Is J. Neil Schulman justified (logically) in believing in God?

[PDS]

Is J. Neil Schulman justified (logically) in believing in God?

Starbuckle, who for some mystical, intangible whoo-whoo purpose started this topic without actually having any interest in any answer of mine he didn't already accept, still says no.

I still say yes.

We're likely never to agree.

I am sympathetic to Neil's point here. He did not ask for this thread to be created, as far as I can tell. To his credit, he came here to further explain his experiences, and (probably naively) thought they would be accepted by some at face value. Probably the wrong crowd for such an assumption. But Neil was doomed from the get-go: nobody has ever proven the existence of God in any objective fashion. Why should we expect Neil to do so? And why should we expect him to change a view on those experiences that he has mulled and reflected upon and discussed for at least 13 years or so?

Some might claim that "intellectual honesty" demands no less, but let's be honest about that rejoinder : as just one example, the same people that claim "intellectual honesty" as the hallmark of their thinking are fairly hard pressed to show how, for instance, a lottery can finance the government that protects rights in a free society. Nevertheless, we have all heard this Objectivst mantra for years, with no proof or experience or hardly even an argument to believe this is even remotely viable. This is one of Objectivism's crazy uncles in the attic, and most Objectivists I know simply hold their breath and hope this can someday be worked out by the "legal philosophers." How to finance a government in a free society, without taxes or otherwise violating the rights of citizens, would seem to be a pretty significant and real-world issue, would it not?

Are we any more "intellectually honest" than Neil? Is Neil any less intellectually honest than us? Perhaps our hobby horses are merely of a different shape and color.

Edited January 10, 2011 by PDS

[George H. Smith]

George, since you've been candid with me, I'll be likewise candid.

I think you and I have extraordinary life experiences in common. You say not to interpret them but that strikes me as a form of blanking out reality.

I never said that you should not interpret or attempt to explain your experiences. Rather, I suggested that you search for explanations within, not without.

I think you're as psychic as I am. I think you've had as many supernatural encounters as I've had. I think, given that we're both rationalists, experiences of things we considered impossible challenged us to the limits of our wits.

I agree that I am as "psychic" as you are, which is to say, not at all.

I think I dealt with the impossible by figuring out how it could be possible, then when the evidence piled up, accepted it.

I think you made a decision to rule psychic and supernatural explanations inadmissible in the court of your mind. Maybe being a science fiction writer helped me understand; writers like Heinlein and John Campbell specialized in weird alternative realities.

Positing a god or a supernatural realm does not explain how anything is possible. Such "explanations" are a cognitive dead-end that inhibit further investigation and authentic understanding. They anesthetize the mind by creating the pleasant illusion that there is meaning in a meaningless universe, and that we will end up as something more than a feast for maggots.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

Is J. Neil Schulman justified (logically) in believing in God?

Starbuckle, who for some mystical, intangible whoo-whoo purpose started this topic without actually having any interest in any answer of mine he didn't already accept, still says no.

I still say yes.

We're likely never to agree.

I am sympathetic to Neil's point here. He did not ask for this thread to be created, as far as I can tell. To his credit, he came here to further explain his experiences, and (probably naively) thought they would be accepted by some at face value. Probably the wrong crowd for such an assumption. But Neil was doomed from the get-go: nobody has ever proven the existence of God in any objective fashion. Why should we expect Neil to do so? And why should we expect him to change a view on those experiences that he has mulled and reflected upon and discussed for at least 13 years or so?

I don't expect Neil to change his mind about anything. Moreover, Neil's experiences have been accepted at face value. Only his explanations of his experiences have been challenged.

What are we to make of a person who claims to have mind-melded with God, who claims to possess supercognition and psychic powers, and who says "fuck you" to people who have the temerity to suggest that his dreams are nothing more than dreams? These fancies of the imagination may be interesting from a psychological perspective, but when used to claim a superior cognitive status, they become intolerable.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

I am sympathetic to Neil's point here. He did not ask for this thread to be created, as far as I can tell. To his credit, he came here to further explain his experiences, and (probably naively) thought they would be accepted by some at face value. Probably the wrong crowd for such an assumption.

Neil has had a much easier time of it on OL than he would on many forums. This is because he is unlikely to find on OL people with competing theistic and supernaturalistic claims. If Neil were to join, say, a good Christian forum, he would find himself trumped again and again by people who have also talked to God (many more times than Neil has), and who would inform Neil that he is a mere novice in this realm who doesn't understand his encounter with God. They would then proceed to instruct Neil on a correct understanding of God, as Neil has attempted to instruct us.

In contrast, the most atheistic OLers can do is to posit hypothetical theistic claims that conflict with Neil's beliefs, and the result is a kind of shadow-boxing. If Neil wants to see what real boxing is like, then he should argue with sophisticated defenders of Christianity. He might last a few rounds before throwing in the towel.

