inkblot, bringing out the inner feelings and desires of the client?

Just some food for thought - I have so much more, but I'm just squeezing this into my busy schedule.

Peace!

Ebert: Sharing with someone may help, no matter what the framework.

Tom and Roger, re: The Worms.
Here in my part of Connecticut, for a child in the Sixties it was, "they eat up your guts and they spit them out."
Regional differences, I suppose, which makes me wonder if there a survival of an ur-"The Worms" somewhere...

The Hearse Song, or, The Worms Crawl In, The Worms Crawl Out.

Adding on to what I said about seeing the future as being something possibly real (and not a supernatural phenomenon), doesn't it seem true that people with bad habits will often say "we're all going to die anyway" or "EVERYTHING is bad for you"?

The strange thing about that is that I think people might be trying to feel more in control of their deaths by causing it.

So, that's why I think perhaps seeing the future, such as someone's death, might be real: because the people are causing their own deaths are counting on it: maybe even literally, because perhaps our brains might even naturally know exactly WHEN that will happen, or if not, it makes it a lot easier to know when you are committing slow suicide: which is, I read, what all addictions are.

Sometimes people walk into death when their subconscious warns them not to, but they don't listen to that inner voice.

So, perhaps seeing when people are going to die ahead of time might be because there is some kind of subconscious mechanism in play, which might lead some to their deaths to give themselves a feeling of control over their deaths; a kind of habit, which isn't mindful of safety; and perhaps even a natural death-time mechanism in the brain which might be able to calculate accurately when death will come if it's not one of the last two, which might make said calculation years ahead of time; if you take it as true that we might know days or hours ahead of time or minutes, then perhaps it might not be such a stretch to say years or months ahead of time.

Now, for the actual thing to add onto my last post (as what was said so far pretty much hasn't added anything to it), let's say that such a thing were tried to be tapped into so that the conscious mind controls the subconscious mind; well there you see already how there's a problem.

So, what would be the consequences of trying to harness this power of the collective and individual subconscious?

I think TRYING to see the future in this way (which is, by definition, not triable) and perhaps being successful at it (or appearing successful at it) would come at the price of a an apparent unpleasant paradox.

So, let's say you've subconsciously guessed correctly some deaths and now you want to harness this.

Now, you've guessed some deaths, by this apparent harnessing.

So, what explanation do you have for it?

The only explanation you would have (as you collective and individual subconscious is by definition what controls YOU, or ONE) is that YOU YOURSELF must have caused their deaths in a kind of reverse way, because before THEY were the ones who would tell the world "I'm going to die" but now YOU are trying to tell THEM WHEN to die. So, you would become a grim reaper in a sense (or, like I said, an APPARENT one, as the subconscious by definition is something we can't tap into).

So, trying to harness said skills will leave you with the feeling that you are the CAUSE rather than the SEER.

I don't know if the film "Hereafter" touches upon this subconscious paradox, but he does in the film refer to his gift as a curse.

So, trying to turn the subconscious into the conscious seems like it would result in the conscious crushing the subconscious as it reverses its processes.

Let's see how another example might clarify this.

Some people project onto others their own fears and everything. Let's say this person were to try to consciously be aware of all of the possible projections to kind of beat the projections as it were, before they enter into his conscious mind, as a kind of consciousness over subconscious victory. What would happen perhaps (or just using this as an analogy) is that some other unfortunate person (now further so) who would come in contact with this mindset (traveled through other subconscious minds) might kind of release some kind of projection explosion, as that kind of pent up energy had to be released some where.

Isn't strange how the drug addict gets just enough of money to support their habit? Or the gambling addict gets just enough money to keep on gambling?

So, perhaps it's not as strange as it sounds that subconscious energies must be released as they must be released.

Seeing into the future is just, perhaps, noticing the pent up subconscious energy as it is being released, or, perhaps just stumbling upon it: and perhaps the energy itself is the result of a person who leads a clumsy life. And perhaps whenever people try to harness the subconscious it gets reversed in a destructive way. So, someone who tries to see deaths, will end up causing deaths. So, if someone tries to, like in the film "Hereafter" try to talk to the dead, what will actually most likely happen (in the real world situation I've been trying to explain) is that you might end up killing yourself (so as to make it true, in a sense) or you might kill the people you are trying to help (to once again make it true)and perhaps you might just become a walking grim reaper, once again.

Adding onto that again (so as to be clear) is that there would probably have to be a conscious desire to kind of make this happen. Some people might just not consciously care about some things, and their subconscious makes them pay, or perhaps some people want to believe in woo-woo,, which once again, their subconscious makes them pay.

I guess what I'm saying is that, in this world, where people are irrational, the irrational becomes true.

If you want to talk to the dead, someone out there who purports to have this ability, will turn your subconscious desire into something true: meaning you will be dead because you, in a sense, wanted to be.

So, what I'm saying is irrationality begets irrationality (just in case people think what I said was irrational).

I think some scientists are actually working on ways for people to become telepathic! So, I guess James Randi would not have to give up that check?

I love it when you get all skeptical on us, but I must make one observation.

I am at peace with the idea that we live in a universe ruled by physical laws. Actually, I am more than just comfortable with it, I would be profoundly resentful of a universe where N2 + 3 H2 might or might not produce ammonia depending on the time of day or whether a disbeliever was present.

Obviously, a significant segment of the population are not happy with the constraints of a universe where the physical laws are not negotiable. I am not sure that I blame them.

Science keeps telling them, "No," and that isn't what they want to hear. So when less skeptically minded entrepreneurs assure them that they can;
A. talk to a deceased love one
B. lose weight without dieting or exercise
- or -
C. experience "male enhancement" with a pill
Why listen to those fancy-smancy city slickers with all their book knowledge?

Americans are dumber than a sack of soiled diapers and they believe whatever appeals to their sense of vanity and feeds their fears!

It's a fascinating subject. I have no idea what happens to us when we die. Nobody does, regardless of how much they've convinced themselves that they do. The way I see it, if the Christians, Muslims and Jews are right and we go to Heaven then that sounds like a pretty good deal (presuming we do go to Heaven, which according to some Christians most of us won't, but will instead go to Hell if we don't think exactly as they do). If the Hindus and Buddhists are right and we come back to live more lives, I'll look forward to the experience (even if I won't be able to remember this one). If the athiests are right and there is nothing, then I'm not going to know anything about it anyway so why the hell should it matter?

