The real miracle will be if someone can read all of this crap...

Okay, in the next few posts that I manage to make I'm hoping to deal with some major religious...things.  Too vague?  I can't really come up with an all-encompassing term to describe them.  The idea of free will, the argument that the universe is fine-tuned (for...something...), the various implications that using naturalism/empiricism/whatever means that you are excluding "other types of explanations," and, in this post, the idea of miracles.  If you can come up with a clear categorical term for these, feel free to mention it.  Otherwise "things" seems sufficient.

So, what is a miracle?  A very rough definition you could use (or that I will effectively be using here) is "anything that could serve as proof of something supernatural at work".  So here are some basic categories:  prophecy, exceptional good fortune,  obvious violation of natural law, and personal revelation.  I'll elaborate on each separately.

As a general rule of thumb, something probably shouldn't be considered a miracle or supernatural if there is an adequate natural explanation for it.  What one considers an adequate natural explanation or simply just desperate handwaving is, I suppose, a personal perspective.  It is sometimes a hard distinction.  Other times, not so much.

Prophecy:  Accurate predictions of the future. Of course, one may need to qualify this a bit.  Predicting that there will be war in the future, that a given person will die, or that the sun will rise tomorrow, even if accurate, should not be considered prophetic.  Why?  Because these things can be concluded inductively, since war, death, and sunrises have effectively been constants in the course of human existence.  In other words, they are obvious.
Other things can mar one's ability to declare something to obviously be prophecy.  The alleged prophecy being only mentioned or recorded after the event that it predicts is one thing that makes the claims questionable.  Another is an excess of metaphor, symbolism, and references to vague (or commonplace) events as indicators of when the predicted occurrence will happen.  A good acid test for a prophecy is to determine whether there is only a select few events that it could possibly be referring to, and if that event could have been predicted before it actually occurred using the prophecy.
Most recorded prophecies suffer from vagueness and overuse of symbols to allow you to interpret the prophecy as possibly predicting an event after it has already occurred by imposing your knowledge of the completed event on those symbols, filling them with meanings after the fact.
So, in order to get a good prophecy with the possibility of being supernatural in origin (rather than being merely psychologically exploitative poetry or  predictions from Captain Obvious), one should make it clear what you are predicting.  Literal language, details that could not be easily guessed, and a specific time frame (and, ideally, location) where it is supposed to occur are necessary.  "A king draped in a mantle of darkness will descend upon the land of the lost sheep, and blood will rain from the sky" as a prediction for a war is bad.  As is "something bad will happen on October 6th" or "a building will fall in Canada".  In the first example, if you don't take it literally, you can make it mean anything you want with the basic format "bad authority hurts helpless things".  The second is too vague to predict anything, and the fact that it does not limit itself geographically virtually guarantees accuracy (also not mentioning a year is helpful).  The third is probably the best prediction, save for one key problem:  no time frame at all (well, and not a lot of detail).  With such a prophecy you are just perpetually waiting until the prediction is finally, inevitably confirmed, because there is no way that you can ever be wrong.
One final problem with prophecies:  the self-fulfilling kind.  If a certain prediction relies on human behavior and the humans involved are well aware of the prediction, they may go out of their way to bring it about (or to prevent it from happening, I suppose).  I personally would put the re-establishing of Israel as a country in this category, as an example. 
If you can avoid all of these pitfalls, then there are just two possibilities left:  the predictor has supernatural knowledge or it was a lucky guess.  Determining the probability of guessing such a thing correctly is pretty much all you have left to do, and at that point you can comfortably assume that there is something weird at work.  I'll reference the implications of "proving" the supernatural using such methods at the end.

Exceptional good luck:  This is one is purely weighing probability.  A few examples of this (that are often the sole things the word "miracle" is used to describe in real life) are spontaneously recovering from an illness or disability (cancer, blindness, paralysis) and surviving a catastrophe (fire,plane crash, getting shot).  Other similar things are getting money at just right time, and other fortuitous coincidences.  The only conditions in which I would personally deem spontaneous recovery a miracle is when it is not only unlikely, but when it is seen as near impossible and there is no known biological mechanisms involved that would help explain how it occurred.  The same is at play for survival, but more often than not, the cases of surviving a catastrophe are obviously not miracles.  It is just probability at work.  99 people die in a plane crash and one survives is not evidence of a miracle, but just of that one who did survive being a somehow more ideal position during the crash.  Only if there was a clear violation of the laws of physics or something to that effect does such "luck" become possibly supernatural.  As for coincidences, it is very hard to say.  The improbable is not necessarily impossible, and countless improbable things happen everyday.  Determining whether something is serendipity or simply just a happy consequence of chance is nearly impossible to do, and frankly, as a result, I think it is very hard to use such things as evidence either way.

Obvious violation of natural law:  For a few minutes in downtown Detroit, gravity pulls you up.  The sun suddenly vanishes from a clear sky.  A river turns into blood and is chemically verified as such.  The girl down the street turns into salt.  A city vanishes from the map when it is decimated by a single massive beam of light.  In short, this kind of miracle is the most impressive, and involves things working one way for the rest of recorded human existence, and then suddenly something completely unprecedented and unexplainable happens.  There are still some problems though. 
First off, a violation of natural law that occurs predictably and in a repeated manner is not a violation of natural law but simply an indication that the natural laws as we have formulated them are in error.
Second, if there is no concrete evidence of the event occurring and only eyewitness testimony, it is actually more probable that the event was a case of hallucinations, mass hysteria, or an elaborate lie.  The probability of this being the case decreases with the number of first hand accounts, however.
Finally, an unprecedented or unexplained event does not necessarily mean that it was supernatural in origin.  In other words, it may be that attributing the event to divine agency is God of the gaps thinking and that there may be unknown natural mechanisms behind it that have yet to be thoroughly explored or understood. This applies to all miracles, so in a way miracles aren't as much proof of the supernatural as "unknowns" that may be supernatural.  Furthermore, such unknowns tell us no more about the nature of the supernatural or about any other things involved in the supernatural.  The miracles themselves are the full extent of the supernatural that we could possibly be aware of.
With all that said, there are certainly situations which you couldn't be blamed for taking an incredibly improbable event that is currently unexplained by science (and, ideally, contradictory to it).  These are violations of natural law that you personally witness and experience.  The reasoning for this is given in the description of the "personal revelation" category below.

Personal revelation:  Something common with most of the categories above is that they mostly rely on weighing the chances of an event happening and deeming it unlikely to occur and therefore more likely supernatural (the threshold for this, of course, being debatable).  Another is that they mostly rely on second-hand accounts.  Personal revelation is different, in that it is based on you directly getting a message in some manner from a clearly non-natural source.   You see an angel, or hear the voice of God in your head.
Key point:  other people's personal revelations are irrelevant.  You have no idea about the nature of it.  It could have been a dream, a hallucination, a completely misremembered mundane event, something they saw on T.V. and received as a false memory of their own life, or they could be outright lying to you.  You have no idea whether this is the case for them because you did experience it yourself.  Only having a personal revelation yourself serves as anything more than anecdotal evidence for the purpose of convincing yourself about the veracity of a miracle.  You will be able to know that you are not lying or dreaming, and you have one other key benefit over other people.
You need to assume that you are sane.
In order to function at all, people need to assume that they are not themselves completely insane unless given adequate external evidence that they indeed are (i.e. clear accounts by others about how your perceptions contradict reality).   As a general rule of thumb, though, if your personal revelation would pit you against the well-being of other people...you are either insane or just got a revelation from something/someone who is not worth obeying.  Other than those cases, getting a personal revelation yourself is more than an adequate to believe in the supernatural, even if it isn't necessarily logical for a strict use of the word.

As mentioned before, even if you do come across an actual miracle, it could only prove the supernatural in so far as the miracle itself (i.e. the only aspect of the supernatural that is proven to exist is the miracle in question).  And, also as mentioned before, it is very hard to prove that something is a miracle as much as simply disprove that it occurred by (known) natural processes.  This is essentially what the saying "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" alludes to:  the fact that a miracle would have to almost pull off a miracle in order to even be considered a miracle.  This level of difficulty is often taken as the fault of the mode of naturalistic logic that makes it almost impossible for a miracle to be proven, suggesting that it is an almost deliberate attempt to exclude such things as even a possibility.  I will try to address that basic concept in a later post.

Thank you for your time [staggers off stage]

Did Glenn Beck Rape and Murder a Girl in 1990?

I don't know...could be...it's not impossible... [furtive movement of eyebrows]

All right, some explanation:  a new internet meme arose recently which involves insinuating that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a girl in 1990, often by mentioning it in the form of a question or using other such underhanded tactics.  This is to lampoon Mr. Beck's own use of such tactics.  Just read this little blurb from what may be considered the authority on the subject matter:

This site exists to try and help examine the vicious rumour that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. We don't claim to know the truth -- only that the rumour floating around saying that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990 should be discussed. So we're going to do our part to try and help get to the bottom of this.

