Is The Afterlife's Rational Conceptualization Impossible?

You should reserve judgement until you experience it yourself.

 

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OBEs and NDEs are clearly not supernatural; anymore than a dream is supernatural. However, saying an OBE or a NDE is your soul leaving your body is clearly supernatural.
A natural explanation is that it is a hallucination or the brain playing tricks on us.

 

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Science is a form of philosophy.

 

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A natural explanation might exist,but happen that at the present human understanding of science is limited to physical mater.

 

They are not dead who live in the hearts they leave behind. - Tuscarora

This Indian saying equates the afterlife with the memories left behind in the matrix of the mind. Albert Einstein died years ago yet science forums discuss his life like he is still with us. He is alive in relativity.

Spiritual worlds are not made of matter, but of information and consciousness.

This sort of lead to the theory that maybe the human brain stores the afterlife within the matrix of consciousness. The DNA stores the past.

 

Everyone is eventually forgotten so everyone eventually dies I guess. Some just linger on longer than others. I hope I am just forgotten quickly after I dies so I can get some goddamn rest.

 

Jesus is not forgotten, , His spirit is growing in more people daily . You " Orgin " you are just a hindrance for the glory of Jesus

 

It's OK your cheerleading for Jesus more than offsets my hindrance.

 

We're not in full control of what we experience, and experience occurs from very early times in our life.

According to your testimony, you know that gods exist. Are people who believe gods exist, wrong for doing so, from your perspective?

Have scripture's got it wrong when it comes to gods, or have they got it right?

Jan.

 

How do you know that?

 

The special poll that "Physics World" conducted back in 2001 regarding how physicists think simply in regard to the realism issues of that territory might be somewhat of an indicator. Over 500 responded. A significant percentage admitted they did feel unsettled in the course of trying to answer the questions. ["This Is Your Philosophy", an article by Robert P Crease, covered the results in April, 2002.]

Robert P Crease: "Some people said that they changed their minds, or grew more uncertain, or realized that their answers were inconsistent, while doing the poll. (It made them think!) A handful of people even stopped in despair partway through. [...] And to those who complained that "it depends": precisely! The philosopher's task is to discover the variables and how they affect the outcome. The results reveal a full spectrum of positions. [...] Still more significantly, a large fraction of respondents cannot be classified as critical realists because they recognized, while answering the poll, that their answers were philosophically indeterminate. Indeed, the most heart-warming letter I received said: 'At the end of [your original] article, you said that a low response will indicate either that you have no readership or that scientists don't care about the issues raised. After 48 hours of discussions we have to suggest a third category - those who would like to reply but in attempting to answer the questionnaire have found their 'gut' philosophical position to be wholly inadequate and inconsistent.' Her poll, too, was blank - but it seemed a product of a sensitivity to the seriousness and significance of philosophical issues rather than a repudiation of them."

The other blank polls he referred to were from a handful of individuals like Weinberg and Gell-Mann, who were ideologically unconcerned about realism / anti-realism categories or anything that didn't contribute directly to their work.

- - - More, from the intro - - -

[...] Everybody, including scientists, makes seat-of-the-pants practical judgements about what's real and what's not. The common-sense assumptions underlying these judgements can be unrecognized, inconsistent and even untenable; they can be home-grown, inherited and absorbed from others. But when someone is engaged in an activity as complex as science, it is almost impossible to avoid making such practical judgements. [...] they are based on preconceptions of what the world consists of and what the world's most important distinctions and categories are - in other words of how it all hangs together.

Professional philosophers analyse these preconceptions and up the ante on them. They formally rework the assumptions into consistent, fully articulated and intellectually supportable positions. They then give them names, such as realist, antirealist, critical realist, constructivist, hermeneutical realist, and so on. To qualify as a philosophical position, it has to be advanced in clear words, articulated in appropriate detail and depth, and be defensible against criticism when scrutinized in a philosophical peer review.

I've often heard scientists call philosophical attention to their field irrelevant at best, and confusing and destructive at worst. [...] But such reactions misconstrue philosophy, however much they may have been triggered by the excesses of philosophers themselves. Scientists cannot avoid making judgements about what is real and what is not, and philosophical analysis seeks to expose and clarify this process.

I've also heard that science inclines its practitioners towards a specific philosophical position. [...] In his book "Faith, Science and Understanding", physicist-turned-Anglican-priest John Polkinghorne remarked that "virtually all scientists" - including himself - adhere to a brand of realism known as critical realism. A reviewer in "Physics World", who doubted Polkinghorne's bold assertion, later suggested that I poll readers, hoping to elicit information to settle the issue. I therefore carried out a survey in which I listed a number of different items and asked readers to say whether or not they considered them to be real things, or whether they were unsure ("Physics World" October 2001 p18). Having received more than 500 replies, the statistics do indeed cast doubt on Polkinghorne's claim.

[...] Critical realism - Polkinghorne's pet idea - is a term that covers several different perspectives, combining aspects of phenomenal and noumenal realism. What these perspectives share in general is the view that what we directly perceive and know is not the real object itself - an electron, say - but rather a sign or datum by which we can infer the existence and properties of the object. These inferences, however, may often fail to capture the object's details and even its essence.

 

The problem is that I'm supposed to take Sean Carroll's word for it. I might as well go to church. There, too, they want me to just take their words for gold.

 

"the profound nature of theism could be a sociopathological response to minimize the moral problems, a reluctance to solve them" -- meaning that theism is economical, cost-effective -- and thus rational.

 

Or they can be dismissed by quoting the Bible:

"God does it so that people will fear him."
Eccl. 3:14 (NIV)

Good question.
The notion that God should be reasonable and kind might come from what belief in God entails. Namely, "to believe in God" seems to actually mean 'to believe that God is on my (ie. the believer's) side; to believe that God will smite my (ie. the believer's) enemies and reward me (ie. the believer)'. Clearly, believers want that God wouldn't do to them what they want God to do to their enemies; ie. they want God to be reasonable and kind to them, the believers, but not to their enemies.

"The righteous person will rejoice when he sees your vengeance; when he washes his feet in the blood of the wicked."
http://biblehub.com/psalms/58-10.htm

"The Lord said,
“I will bring them back from Bashan,
I will bring them back from the depths of the sea,
23that you may strike your feet in their blood,
that the tongues of your dogs may have their portion from the foe.”"
http://biblehub.com/esv/psalms/68.htm