People often say it is immoral for Governments to tax people. If people want their money to fund a health service, or to alleviate peoples' poverty etc, then it should be voluntary. So, in the context of funding a health service, someone on facebook said:
"Forcing others to do things, even righteous things, is not morally sound. That is also basic common sense".
But this is confused thinking, perhaps deliberately so.
Think of a rich person who is a socialist. He thinks society ought to be a great deal less unequal than it is. He personally could give most of his money away, and for no other rich person to do so. But that won't make much of a dent in alleviating peoples' poverty. All that happens is that he becomes that much poorer, but without really helping anyone else since his wealth spread over millions of impoverished people will not make much difference to any of their lives.What he wants is for all rich people to give a large percentage of their wealth away, not just him alone since the latter is fairly futile.Now suppose all rich people felt the same way. In that case the Government is forcing them to do what they want as a collective whole. But, in this sense of "forced", it would be ludicrous to suggest the Government is acting immorally. Indeed, it's quite the converse, the Government would be doing the right moral thing.
Our whole lives and all things are pervaded with ultimate mystery. I sometimes feel as if I'm in something akin to a dream. That when I wake up I'll understand everything, perhaps when I die. That at the present time my mind is effectively wading through sludge.
Sean Carroll said:
“Believing in a life after death, to put it mildly requires physics beyond the Standard Model.” (From an Express article)
I agree. But so does believing in a "life before death". "The standard model" does not accommodate consciousness whether disembodied or embodied.
I think many people are extremely averse to feeling their lives are to no ultimate avail and that the Universe has no purpose and just exists by happenstance. Equally it is repugnant to people and that they will cease to exist forevermore when they die.
I agree with atheists/materialists that this is why most of us believe in an afterlife and God. We want it to be true so we believe it, although deep down I feel many of us don't really believe it.
The mistake here though is to imagine that just because someone believes something because it makes them feel better, then it is false. There are compelling arguments and evidence to reject materialism and all that it implies.
I've just read the following article:When Religion Makes Grief More Difficult.
It says:
Most Americans grew up with a Sunday school image of God as a protector/punisher, and go through their lives without ever questioning that image. For some, a profound loss or trauma can inspire deeper exploration, but for those don’t – or won’t — question their faith, trying to make that image fit with actual human experience is like trying to put a square peg into a round hole.The square peg is a belief in divine reward and punishment. The round hole is the way life actually works. By the time most of us are young adults we have observed that the good are not necessarily rewarded and the bad are not necessarily punished. Real human experience proves that it just doesn’t work that way.
People have a propensity to subscribe to extreme positions. Further, others tend to assume if you disagree with their position then you must subscribe to the precise opposite e.g. you disapprove that the bottom 80% of people in the USA only have 11% of all wealth? Then you must be a communist who is in favour that everyone has precisely the same wealth! And of course the same applies to concepts of God and an afterlife. You don't subscribe to the notion that the Universe and our lives are pure happenstance, that we are merely sophisticated biological robots with no free will whose lives have no ultimate purpose? Then you must believe in a personal God as a protector and punisher; that if you are good you will go to Heaven, if you are bad you will go to Hell.Personally my beliefs are more along the lines that reality as a whole is somehow infused with awareness, and indeed a manifestation of awareness. And all things, all events, everything that has been, everything that will be, is infused with ultimate meaning. A meaning that eludes us in our daily day to day existence, but whose existence might be very briefly glimpsed with peak experiences and mystical experiences. But this awareness underlying reality, or all pervading spiritual presence, is not some personal being that watches over us and requires us to worship it.
I don't want to argue about the issue of an appropriate "God" though. The point I'm making is that people should think more about what they believe, and avoid believing something simply because most others in your camp believe it. We need to adopt more nuanced positions.
Just been walk in Hubbard Hills. Dark. Put torch on mobile on. Interesting to see menacing shapes in the distance that might be dark evil creatures of the night venturing forth from the underworld or a parallel reality, only to coalesce into a bush as I got closer.
Perhaps should put my glasses on.
The following article is not my own. The author is Andreas Sommer who is a German-born historian of science and magic who runs the Forbidden Histories website. The original article can be found here.
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‘If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealise and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it.’