I do believe there is more to the universe and our existence than what we see. I doubt that includes what the great George Carlin referred to as "the invisible man in the sky," but I won't completely discount the possibility. I've always thought of "God" (for lack of a better word) as an energy that runs through all existence. This is what attracted me to string theory and, oddly enough, to Buddhism. Both hold a certain logic for me. Buddhism has been called "the perfect religion for athiests" because it doesn't really concern itself with gods, but more with our inner selves (some would say it's actually more a philosophy than a religion). But it also better fits with known science. The Dalai Lama wrote a very thoughtful and insteresting book called The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality" which I highly recommend to anyone who is interested in the subject.

As for Mr. Eastwood's film, I found it totally absorbing and thoughtful. I thought you understood the film more than any of the other reviewers I read, Roger. Well done.

Others might be interested in reading CS Lewis's The Great Divorce....good stuff

"We live, we die. That is not a tragedy. The tragedy would be never having been born."

hmmmm

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Ebert: There goes Tom the carnival barker again, drumming up eyeballs for his ghost in the dust.

Gosh darn it, Michael Wong the Merciless, don't make me come over there. I TOLD everybody: the frigging Department of Defense has a "remote viewing pool." Do you know what that is? IT IS PSYCHIC WOO-WOO AND U.S. TAX DOLLARS ARE PAYING FOR IT.

There's a LOT more and has been for ages. Christ, won't you go educate yourself a little? Even the movie "Men Who Stare At Goats" has a half-ton of factual accuracy in it.

So that knocks down your bold assertion that "if it's true, the government would be using it." Unless of course your boldness is the kind that stays bold by prudently not knowing what it is talking about.

And it started out to be such a good day.

Keith? Three words to last you the rest of your life: Time is simultaneous.

I went to an ayurvedic practitioner once to see if he could do anything about some knee pain I was having. As it turn out, he did the medical equivalent of a cold reading. Checked my pulse and then proceeded to rattle off possible old injuries "You have some back trouble, you hurt your back at some time in the past". Yes, I'm 6'4" and having pain in my knee, how ever could you guess that after a lifetime of stooping and bending while doing physical labor I might have hurt my back...

Adding on to what I said about seeing the future as being something possibly real (and not a supernatural phenomenon), doesn't it seem true that people with bad habits will often say "we're all going to die anyway" or "EVERYTHING is bad for you"?
The strange thing about that is that I think people might be trying to feel more in control of their deaths by causing it.

Which ties in neatly to the old aphorism of "The drug addict wants the rest of the world to be one."
(Because, of course, that it's no fun drinking alone, as then it would be a problem.)

The same could be said of the "drug" of public cynicism, and why Athies (especially those on the Internet) feel such a need to turn every conversation to their own self-justifying forum.
The idea that someone else they encounter might NOT be cynical--or actually, heavens, possess a principle, rationally achieved or not--is somehow an abhorrence to the thinking world.
Such people clearly haven't "grown up" yet, think more about how nice it is to lock their doors and indulge themselves here and now, and learned how to act like one-liner spouting jackasses with all the compassive public sensitivity of a French waiter. :)

Roger,

I just saw "Hereafter." Based on your review, I was expecting the movie to remain ambiguous as to the existence of an afterlife. But it just isn't the case. (SPOILER ALERT!) I was willing to buy most of Damon's perceptions as possibly resulting from a combination of skilled psychological insight, lucky guesses and unconscious "tells" by his subjects. I even bought the chance mention of the name "June" in his first reading. But three words of dialogue push the movie over the line into certainty, when Damon's character mentions the loss of the boy's cap "on the tube." There's no way he could have come up with that image without the dead brother's help. So I have to strongly disagree with your statement that "the movie never declares that his insights literally come from dead spirits." I wish that were so -- it's a major distraction in a movie that's supposed to be about how we live, not how we die.

I would like to register that I find the phrase 'woo-woo' to be very nearly hate speech. I am a functional skeptic (but not a member of the movement), and have deep concerns with people who believe in disproven things, like homeopathy. But to use a derisive, derogatory term like this to describe other people's beliefs, even those beliefs we know to be false is beneath the dignity of reasonable discourse.

Eric J wrote: "However--as Rod Serling once memorably pointed out (and with the benefit of Burgess Meredith and Fritz Weaver to boot)--put a person of secure faith and an unrepentant atheist in a locked room with a loudly ticking time bomb....
And see which one of the two is the FIRST to soil his diapers, cry like a little girl, and chew through the door trying to get out. :)"
__________________

Yes, it's true: the truly confident religious man has no fear of death. However, this is not a compliment.

It is perfectly natural and healthy to fear death. It is also perfectly natural and healthy to have some doubt about one's own religion. Few religious people are as confident in their beliefs as they pretend to be, which is actually a good thing.

There is a word for people who have absolute confidence in their religion and no fear of death: FANATICS. Such men do not value their own lives the way normal people do. A man who does not value his own life cannot be counted upon to value yours; consider that.

It was not atheists flying those planes on 9/11.

Can I first say that I find "athie" rude and evidence of dismissing an argument based on the beliefs of the person who said it, not the argument itself?

Because bigoted intolerant stereotyping is BAD, you see... ;)

Athies have a marked tendency to Dish Out the dismissive de-humanizing quips, cynical over-personalized messenger-shooting, and sweeping social reducto ad absurdum without being able to Take It:
THEIR views are serious, you see, because they thought a long time about them, while everyone else is immature and neurotic for clinging to self-justifying fantasy. If it's "all opinion", pal, you're on an even playing field, and that starts us looking at what's in your closet.

As soon as I will see the dead ones of my family waiting for me in a tunnel of light all my doubts about The Existence Of Hell will be gone.

The fact that our brains use electromagnetism often leads people to believe telepathy is feasible, but while scientists are usually reluctant to say "absolutely impossible", it has to be lumped in with astrology and rain dances on the goofy scale.

The reason is simple: the inverse square law. This is the law which tells us that the strength of electromagnetic fields decreases with the square of distance. Move twice as far away, and the field strength drops by a factor of 4. Anyone can verify this with the right measuring equipment.

Science is not just about principles: it is also (very importantly) about magnitudes. The electrical impulses in your brain are simply too miniscule, and the distances between the neurons in your brain and the neurons in somebody else's brain are gigantic (relatively speaking), even if you're sitting next to each other.

If telepathy is real, and it has something to do with electromagnetism, then why don't its practitioners insist on getting their heads as close to yours as possible? If you cut the distance in half, the field strength quadruples. So why do they sit across from a table? Why don't they insist on sitting so close that your heads touch? If they really hear something, it would become so much clearer that way.