Why won't Glenn Beck deny these allegations? We're not accusing Glenn Beck of raping and murdering a young girl in 1990 - in fact, we think he didn't! But we can't help but wonder, since he has failed to deny these horrible allegations. Why won't he deny that he raped and killed a young girl in 1990?

Anyone seeing the joke yet?  The comedy?   No?  How about in the selection of quotes towards the bottom of the page....[beware:  vulgarity ahead]

-How long before we find out that Sarah Palin is implicated in the alleged 1990 rape and murder of a young girl by Glenn Beck?

-Come clean, Glenn, just come clean. It's the right time now. It is the decent thing for you to do, out of respect for the American people, and if you don't respect them, out of respect for yourself. For the sake of the girl's family, or girls' families, *sniff* think of the families, Glenn, *sobs*, they need just that little bit of closure your confession can give them, just, please, Glenn, think of those poor families *cries* and what you have *cries a bit more* have put them through. I can't ... *breaks down*

-Not only does Google say that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a girl in 1990, it also says that Glenn Beck blows goats. So he's a raping murderer who's into bestiality. Wow, it just gets better for ol' Glennie.

-Why is the MSM not reporting that Glenn Beck might have raped and murdered a girl in 1990? Why are they not investigating these allegations?

-Glenn Beck raping and murdering a girl in 1990: could it be a good thing?

-Guys, this is getting kind of scary. I just did another Lexis-Nexis search, and there is not one record of the statement "Glenn Beck did not rape and murder a girl today" in all of the records for 1990. It is possible, then, that he raped and killed as many as 365 1/4 girls in 1990. We're through the looking glass here folks.

Gotta admit, the last one was actually pretty funny.  See the comedy now?  Do you see the point?   If so, then you obviously deserve some kind of medal, because so many people fucking missed the point of this that the website needed to post the purpose of all of this satiric libel at the bottom.  

Notice: This site is parody/satire. We assume Glenn Beck did not rape and murder a young girl in 1990, although we haven't yet seen proof that he didn't. But we think Glenn Beck definitely uses tactics like this to spread lies and misinformation.

Read the last sentence again. That's the point. Read it a third time and ignore the name of the site itself, because anyone who believes that we're trying to actually get people to believe Glenn Beck raped and/or murdered is *whoosh* missing the entire point. So don't be dumb like a lot of people are. I greatly expanded this text because so many people *read* it, and *still* didn't understand.

Granted, I was not sure myself what the point of this particular joke was at first, or if it was a joke, until I had happened across the main page of that website.  Why?  Because I came across sources like this first. 

 What evidence is there that Glenn Beck raped someone? Well, there's a "police report" that has been released and has shown up everywhere from Reddit, to the Daily Kos, to the Democratic Underground among other places....The whole point here is to simply repeat the words "rape," "murder," and "Glenn Beck" enough so that people who don't pay attention will falsely associate them -- and the only piece of "evidence" presented has been a "police report" with unknown origins.Of course, no one could ever just create a police report from scratch or alter one to put someone else's name in -- or, so you would think.

 He then proceeds to put up copies of the photoshopped police report that he himself photoshopped so that it is now Bill Clinton and Barack Obama's name listed as the culprit instead of Glenn Beck's.  While turnabout is fair play, it would be nice to see that such a thing was done without robbing the original police report of its context:  namely, making fun of the mostly unevidenced conspiracy theorist kind of claims that Beck makes, and that the parody is itself supposed to be in an obvious manner.   He does this in order to make the exact point about the parody (that the evidence for it is pathetic) by being completely oblivious to the fact that that was the entire purpose of it.   Another site linked to him, with the title of "The Left Creates Fake Glenn Beck Rape Document.  You Stay Classy, Libs!."  I have to say this at least:  when the left creates a crusade against a popular figure of the opposite political affiliation using specious or outright fake evidence to claim that they are guilty of heinous crime, at least they're doing it in a tongue-in-cheek fashion!  (Well...some of them are at least...)

 RightWingNews cited this article for its own, which had this statement:

The attack on Glenn Beck continues by the internet crowd calling for a boycott of Beck’s advertisers. Can we now boycott the internet for making false accusations? The accusation that “Glenn Beck raped and murdered a girl in 1990” has apparently gone… well, viral. 

Aside from obviously not getting the point of the "false accusation"  (despite later referring to it as a "viral joke"), the analogy is bad.  Boycotting the individual websites that spread misinformation would be analogous to boycotting the Glenn Beck program.  Boycotting the entire internet in response to some "false accusations" about Glenn Beck is more akin to deciding to boycott all of television because Glenn Beck is an insane liar.  They then mention briefly something that I agree with:  that many people [might] believe that this is true and that this isn't a good thing.  People not understanding that it is a joke is quite clearly a problem.  As we can see by the presumably objectionable quote they put at the end of the article:

"With all this controversy, there must be something to it". hamobu

Heh.  So true.  So true.

While there are a few things that I find objectionable about this particular meme (such as the possibility of accidentally making people believe it is true, or the fact that it is basically making light of "rape and murder"), the message that it is trying to convey, by showing Beck's (and several other media members') illogic for what it is, is something that I can appreciate.

Update:  the joke loses some originality points with me because apparently it is just a rephrased version of a joke done by Gilbert Gottfried at the Comedy Central Roast of Bob Saget, which is shown here.  They also explain in the link that Glenn Beck is trying to get the glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com taken down due to defamation in the domain name (and that this legal action will only bring more attention to it).

The Amazing Pointed Counterpoint

Let me state the bottom line of this at the very beginning. When you frame an argument as if it were a counterargument against a popular idea and, in fact, construct your own rendition of it in a manner parallel to the popular form, except slightly nudge it to show that the same reasoning can be applied to reach alternate conclusions, it is then dishonest to turn around and discuss this counterargument as an argument in of itself.  It is not a positive case, since it was only concocted to show fault in the original argument and its conclusions, and it should not be presented as if it were an actual argument for the point it reached, rather than an attempt to undermine the credibility of a similarly structured case which reached an opposing conclusion.  But, this does not stop people, sadly.  Whether due to an acute case of memory loss, or profound dishonesty, there are people out there who will first poke fun at an argument that they disagree with by showing how easily it could also be used to either argue an opposing point, and then run with this counterargument by completely ignoring that its purpose was to undermine or outright negate a previous argument, which they will also subsequently sweep under the rug.  The previous argument will never come up again, since that context needs to vanish in order for the illusion of a good point to be made (in contrast to the actual "good refutation/parody/usurpation of a bad point" which is what was actually presented).

With that stated, it may be easier for me to point out the key problem with the following essay by Paul Vitz (author of "Faith of the Fatherless").  Allow to make one more point before we move on:  Paul Vitz is either a psychodynamicist (modern day iteration of psychoanalysis) or a more standard psychologist who simply puts an awful lot of a weight on Freudian psychology (you know: defense mechanisms, id-ego-superego, subconscious desires, stages of psychosexual development [oral, anal, phallic, etc.]).  Here's the thing about that:  Freudian psychology has more or less been stripped down to a few shreds that are currently relevant to modern day psychology as we know it.  Freud helped very much in its formation and helped establish "theories" in the sense of elaborate hypotheses based mostly on his own observations, but which were the only things that psychology had that even approached some sort of methodology and consistency at the time.  But, since that time, we've been able to change things a bit.  Freud's theories are still somewhat relevant to therapy but they are nowhere near as authoritative as they once were.  Psychology has since become somewhat more scientific, while Freud's theories were more philosophical (even if his philosophy was supposed to be applied and was grounded in some semi-concrete observation).  Freud, though still rightfully acknowledged for serving as a forefather in the field, is not as relevant to modern psychology as one would think given knowledge of his incredible influence on pop psychology and literary interpretation to this day.  But the most significant thing that is actually still relevant is the precise shared terminology that he established for many things pertinent to his theories.  Aside from that, historical relevance, and relevance to the one school of psychology specifically devoted to using the psychotherapy techniques he developed, he is not as much of an authority on present day knowledge as one would expect a person of such historic fame and influence to be.

Okay, that was my preface.  On to Vitz's essay.

At the very least such a project puts many psychologists on the defensive and gives them some taste of their own medicine. Psychologists are always observing and interpreting others and it is high time that some of them learn from their own personal experience what it is like to be put under the microscope of psychological theory and experiment.

Regardless, I hope to show that the psychological concepts used quite effectively to interpret religion are two- edged swords that can also be used to interpret atheism. Sauce for the believer is equally sauce for the unbeliever.

Now, here is where he establishes that the main point of this essay, if I interpret those paragraphs correctly, is to show that some psychologists arguments against religion are going to be shown to be a "pot calling the kettle black" kind of argument.  He's going to hoist them by their petards.  That the argument cuts both ways.  Insert other assorted metaphors that suggest that he is focused on showing that concepts in question can be used to reflect on any party poorly in the same manner.

First, I assume that the major barriers to belief in God are not rational but-in a general sense- can be called psychological. I do not wish to offend the many distinguished philosophers-both believers and nonbelievers-in this audience, but I am quite convinced that for every person strongly swayed by rational argument there are many, many more affected by nonrational psychological factors.