From The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) by William James
There is a long tradition of scientists and other intellectuals in the West being casually dismissive of people’s spiritual experiences. In 1766, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant declared that people who claim to see spirits, such as his contemporary, the Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg, are mad. Kant, a believer in the immortality of the soul, did not draw on empirical or medical knowledge to make his case, and was not beyond employing a fart joke to get his derision across: ‘If a hypochondriac wind romps in the intestines it depends on the direction it takes; if it descends it becomes a f–––, if it ascends it becomes an apparition or sacred inspiration.’ Another ‘enlightened’ enemy of other-worldly visions was the chemist and devout Christian, Joseph Priestley. His own critique of spirit seership in 1791 did not advance scientific arguments either, but presented biblical ‘proof’ that the only legitimate afterlife was the bodily resurrection of the dead on Judgment Day.
However, there is good cause to question the overzealous pathologisation of spiritual sightings and ghostly visions. About a century after Kant and Priestley scoffed at such experiences, William James, the ‘father’ of American scientific psychology, participated in research on the first international census of hallucinations in ‘healthy’ people. The census was carried out in 1889-97 on behalf of the International Congress of Experimental Psychology, and drew on a sample of 17,000 men and women. This survey showed that hallucinations – including ghostly visions – were remarkably widespread, thus severely undermining contemporary medical views of their inherent pathology. But the project was unorthodox in yet another respect because it scrutinised claims of ‘veridical’ impressions – that is, cases where people reported seeing an apparition of a loved one suffering an accident or other crisis, which they had in fact undergone, but which the hallucinator couldn’t have known about through ‘normal’ means. The vicinity of such positive findings with ‘ghost stories’ was reason enough for most intellectuals not to touch the census report with a bargepole, and the pathological interpretation of hallucinations and visions continued to prevail until the late-20th century.
Things slowly began to change in about 1971, when the British Medical Journal published a study on ‘the hallucinations of widowhood’ by the Welsh physician W Dewi Rees. Of the 293 bereaved women and men in Rees’s sample, 46.7 per cent reported encounters with their deceased spouses. Most important, 69 per cent perceived these encounters as helpful, whereas only 6 per cent found them unsettling. Many of these experiences, which ranged from a sense of presence, to tactile, auditory and visual impressions indistinguishable from interactions with living persons, continued over years. Rees’s paper inspired a trickle of fresh studies that confirmed his initial findings – these ‘hallucinations’ don’t seem inherently pathological nor therapeutically undesirable. On the contrary, whatever their ultimate causes, they often appear to provide the bereaved with much-needed strength to carry on.
Rees’s study coincided with writings by a pioneer of the modern hospice movement, the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in which she emphasised the prevalence of comforting other-worldly visions reported by dying patients – an observation supported by later researchers. Indeed, a 2010 study in the Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics addressed the need for special training for medical personnel regarding these experiences, and in recent years the academic literature on end-of-life care has recurrently examined the constructive functions of death-bed visions in helping the dying come to terms with impending death.
Kübler-Ross was also among the first psychiatrists to write about ‘near-death experiences’ (NDEs) reported by survivors of cardiac arrests and other close brushes with death. Certain elements have pervaded popular culture – impressions of leaving one’s body, passing through a tunnel or barrier, encounters with deceased loved ones, a light representing unconditional acceptance, insights of the interconnectedness of all living beings, and so on. Once you ignore the latest clickbait claiming that scientists studying NDEs have either ‘proven’ life after death or debunked the afterlife by reducing them to brain chemistry, you start to realise that there’s a considerable amount of rigorous research published in mainstream medical journals, whose consensus is in line with neither of these popular polarisations, but which shows the psychological import of the experiences.
For instance, although no two NDEs are identical, they usually have in common that they cause lasting and often dramatic personality changes. Regardless of the survivors’ pre-existing spiritual inclinations, they usually form the conviction that death is not the end. Understandably, this finding alone makes a lot of people rather nervous, as one might fear threats to the secular character of science, or even an abuse of NDE research in the service of fire-and-brimstone evangelism. But the specialist literature provides little justification for such worries. Other attested after-effects of NDEs include dramatic increases in empathy, altruism and environmental responsibility, as well as strongly reduced competitiveness and consumerism.
Virtually all elements of NDEs can also occur in psychedelic ‘mystical’ experiences induced by substances such as psilocybin and DMT. Trials at institutions such as Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Imperial College London have revealed that these experiences can occasion similar personality changes as NDEs, most notably a loss of fear of death and a newfound purpose in life. Psychedelic therapies are now becoming a serious contender in the treatment of severe conditions including addictions, post-traumatic stress disorder and treatment-resistant depressions.