Roger, I agree with you that there's nothing "bleak" about the prospect of dying and returning to the same state of non-consciousness that presumably characterized us before we existed. But I disagree with you that there would be anything "tragic" about never being born in the first place. For whom would it be tragic? If one never existed, there would be nothing to regret missing out on the experience it never existed to have.

In fact, I'd go further and agree with philosopher David Benetar's premise in "Better Never to Have Been" that if our lives are simply, as Alan Watts characterized the prevailing non-religious view, "a trip from the maternity ward to the crematorium, and, as Benatar argues, fraught with more pain and suffering than pleasure and happiness, the REAL "tragedy" for most if not all of us is that we WERE born. We'd have been better off had we never been at all.

Personally, I don't have an absolute position on whether some people possess psychic abilities, preferring to believe in shades of gray. Nonetheless, "Hereafter" is a hell of a movie that affected me deeply.

This is addressed to the poster Michael Wong, but I think you're making an assumption here that all atheists have accepted death. The fact is, while some have come to the conclusion that the afterlife is unlikely based on what they've seen, not all of them are happy about it and some here have already commented that it's not an outcome they particularly enjoy.

I know of an atheist blogger who sees this problem of atheists who are depressed or unhappy about the potential of extinction at death as does her best to try and counsel them that there is still purpose in life. She feels that there are unfortunately militant atheists who "cut the safety net" out there.

So in conclusion, I think it's a bit of a stretch to imply that all atheists have looked head on into death and accepted it. I don't doubt they exist and to be honest I admire their ability to accept what they do, but I think there is still a number of atheists who reluctantly accept the hypothesis and are still scared by it, I do not believe this makes them any less human or weaker as unfortunately some of their more militant counterparts seem to imply.

Although I can't speak for Patrick himself, I don't think he's demonstrated that he believes in the afterlife out of fear of extinction and has stated he is borderline agnostic. What he does say (and the poster underneath him also) is that under the materialist's model there is an appearance of nihilism if all memories are lost at death because you'll never know you existed in the first place anyways, you've essentially come full circle with the appearance of not having made any progress at all. I think "Roger"'s (not Ebert but the poster underneath Patrick) some what demonstrates this with his movie production example.

Basically, I believe (as I said, I can't speak for Patrick himself) what Patrick is saying is few people (and I also like to add regardless of belief system, not just atheists) take the time to think about the implications of materialism and death.

It was not atheists flying those planes on 9/11.

Nor was it atheist firemen rushing in to save victims, despite the possibility of their own survival being rather unlikely.
Must be that Principle thing, again, keeps throwing off all our priorities.

(Which may point up one of the key differences:
Those of faith have a tendency to see the human face, and the duties and responsibilities thereto--
Whereas the Athie will wrap himself in the validating fear and this-is-CNN headlines that daily remind us what a Scary World It Is Out There, should one ever be foolish enough to step outside one's safe door.)

Hmmm, my first post on here seems to have vanished into the ether. Then again, thinking of how all over the place it was, that may be a blessing in disguise.

As for Tom, he just wants some attention on his birthday, the poor guy. ;-)

Now then, as science will never crack all the mysteries of the atom, so I am skeptical that it will crack all the mysteries of the mind, and of other worlds (which, in scientific theory, do exist, though as parallel universes). To think that we are the only intelligent life in the universe is as odd as thinking living is the only consciousness out there. And yet, if there is an afterlife, we would have a different consciousness than we do here. Also, wouldn't time behave differently, ala Narnia?

As for psychic practitioners, palm readers, fortune tellers, etc., here is an interesting article about Mark Twain and phrenology. While I summarized part of it in "the lost comment," this article gives a much more detailed account of the (several) readings Twain received in his lifetime (under the subheading "Enter Mark Twain") and of the phrenologist whom he went to: http://www.csicop.org/si/show/snaring_the_fowler_mark_twain_debunks_phrenology/

@EricJ

Did you know that atheists/non-religious people are over represented in the U.S. military?

www.prb.org/Source/ACF1396.pdf (See the bottom of page 25.)

You probably do know the famous case of Pat Tillman, a successful NFL football player who, in the wake of 9/11, quit the NFL and became a U.S. Army Ranger. About two years later he was unfortunately killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. He was an atheist.

The Wall Street Journal has an article about an Army chaplain and the Religious Programs Specialist assigned to protect him. The Specialist is an atheist. You might note that the chaplain's "secure faith", as you would call it, makes him unduly dangerous to himself and, indirectly, to others in his unit. (See Michael Wong's reply to you.)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467004575463833265055248.html

There is, of course, no need to highlight that there are believers who will crumble in the face of danger, and you could substitute one of their vast number for the atheist in your ticking time bomb scenario. The truth is, whether someone is brave or not is more a matter of individual character than of religious belief.

I was raised as a Christian, and as I got older (as happens with many people) I began to question my faith more and more, to the point where I began to wonder if there was really anything out there at all. The core (or crux, if you will) of Christianity is that failure to accept Christ results in everlasting damnation. I never have been able to accept this as right, and have always been quietly horrified that others did not share the same emotion. When I confessed to others in the church my feelings, I was usually told I "did not have enough faith," or "it's in the bible so it has to be true." I really wish this could be enough for me, but it never has been.

At 41 years of age and after years and years of soul-searching, I have realized this is a question that will never be answered. Is there a God or isn't there? Was Christ divine? Is there a heaven and a hell? To accept these questions as unanswerable has been quite depressing and sad for me.

So what is left? How does one carry on with their life? For me, I decided that I just had to live by the few things that I really "knew," or believed in.

Roger, I remember that a favorite question of Gene Siskel was, "What do you know for sure?" I have thought of this many times. I don't know for sure if there is a God or not, or if there is a heaven or hell, or if any of this means anything. But what I do know for sure, is that without love (not to sound too corny) the world is pretty much meaningless. It would all boil down to that horribly depressing book of the bible called Ecclesiastes.

So I go about my life and try as hard as I can to be kind to others, to show love to my friends and family. I fail constantly but that is what I believe in. Those other unanswerable questions will have to wait. If there is a God I suspect that is what "It" would want me to be doing anyway, and if not then at least I will have hopefully helped make a few people that I care about happy, and by association myself too.

I know that seems like a ridiculously simple way to live ones life, but as far as what I know for sure, that is it.

wish i had thought of "rock, paper, scissors."

Contrary to confused commentators, metaphysical naturalism isn't nihilistic. I'm sorry that we "Atheists" aren't a nihilistic, militant hive mind.