Ghs

[PDS]

Is J. Neil Schulman justified (logically) in believing in God?

Starbuckle, who for some mystical, intangible whoo-whoo purpose started this topic without actually having any interest in any answer of mine he didn't already accept, still says no.

I still say yes.

We're likely never to agree.

I am sympathetic to Neil's point here. He did not ask for this thread to be created, as far as I can tell. To his credit, he came here to further explain his experiences, and (probably naively) thought they would be accepted by some at face value. Probably the wrong crowd for such an assumption. But Neil was doomed from the get-go: nobody has ever proven the existence of God in any objective fashion. Why should we expect Neil to do so? And why should we expect him to change a view on those experiences that he has mulled and reflected upon and discussed for at least 13 years or so?

I don't expect Neil to change his mind about anything. Moreover, Neil's experiences have been accepted at face value. Only his explanations of his experiences have been challenged.

What are we to make of a person who claims to have mind-melded with God, who claims to possess supercognition and psychic powers, and who says "fuck you" to people who have the temerity to suggest that his dreams are nothing more than dreams? These fancies of the imagination may be interesting from a psychological perspective, but when used to claim a superior cognitive status, they become intolerable.

Ghs

Ghs: you know, when you put just like that, my sympathy does take a wee nosedive...

[J Neil Schulman]

Interesting that Neil now adds John Campbell to the list of seers. Is this an implicit endorsement of the hogwash of dianetics?

Everybody who's actually interested in learning anything from this discussion, pay attention.

In his previous message Starbuckle accused me of putting forth a smear. No, this is how you do a smear.

First Starbuckle pulls the word "seer" out of thin air, since I never used the word with reference to the Golden Age science-fiction writer and editor of Astounding (later Analog), John W. Campbell.

Then Starbuckle dismisses John W. Campbell because he was friends with the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard (so was Heinlein and half the other science-fiction writers at the time) and found in the early drafts of Hubbard's book Dianatics some valid criticisms of psychiatry (Thomas S. Szasz is far harsher on the profession), and a brilliant suggestion of conducting psychanalysis while using a polygraph to detect peaks in patient stress.

I've resigned from this discussion several times. This sort of vile and dishonest crap is why.

Edited January 10, 2011 by J. Neil Schulman

[J Neil Schulman]

George, since you've been candid with me, I'll be likewise candid.

I think you and I have extraordinary life experiences in common. You say not to interpret them but that strikes me as a form of blanking out reality.

I never said that you should not interpret or attempt to explain your experiences. Rather, I suggested that you search for explanations within, not without.

I think you're as psychic as I am. I think you've had as many supernatural encounters as I've had. I think, given that we're both rationalists, experiences of things we considered impossible challenged us to the limits of our wits.

I agree that I am as "psychic" as you are, which is to say, not at all.

I think I dealt with the impossible by figuring out how it could be possible, then when the evidence piled up, accepted it.

I think you made a decision to rule psychic and supernatural explanations inadmissible in the court of your mind. Maybe being a science fiction writer helped me understand; writers like Heinlein and John Campbell specialized in weird alternative realities.

Positing a god or a supernatural realm does not explain how anything is possible. Such "explanations" are a cognitive dead-end that inhibit further investigation and authentic understanding. They anesthetize the mind by creating the pleasant illusion that there is meaning in a meaningless universe, and that we will end up as something more than a feast for maggots.

Ghs

Like you I did not posit a god or a supernatural realm because my epistemological premises that no data coming from anything other than the five senses eliminated them from my consideration. When I had experiences that I'd been dismissing as merely unreal artifacts of human psychology began showing evidence of having cognitive value, I revised my epistemological premises, and I now was examining and analyzing additional data.

I've been using the word God because that's the common designator for the person who I connected with. There are good reasons to use that designator because of the nature of this person. But if I simply used the phrase "the first man" it would be as true to fact -- and I consider the word "supernatural" ultimately a null term, since nothing above the "nature" we observe with the five senses is less subject to the axiomatic laws of existence, non-contradiction, and identity.

I don't posit survival after death, George. I've communicated with people whose conscious minds survived death. I've concluded that death of a body here is not death of the person's mind, which goes elsewhere. I've concluded that elsewhere is pretty much a familiar terrestrial environment.

I've said elsewhere the the main debate is not whether God is real. It's whether death is real.

You heard your father's voice after he died. You wrote

[T]he weirdest experiences occurred while I was wide awake and completely sober. I would sometimes go for hours at a time without realizing that my father was dead, and I would frequently hear his voice coming from another room. It took at least a year before these voices stopped, and there were other disturbing incidents as well.

So don't tell me about your paranormal interpretations of such experiences, as if you are the only one who has ever had them. I had dozens and dozens of them, and I struggled like a son-of-bitch to retain my hold on reality.