This brings us back to James, whose arguments in The Varieties of Religious Experience for the pragmatic clinical and social value of such transformative episodes have been mostly ignored by the scientific and medical mainstream. If there really are concrete benefits of personality changes following ‘mystical’ experiences, this might justify a question that’s not usually raised: could it be harmful to follow blindly the standard narrative of Western modernity, according to which ‘materialism’ is not only the default metaphysics of science, but an obligatory philosophy of life demanded by centuries of supposedly linear progress based on allegedly impartial research?
Sure, the dangers of gullibility are evident enough in the tragedies caused by religious fanatics, medical quacks and ruthless politicians. And, granted, spiritual worldviews are not good for everybody. Faith in the ultimate benevolence of the cosmos will strike many as hopelessly irrational. Yet, a century on from James’s pragmatic philosophy and psychology of transformative experiences, it might be time to restore a balanced perspective, to acknowledge the damage that has been caused by stigma, misdiagnoses and mis- or overmedication of individuals reporting ‘weird’ experiences. One can be personally skeptical of the ultimate validity of mystical beliefs and leave properly theological questions strictly aside, yet still investigate the salutary and prophylactic potential of these phenomena.
By making this quasi-clinical proposal, I’m aware that I could be overstepping my boundaries as a historian of Western science studying the means by which transcendental positions have been rendered inherently ‘unscientific’ over time. However, questions of belief versus evidence are not the exclusive domain of scientific and historical research. In fact, orthodoxy is often crystallised collective bias starting on a subjective level, which, as James himself urged, is ‘a weakness of our nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can’. No matter if we are committed to scientific orthodoxy or to an open-minded perspective on ghostly visions and other unusual subjective experiences, both will require cultivating a relentless scrutiny of the concrete sources that nourish our most fundamental convictions – including the religious and scientific authorities on which they rest perhaps a little too willingly.
Andreas Sommer
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.
Just reading the following article:
20 years ago, we were all set for a Y2K disaster that wasn’tArticle says:
Patti Duncan stockpiled enough water, food for herself and her cat, and books she hadn’t read to survive two weeks in her Marysville home. She was sick of hearing about the Y2K bug — a programming flaw that raised fears of computers misreading the year 2000 as 1900 and going haywire. Even so, Duncan told The Herald in December 1999 that she was ready, just in case. Throughout 1999, we were bombarded with warnings of Y2K pandemonium. People were stashing food and cash. Agencies offered assurances — the power would stay on, financial markets wouldn’t collapse, travel wouldn’t be disrupted and life’s necessities would be available. We prepared, because who knew for certain?
Yes, I filled my bath with water and bought loads of tins of food. I didn't think anything particularly untoward would occur, but it was sensible to take necessary precautions. No one else I knew took any precautions at all!We got computer experts saying that the bug was too deeply imbedded in computers to possibly expect that nothing would happen. They said there will be some disruption, and perhaps considerable disruption. That Governments were being unrealistic and irresponsible in their reassuring messages. Well, these were experts on computers, and I knew virtually nothing about computers at that time. So it was surely sensible to take note of their warnings.So what happened on 31st December 1999? Bollocks all happened is what! Very disappointing. And this is why people aren't in thrall to "experts"; namely because more often than not their predictions don't pan out. Predictions by economists scarcely perform any betting than flipping a coin. Those that have a track record of successful predictions almost invariably did so by chance (if a million people flip a coin 20 times in a row, there will be 1 person on average who will get 20 heads. But he has no ability to get heads when flipping coins).4/1/2020 Edited to add:
I put the forgoing on facebook, and a certain Steve Hume responded by claiming the reason why the bug didn't manifest itself was because of all the work done by people like himself to prevent it. Moreover, he appears to think this contradicts what I said.It doesn't. Either the millenium bug:
a) Was a problem that could be largely dealth with before the year 2000 had rolled round,
or
b) The bug was too deeply imbedded in computers and some disruption was inevitable (i.e sufficient disruption to make it to the news).
Before the year 2000 rolled round most acknowledged "experts" were maintaining "b". However, after the year 2000 it transpired that "a" was correct.
Hence, the claims that it was too deeply embedded were nonsense.So Steve Hume's comment didn't actually have any relevance to what I originally said. Pointing this out to him simply elicited a response saying my position is "slightly incoherent and, not a little weird".The frustrations of trying to explain things to people on the net..
Article says:
Our trust in digital technology companies has become so complete, that when a host of these promised self-driving cars, we believed them. Everyone believed them.
Well, not quite everyone. I didn't. I made a prediction in 2014 that they will become ubiquitous by 2060 and certainly not within a period of 5-20 years as the "experts" were predicting. Why people take note of preposterous predictions from the likes of Elon Musk is beyond me.