Assuming the decisions to be non-rational from the outset?  Why would you care about an argument about your particular beliefs that starts out with that assumption rather than actually establishing it to be a fact?  Directed at either believers or non-believers, that is a bit of a joke, honestly.

The human heart-no one can truly fathom it or know all its deceits, but at least it is the proper task of the psychologist to try. Thus, to begin, I propose that neurotic psychological barriers to belief in God are of great importance. What some of these might be I will mention shortly. For believers, therefore, it is important to keep in mind that psychological motives and pressures that one is often unaware of, often lie behind unbelief.

In the first sentence, I believe he had a typo and typed "psychologist" instead of "cardiologist".  Unless I simply am making the mistake of taking him too literally, considering that the sentence would have made just as much since if he had used the word "mind" instead of going into dead metaphor territory.  As for the rest:  the suspense is killing me.

Further, as a corollary it is reasonable to propose that people vary greatly in the extent to which these factors are present in their lives. Some of us have been blessed with an upbringing, a temperament, social environment, and other gifts that have made belief in God a much easier thing than many who have suffered more or have been raised in a spiritually impoverished environment or had other difficulties with which to cope. Scripture makes it clear that many children-even into the third or fourth generation-suffer from the sins of their fathers, including the sins of fathers who may have been believers. In short, my first point is that some people have much more serious psychological barriers to belief than others, a point consistent with the scriptures' clear statement that we are not to judge others, however much we are called to correct evil.  

My second point as qualification is that in spite of serious difficulties to belief, all of us still have a free choice to accept God or reject Him. This qualification is not in contradiction to the first. Perhaps a little elaboration will make this clearer. One person, as a consequence of his particular past, present environment, etc., may find it much harder than most people to believe in God. But presumably, at any moment, certainly at many times, he can choose to move toward God or to move away. One man may start with so many barriers that even after years of slowly choosing to move toward God he may still not be there. Some may die before they reach belief. We assume they will be judged-like all of us- on how far they traveled toward God and how well they loved others-on how well they did with what they had. Likewise, another man without psychological difficulties at all is still free to reject God, and no doubt many do. Thus, although the ultimate issue is one of the will and our sinful nature, it is still possible to investigate those psychological factors that predispose one to unbelief, that make the road to belief in God especially long and hard.

This is interesting. First paragraph is the suggestion that those who are experiencing hardship have barriers against believing in God and those who are well off do not.  This makes sense if people perceive things in the view that they are (semi-)rationally assessing their situation and how it pertains to several perspectives on the nature of God. It depends on whether people are using their own experiences to endlessly debate themselves over the problem of evil.Though that may happen occassionally, I doubt it has too much relevance. Attribute it to a greater plan that He has in store and move on as best you can.  When they do so successfully, it will strengthen their faith all the more.

Second paragraph declares that it matters not as much whether one believes in God as much as simply making steps to try to "move towards Him".  Which is both adorable and makes me wonder if he is implying imperfect conversions getting the effect of full conversion on occasion, or if he is claiming that good works can get you salvation as well.  Depends on what the vague phrase "move towards God" actually means.  Need I mention that either idea is probably heretical to wide swathes of Christendom?

I am not going into this to bore you with parts of my life story, but to note that through reflection on my own experience it is now clear to me that my reasons for becoming and for remaining an atheist-skeptic from about age 18 to 38 were superficial, irrational, and largely without intellectual or moral integrity. Furthermore, I am convinced that my motives were, and still are, commonplace today among intellectuals, especially social scientists.

Anecdotes.  He is giving us the full Freud experience here.  I am convinced that, though I am not an intellectual, my personal motives for being an atheist are not superficial, not (wholly) irrational, not without intellectual or moral integrity.  However, considering that this is simply a subjective self-assessment though (much like your's is the same), this proves not a thing.

Terribly middle class. Further, besides escape from a dull, and according to me unworthy, socially embarrassing past, I wanted to take part in, in fact to be comfortable in, the new, exciting, even glamorous, secular world into which I was moving. I am sure that similar motives have strongly influenced the lives of countless upwardly mobile young people in the last two centuries. Consider Voltaire, who moved into the glittery, aristocratic, sophisticated world of Paris, and who always felt embarrassed about his provincial and nonaristocratic origin; or the Jewish ghettos that so many assimilating Jews have fled, or the latest young arrival in New York, embarrassed about his fundamentalist parents. This kind of socialization pressure has pushed many away from belief in God and all that this belief is associated with for them.

I am sorry.  My only response is to giggle at the idea of a "glamorous, secular world."  Mostly because I am imagining him becoming a runway model.  Well, I guess begrudgingly also mention that people could easily become embarrassed about any part of their background in the right circumstances.  For instance, if you feel embarrassed for growing up in a poor family or in a city, should anyone be held at fault?  Or does it take little to no provocation for people to want to reinvent themselves when in a new social context?

Specific socialization. Another major reason for my wanting to become an atheist was that I desired to be accepted by the powerful and influential scientists in the field of psychology. In particular, I wanted to be accepted by my professors in graduate school. As a graduate student I was thoroughly socialized by the specific "culture" of academic research psychology.....

In this environment, just as I had learned how to dress like a college student by putting on the right clothes, I also learned to "think" like a proper psychologist by putting on the right-that is, atheistic-ideas and attitudes.

I know that psychology has a lot of atheists involved in it, but if they are teaching one to adopt explicitly atheistic ideas, you should complain and address those things directly.  It is outrageous.  But, the arguments I believe you address in this essay originate from Freud, whose stance on religious matters is taught with an even more cautious "that's just what he thought" than his actual theories, if it is even touched on

Without going into details it is not hard to imagine the sexual pleasures that would have to be rejected if I became a serious believer. And then I also knew it would cost me time and some money. There would be church services, church groups, time for prayer and scripture reading, time spent helping others. I was already too busy. Obviously, becoming religious would be a real inconvenience.

Ah yes, the classic "atheist for hedonism's sake".   Granted, I do think that not having to go to church is an added benefit to being an atheist, but I could still believe in a God and do that.  And of course, God knows that you don't have to swear off teh sexual pleasures if you become Christian.  Some might debate how good of a Christian you are depending on what you do.  But even being a bad Christian is better than being an atheist, save in whatever pocket dimension of our country you were residing in.

In summary, because of my social needs to assimilate, because of my professional needs to be accepted as part of academic psychology, and because of my personal needs for a convenient lifestyle-for all these needs atheism was simply the best policy. Looking back on these motives, I can honestly say that a return to atheism has all the appeal of a return to adolescence.

Yes, atheism has the appeal of adolescence because your atheism was adolescent.  Somehow I doubt that in a country consisting of 80% Christians that there are many other cases of someone being subtly coerced into atheism due to peer pressure.  Not that it couldn't happen, but that it is reflective of a level of social influence that simply isn't possessed by atheists save in the remote microcosm that you allege to have found yourself in X number of years ago.

As is generally known, the central Freudian criticism of belief in God is that such a belief is untrustworthy because of its psychological origin. That is, God is a projection of our own intense, unconscious desires; He is a wish fulfillment derived from childish needs for protection and security. Since these wishes are largely unconscious, any denial of such an interpretation is to be given little credence. It should be noted that in developing this kind of critique, Freud has raised the ad hominem argument to one of wide influence.

It's not as much an ad hominem argument as an insulting attempt to see why a group of people thinks the way they do based almost exclusively on speculation (and, since it involves "unconscious desires," unfalsifiable speculation at that) and suggests that what they think is wrong because of said possible explanation.  In short: it's a bullshit argument if taken as anything more than a possible explanation.

In the second paragraph Freud makes another strange claim, namely that the oldest and most urgent wishes of mankind are for the loving protecting guidance of a powerful loving Father, for divine Providence. However, if these wishes were as strong and ancient as he claims, one would expect pre-Christian religion to have strongly emphasized God as a benevolent father. In general, this was far from the case for the pagan religion of the Mediterranean world-and, for example, is still not the case for such popular religions as Buddhism and for much of Hinduism. Indeed, Judaism and most especially Christianity are in many respects distinctive in the emphasis on God as a loving Father.

Interesting though that many pagan religions supposedly put some degree of emphasis on a protective and life-giving Mother entity.  As for Buddhism and Hinduism: it depends on whether you view avatars and buddhas as protective father-figures or not, making this come down to how liberally you are willing to apply the "protective and loving father" archetype.  As a result, I agree that it is a strange claim if not stretched nearly to the limit of figurative language.

There is one other somewhat different interpretation of belief in God which Freud also developed, but although this has a very modest psychoanalytic character, it is really an adaptation of Feuerbachian projection theory. This is Freud's relatively neglected interpretation of the ego ideal. The super-ego, including the ego ideal is the "heir of the Oedipus complex," representing a projection of an idealized father-and presumably of God the Father (see Freud, 1923, 1962, pp. 26-28; p. 38).