I think you lost that battle. I think Occam's Razor is that you did in reality hear your dead father's voice because your dead father isn't as "dead" as your epistemological filters of "non-allowed" data leave you to believe.

And that would mean that there are two psychic mediums (media?) in this debate, one of whom denies it.

Edited January 10, 2011 by J. Neil Schulman

[J Neil Schulman]

Is J. Neil Schulman justified (logically) in believing in God?

Starbuckle, who for some mystical, intangible whoo-whoo purpose started this topic without actually having any interest in any answer of mine he didn't already accept, still says no.

I still say yes.

We're likely never to agree.

I am sympathetic to Neil's point here. He did not ask for this thread to be created, as far as I can tell. To his credit, he came here to further explain his experiences, and (probably naively) thought they would be accepted by some at face value. Probably the wrong crowd for such an assumption. But Neil was doomed from the get-go: nobody has ever proven the existence of God in any objective fashion. Why should we expect Neil to do so? And why should we expect him to change a view on those experiences that he has mulled and reflected upon and discussed for at least 13 years or so?

I don't expect Neil to change his mind about anything. Moreover, Neil's experiences have been accepted at face value. Only his explanations of his experiences have been challenged.

What are we to make of a person who claims to have mind-melded with God, who claims to possess supercognition and psychic powers, and who says "fuck you" to people who have the temerity to suggest that his dreams are nothing more than dreams? These fancies of the imagination may be interesting from a psychological perspective, but when used to claim a superior cognitive status, they become intolerable.

Ghs

I think it's your own superior cognitive status that you find intolerable.

[J Neil Schulman]

I am sympathetic to Neil's point here. He did not ask for this thread to be created, as far as I can tell. To his credit, he came here to further explain his experiences, and (probably naively) thought they would be accepted by some at face value. Probably the wrong crowd for such an assumption.

Neil has had a much easier time of it on OL than he would on many forums. This is because he is unlikely to find on OL people with competing theistic and supernaturalistic claims. If Neil were to join, say, a good Christian forum, he would find himself trumped again and again by people who have also talked to God (many more times than Neil has), and who would inform Neil that he is a mere novice in this realm who doesn't understand his encounter with God. They would then proceed to instruct Neil on a correct understanding of God, as Neil has attempted to instruct us.

In contrast, the most atheistic OLers can do is to posit hypothetical theistic claims that conflict with Neil's beliefs, and the result is a kind of shadow-boxing. If Neil wants to see what real boxing is like, then he should argue with sophisticated defenders of Christianity. He might last a few rounds before throwing in the towel.

Ghs

I was a member of the C.S. Lewis Society of Southern California for many years. I even served on its BoD (they called it the "governing council) for several terms. Sam Konkin and I joined together, attended together, and he also served on the BoD. I was an atheist when I first joined. I was still a member when I had my mind-meld, and was a speaker to the group on my experiences as reflected as fiction in Escape from Heaven.

I've been in discussions of my experiences against as sophisticated Christians as exist. I didn't throw in the towel. If you want to talk to one, I suggest Chris McKinney, because he's both a hard-core ancap and a professional Christian minister.

[Brant Gaede]

I think the reason you've been taunting me is that I represent everything you decided was never going to be allowed into your philosophy.

So I think one of the world's most published atheists is a self-denying psychic.

Since epistemology is concerned with ways to knowledge and its verification not what constitutes reality as such, all you've come up with are stories which may indicate a way to knowledge but are substantially unverifiable and cannot travel beyond the campfire or bull sessions.

--Brant

[Xray]

I subscribe to every premise Ayn Rand puts forth in this video -- including her statement that substituting faith for reason is psychologically destructive and that faith-based religion is damaging to human self-esteem and reliance on reason.

Nowhere does she [AR] assert that God can not exist.

Wrong. She even boldly asserts that God does not nexist.

She makes an epistemological mistake just like you, only from the other side of the fence.

How much more of this epistemological rat poison must we endure?

Imo Neil's struggle to get his foot on epistemological ground here has not a poisonous, but a comical effect.

Trying to use Ayn Rand's axioms as conclusive evidence to make his case for God is really priceless. It's like trying to use Karl Marx's axioms to prove that the Bible says the truth.

What's making you [Ghs]choke is that Objectivist epistemology places direct experience at the root of all perception and concept-formation.

The issue here is about the interpretation of the perceptions. Or do you think little Susie's perception of a dollar on her pillow constitutes proof of the Tooth Fairy's existence?

Also, the perceptions themselves can be deceiving due to sensory delusion, for which again there can be various reasons.

[To Ghs]:

I had an experience. You are free to dismiss my interpretation of it because I regard it as proving to myself things you consider unprovable, but you are not going to get away with dismissing me as irrational.

Believing that it is possible to prove a god's existence to oneself is irrational. It is a huge thinking error actually.