In Hindu way of life, the highest attainment or the pinnacle of human life is to achieve "Moksha", which loosely translated means freedom from the never ending cycle of life, death and rebirth. As much as I cherish the pleasures of human life like reading, watching plays/movies, making someone smile, experience love & pain and the irony to look back at both with a similar sense of affection....I would probably settle for Moksha :-)

I, and am sure most of your readers, would love to know if you would like to born again? if yes/no, why? ( not that its a choice or it actually happens )

Siva Karun
Hyderabad, India

Eric J wrote: "Athies have a marked tendency to Dish Out the dismissive de-humanizing quips, cynical over-personalized messenger-shooting, and sweeping social reducto ad absurdum without being able to Take It:"
_____________

It's interesting how 100% of your arguments on atheism are based on personality and motive, and totally ignore the scientific aspect. People tend to argue using concepts they understand. In your case, you can only imagine atheist motives in terms of desires, neuroses, feelings, etc. The scientific stuff just flies over your head, so you ignore it.

Roger, you might enjoy this book:

Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death
by Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NveptKbu_8c

I love my Peggy Lee and my Nina Simone any time I'm feeling down, but I default to lesser known hip-hop anytime I want to feel a little better about our collective state.

Tom Dark: But "the rest is speculation and wishful thinking" is merely popular scare bullshit.

The truth, like your moustache, is scary.

But it certainly ain't popular.

Mat

Tom Dark on October 25, 2010 12:10 PM

"Keith? Three words to last you the rest of your life: Time is simultaneous"

I think I quite like that. At any rate, I've discovered that there is indeed a rhythm to the universe. So, it seems that there really is a cosmic speed limit, which is the speed of light, and so figuring out WHY that is would probably make solving ALL of the scientific mysteries much more solvable: and I think just observing the rhythm of things could tell us a lot in the mean time.

EricJ on October 25, 2010 12:22 PM

Well, I can't say I've had so much experience with "athies" as you've described them, but it does seem to be part of the general conduct of internet comments about which you could ascribe any label to, not necessarily "atheists"; "unmannered" is probably a better lumper.

I tend to think that we are religious creatures and that everything is a religion.

The highest level of meaning is achieved by not turning anything into a religion, which is why Jesus was anti-religion. So, religion is about not turning anything into a religion. Or in other words, to not make idols, or the leave the infinite with the infinite.

This is why Buddha left civilization to go meditate and why Muhammad meditated, alone, in a cave etc. It's about being in touch with the infinite as opposed to the finite world. Or if that doesn't help, think of the movie "You Don't Mess With The Zohan" and how the character would always say "It's all B'seder", which sounds like "Bulls#it", and yeah, that's the joke, but he is actually saying something deeper, which is that this finite world is not important, or rather, being in touch with the infinite is what's most important.

So, I think there is kind of a lack of depth with "atheists." And there is a kind of real meaninglessness stench about it. And, if you look at, say, the movie "Inception", there tends to be a kind of certainty about things, and that people can kind of be reduced to certain knowledge; the whole premise of the movie is based on the idea that if you put a positive emotion attached to a thought, that that person will go through with it, but people DON'T do things for themselves all the time that they KNOW will certainly be positive for themselves but they don't have the courage to go through with it; so, basically, it's reducing people to subhuman or mechanistic levels. The movie also didn't really deal with the consequences that it would have, as there certainly no doubt should be, as it just ends up making Mal kill herself but not dealing with the paradoxes that would probably come if you did reduce humans to such a state where they no longer are in control of their own thoughts (as that's the premise). Just imagine if all of your thoughts that you acted upon were placed there as a kind of trap by someone else. That would have been interesting. You could have used it for something subversive like the brainwashing of advertisers and its effects on the mind, or lack thereof effects OF the mind. Anyway, never mind.

And there's a problem with meaninglessness, if we are religious creatures created for meaning.

Germany had a lack of meaning in its culture for hundreds of years, and it eventually created the Nazis. As we are religious creatures, Hitler came in to fill that gap of meaning and became a God-like figure. So, it seems that religion is going to find its way into our lives, and the highest level of meaning of religion, if you like, is to not make anything into a religion.

So, if there was the highest level of meaning in Germany, Hitler wouldn't have come to power because they would have realized that he was an idol.

The highest level of meaning of religion (or just meaning) is make no idols the idol, to put it another way.

But again everything is going to be a religion. It's probably best to make the religion the religion, rather than making anti-religion the religion with the false belief that everything, meaning IT (the anti-religion), is not a religion, as that would be a religion of meaninglessness, as it inadvertently destroy the foundation of the illusion, if you like, of everything; that's like what Glenn Beck represents: the everything-everyone-else-does-is-meaningless attitude: which is really a destruction of the foundation of society; it is the very attitude that will bring mankind to self-destruction.

Basically, as was said in "No Country For Old Men":

"Once you stop hearing "sir" or "ma'am" the rest is soon to foller.

So, as "Seinfeld" said:

"Manners are the glue of society."

It's pretty much true.

So, when you follow the line of reasoning of the "atheists" that we are all sub-human things, then it's getting pretty close to Glenn Beck territory, but in a different sense. It might eventually lead down to the humanity's self-destruction path. If everything is a religion and you take away that illusion as it were of everything, kind of symbolically represented by manners (the "sir" and "ma'am"), then perhaps the next step would be is the fall of manners, as it would be hard to have a cheerful "yes, ma'am" attitude if everything doesn't have that highest level of meaning where the infinite is what's important and not the finite world, such as the turning science into a kind of religion.

Patrick you are going to have to clarify statements like

"Again, it is not just a stopping in progression, but a complete erasure of everything.

As an atheist (or strongly atheistic agnostic depending on your definition, as I cannot prove there's no God) I believe when I die my organs shut down and my body rots. My consciousness and memories as such end and cease to be when I die.

If I have recorded my thoughts or memories and/or passed things on to family and/or made an impression in other people, then the accomplishments in my life are hardly for naught.

So I am not sure what you mean by erasure.

Eric J

"Nor was it atheist firemen rushing in to save victims, despite the possibility of their own survival being rather unlikely.
Must be that Principle thing, again, keeps throwing off all our priorities."

(1) I'm sure some of them were atheists, and

(2) Why do you conflate principle with religious faith?

Reading Eric J's comments it reminds of something that bothers me. Atheists portrayed in the media, are often portrayed as hardcore cynics (McGinley's character on Scrubs, for example). The basic concept appears to be that these people are atheists because of their world view (and not because, oh, it makes the most rational sense). It's a very cynical view of atheists.