The difficulty here is that the ego ideal did not really receive great attention or development within Freud's writings. Furthermore, it is easily interpreted as an adoption of Feuerbach's projection theory. Thus, we can conclude that psychoanalysis does not in actuality provide significant theoretical concepts for characterizing belief in God as neurotic

No, I am not sure what he is talking about here and if you know, please share.  But the last sentence is interesting.  Why?  Because of the idea of using "neurotic" as a classification, a distinctly Freudian term which, to reflect upon what I said about Freud earlier, is no longer used in modern day psychology.  "Psychotic," neurotic's evil twin in Freudian psychology, is used a bit more often however but also no longer in a dichotomous method of classifying disorders.  It is because the terms "psychotic" and "psychosis" have been taken on to describe disorders or episodes that involve hallucinations or delusions whereas neurosis...who the hell knows what it is that neurosis is supposed to actually describe.

In the case of male personality development, the essential features of this complex are the following: Roughly in the age period of three to six the boy develops a strong sexual desire for the mother. At the same time the boy develops an intense hatred and fear of the father, and a desire to supplant him, a "craving for power." This hatred is based on the boy's knowledge that the father, with his greater size and strength, stands in the way of his desire. The child's fear of the father may explicitly be a fear of castration by the father, but more typically, it has a less specific character. The son does not really kill the father, of course, but patricide is assumed to be a common preoccupation of his fantasies and dreams. The "resolution" of the complex is supposed to occur through the boy's recognition that he cannot replace the father, and through fear of castration, which eventually leads the boy to identify with the father, to identify with the aggressor, and to repress the original frightening components of the complex.

And here's the feature presentation:  the Oedipus complex.  So beautiful.  It is a complex series of speculated emotions and attitudes that can be unconscious when you are supposed to be in the period where you are actually experiencing them, will not remember them in the future, and may not even have any form of actual behavior that could possibly serve as actual evidence for having the complex in the first place.  It is conveniently undisprovable almost every step of the way.

In short, all human neuroses derive from this complex. Obviously, in most cases, this potential is not expressed in any seriously neurotic manner. Instead it shows up in attitudes toward authority, in dreams, slips of the tongue, transient irrationalities, etc.

I almost forgot that part of Freudian psychology: using things like free association, dream analysis, and "slips of the tongue" to determine what you're really thinking about.  Mostly by using Freud's preconceptions of what people were usually really thinking about and using confirmation bias to zone your interpretations of each individual data point in on your pet theory about the person's pathology.

Now, in postulating a universal Oedipus complex as the origin of all our neuroses, Freud inadvertently developed a straightforward rationale for understanding the wish-fulfilling origin of rejecting God. After all, the Oedipus complex is unconscious, it is established in childhood and, above all, its dominant motive is hatred of the father and the desire for him not to exist, especially as represented by the desire to overthrow or kill the father. Freud regularly described God as a psychological equivalent to the father, and so a natural expression of Oedipal motivation would be powerful, unconscious desires for the nonexistence of God. Therefore, in the Freudian framework, atheism is an illusion caused by the Oedipal desire to kill the father and replace him with oneself. To act as if God does not exist is an obvious, not so subtle disguise for a wish to kill Him, much the same way as in a dream, the image of a parent going away or disappearing can represent such a wish: "God is dead" is simply an undisguised Oedipal wish-fulfillment.

Yes.  We get it.  Nice.  Hoisted by his own petard.  Double-edge sworded.  Sauced like the goose.  Bitch got served.  So we're done here, right?

It is certainly not hard to understand the Oedipal character of so much contemporary atheism and skepticism. Hugh Heffner, even James Bond, with their rejection of God plus their countless girls, are so obviously living out Freud's Oedipal and primal rebellion (e.g., Totem and Taboo). So are countless other skeptics who live out variations of the same scenario of exploitative sexual permissiveness combined with narcissistic self-worship.

James Bond (the fictional character...) and Hugh Heffner are atheists?  Look, they may not be pious, and they may like themselves some ladies, but that hardly means they are rejecting God.  Also, what the fuck is self-worship?  How do you even do that?  Also: suggesting that skeptics are more "narcissistic" and "sexually permissive" are testable predictions.  And I'm not so sure that the results will paint the image of "godless hedonists" that you expect based on your own experience/biased extrapolations.

Now man, not God, is the consciously specified ultimate source of goodness and power in the universe. Humanistic philosophies glorify him and his "potential" much the same way religion glorifies the Creator. We have devolved from one God to many gods to everyone a god. In essence, man-through his narcissism and Oedipal wishes-has tried to succeed where Satan failed, by seating himself on the throne of God. Thanks to Freud it is now easier to understand the deeply neurotic, thoroughly untrustworthy psychology of this unbelief.

This kind of stuff pisses me off.  Saying that anyone thinks that humans are the "ultimate source of goodness and power" is a strawman.  Or at very least ripe for equivocation, when the proper word would have been "only" instead of "ultimate".  Also, we have never "devolved from one God to many gods" on a global scale.  If you are speaking about religious pluralism when saying that, I am disgusted by your xenophobia.  If you are speaking about the history of religion, you should know that polytheism is older than monotheism and never had a "latency" period that I am aware of.  And either way, suggesting "devolve" from one God to many gods is biased, whereas your suggestion that people view humans collectively as gods is not only biased extrapolation, but it is not even wrong.  Why?  Because you are viewing an atheist's perspective of human beings with the same power structure that theist's view the entire universe with.  They see gods at the top, and humans next in line, and thus conclude that if you remove the gods, the humans are now at the top and are therefore the new gods.  But, in reality, we are not viewing ourselves as akin to gods in power due to the absence of gods to be more powerful than us.  We are viewing ourselves as...well...human beings.  Still small on a cosmic scale, still physically frail, still error prone.  To suggest that any significant number of people claim to believe to have a level of power akin to gods solely because gods do not exist is to suggest that we have an inordinately large number of crazy people.

Throughout his life, Voltaire (like Freud) toyed with the idea that he was not his father's son. He apparently felt the desire to be from a higher, more aristocratic family than his actual middle-class background. (A major expression of this concern with having a more worthy father is the play Candide.) In short, Voltaire's hostility to his own father, his religious rejection of God the Father, and his political rejection of the king-an acknowledged father figure-are all reflections of the same basic needs. Psychologically speaking, Voltaire's rebellion against his father and against God are easily interpretable as Oedipal wish fulfillment, as comforting illusions, and therefore, following Freud, as beliefs and attitudes unworthy of a mature mind.

It is around here that he is beating a dead horse and should have quit long ago if the original quoted paragraph was his actual intent.  Also: any form of rebellion against a male authority of any type is Oedipal wish fulfillment?  For fuck's sake...the only way that you could avoid accusations of the Oedipus Complex being at work in that situation is to either be utterly complacent (and therefore not noteworthy) or to hope beyond all hope that you happen to be a country with a matriarchal government.  In addition, I frankly do not see being dissatisfied with one's own social standing to be a form of disliking one's father specifically.  You might as well say that it reflects upon his hatred of his mother, wishing that he had born to another, wealthier womb,  thus suggesting that he didn't have an Oedipus complex and was most likely gay.  It makes as much sense, even if it doesn't make the point you are after.

I am well aware of the fact that there is good reason to give only limited acceptance to Freud's Oedipal theory. In any case, it is my view that although the Oedipus complex is valid for some, the theory is far from being a universal representation of unconscious motivation. Since there is need for deeper understanding of atheism and since I don't know of any theoretical framework-except the Oedipal one-I am forced to sketch out a model of my own, or really to develop an undeveloped thesis of Freud. 

Okay, this all makes sense until one mind-shattering statement:  "I don't know of any theoretical framework-except the Oedipal one".  I really hope he mistyped,  I really hope I misunderstood him, or I really hope that Professor Paul Vitz does not teach psychology.

Instead he makes the simple easily understandable claim that once a child or youth is disappointed in and loses his or her respect for their earthly father, then belief in their heavenly Father becomes impossible. There are, of course, many ways that a father can lose his authority and seriously disappoint a child. Some of these ways-for which clinical evidence is given below-are:

1. 
   
   

   He can be present but obviously weak, cowardly, and unworthy of respect- even if otherwise pleasant or "nice."

2. 
   
   

   He can be present but physically, sexually, or psychologically abusive.

3. 
   
   

   He can be absent through death or by abandoning or leaving the family.

Taken all together these proposed determinants of atheism will be called the "defective father" hypothesis. To support the validity of this approach, I will conclude by providing case history material from the lives of prominent atheists, for it was in reading the biographies of atheists that this hypothesis first struck me.

First of all, this very idea doesn't make sense.  Wouldn't a "defective father" mean that one is more likely to seek out and believe in a better, alternate father figure, in the form of a god or otherwise?  Also, interesting that "defective father" can be anything from a mean father who is present, a not-mean-enough father who is present, or a father who is absent for any reason at all.  In other words, having anything but a perfect father can lead to atheism.  I wonder if one would find that those with fathers who are best qualified for any of the three categories (exceptionally weak, exceptionally abusive, exceptionally not there) were atheists at a higher percentage than those whose fathers were borderline (sorta wimpy, sorta mean, sorta dead).
Also:  yay, case history material/anecdotal evidence!