Edited January 10, 2011 by Xray

[Starbuckle]

I really am not enough of a seer to understand why referring to the mystics as "seers" is proof of dishonesty. I didn't get it out of "thin air," it just happened to be one of the words I keep on tap in my brain.

Unfortunately, my Asimov autobiographies are in boxes, but I was able to get the following snippets from Google Books. Asimov goes into more detail about Campbell's saturating late-life mysticism. Campbell of course gave Hubbard his first forum, the Campbell-edited sf magazine Astounding/Analog, for expounding the dianetics baloney.

Asimov:

"This was going to develop into 'dianetics,' out of which Hubbard was to make his fortune and gain his godhead. Campbell was unabashedly enthusiastic about it, and this marked his first dip into the kind of mysticism that was to consume him for the rest of his life."

[in Memory Yet Green, Isaac Asimov]

"'Aha,' said Campbell, triumphantly, as he carefully took the reading. 'Negative stickiness.'

"And that's how great nonsense discoveries are made."

[in Joy Still Felt, Isaac Asimov]

Edited January 10, 2011 by Starbuckle

[william.scherk]

Interesting that Neil now adds John Campbell to the list of seers. Is this an implicit endorsement of the hogwash of dianetics?

Probably not for Neil, but definitely for the early Campbell -- who left Dianetics even before the e-meters were constructed and peddled. Neil spins Campbell's initial boosterism as somehow blessed by Szasz, Heinlein and other holies, and pretends that Campbell saw Dianetic's central procedure of auditing as "a brilliant suggestion of conducting psychanalysis while using a polygraph to detect peaks in patient stress." Hooey of the first order as well as a deeply stupid gloss on the basis of Hubbard's practice. Campbell was hands-down the woo-iest of the SF woo woos.

I wish Neil could tell us what he thinks about Dianetics, auditing and e-meters, but he likely won't. Still, what impression is left from his comments? That anything paranormal should be swallowed whole.

At the Buffet of Woo, Neil is a champion feeder.

[Starbuckle]

WSS writes: "Probably not for Neil, but definitely for the early Campbell -- who left Dianetics even before the e-meters were constructed and peddled."

Early Campbell? My impression from the reports by those who knew him is that he went downhill in later years, although I suppose he moved on from the dianetics fad to favor other mystical fads.

Here's an excerpt from the article on Campbell in Wikipedia (I credit it because it matches my memory of other reports about Campbell):

>>In 1949, Campbell also became interested in Dianetics. He wrote of L. Ron Hubbard's initial article in Astounding that "It is, I assure you in full and absolute sincerity, one of the most important articles ever published."[22] He also claimed to have successfully used dianetic techniques himself....

>>British novelist and critic Kingsley Amis dismissed Campbell brusquely: "I might just add as a sociological note that the editor of Astounding, himself a deviant figure of marked ferocity, seems to think he has invented a psi machine."[31]...

>>SF writer Alfred Bester, an editor of Holiday Magazine and a sophisticated Manhattanite, recounted at some length his "one demented meeting" with Campbell, a man he imagined from afar to be "a combination of Bertrand Russell and Ernest Rutherford." The first thing Campbell said to him was that Freud was dead, destroyed by the new discovery of Dianetics, which, he predicted, would win L. Ron Hubbard the Nobel Peace Prize. Campbell ordered the bemused Bester to "think back. Clear yourself. Remember! You can remember when your mother tried to abort you with a button hook. You've never stopped hating her for it." Bester commented: "It reinforced my private opinion that a majority of the science-fiction crowd, despite their brilliance, were missing their marbles."[33]<<

(I omitted parts that I didn't want to seem to endorse by including them and that do not pertain anyway to the mysticism. For example, socialist Moorcock is quoted in the middle of the above passages as intimating that anti-socialism is tantamount to fascism.)

Edited January 10, 2011 by Starbuckle

[George H. Smith]

Like you I did not posit a god or a supernatural realm because my epistemological premises that no data coming from anything other than the five senses eliminated them from my consideration.

I have never made any such assumption, nor do I rule out a priori the possibility of extra-sensory abilities that we sometimes characterize as "intuition." What I object to is someone who makes fantastic claims and, when criticized, appeals to special cognitive powers that others lack or have not developed. This is cognitive elitism, pure and simple -- a somewhat more sophisticated version of claiming that I am smarter than other people.

Cognitive elitism (in various forms) has a long history, and it led to disastrous results. This is why John Locke and the Deists (many of whom were libertarians) argued against it with such passion.

When I had experiences that I'd been dismissing as merely unreal artifacts of human psychology began showing evidence of having cognitive value, I revised my epistemological premises, and I now was examining and analyzing additional data.

I have never dismissed my weird experiences as "unreal artifacts of human psychology." Most have been as real as anything I have ever experienced.