I am not an atheist because I think the world is a bad place, or I cannot understand why there's evil in the world. I am an atheist because (1) I believe our beliefs should be based upon evidence and (2) the universe does not need a God, so why bother believing in one absent any direct evidence. As far as what happens after we die, I strongly believe nothing, but honestly, I'll find out when I die.

To my mind, the very concept of infinity and its myriad manifestations even in the rational world assures me that we are all destined for immortality. The question is whether we will be conscious of our immortality. Apparently you claim that we will not. I am more ambivalent about that awareness, but I generally believe (or at least wish ardently to believe) that we will be conscious of it.

The recondite themes you evoke in this blog inexorably lead to the venerably cliched query, "What is the purpose of life?" or more prosaically and sullenly "Why bother living?" You seem to aver that the purpose of living is to experience life, which seems to contain a soupcon of circular reasoning. Yes, we experience life, but for what? Why accumulate that experience and wisdom, for oneself or for others, if death's entropy will eventually dissolve it? Why build that sand castle?

I subscribe to the "God/life/nature is testing you" theory of living. This is not the true, final life. Our rational life is more of a "boot camp pseudo-life" where you receive a ration of traits and abilities at birth and then set out to see how you fare against life's adversities. If you, metaphorically speaking, make two or more plants grow where only one grew before, you attain peace of mind when you die and become free to explore more of universal infinity. If you extinguish even that one plant, when you die you will not "go to hell" (pseudo-life is hell enough, thank you). Instead, your mind will be uneasy until you perform some ethereal penance. Our internal animus or energy will still play some role in the universe's development.

"There are more things in heaven...", ah, you know the rest.

The circle continues...

Coincidentally, the article below appeared yesterday in our paper, The South Bend Tribune. I wrote them a letter, suggesting they consult the economists at Notre Dame instead of these charlatans.

http://www.southbendtribune.com/article/20101025/News01/10250303/1130

I will never claim to know what happens when we die. I have an idea, a theory, backed up by evidence and introspection but still amenable to change. But, I do think we spend, as human beings, far too much time worrying and arguing about it. We should all be able to agree that life, at least on this planet, is too short and too hard for far, far too many.

“Time,” as Tennyson wrote, “Driveth onward fast. And, in a little while our lips are dumb.”

I could spend my time, I imagine, fretting about the state of an eternal soul that may or may not exist. I could be pious and aloof, pondering ontology and teleology in the cold, dark towers of churches or the cold, dark hallways of academia.

But, I would rather spend what time I have here being decent to other people. I don’t imagine myself as a great man who will change the world. I can change the people around me, however. I can be kind to my coworkers and help my community and family. I can pass down those things that have affected me to my children, my niece and my nephews. I don’t know if life is eternal, but, in many ways, I can keep myself alive in the people around me. Even if it’s just as a memory.

In The Human Comedy, by William Saroyan, it says this: “Death is not an easy thing for anyone to understand, least of all a child, but every life shall one day end. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us. His body can be taken, but not him… I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.”

Ebert: There goes Tom the carnival barker again, drumming up eyeballs for his ghost in the dust.

"GHOST IN THE DUST"!! THAT'S RIGHT! ROGER HAS REVEALED JUST A TIP OF WHAT YOU WILL SEE IN THE NEXT FABULOUS EDITION OF EBERT CLUB E-ZINE! ON SALE TOMORROW AT A COMPUTER NEAR YOU!

GET YOUR SUBSCRIPTION NOW. ONLY FIVE BUCKS FOR A WHOLE YEAR OF MIND-ALTERING, LIFE-CHANGING ARTICLES, FILM CLIPS AND UNBELIEVABLE UNreTOUCHED PHOTOS LIKE THIS ONE!

What more proof of life after death do you need?

(Psst. Rodge. That last check bounced. Should I run it through again?)

I will enjoy this movie when I see it. The jolt and the flash you describe reminded me of how John Carpenter fired a Magnum behind Christopher Walken to get the reaction he wanted for Johnny Smith's precognitions in "The Dead Zone". I liked this movie SO much - until I read the book which was so much better.

I am entertained in movies by psychics and aliens and even Stanley Kowalski, but I don't believe any of them are real.

In related news, Paul the Octopus died yesterday. In life, Paul the Octopus gained fame (if not fortune) by correctly predicting the results of the World Cup.

Ebert: There goes Tom the carnival barker again, drumming up eyeballs for his ghost in the dust.

"GHOST IN THE DUST"!! THAT'S RIGHT! ROGER HAS REVEALED JUST A TIP OF WHAT YOU WILL SEE IN THE NEXT FABULOUS EDITION OF EBERT CLUB E-ZINE! ON SALE TOMORROW AT A COMPUTER NEAR YOU!

GET YOUR SUBSCRIPTION NOW. ONLY FIVE BUCKS FOR A WHOLE YEAR OF MIND-ALTERING, LIFE-CHANGING ARTICLES, FILM CLIPS AND UNBELIEVABLE UNreTOUCHED PHOTOS LIKE THIS ONE!

What more proof of life after death do you need?

(Psst. Rodge. That last check bounced. Should I run it through again?)

Here is one atheist's reflections on death (not by me):

http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/stardust.html

So when I got the random phone call this morning from the Jehovah's Witnesses asking if I read the Bible (presumably because the apartment complex gets them for trespassing if they knock on my door), that wasn't making a blind assumption that the Bible ought to mean something to me? As it happens, it does--it is a work of deep and lasting impact. There is beautiful poetry and stirring stories in it. There is incredible bigotry and sensible advice. It is an example of how men think and how they change things to suit their own needs. But no, that's not enough--I'm supposed to let people teach their version of it to my children in science class, because my worldview, which is based on actual evidence, is opposed to their values.

I have known plenty of what I think of as fundamentalist atheists. The kind that try to force you into their way of thinking. I told one of them once that my version of Hell was full of proselytizers. It doesn't matter which version. I don't need to be preached at by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Jainists, Sikhs, or atheists. My faith, or lack thereof, is my business so long as I don't try to force anyone else to change their behaviour based on it. I don't want to be preached at to change my beliefs; that's none of your business. My telling you doesn't mean you can tell me you have any right to change who I am and what I believe.

I dislike "athie" because it is painting all atheists as believing the same thing. I dislike "fundie" for the same reason. I don't use either. Yes, there are atheists who are judgemental and want you to meet their standards of what you should believe. On the other hand, they don't run the country.

Malcolm Gladwell has a great piece in the New Yorker (which is included in his 'What the Dog Saw' collection) called "Dangerous Minds" about criminal profilers and psychics that touches on a lot of what you said, especially the cold readings.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/12/071112fa_fact_gladwell

I personally have no need nor real desire for an afterlife and overall I find most notions of it disturbing and not very appealing.