Specifically, his father was a weak man unable to financially provide for his family. Instead money for support seems to have been provided by his wife's family and others. Furthermore, Freud's father was passive in response to anti-Semitism. Freud recounts an episode told to him by his father in which Jacob allowed an anti-Semite to call him a dirty Jew and to knock his hat off. Young Sigmund, on hearing the story, was mortified at his father's failure to respond, at his weakness.

Vitz later recounts Freud's own strength of personality in comparison to his father which leads to the question: is this a matter of a father's seeming "weakness" objectively leading one to doubt them and therefore doubt skydaddies as well, or is the difference between their respective attitudes and personalities the key?

The connection of Jacob to God and religion was also present for his son. Jacob was involved in a kind of reform Judaism when Freud was a child, the two of them spent hours reading the Bible together, and later Jacob became increasingly involved in reading the Talmud and in discussing Jewish scripture. In short, this weak, rather passive "nice guy," this schlemiel, was clearly connected to Judaism and God, and also to a serious lack of courage and quite possibly to sexual perversion and other weaknesses very painful to young Sigmund.

Which means that he is not rejecting the idea of a divine father based on the incompetence of his own father, but associating his religious father's incompetence with his incompetent father's religion.  Still irrational, still a form of rebellion, but it doesn't have to do with the idea of a divine father but simply to the religion's association to the actual father he didn't care for.

Karl Marx made it clear that he didn't respect his father. An important part in this was that his father converted to Christianity-not out of any religious conviction-but out of a desire to make life easier. He assimilated for convenience. In doing this Marx's father broke an old family tradition.

Again, you seem to be suggesting a rebellion against the actual father who happens to have religion associated with them and therefore not adopting that religion, rather than showing any support for the idea that disrespect for the father will lead to, in the absence of such social milieu as religious affiliations, doubt in a divine father.  Show me an atheist who had a father he hated that was also not religious and that would be awesome.  Showing me that a smaller proportion of Christians have fathers that meet the criteria that you mention than atheists would also be just peachy.  But extrapolating based on the bios of a handful of famous atheists seems more like an exercise in inanity than anything else.

Baron d'Holbach (born Paul Henri Thiry), the French rationalist and probably the first public atheist, is apparently an orphan by the age of 13 and living with his uncle. (From whom he took the new name Holbach.) Bertrand Russell's father died when young Bertrand was 4-years-old; Nietzsche was the same age as Russell when he lost his father; Sartre's father died before Sartre was born and Camus was a year old when he lost his father. (The above biographical information was taken from standard reference sources.) Obviously, much more evidence needs to be obtained on the "defective father" hypothesis. But the information already available is substantial; it is unlikely to be an accident.

But, I will grant, that that is very interesting.  I do wonder what the explanation is.  Suffering enough to make the problem of evil relevant/gaining too much pessimism to accept religious ideas?  Ostracism leading to aversion to the religion of those ostracizing them or preventing conversion via osmosis?  Your defective/non-existent father hypothesis?  I don't know.  I am not even sure if the data you obtained wasn't cherry picked and thus am also not sure if an explanation is even necessary.

The psychology of how a dead or nonexistent father could lay an emotional base for atheism might not seem clear at first glance. But, after all, if one's own father is absent or so weak as to die, or so untrustworthy as to desert, then it is not hard to place the same attribute on your heavenly Father.

Finally, there is also the early personal experience of suffering, of death, of evil, sometimes combined with anger at God for allowing it to happen. Any early anger at God for the loss of a father and the subsequent suffering is still another and different psychology of unbelief, but one closely related to that of the defective father.

Notice how he is still going on?  Notice how he is still talking about this, presenting his own hypothesis, throwing up some scant but vividly detailed evidence, and has now gotten so far in that you have forgotten that the stated purpose of the paper was to show how shallow and vapid the psychologically based argument against religion was?  Brilliant, no?  He can have his cake and bash the opposing cake to bits too!

Let me conclude by noting that however prevalent the superficial motives for being an atheist, there still remain in many instances the deep and disturbing psychological sources as well. However easy it may be to state the hypothesis of the "defective father," we must not forget the difficulty, the pain, and complexity that lie behind each individual case. And for those whose atheism has been conditioned by a father who rejected, who denied, who hated, who manipulated, or who physically or sexually abused them, there must be understanding and compassion. Certainly for a child to be forced to hate his own father-or even to despair because of his father's weaknesses is a great tragedy. After all, the child only wants to love his father. For any unbeliever whose atheism is grounded in such experience, the believer, blessed by God's love, should pray most especially that ultimately they will both meet in heaven. Meet and embrace and experience great joy. If so, perhaps the former atheist will experience even more joy than the believer. For, in addition to the happiness of the believer, the atheist will have that extra increment that comes from his surprise at finding himself surrounded by joy in, of all places, his Father's house.

And there you have it.  He may toss up a few disclaimers here and there, but he proceeds to ignore them himself and decide that, yes indeed, he has made a positive case for why atheism is brought about by petty desires and daddy issues with not a mention of the fact that he was originally trying to do so to refute the case for why religious belief is brought about by petty desires and daddy issues.  He makes sure to sprinkle it with a dash of condescending concern for the atheists, and finally some smultz to really drive the message home.  The message?  "All the atheists need is love!  Then they'll believe!".  Considering that he mentioned "specific socialization" (i.e. peer pressure) as one of the irrational reasons for why he was turned atheist, I wonder if it occurs to him that he is basically suggesting that people try to convert those poor atheists by intentionally using a similar process.  Ehh, whatever.

I am putting my cards on the table:  I am an atheist, I am not around other atheists to pressure me into being one, I am not aware of any local groups that would make one ashamed of religious roots let alone current beliefs, I am not an atheist for the sex life (if I were, I would actually have one...), and my father has always been there, always "strong", and never anything close to abusive.  I have nothing but respect for him, and the very idea that fathers have anything to do with religion or deities at all is thoroughly biased by a Christian-centric view of what religion is and gods are.  Aside from in the Jewish/Christian religion, which you admitted yourself was pretty much the only religion where the god/father comparison was made explicit, the only thing that gods have in common with fathers is that both are deemed to be figures of authority.  Outside of the bizarre construct of the Oedipus complex and the far-reaching conclusions one decides to draw from it, that similarity is more or less irrelevant.  Without evidence for such speculation, save in the form of glorified anecdotes which I myself can supply counterpoints to, I am afraid that your case, even without considering that Freud counters your case as much you counter his, is pathetic.  But don't worry, we'll let you come back to atheism and we'll invite you with open arms and a firm handshake.  Maybe, perhaps, at the surprise of finding love and warmth in your No-Father's House, you will finally be able to see the light.

Life after the end of life

Today's topic is the afterlife. The one offering up the case for it is a man named Peter Kreeft, in a short essay here. It's entitled "The Case for Life After Death". I wonder if he actually made it, don't you? Let's see.

Whenever we argue about whether a thing can be proved, we should distinguish five different questions about that thing:

1. Does it really exist or not? "To be or not to be, that is the question."
2. If it does exist, do we know that it exists? A thing can obviously exist without our knowing it.
3. If we know that it exists, can we be certain of this knowledge? Our knowledge might be true but uncertain; it might be "right opinion."
4. If it is certain, is there a logical proof, a demonstration of why we have a right to be certain? There may be some certainties that are not logically demonstrable (e.g. my own existence, or the law of non-contradiction).
5. If there is a proof, is it a scientific one in the modern sense of 'scientific'? Is it publicly verifiable by formal logic and/or empirical observation? There may be other valid kinds of proof besides proofs by the scientific method.

The answers seem pretty easy: maybe, no, no, no, and only if you take great liberties with known facts.

The fifth point is especially important when asking whether you can prove life after death. I think it depends on what kinds of proof you will accept. It cannot be proved like a theorem in Euclidean geometry; nor can it be observed, like a virus. For the existence of life after death is not on the one hand a logical tautology: its contradiction does not entail a contradiction, as a Euclidean theorem does. On the other hand, it cannot be empirically proved or disproved (at least before death) simply because by definition all experience before death is experience of life before death, not life after death.

Yes, and this is all good reason to consider it a moot question considering current limits to our knowledge, and it is an idea that is simply that: an idea. It is unfalsifiable.

If life after death cannot be proved scientifically, is it then intellectually irresponsible to accept it? Only if you assume that it is intellectually irresponsible to accept anything that cannot be proved scientifically.

It's not just about being proven scientifically: it is not it cannot be proven through any somewhat reasonable means at all. There is no reason to accept such an idea as true.

You cannot scientifically prove that the only acceptable proofs are scientific proofs. You cannot prove logically or empirically that only logical or empirical proofs are acceptable as proofs. You cannot prove it logically because its contradiction does not entail a contradiction, and you cannot prove it empirically because neither a proof nor the criterion of acceptability are empirical entities. Thus scientism (the premise that only scientific proofs count as proofs) is not scientific; it is a dogma of faith, a religion.