I am going to tell a true story that I alluded to I while back. This was my most dramatic "supernatural" experience. I have never related this story for public consumption, and I am reluctant to tell it now, because it involves my boyhood sexuality, but here it is.

By the seventh grade I had mastered that art of masturbation, but, as a good Christian boy, I felt guilty about it. But there was something far worse, namely, the certainty that I was being watched, not only by God and Jesus but by all my dead relatives. (Readers of ATCAG may recall my reference to God as an "omnipresent voyeurist." Now you know why I cooked up this phrase.) This bugged the hell out of me.

Anyway, one day after awakening with the usual EMH (early morning hard-on), I went through my usual routine. Then around a minute after climaxing, I felt an extremely sharp pain in my testicles. And I mean it was unbearable; imagine someone using your balls for a pin cushion, and you will get some idea of what it felt like. It was the worst pain I have ever felt in my life, and it shot all the way up into my chest.

I immediately knew what had happened: God finally got fed up with my sinning and decided to send a warning. I headed to the bathroom, but I couldn't stand up, so I crawled. I stayed in a fetal position on the bathroom floor for around five minutes, hoping the pain would subside, but it didn't. If anything it got worse. So I cried out to God, "Please, stop it. Stop it! I'm sorry. I won't ever do it again." (By "it," of course, I meant masturbation.)

Immediately the pain began to go away. I could feel it flow from my body, and within ten seconds it was all gone. Here was a "miracle" if ever there was one, a confirmation of my belief in God. I was profoundly grateful and headed back to bed determined to keep my promise to God. I returned to bed with a sense of inner piece.

But as I lay in bed blasphemous doubts began to whirl through my mind. My thinking, put in terms that I would use today, was as follows.

What's the big deal here? Every boy jacks off, and I'm just a kid. I'm not hurting anyone. Why would God bring me such pain just to teach me a lesson? This is bullshit.

Within 30 minutes I was extremely angry at God, so I challenged him in an unusual and risky way. I thre the sheet off of me and started to masturbate again, while thinking (again, in adult language), Here, God, get a really good look. This is what I think of your stupid punishment. You want to punish me? okay, give it your best shot. I climaxed within a minute or two and repeated the performance one more time. The pain didn't return, ever, and I quickly concluded that it was guilt, not God, that had caused it the first time.

This experience didn't make me an atheist, but it raised some serious doubts. In addition, it made me keenly aware of the power of the mind and the relationship between sex and guilt. (Again, some of this comes out in ATCAG, and much of my discussion is based on this experience, even though I never mention it.) I later came to terms with the problem of voyeuristic relatives, but that is another interesting story.

Looking back, I suppose my "challenge" was pretty gutsy for a pious Christian boy. Deliberately breaking a promise to God, especially when he had just "healed" me in what seemed a miraculous way, and then challenging him to do something about it, was about the worst sin imaginable. If anyone ever had "proof" of God's existence, it was surely I on that bathroom floor begging for God to help me and having my prayer answered. Yet the net result was to raise serious doubts about my religious beliefs. This one event, probably more than any other, put me on the path to atheism.

Fair warning, Neil. If you give my experience a bullshit theistic interpretation, e.g., that all this was God's way of teaching me to be independent (or whatever), I'm going to hire a gypsy fortune teller to put a curse on you.

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

Interesting that Neil now adds John Campbell to the list of seers. Is this an implicit endorsement of the hogwash of dianetics?

Probably not for Neil, but definitely for the early Campbell -- who left Dianetics even before the e-meters were constructed and peddled. Neil spins Campbell's initial boosterism as somehow blessed by Szasz, Heinlein and other holies, and pretends that Campbell saw Dianetic's central procedure of auditing as "a brilliant suggestion of conducting psychanalysis while using a polygraph to detect peaks in patient stress." Hooey of the first order as well as a deeply stupid gloss on the basis of Hubbard's practice. Campbell was hands-down the woo-iest of the SF woo woos.

I wish Neil could tell us what he thinks about Dianetics, auditing and e-meters, but he likely won't. Still, what impression is left from his comments? That anything paranormal should be swallowed whole.

At the Buffet of Woo, Neil is a champion feeder.

Don't you mean "Diuretics"?

--Brant

[Starbuckle]

Oh George. That was just God's way of teaching you to be independent, or whatever.

[william.scherk]

WSS writes: "Probably not for Neil, but definitely for the early Campbell -- who left Dianetics even before the e-meters were constructed and peddled."

Early Campbell? My impression from the reports by those who knew him is that he went downhill in later years, although I suppose he moved on from the dianetics fad to favor other mystical fads.

Yeah. My sentence was full of a few too many data points.

I meant to point out that Campbell was head booster for a short time only (breaking off with Hubbard in 1951) -- and that if Neil thought Campbell bought into the gush about e-meters, that was historically inaccurate since the e-meter came after Campbell ditched Hubbard and Hubbard moved the cult to Wichita.