... How weird or odd does that make me stacked against the average homo-sapien?

oh, Rene. . . thought i was the only one with that thought!!!
OK, i am in minnesota on vacation. daughter, early 20s in arizona. just a few days gone; no phone calls or emails or letters. i get home and ask "who was the blond guy with no shirt on?" oh, mom, don't i have ANY secrets?! [dancer at her bachelorette party.] telepathy lives. if thoughts can travel geographically hundreds of miles, why not zillions of miles celestially? from 'heaven' to earth; from person to person if the dead ARE still 'alive' to send. we are our thoughts and they are electricity. believe in radio and television, do you not? believer and non-believer . . . each will find out in good time which one is correct. live a good life in any case and all will benefit. Peace and Prosperity. Love you, dear Ebert; hope it is NOT soon, but PLEASE COME BACK TO TELL US!!!
Cassandra

A moment of silence please...

Paul, the clairvoyant octopus is dead. He succumbed to the effects of a massive psychic short circuit. Paul had been attempting a reading of Rep. Michele Bachmann when stricken.

This is the third place, that I can remember, that the word "floated" being used in this way. A great use of the word.

I have been floated - By Olivia Tremor Control

And the essay Intellect by Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Whatever any mind doth or saith is after a law; and this native law remains over it after it has come to reflection or conscious thought. In the most worn, pedantic, introverted self-tormenter's life, the greatest part is incalculable by him, unforeseen, unimaginable, and must be, until he can take himself up by his own ears. What am I? What has my will done to make me that I am? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this connection of events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my ingenuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an appreciable degree."

Made me smile. Great essay, Ebert.

Keith, it might be better to think of Einstein's C as "a local speed limit," not an unbreakable law.

Kurt Vonnegut said a poetic thing. We look at the night sky and move our eyes across billions of light years in a flash -- so, even our eyes move a lot faster than 186,000 miles a second. Elsewhere, in the gizmo world, the Yang experiment in 2000 at Princeton using a laser setup apparently moved light 300 times faster than usual.

A lot of people are bitching about that. Having read some of the objections, I suspicion they're afraid to admit Yang did what he did, because... it would be breaking the law.

But none of this gets at what "psychic" really is, or what "the psyche" is in the first place. I see there are no takers. Wong the Merciless is excused from this exercise. He can wait until a government representative knocks on his door and tells him, yes, they use psychics.

"Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn't."

Enough of my trying to sell Roger's Ebert Club e-letter. A thankless task, even if that IS a darned neat photograph. So instead I will offer my latest brochure: HOW TO HERD YOUR CATS.

HOW TO HERD YOUR CATS is not for the literal minded, who won't understand it anyhow. Just as soon as I write it, it will be a fable about someone who, for years, has been trying to make his 27 cats line up in an orderly fashion and do synchronized calisthenics.

It will be a cautionary analogy about people who think unbending laws govern everything... and they know all these laws, or at least can look them up.

Like people who think "eternal truths" can be laid out in reliable letters of language that become just about incomprehensible with age every 300 years.

Or insist so rigidly that "God does not exist" who, at the same time, haven't a problem getting their guts in a knot over some movie because it seems so real to them.

...or are easily frightened by unpopular mustaches, like Mat Viola.

There is a dearth of psychic anecdotes here, people. Come on, come on, get on with them.

"In one way or another, we read our own minds" -- yes. "We should collect our winnings and feel grateful when we die" -- exactly. Being nervous about what happens after death is like being scared of the dark. Religion is a nightlight.
A few years ago my Japanese father-in-law died and his body was in the house (in Japan) for three days, packed in dry ice in his futon. I'd never even seen a dead body before and had a hard time sleeping that first night in the bedroom directly above the departed, but by the third night, the wake, when family members were supposed to stay up all night under bright florescent lights with the body, well, half a dozen corpses could've been strewn about the room for all I cared -- death didn't scare me anymore. The next morning at the crematorium we watched the body go into the furnace and the skeleton come out, and we each picked up a bone with chopsticks and placed it in the urn with the ashes. After the funeral we had a very nice lunch, the mother-in-law even drank beer. The little niece and nephew know this will happen soon enough to grandma, to their parents, to them, to everybody.
Hey, nonny no!
Men are fools that wish to die!
Is't not fine to dance and sing
When the bells of death do ring?
Is't not fine to swim in wine,
And turn upon the toe,
And sing Hey, nonny no!
When the winds blow and the seas flow?
Hey, nonny no!

Debate about important question of eternity of life is futile on rationalistic grounds because it leads to the conclusion::"No Conclusion".I choose to strongly believe in it because it helps me to live more responsibly, courageously, enjoyably, and meaningfully.Science is a nice mistress but a bad wife.

Joe Young, while I think surviving through memories and accomplishments is a noble thought, I still think ultimately in the end Patrick's point comes through, my thoughts anyways.

Simply, there is no guarantee you will be remembered. In fact, I think there are examples to show how easily one can be forgotten, look at services out there that exist to track down family trees. From what I've seen, the deceased are usually remembered the best by people who have had direct contact with them, once they die off interest in that particular person seems to wan. Ask yourself how well do you know family members from three to four generations ago beyond a story or two, or even just a name?

Of course there are people whose memories have survived the test of time because of their accomplishments, good or bad. Names such as Shakespeare and Einstein are such examples of the above, but it seems like they are but a thimble of sand in a large beach that spans miles. Basically, what I'm saying is although famous people may number in the thousands, there have been billions that have come and gone who don't have the same remembrance. Their memories may not have been erased right away, but because they never wrote outstanding literature or made a famous scientific discovery, their traces in time seem to have been forgotten. And I highly doubt many of these people were deserving to have been forgotten, they were probably loving fathers, mothers, or committed to their local communities. I wonder if some people are so fixated in trying to leave a big accomplishment because they know only the biggest will stand out in that beach of billions.

I should note I'm not saying that everyone will be forgotten, but it seems for the vast majority their memories only seem to be temporary.

And then comes the big kicker of all - modern science tells us that the universe will one day enter a state where it can no longer support life, or as some people see it, "end". So if humanity survives long enough (solving big difficulties such as finding new habitation when the eventual collapse of the sun destroys Earth) to see this "end", I can't help but to wonder if those final decedents will ask themselves, "Was it all worth it?" By then, humanity will have accumulated billions of years of knowledge, including arts and scientific discoveries. Imagine living with the awareness that everything your species has created and fought for over the ages is now all about to be wiped out. Once those final decedents of humanity are gone, in a sense a state of total erasure has been reached. With everything physically reduced to space dust (well, that's one of the "end of universe" theories) and no conscious beings around to observe anything or even think, it will appear humanity itself will have never existed in the first place.