Wouldn't scientifically proving that scientific proofs are the only acceptable kind be circular logic anyway? The thing is: empirical and scientific evidence is the best indicator that we have to whether the premises used in logic are true, and logic is the best indicator to whether the conclusions we draw based on that evidence is accurate. I cannot state this as a proof, no. What I would rather see is someone propose a reliable alternative method of discovering truth. For all the bloviating about the evils of assuming science to be the only method of such proof, the alternatives are either easily shown to be pathetic and unreliable, or are simply not brought up at all.

The first reason for believing in life after death is simply that there is no compelling reason not to, no objection to it that cannot be answered.

I'll take your word for it...

Now this objector either means by 'evidence' merely empirical evidence, or else any kind of evidence. If he means the latter, he ignores all the following proofs for life after death. There is a lot of evidence. If he means the former, he falls victim to the self-contradiction argument just mentioned. There is no empirical evidence that the only kind of evidence we should accept is empirical evidence.

Can't wait to hear this "evidence". But, then again, since you are essentially arguing that anything can serve as evidence because you can't empirically prove empiricism, you might as well as just offer up the fact that you say that it exists as evidence and settle it right here.

In most supposedly scientific objections of this type, an impossible demand is made, overtly or covertly-a demand for scientific proof-and then the belief is faulted for not satisfying that demand.

And whose fault is it that the demand is impossible? You are only claiming this to be a category error because there is no method for determining the existence of an afterlife. You are trying your damndest to suggest that making an unfalsifiable claim made out of gut instinct is on par with making with a claim that actually has evidentiary basis in observable reality. I am not quite sure that they are on equal footing. But don't accuse of me of scientism for such a remark! I know some things can't be proven through scientific examination. But, most of them are abstract concepts or descriptions of feelings that can in fact be examined in some way. So.....

This is like arguing against the existence of God on the grounds that "I have not found Him in my test tube," or like the first Soviet cosmonauts' "argument" that they had found no God in outer space. Ex hypothesi, if God exists He is not found in a test tube or in space. That would make Him a chemical or a meteor. A taxi trip through Cleveland disproves quasars as well as a laboratory experiment disproves God, or brain chemistry disproves the soul or its immortality. The demand that non-empirical entities submit to empirical verification is a self-contradictory demand.

So, "the afterlife is elsewhere" is the jist of this. Here's the thing: there is no reason to believe that this thing exists. For the very reasons you are expounding upon in fact. We cannot prove it through our most reliable methods of proof. It is a bald assertion, and when asked for facts to support it, you question the very merit of facts itself. This does not make your claim more credible as much as simply providing for the possibility that any given inane speculation may be true. So, yes, non-empirical entites shouldn't be expected to be verified empirically. Why you would assert that such a thing exists in the first place though is the question, and what kind of non-empirical evidence for such a thing could be considered reliable.

The belief that something exists outside a system cannot be disproved by observing the behavior of that system. Goldfish cannot disprove the existence of their human owners by observing water currents in the bowl.

And yet a goldfish that could not observe outside of its bowl and had never been outside of it would have no credible reasons for believing humans to exist at all. In this scenario, the goldfish is using the same methods of observation outside and inside of the bowl, same senses but different visible locations are focused on. This is not comparable to what you are suggesting. There is no sense applicable to our observable environment linking the proposed outside of our system and us. Trying to frame it as if there is seems underhanded. Once again, this isn't about disproving things outside of this "system": it's about there being no reason to believe that there is such a place at all, let alone believe that there is a certain definable nature to it.

What does the observed dependence of mind upon matter prove, if not the mortality of the soul? Wait. First, just what do we observe? We observe the physical manifestations of consciousness (e.g. speech) cease when the body dies. We do not observe the spirit cease to exist, because we do not observe the spirit at all, only its manifestations in the body. Observations of the body do not decide whether that body is an instrument of an independent spirit which continues to exist after its body-instrument dies, or whether the body is the cause of a dependent spirit which dies when its cause dies. Both hypotheses account for the observed facts.

Key words: "We do not observe the spirit". This is true, obviously. And the spirit has the problems of the supernatural mentioned above (i.e. no reason to posit that such a thing exists). In fact, in so many words, you explain that the spirit is only observed in "its manifestations in the body". Problem? You are merely ascribing the already observed activities of the body to this "spirit". It is affirming the consequent. Same thing that creationists do when explaining existence.

"A creator creates things

We have a thing

Therefore, a creator created it"

In your case, you are saying:

"A spirit causes certain types of human activity

We have this kind of activity.

Therefore, we have a spirit"

This wouldn't be as bad if you had something backing it up. But, by your own admittance, you are using the presence of this activity as the sole evidence for the existence of a spirit, even though the idea of the spirit was itself only made to explain that very thing. The fact that it serves as an alternative explanation to those that are focused on the neurons and brain doesn't matter in the least because not only is the spirit an unevidenced hypothesis, but it is far less evidenced than the alternatives. You might as well be claiming that human locomotion is explainable by extradimensional goblin puppeteers.

When a body is paralyzed, the mind and will are still operative, though deprived of expression. Bodily death may be simply total paralysis. When you take a microphone away from a speaker, he can no longer be heard by the audience. But he is still a speaker. Body could be the soul's microphone. The dependence of soul on a body may be somewhat like the dependence of a ship on a dry-dock. Ships are not built on the open sea, but on dry-dock; but once they leave the dry-dock, they do not sink but become free floating ships. The body may be the soul's dry-dock, or (an even better metaphor) the soul's womb, and its death may be the soul's emergence from its womb.

I will grant that all of this is possible. But that means fuck-all, to be honest. You can try to explain the intricacies of a body-soul distinction all you like, but if there is no rational reason for believing that such a thing exists, it is frankly irrelevant. So many "maybe"'s, so little "why there is any reason to believe that this particular 'maybe' is in any way likely and relevant".

But what of the need for a brain to think? The brain may not be the cause of thought but the stopping down, the 'reducing valve' for thought, as Bergson, James and Huxley suppose: an organ of forgetting rather than remembering, eliminating from the total field of consciousness all that serves no present purpose. Thus when the brain dies, more rather than less consciousness occurs: the floodgates come down. This would account for the familiar fact that dying people remember the whole of their past life in an instant with intense clarity, detail, and understanding.

How the fuck would this work! First, I'm not even sure if the last sentence is true outside of drama. Second, if a brain is a forgetting machine, why the fuck would getting brain damage give you amnesia? And why does brain damage never seem to give you enhanced memory? Would a person whose brain was severely damaged in almost all areas, but who was still capable of movement and speech, be super-conscious or effectively comatose? These are testable predictions, so I would not suggest trying to bullshit too much about this.

In short, the evidence, even the empirical evidence, seems at least as compatible with soul immortality as with soul-mortality.

Yeah..."compatible" because it doesn't outright contradict it. Because it's been described in a manner especially to make it so that it cannot be disproven.

According to the medievals, the most logical of philosophers, "the argument from authority is the weakest of arguments." Nevertheless, it is an argument, a probability, a piece of evidence. Forty million Frenchmen can be wrong, but it is less likely than four Frenchmen being wrong.

Good points. Though the last sentence is attempting to lend credibility to an argumentum ad populum not an argument from authority. I guess they are kind of similar in effect though...

The first argument from authority for life after death is simply quantitative: "the democracy of the dead" votes for it. Almost all cultures before our own have strongly, even officially, believed in some form of it. Children naturally and spontaneously believe in it unless conditioned out of it.

Really? I had no idea that children would come to believe that their mind would survive death without being culturally conditioned into it. I do accept that children seem to be natural dualists, but I just don't think the idea of an afterlife naturally follows from that (though it is obvious to see why it is necessary to believe that the mind and body are separate entities to springboard into the idea of an afterlife). I also accept that children seem to be naturally "superstitious" in that they can be accidentally conditioned to see human agency in nature. So, this is interesting, but it could equally be an indication of errors in human cognition as much as of "maybe they were on to something".

But thinkers considered wise for other reasons have believed; why should this one belief of theirs be an exception to their wisdom?

This is the real argument from authority.

We can believe them wrong for the same reason that you can believe that a brilliant historian did a math problem incorrectly. Proven intelligence in many different areas, on many subjects, is not an indication of intelligence of equal amount in all areas and subjects. And past correctness is not proof that you are correct about a given claim. It is evidence that you are reliable, but that itself is insufficient.

Finally, we have the supreme authority of the teachings of Jesus....Even if you do not believe He is the incarnate God, can you believe He is a naive fool?

Ugggh. Yes. Or a liar. Or a lunatic. Or whatever the fuck you would call everyone else that had a similar idea of an afterlife throughout history, be it in the form of Samsara, Asgard, Tartarus, or whatever crazy ass Ancient Egyptian extra-dimensional afterlife location the pharaohs tried to get to by using their bling-laden sarcophagi as canoes. Just because "Jesus" seems to have an extra gallon and a half of authority with you and others born in a modern Christian culture doesn't make him much more credible than the countless others who believed in different afterlives that you would gladly scoff at.