As you allude, Campbell went full-bore into Kookdom thereafter, with his psionics and other magical machinery emerging a bit later. From the histories I read, it's obvious that Campbell alienated every one of the early SF greats who published in his magazine once he kooked out. It would be sad to think that Neil respects the subsequent kookout and disremembers that Campbell thought Hubbard an authoritarian cultist whackjob.

In one backstage exchange with Neil, while probing his self-professed early skepticism, I wondered what kind of skeptical books and other materials he had been reading back before he began to become suffused with woo. I mentioned (Paul) Kurtz / (Martin) Gardner and hoped to find out which if any published works helped him navigate around crackpottery.

He replied that he read everything, and I left it at that.

In retrospect, that was a dodge. He never read Gardner at all, I bet, let alone Gardner's masterly takedown of Hubbard and Dianetics first published in 1952 (Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science), from which the Dianetics chapter is available here.

Neil: Then Starbuckle dismisses John W. Campbell because he . . . found in the early drafts of Hubbard's book Dianatics some valid criticisms of psychiatry . . . and a brilliant suggestion of conducting psychanalysis while using a polygraph to detect peaks in patient stress.

Scherk: Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. The book says fuck all about using a polygraph.

[J Neil Schulman]

I wish Neil could tell us what he thinks about Dianetics, auditing and e-meters, but he likely won't. Still, what impression is left from his comments? That anything paranormal should be swallowed whole.

When I used to walk through New York every once in a while I'd get approached by someone from the Church of Scientology asking me if I wanted to take a personality test. Once I agreed and took it ... and was shuffled quickly outside, without them giving me any results. I guess I didn't fit their criteria of what they were recruiting. After that, when one of them asked me if I wanted to take a personality test, I gave them my prepared answer: "Sorry, I don't have a personality."

More recently Scientologists are very polite to me because they know I was friends with Heinlein. Friends of friends, and all that. But they tend to be very nice to science-fiction writers. They put out very nice spreads and lots of booze for free at their science-fiction convention room parties.

[J Neil Schulman]

WSS writes: "Probably not for Neil, but definitely for the early Campbell -- who left Dianetics even before the e-meters were constructed and peddled."

Early Campbell? My impression from the reports by those who knew him is that he went downhill in later years, although I suppose he moved on from the dianetics fad to favor other mystical fads.

Yeah. My sentence was full of a few too many data points.

I meant to point out that Campbell was head booster for a short time only (breaking off with Hubbard in 1951) -- and that if Neil thought Campbell bought into the gush about e-meters, that was historically inaccurate since the e-meter came after Campbell ditched Hubbard and Hubbard moved the cult to Wichita.

As you allude, Campbell went full-bore into Kookdom thereafter, with his psionics and other magical machinery emerging a bit later. From the histories I read, it's obvious that Campbell alienated every one of the early SF greats who published in his magazine once he kooked out. It would be sad to think that Neil respects the subsequent kookout and disremembers that Campbell thought Hubbard an authoritarian cultist whackjob.

In one backstage exchange with Neil, while probing his self-professed early skepticism, I wondered what kind of skeptical books and other materials he had been reading back before he began to become suffused with woo. I mentioned (Paul) Kurtz / (Martin) Gardner and hoped to find out which if any published works helped him navigate around crackpottery.

He replied that he read everything, and I left it at that.

In retrospect, that was a dodge. He never read Gardner at all, I bet, let alone Gardner's masterly takedown of Hubbard and Dianetics first published in 1952 (Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science), from which the Dianetics chapter is available here.

Neil: Then Starbuckle dismisses John W. Campbell because he . . . found in the early drafts of Hubbard's book Dianatics some valid criticisms of psychiatry . . . and a brilliant suggestion of conducting psychanalysis while using a polygraph to detect peaks in patient stress.

Scherk: Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. The book says fuck all about using a polygraph.

Of course I've read Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. It wasn't on the same shelf with Atheism: The Case Against God because I shelved my autographed books separately. But back when I had bookshelf space it was on the same shelf as books like Harry Lorayne's The Memory Book, Hawking's Brief History of Time, and Asimov's Guide to the Bible.

You really don't want to get into a pissing contest with me about what I've read. Before my eyes went bad I was reading whenever I wasn't doing something you couldn't do while reading.

[J Neil Schulman]

WSS writes: "Probably not for Neil, but definitely for the early Campbell -- who left Dianetics even before the e-meters were constructed and peddled."

Early Campbell? My impression from the reports by those who knew him is that he went downhill in later years, although I suppose he moved on from the dianetics fad to favor other mystical fads.

Yeah. My sentence was full of a few too many data points.

I meant to point out that Campbell was head booster for a short time only (breaking off with Hubbard in 1951) -- and that if Neil thought Campbell bought into the gush about e-meters, that was historically inaccurate since the e-meter came after Campbell ditched Hubbard and Hubbard moved the cult to Wichita.