So as bleak as it sounds, I think that living on through memories or accomplishments is still insignificant when compared to the chaos of the universe that will one day get humanity sooner or later.

Reading Eric J's comments it reminds of something that bothers me. Atheists portrayed in the media, are often portrayed as hardcore cynics (McGinley's character on Scrubs, for example). The basic concept appears to be that these people are atheists because of their world view (and not because, oh, it makes the most rational sense). It's a very cynical view of atheists.

Perhaps it's also a resentful one:
When I look at an athie, I see not only bad manners (depending on whom), I also see Fear. And Fear makes human beings do and say things they might otherwise not proud of, believing that they're following some "survival" instinct.

They fear the outside world, full of "crazy car-bombing Muslims" they see on their television every night...As this television tells them more about the world than a nice, patient chat with their friends and co-workers would. (We are told that Muslims flew planes into a building by being on some religious locoweed, and not as a cheap headline-grabbing stunt about "Western capitalism" fueling the Saudi state.)
When they are unable to create such fear in someone secure in his own character and faith, they quickly disclaimer that they're not against ALL religions, only the dogmatic or fanatical "bad" ones. They're much worse than the "good" ones that normal people they know go to, you see.

They fear that others will laugh at them, or damage their sacred credibility by calling them personally boorish or intolerant...And quickly bring out volume upon volume of exhaustively discussed pseudo-science and out-of-context quotes--dissected to each and every word with in an inch of their lives--to prove that It's All True, and even become angry and petulant when the topic turns back to their own behavior: But that's not how you play the game!

They fear that they may have cut themselves off from the simple and more natural pleasures that their friends and co-workers enjoy, and strive to tell all who listen of how nothing can be done, as They Are What Others Have Made Them, and that society is to blame.
Catholic schools teach hundreds of children a year, and yet we have doctors, teachers, priests who aren't pedophiles, and yes, the occasional smartass who believed he's Cracked the Secret because someone told him too many stories about Double-Toothpicks. (Which brings up the old quote posted in the Catholic-school thread: "Only an atheist believes in Hell.")
Even Dickens wished to portray Ebenezer Scrooge as a sort of atheist who believed that people had become fools enough to "humbug" themselves into a sham of goodwill to drive commerce--Yet that same character had a girl with no such demons tell him "You fear the world too much, and fear its disapproval."

And then, they cap it off with the colossal gall to say that religion is the product of OTHER people's fears (of death, the unknown, etc.)
Tell ya what: You conquer your fears first--and learn how to treat a human being as a product of thoughts and emotions and not as a faceless "threat" that exists to create everything you personally feel powerless about--and I'll see what I can do about conquering "mine".

My views on psychics (and how quickly they lost their currency after we all giggled at 3am infomercials) have already been noted and logged.
And while Tom was being a nice jovial wiseacre for image and forum-buddy's sake, I think he hit on the basic heart of the matter: Stick to movie criticism, Roger, and leave the damaged cosmology to the experts:
I don't ask Bill Maher to discuss Citizen Kane, and I don't ask Roger Ebert to tell us why he's discovered the secret that's eluded mankind for centuries. This may be a private blog, but that also makes it a private opinion.

I'm an atheist, although to quote Michael Shermer, if you asked me about the existence of an afterlife, I'd say "I'm in favor of it."

Some days I feel equanimity towards the fact that someday I won't exist. It'd be nice to think that what has existed once can never cease existing (my consciousness), and thus, that there will be some sort of afterlife. Other times, I just don't feel too worried about it, figuring that there's nothing I can do about it, and whatever has happened to every other human being who ever lived is good enough for me.

Other times, though, when I really try to wrap my mind around the concept of nonexistence, I feel terribly afraid. I mean, to not exist really is unimaginable. Unthinkable. There was an amazing short horror story about the concept written by R.A. Lafferty around 1980, called "Fog in My Throat." (A brief quote: "Even walking corpses are the best of several choices... the worst being a corpse that will not walk again.")

Then, on other days, I feel okay with the thought of dying. To me will come the fate of all humankind, which is probably no different than the fate of any living thing. But the equanimity, like the anxiety, comes and goes, and I wonder if other people feel it. I can understand how fear of death is enough to turn someone to religion.

Here's another thought: Buddhism teaches (roughly speaking) that nonexistence is the ideal state, and that it may take many lifetimes to achieve this blissful release from the suffering of existence.

Perhaps, as a religion, Buddhism was invented to make people happy to receive what they've got coming to them anyway? ;) And since it only takes one lifetime, you're sure to have a pleasant surprise.

I've struggled with a lack of faith in any religion since I was a very young child. At 21, I still struggle with mortality every day, further validating your claim that to say Eastwood made this film with its themes as a response to his advanced age is condescending (I would add "reductive") and wrong, given how many young people share the fears and frailties you aptly describe here.

I don't understand the universe you conceive of and lay out in this essay not because of a lack of a divine or guiding power, but because you maintain its rationality in spite of that lack. Those, to me, are contradictory impulses. I go through life without a belief in God but consequently suffer with the knowledge that to reject all dogma includes rejecting rationalism. There is nothing rational about a universe where, as you say, we live and die and that's the entirety of consciousness. (As "Josh" said in other words on October 22.)

Having said that, I appreciate that a movie blog is the place where I find myself having this discussion.

"Roger, I remember that a favorite question of Gene Siskel was, "What do you know for sure?""

That you know nothing for sure.

Ah, profound! :S

Eric J,

Christians in the USA are much more ruled by fear than atheists. Especially when it comes to Muslim extremists. Atheists also tend to know more about both science and religion and tend to be much more rational people.

I admit some come across as arrogant pricks, but certainly not people ruled by fear.

Eric J,

Having read the rest of your post, I have to say you have a very distorted view of atheists.

The fact is there are very few atheist activists. Many of us are atheists in large part because we cannot see putting the effort into belief when there are no earthly reasons to do so.

I do not begrudge anyone their beliefs.

With respect to the Catholic Church, while the number of pedophiles is extremely low, the Church's attempts to cover it up repeatedly is cause for concern. Ask yourself, if it was any other organization, would it still exist at this point?

Eric J,

You also realize that Matt Groening, Adam Carolla, Joss Whedon, as well as Jefferson and other foundng fathers are/were all atheists, right? Do you believe they are ruled by fear?