Arguments from reason are logically stronger than arguments from authority. The premises, or evidence, for arguments from reason can be taken from three sources, three levels of reality what is less than ourselves (Nature), ourselves (human life), or what is more than ourselves (God). Again, we move from the weaker to the stronger argument.

...wow. Nature is less than us? Somebody is just begging for Gaia to come kick his ass. Where are rabid hyenas and hurricanes when you need 'em?

We could argue from the principle of the conservation of energy. We never observe any form of energy either created or destroyed, only transformed. The immortality of the soul seems to be the spiritual equivalent of the conservation of energy. If even matter is immortal, why not spirit?

Okay, hold on to your seats.

First off, I will henceforth assume you are talking about "consciousness" rather than "spirit" and "soul" because not only is the former more coherent, it also makes it seem less like you are doing less inane blathering about the nature of those still unproven, still irrelevant hypothetical entities than you actually are.

Second off, it is a mighty big leap to assume that our consciousness either is a form of energy or is subject to comparable laws. I could argue according to Newton's laws that the soul (a force) is equal to its mass times its acceleration, and is therefore nothing. But doing so would be incredibly stupid. Especially for such a "non-empirical" construct.

Third, while energy is conserved, it isn't conserved in the same package. In other words, it moves around in the sense of dispersing, rather than as a unbreakable (immortal?) chunk. Our consciousness energy in such a scenario would more accurately exist forever as little consciousness particles tossed all over the place, functionally distinct from how it was when we were alive. It would live in much the same way that our body does: not as an immutable corpse, but as an ever decaying body whose parts are gradually spread across the region. The particles that were once part of us last, though each individual is so negligible of a part that it scarcely matters.

So, even granting your bizarre conflation of consciousness and energy, there is still reason to believe that we would live on in any meaningful way after death.

The next class of arguments is taken from the nature of Man. What in us survives death depends on what is in us now. Death is like menopause. If a woman has in her identity nothing but her motherhood, then her identity has trouble surviving menopause. Life after menopause is a little like life after death.

So, if a person has their identity in nothing but their living self, then they will not survive death? How do you manage to have an identity for yourself that does not have to do with you being alive in some way? And isn't claiming that it is possible to do so almost presupposing the existence of life after death anyway?

The simplest and most obvious of these arguments may be called Primitive Man's Argument from Dead Cow. Primitive Man has two cows. One dies. What is the difference between Dead Cow and Live Cow? Primitive man looks. (He's really quite bright.) There appears no material difference in size or weight immediately upon death. Yet there is an enormous difference; something is missing. What? Life, of course. And what is that? The answer is obvious to any intelligent observer whose head is not clouded with theories: life is what makes Live Cow breathe. Life is breath. (The word for 'soul', or 'life', and 'breath' is the same in many ancient languages.) Soul is not air, which is still in Dead Cow's lungs, but the power to move it.

Life becomes associated with breath and vice versa. And soul is associated with that breathing and therefore life as well. So...the soul basically was just a weird construct meant to explain "life". Which, I believe is what I've already mentioned (in slightly more words).

Life, it is seen, is not a material thing, like an organ. It is the life of the organs, of the body; not that which lives but that by which we live. Now this source of life cannot die as the body dies: by the removal of the soul. Soul cannot have soul taken from it. What can die has life on loan; life does not have life on loan.

Way to talk on about nothing. Of course life isn't a "material thing": it is a state of material things, which is what you suggest but do not explicitly illustrate in your next convoluted sentence. Oh, and will you look at that: trying to prove that souls are immortal by assuming that "death=soul release", ergo souls can't die. And, yes, life cannot die: the living die. Life can end, however, and we call that death.

The 'catch' in this argument is that this 'soul' may in turn have its life on loan from a higher source, and transmit it to the body only after having been given life first. This is in fact the Biblical teaching, contrary to the Greek view of the soul's inherent, necessary and eternal immortality. God gives souls life, and souls can die if they refuse it. But in any case the soul survives the body's death.

Above: shit no one cares about.

Another quite simple piece of evidence for the presence of an immaterial reality (soul) in us which is not subject to the laws of matter and its death, is the daily experience of real magic: the power of mind over matter.

Add "real magic" to the big list of oxymorons, please. "Immaterial reality" is on the razor's edge for that as well.

Every time I deliberately move my arm, I do magic. If there were no mind and will commanding the arm, only muscles; if there were muscles and a nervous system and even a brain but no conscious mind commanding them; then the arm could not rise unless it were lighter than air.

Movement means soul. Non-human animals move. Ergo animals have souls. Therefore your arguments have betrayed your religion's view of the afterlife. Congrats.

Anyway, the problem here is that you are assuming that "brain" and "conscious mind" are too disparate things. It remains to be seen whether this is the case.

When the body dies, its arms no longer move; the body reverts to obedience to merely material laws, like a sword dropped by a swordsman.

I am actually starting to think that you aren't playing, but you are really this ignorant about this subject. The body is not defying physical laws, it is in fact using them to its advantage. The problem is you are viewing the body as a uniform object, like a chunk of meat, rather than a series of complex systems. Which is odd, considering that this complexity is often conflated with "design" for those who would argue for the existence of deities rather than souls, so I wonder if overlooking it is deliberate. You are also ignoring that bodily death is caused by the very systems that support life (cardiovascular, nervous, etc.) stopping. Why you need to throw in a departing soul into mix is beyond me.

Even more simply stated, mind is not part of the system of matter, not measurable by material standards (How many inches long is your mind?)

How profound. Yes, it is somewhat distinct from the material. This still does not change the fact that changes to the material brain itself will have an effect on the "mind". Though it may not be measurable by material standards, it is still dependent on the material to a high degree.

Therefore it need not die when the material body dies. The argument is so simple and evident that one wonders who the real 'primitive' is, the 'savage' who understands it or the sophisticated modern materialist who cannot understand the difference between mind and brain.

It doesn't need to, but we have many reasons to believe it will and none to believe it won't. Very nice insult. I understand the distinction between brain and mind well enough. But I find that you have overzealously separated them into two completely independent things when it quite simply is not the case. They may not be completely identical, but the "mind" (our collection subjective mental experiences) is largely connected to brain activity in many observable ways. So, I'd say you're still the real primitive. My condolences.

A traditional Scholastic argument for an immortal soul is taken from the presence of two operations which are not operations of the body (1) abstract thinking, as distinct from external sensing and internal imagining; and (2) deliberate, rational willing, as distinct from instinctive desiring. My thought is not limited to sense images like pyramids; it can understand abstract universal principles like triangles. And my choices are not limited to my body's desires and instincts. I fast, therefore I am.

This does not argue for a soul at all. You are arguing for the existence of a mind. Which, I've already mentioned, is contigent upon the brain to a large degree. Stop playing games.

Still another power of the soul which indicates that it is not a part or function of the body and therefore not subject to its laws and its mortality is the power to objectify its body. I can know a stone only because I am more than a stone. I can remember my past. (My present is alive; my past is dead.) I can know and love my body only because I am more than my body. As the projecting machine must be more than the images projected, the knower must be more than the objects known. Therefore I am more than my body.

First, what part of "being more than a stone" is necessary to "know" a stone save assuming that the cognitive process of knowing inherently makes you "more" due to the existence of the mind again? There is no logic here unless that is what you are saying. But, if that is what you are saying, it is goddamn irrelevant. The possibility of "more" does not allow you to assert what that "more" must be.

Still another argument from the nature of soul, or spirit, is that it does not have quantifiable, countable parts as matter does. You can cut a body in half but not a soul; you can't have half a soul. It is not extended in space. You don't cut an inch off your soul when you get a haircut.

....what does this matter?

Since soul has no parts, it cannot be decomposed, as a body can. Whatever is composed (of parts) can be decomposed: a molecule into atoms, a cell into molecules, an organ into cells, a body into organs, a person into body and soul. But soul is not composed, therefore not decomposable.

Oh, all that was babble was to try to prove that the soul is elemental. Well, that's fantastic. I am not going to debate with you over whether an unverified abstract entity specifically defined to not be verifiable and to explain life itself allows for immortality if it exists. That is irrelevant to the actual concerns most people have about the idea of the afterlife. So you claim that souls are whatever the fuck you want, but I want to know why I should believe that such a thing exists.

It could die only by being annihilated as a whole. But this would be contrary to a basic law of the universe: that nothing simply and absolutely vanishes, just as nothing simply pops into existence with no cause.

But if the soul dies neither in parts (by decomposition) nor as a whole by annihilation, then it does not die.

It could very well still "die": by turning into something that isn't a soul. That way, it wouldn't be annihilated, wouldn't decompose, and still wouldn't be a soul, therefore "dying" in the sense that it is no longer representative of the person that the soul came from. If souls are atoms, these would be molecules. And they would be necessarily different entities. Of course, this is all bullshit, but why shouldn't I get a turn?