As you allude, Campbell went full-bore into Kookdom thereafter, with his psionics and other magical machinery emerging a bit later. From the histories I read, it's obvious that Campbell alienated every one of the early SF greats who published in his magazine once he kooked out. It would be sad to think that Neil respects the subsequent kookout and disremembers that Campbell thought Hubbard an authoritarian cultist whackjob.

In one backstage exchange with Neil, while probing his self-professed early skepticism, I wondered what kind of skeptical books and other materials he had been reading back before he began to become suffused with woo. I mentioned (Paul) Kurtz / (Martin) Gardner and hoped to find out which if any published works helped him navigate around crackpottery.

He replied that he read everything, and I left it at that.

In retrospect, that was a dodge. He never read Gardner at all, I bet, let alone Gardner's masterly takedown of Hubbard and Dianetics first published in 1952 (Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science), from which the Dianetics chapter is available here.

Neil: Then Starbuckle dismisses John W. Campbell because he . . . found in the early drafts of Hubbard's book Dianatics some valid criticisms of psychiatry . . . and a brilliant suggestion of conducting psychanalysis while using a polygraph to detect peaks in patient stress.

Scherk: Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. The book says fuck all about using a polygraph.

An eMeter is a stripped down homemade polygraph, apparently made from Campbell's soup cans with the labels steamed off.

[J Neil Schulman]

WSS writes: "Probably not for Neil, but definitely for the early Campbell -- who left Dianetics even before the e-meters were constructed and peddled."

Early Campbell? My impression from the reports by those who knew him is that he went downhill in later years, although I suppose he moved on from the dianetics fad to favor other mystical fads.

Here's an excerpt from the article on Campbell in Wikipedia (I credit it because it matches my memory of other reports about Campbell):

>>In 1949, Campbell also became interested in Dianetics. He wrote of L. Ron Hubbard's initial article in Astounding that "It is, I assure you in full and absolute sincerity, one of the most important articles ever published."[22] He also claimed to have successfully used dianetic techniques himself....

>>British novelist and critic Kingsley Amis dismissed Campbell brusquely: "I might just add as a sociological note that the editor of Astounding, himself a deviant figure of marked ferocity, seems to think he has invented a psi machine."[31]...

>>SF writer Alfred Bester, an editor of Holiday Magazine and a sophisticated Manhattanite, recounted at some length his "one demented meeting" with Campbell, a man he imagined from afar to be "a combination of Bertrand Russell and Ernest Rutherford." The first thing Campbell said to him was that Freud was dead, destroyed by the new discovery of Dianetics, which, he predicted, would win L. Ron Hubbard the Nobel Peace Prize. Campbell ordered the bemused Bester to "think back. Clear yourself. Remember! You can remember when your mother tried to abort you with a button hook. You've never stopped hating her for it." Bester commented: "It reinforced my private opinion that a majority of the science-fiction crowd, despite their brilliance, were missing their marbles."[33]<<

(I omitted parts that I didn't want to seem to endorse by including them and that do not pertain anyway to the mysticism. For example, socialist Moorcock is quoted in the middle of the above passages as intimating that anti-socialism is tantamount to fascism.)

I just love seeing half-century old fan feuds reignited.

[J Neil Schulman]

Like you I did not posit a god or a supernatural realm because my epistemological premises that no data coming from anything other than the five senses eliminated them from my consideration.

I have never made any such assumption, nor do I rule out a priori the possibility of extra-sensory abilities that we sometimes characterize as "intuition." What I object to is someone who makes fantastic claims and, when criticized, appeals to special cognitive powers that others lack or have not developed. This is cognitive elitism, pure and simple -- a somewhat more sophisticated version of claiming that I am smarter than other people.

Cognitive elitism (in various forms) has a long history, and it led to disastrous results. This is why John Locke and the Deists (many of whom were libertarians) argued against it with such passion.

When I had experiences that I'd been dismissing as merely unreal artifacts of human psychology began showing evidence of having cognitive value, I revised my epistemological premises, and I now was examining and analyzing additional data.

I have never dismissed my weird experiences as "unreal artifacts of human psychology." Most have been as real as anything I have ever experienced.

I am going to tell a true story that I alluded to I while back. This was my most dramatic "supernatural" experience. I have never related this story for public consumption, and I am reluctant to tell it now, because it involves my boyhood sexuality, but here it is.

By the seventh grade I had mastered that art of masturbation, but, as a good Christian boy, I felt guilty about it. But there was something far worse, namely, the certainty that I was being watched, not only by God and Jesus but by all my dead relatives. (Readers of ATCAG may recall my reference to God as an "omnipresent voyeurist." Now you know why I cooked up this phrase.) This bugged the hell out of me.