Why is it hard to accept that life has no inherent meaning or purpose. It just is. Your anger simply points to your own fears.

Say, I LIKE this Eric J.! Good stuff! Yes I was being buddy-jovial about Roger "sticking to movie criticism," since he gets it every time somebody disagrees with him. BUT. A guy's gotta sort out his own cosmology and I'm all for it. I'm always all for it.

It's natural. What's unnatural here, besides the government spy (I see he's turned his psychotic Muslim-baiting to Iran, so keep a watch, people, those military exercises ARE happening) is, as Eric suggests, fear.

Some create (tap tap) invisible shields against ideas of "God" or whatever is not measurable by gizmo; they protest too much. Such won't be mollified until an Apostolic Atheist Church rules that all must quit invisible thought or face stiff fines, jail and torture. We do see medieval torture has been back in vogue for some time now. Are these perpetrators the bold, steely-eyed, forward-looking supermen atheists Michael Wong can't stop fantasizing?

Speaking of Vonnegut again,he wrote a great short story called "Unready to Wear." Some people learned how to shed their bodies. Those who didn't were scared to death of it and outlawed it -- about as effectively as our Concerned Father Government has outlawed marijuana, naturally. We could've saved a whole blog by citing that charming story. But so it goes.

Okay, okay, a couple anecdotes. We need psychic anecdotes here.

Tucson, 1999. Got a little package to take to the P.O. Nothing stopping me from walking it over. Nah, I don't feel like it. But I should. Nah, I don't feel like it. Okay, I feel like it now. I walk over just in time to see the cops finishing up hanging the yellow tape on the sawhorses. A madwoman has just shot 5 people standing in line. Had I left home when logic dictated I should, I might be dead from standing in the line of people holding their little number tickets.

Coincidence, you say? Of COURSE it's a goddam coincidence. Get over it.

'nother: my pal Merci, 98 at the time, moves into new digs. I help. That night I dream "don't let that place become a charnel house." I wake and have to look up "charnel," as I've forgotten. I see. That day I show up at a time I ordinarily wouldn't 'cuz of that dream. I never mention dreams to Merci, she's still in the Freudian age and has blocked them from mind as that whole generation did. She reaches for a couple wine glasses for us as I stand next to that large cupboard on the wall. It starts to collapse, as it's never been securely attached.

I reach out an arm and stop it before it lands on her. Her life saved by a casual sweep of my arm. Had I not shown up, it would have killed that tiny, fragile old woman reaching up for a glass or plate. (There was more, later, but that's enough for now.)

ANOTHER coincidence, you smirk, if uncomfortably. I cite a favorite line from an old Twilight Zone episode: "How many coincidences does it take to add up to a fact, Captain?!"

The stroll of my life has more coincidences than a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Most people's do. I just pay attention to 'em, and that's how I came to notice.

It's a psychic thang. You can't get there by grim insistence on linear syllogisms all the time -- or on sheer empiricism, which is great for inventing gizmoes but lunk-headed for everything else. You can maybe try multi-linear logic, but you'd better have the kind of attention span that can hold all that together.

In any case, all this ludicrously paranoid "ain't no such thing as God er ghosts er t'leputhy" nonsense won't get you anywhere. Nor will waiting for a Papal Bull from "Big Science News Today."

Click on my URL. Testing out a story on people. SOMEBODY's gotta catch on. I mean, usefully.

@EricJ on October 27, 2010 1:52 AM

Allow me to respectfully suggest that when you speak of "Athies" as being universally fearful, rude, etc., you are indulging in the same kind of prejudice that you decry in those same Athies who label "all religion" as being the product of fear.

There are many different kinds of people of all stripes. Suffice to say that those atheists you have met are not representative of the whole, just as the stereotypical "child molestin' priest" isn't representative of all priests everywhere.

As someone who would like to be an atheist(but I can't because after all it's just my opinion that there is no god and I recognize that my opinion has absolutely no influence on the reality of whether god exists or not), allow me to offer a different view of an atheist's view of religion.

Organized religion uses the twin levers of fear and guilt, yes. Religions teach that sin is wrong and will be punished - they attempt to make people believe that certain behaviours are harmful to their "immortal souls", thus conditioning them to feel guilt if they indulge in those behaviours. And if they are likely to indulge in them anyway, then religions try to keep people in line through fear of eternal damnation (I am speaking primarily of Christianity here, although other major religions have their own punishments).

My view on this is that this is not to ensure conformance to the will of god, because there is no such thing - all the evidence we have has been produced by people trying to figure things out and do the best they can, and there's no a priori reason to believe they got it right.

Instead, the purpose is to ensure social stability. In republican and early imperial Rome, the mors maiorum - the morals of the majority - were used to ensure conformance. Christianity has continued in this fine tradition, and has some notable successes, such as curbing the excessively violent behaviour of nobles and knights in western Europe during the period 600-800 CE.

But, sadly, these artificial rules respecting "the will of god" also have the effect oof infantilizing or domesticating people. Don't believe me? What do you call the man who runs your church? Father? Pastor? What dose he call you? "My children"? "My flock"? Or how about this: "Our Father, who art in heaven..."

I've argued on Roger's blogs in favour of the theory of evolution through natural selection; against psychic phenomena, etc., etc. And some of the most revealing comments come from people who defend the "absolute moral rules" as defined by religion. Some have said that without religion, without those absolute moral rules, there would be nothing to stop people from descending into anarchy and immorality.

Really? Can you do no better? Without some flying spagehetti monster in the sky to tell you what is right and what is wrong - on a daily basis - you will become no better than a ravening beast?

I can - I live without absolute moral rules as defined by a religion, and I haven't killed anyone; I haven't stolen; I hold doors for men and women as a courtesy; I try to act politely and with consideration for others every day. I'm nnot perfect, but I continue to try to live up to those expectations I have for myself, because I chose them for myself, acting as an adult who is responsible for himself.

When a child is born, they know nothing. Slowly, as they grow, they learn from their parents and other authorities. As they age, eventually, they learn to exceed their early learning and strike out on their own (well, some do and some don't).

But organized religion, especially christianity in my view, exists expressly to maintain a childlike dependence on the church for moral guidance - refusing to allow these people to grow up and take responsibility for themselves and their actions.

Now, doubtless the people who argue that there is no morality at all without the church do not represent the whole - or even the mainstream of the most sophisticated theology being practiced today.

And as a "wannabe" atheist who reluctantly falls into the "strong agnostic" camp, I recognize that there are social elements to church-going that are beneficial for some.

But, boy, do I wish that these people had been allowed to gro