One last argument for immortality from the present experience of what soul is, comes from Plato. It is put so perfectly in the Republic that I quote it in its original form, adding only numbers to distinguish the steps of the argument:

1. Evil is all that which destroys and corrupts. . .
2. Each thing has its evil . . . for instance, ophthalmia for the eye, and disease for the whole body, mildew for corn and for wood, rust for iron . . .
3. The natural evil of each thing . . . destroys it, and if this does not destroy it, nothing else can . . .
   (a) for I don't suppose good can ever destroy anything,
   (b) nor can what is neither good nor evil,
   (c) and it is certainly unreasonable . . . that the evil of something else would destroy anything when its own evil does not.
4. Then if we find something in existence which has its own evil but which can only do it harm yet cannot dissolve or destroy it, we shall know at once that there is no destruction for such a nature. . . .
5. the soul has something which makes it evil . . . injustice, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance. Now does any one of these dissolve and destroy it? . . .
6. Then, since it is not destroyed by any evil at all, neither its own evil nor foreign evil, it is clear that the soul must of necessity be . . . immortal.

It is unclear what a soul is, how we would know it was destroyed, why we would accept that those abstract notions are its evils, why we would accept that those are exclusively the evils relevant to it, and why those evils cannot be unevidenced conjectural metaphysical entities (or UCME's) like the soul itself. Very bizarre.

We turn now to a stronger class of arguments: not from the nature of Man but from the nature of God; not 'because of what I am, I must be immortal' but 'because of what God is, I am immortal.' The weakness of this type of argument for practical apologetics, of course, is that it does not convince anyone not already convinced, because it presupposes the existence of God, and those who admit God usually admit life after death already, while those who deny the one usually deny the other as well.

Oh goodie! He realizes that it is pointless!

We could first argue from God's justice. Since God is just, His dealings with us must be just, at least in the long run, in the total picture. ("The long run" is the answer to the problem of evil, the apparently unjust distribution of suffering.) The innocent suffer and the wicked flourish here; therefore 'here' cannot be 'the long run,' the total picture. There must be justice after death to compensate for injustice before death.

It's just a damn shame that he apparently will punish everyone, because even the slightest infraction means that you are deemed not-innocent, and in some perspectives we are born "wicked". So...the justice after death doesn't help when that's the kind of justice you are offering.

The next argument, from God's love, is stronger than the one from His justice because love is more essential to God. Love is God's essence; justice is one of His attributes-one of Love's attributes.

Love is "the fulfillment of the whole law." Each of the Ten Commandments is a way of loving. "Thou shalt not kill" means "Love does not kill." If you love someone, you don't kill him. But God IS love. Therefore God does not kill us. We want human life to triumph over death in the end because we love; is God less loving than we? Is He a hypocrite? Does He refuse to practice what He preaches?

Only if God does not love us or is impotent to do what He wills, do we die forever. That is, only if God is bad or weak-only if God is not God-is death the last word.

God kills us plenty. Whether the soul lives on is an entirely different matter. So, yeah, He does refuse to practice what He preaches, because He is far too powerful to be worried about restrictions He has placed on us. And I would think that a God who makes death the last word is still better than a God who tortures you forever for being born human unless you converted to Christianity...

Whether the premises be taken from the nature of the world, of man, or of God, the last three arguments were all deductive, arguments by rational analysis. More convincing for most people are arguments from experience

Those people fail.

These can be subdivided into two classes: arguments from experiences everyone, or nearly everyone, shares; and arguments from extraordinary or unusual experiences.

.....can't wait....

The first class includes:

1. the argument from the demand for ultimate moral meaning, or long-range justice (similar to the argument from God's justice, except that this time we do not assume the existence of God, only the validity of our essential moral instinct)- this is essentially Kant's argument;
2. the argument from our demand for ultimate purpose, for a meaningful end, or adequate final cause-this argument is parallel, in the order of final causality and within the psychological area, to the traditional cosmological arguments for the existence of God from effect to a first, uncaused cause in the order of efficient causality and within the cosmological area;
3. the argument from the principle that every innate desire reveals the presence of its desired object (hunger indicates the existence of food, curiosity knowledge, etc.) coupled with the discovery of an innate desire for eternity, or something more than time can offer-this is C. S. Lewis' favorite argument.
4. the argument from the validity of love, which insists on the intrinsic, indispensable value of the other, the beloved-if love is sighted and not blind and if it is absurd that the indispensable is dispensed with, then death does not dispense with us, for love declares that we are indispensable;
5. finally, the argument from the presence of a person, who is not a thing (object) and therefore need not be removed when the body-object is removed-the I detects a Thou not subject to the death of the It.

1. Evidence for a desire for a secure and stable society and a realization that people who disrupt society and then die cannot pay for what they have done.
2. Evidence for human desire for relevance, collectively but, above all, for themselves individually.
3. Stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard. It would be fine if there was a stricter definition of "innate desire" but wanting something does not mean that what you want exists. That is why "idealist" and "realist" aren't the same thing.
4. Love may declare that we are indispensable to our loved ones, but that does not mean that death gives a flying fuck about that. It will dispose of us as it deems suitable. And you will like it.
5. Were these last two even in English!?

From one point of view, these five arguments are the weakest of all, for they presuppose an epistemological access to reality which can easily be denied as illusory. There is no purely formal or empirical proof, e.g., that love's instinctive perception of the intrinsic value of the beloved is true. Further, each concludes not with the simple proposition 'we are immortal' but with the disjunctive proposition 'either reality is absurd or we are immortal.'

Not only do they talk about things that could be deemed illusory, but most of the arguments are themselves absurd. Not to mention that the first two presumed universal desires may be fostered by cultural climates that focus on such things as universal morals and meaning and may not, in fact, be too important otherwise.

Finally, each is less a demonstration than an almost-immediate perception: in valuing, purposing, longing, loving, or presencing one sees the immortality of the person.

Ahahaha. Or simply imposes "immortality" on them due to how important they are to that person. Again, why does imagining that something exists, wanting something to exist, or exagerrating the world as you see it to the degree that you think it exists assure us that the something in question actually exists?

These are five spiritual senses, and when one looks along them rather than at them, when one uses them rather than scrutinizing them, when they are innocent until proven guilty rather than proven innocent, one sees. But when one does not take this attitude, when one begins with Occam's razor, or Descartes' methodic doubt, one simply does not see. They are less arguments from experience than experiences themselves of the immortal soul.

So, in other words: "if you believe that gut feelings are accurate and stop using logic, then you will see the light".

Three arguments from unusual or extraordinary experience are:

1. The argument from the experience of medically 'dead' and resuscitated patients, all of whom, even those formerly skeptical, are utterly convinced of the truth of their 'out-of-the-body' existence and their survival of bodily death. To outside observers there necessarily remains the possibility of doubt; to all, who have had the experience, there is none. It is no more deceptive than waking up in the morning. You may dream that you are awake and in fact be dreaming, but once you are really awake you are in no doubt. Unfortunately, this waking sense of certainty can only be experienced, not publicly proved.
2. A similar sense of reality attaches to an experience apparently even more common than the out-of-the-body experience. Shortly after a loved one dies (most usually a spouse), the survivor often has a sudden, unexpected and utterly convincing sense of the real here-and-now presence of the dead one. It is not a memory, or a wish, or an image from the imagination. It is not usually accompanied by an image at all. But it is utterly convincing to the experiencer. Only to one who trusts the experiencer is the experience transferable as evidence, however. And that link can be denied without absurdity. Again, it is a very strong and convincing experience, but not a convincing proof.
3. What would be a convincing proof from experience? If we could only put our hands into the wounds of a dead man who had risen again! The most certain assurance of life after death for the Christian is the historical, literal resurrection of Christ. The Christian believes in life after death not because of an argument, first of all, but because of a witness. The Church is that witness; 'apostolic succession' means first of all the chain of witnesses beginning with eyewitnesses: "We have been eyewitnesses of His resurrection. . . and we testify (witness) to you." This is the answer to the skeptic who asks: "What do you know for sure about life after death anyway? Have you ever been there? Have you come back to tell us?" The Christian reply is: "No, but I have a very good Friend who has. I believe Him, and I follow Him not only through life but also through death. Come along"

1. Glorified dreaming. As you mention, only convincing to the person who actually had the Near Death Experience. And don't try to suggest that everyone who has been resuscitated at that point has had one.
2. G-g-g-ghosts. Seriously, start bringing up ghosts if you want to go down this road the whole way. Or are you too afraid that doing so might get you stumbling on your foot if you accidentally contradict your theology in bringing up certain anecdotes?
3. Fantastic. Your evidence for believing the afterlife claims of Christianity is that you accept the Resurrection claims of Christianity. I am convinced!

So, in summary, the case for life after death that isn't applicable to those who basically accept every other tenet of Christianity except for that part is that we can't prove it doesn't exist, anecdotes are just as reliable as scientific and logical proof, the soul couldn't possibly be mortal, and the "mind" exists, so why not suggest that unverified but equally immaterial things exist as well. It's really a case for one's ability to make baseless claims in order to explain things around them as long as you make it so that such claims can't possibly be contradicted, despite having no support either. Which, is fine by me, even if it is ridiculous. I just wish he had the honesty/self-awareness to realize that that is what he is essentially making the case for.