Anyway, one day after awakening with the usual EMH (early morning hard-on), I went through my usual routine. Then around a minute after climaxing, I felt an extremely sharp pain in my testicles. And I mean it was unbearable; imagine someone using your balls for a pin cushion, and you will get some idea of what it felt like. It was the worst pain I have ever felt in my life, and it shot all the way up into my chest.

I immediately knew what had happened: God finally got fed up with my sinning and decided to send a warning. I headed to the bathroom, but I couldn't stand up, so I crawled. I stayed in a fetal position on the bathroom floor for around five minutes, hoping the pain would subside, but it didn't. If anything it got worse. So I cried out to God, "Please, stop it. Stop it! I'm sorry. I won't ever do it again." (By "it," of course, I meant masturbation.)

Immediately the pain began to go away. I could feel it flow from my body, and within ten seconds it was all gone. Here was a "miracle" if ever there was one, a confirmation of my belief in God. I was profoundly grateful and headed back to bed determined to keep my promise to God. I returned to bed with a sense of inner piece.

But as I lay in bed blasphemous doubts began to whirl through my mind. My thinking, put in terms that I would use today, was as follows.

What's the big deal here? Every boy jacks off, and I'm just a kid. I'm not hurting anyone. Why would God bring me such pain just to teach me a lesson? This is bullshit.

Within 30 minutes I was extremely angry at God, so I challenged him in an unusual and risky way. I thre the sheet off of me and started to masturbate again, while thinking (again, in adult language), Here, God, get a really good look. This is what I think of your stupid punishment. You want to punish me? okay, give it your best shot. I climaxed within a minute or two and repeated the performance one more time. The pain didn't return, ever, and I quickly concluded that it was guilt, not God, that had caused it the first time.

This experience didn't make me an atheist, but it raised some serious doubts. In addition, it made me keenly aware of the power of the mind and the relationship between sex and guilt. (Again, some of this comes out in ATCAG, and much of my discussion is based on this experience, even though I never mention it.) I later came to terms with the problem of voyeuristic relatives, but that is another interesting story.

Looking back, I suppose my "challenge" was pretty gutsy for a pious Christian boy. Deliberately breaking a promise to God, especially when he had just "healed" me in what seemed a miraculous way, and then challenging him to do something about it, was about the worst sin imaginable. If anyone ever had "proof" of God's existence, it was surely I on that bathroom floor begging for God to help me and having my prayer answered. Yet the net result was to raise serious doubts about my religious beliefs. This one event, probably more than any other, put me on the path to atheism.

Fair warning, Neil. If you give my experience a bullshit theistic interpretation, e.g., that all this was God's way of teaching me to be independent (or whatever), I'm going to hire a gypsy fortune teller to put a curse on you.

Ghs

George, in your account you have yourself praying to God to remove pain, followed by pain being removed. This is the only direct communication between you and God in this entire account. Everything else is you arguing against the anti-sexual religious dogma you were raised into.

Nowhere in your account do you have God causing your pain. That was your own religious assumptions.

Nowhere in your account do you have God punishing you for making then breaking a promise to him that apparently he never asked you for.

In your account you do get mad at God and conclude that the net results was to raise serious doubts about your religious beliefs.

Here's my bullshit theist interpretation: I can't follow your logic of what you were blaming God for.

Me, I don't blame God for religious bullshit. I think people made almost all that shit up. Your story does make me feel sorry for God, if he made your pain go away, then got blamed for causing it.

Edited January 11, 2011 by J. Neil Schulman

[william.scherk]

Of course I've read Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.

<br>

Oh, good. I lose my bet, then. <br><br>

What did you think of that book, and has your opinion changed much since your unusual experiences?<br><br>My favourite chapter covers Wilhelm Reich. I wonder if you have any brief comments on Reich. Was he an inspiration to you, and do you think his orgone theory can fit in your cosmology?<br>

[George H. Smith]

George, in your account you have yourself praying to God to remove pain, followed by pain being removed. This is the only direct communication between you and God in this entire account. Everything else is you arguing against the anti-sexual religious dogma you were raised into.

Nowhere in your account do you have God causing your pain. That was your own religious assumptions.

Nowhere in your account do you have God punishing you for making then breaking a promise to him that apparently he never asked you for.

In your account you do get mad at God and conclude that the net results was to raise serious doubts about your religious beliefs.

Here's my bullshit theist interpretation: I can't follow your logic of what you were blaming God for.

Me, I don't blame God for religious bullshit. I think people made almost all that shit up. Your story does make me feel sorry for God, if he made your pain go away, then got blamed for causing it.

Thanks for your bullshit interpretation. You don't seem to have a clue about what was going on. Perhaps this is because you were never a Christian and don't understand the mindset.

After my defiant challenge, it quickly became evident to me that God was neither the cause nor the cure of my pain. I was the cause of both. The experience was purely psychosomatic.

Ghs