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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The rest of you may now make fun of me for regarding this as anything other than an ordinary dream. Fuck you.

I'm going to drop the critical stance for a while and give you my general perspective on all this.

I have lived an extraordinary life by most standards. Suffice it to say that I have long considered writing an autobiography titled Sex, Drugs, and Philosophy: In Pursuit of a Hedonistic Life. Although this would be my best book by far and would probably sell very well, it would almost certainly ruin my academic career. I suppose you might call it a blend of philosophy and (written) pornography. In any case it would be a brutally honest account of the pros and cons of "rational hedonism."

One thing I learned during decades of experimentation and intense introspection is how incredibly complex the human mind can be. I don't want to pontificate too much, but here would be my honest advice to you.

Forget about your "explanations" and focus on the experiences themselves. Assume that your subconscious, not God or dead people, is telling you something. I am not recommending some Freudian analysis of dreams and so forth, but something quite different (though I think Freud had some brilliant insights about the human condition.) Nor am I recommending some kind of self-administered therapy, though the procedures I hit upon nearly 30 years ago did revive many childhood memories. I went from recalling very little before age 5 or 6 to having several distinct memories before age 1 and many after that. I recall the evening in 1983 when I was able to remember the name of every teacher I had from kindergarten through high school, and was able to visualize what each of them looked like. This may not be unusual for some people, but it was extraordinary for me.

I know I have been vague, but I will go into more detail if anyone is interested.

Ghs

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 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 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.

Maybe Clarke's Law helped: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I just considered a few corollaries to that law that anything that appears magical has a natural explanation we don't yet understand -- and that includes any phenomena we tag supernatural. If anything supernatural is real, it is subject to eventual discovery by reason -- and that includes "miraculous" or "divine" interventions, minds that continue thinking -- possibly in a body existing in another continua -- after we see the body die here, communications from "beyond" (hey, beyond used to be any farther than smoke signals), and so forth.

I regard the Sixth Sense as Imagination, and I'm serious when I say being able to image the unknown is a necessary tool of cognition.

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.

Now feel free to go back to dumping on me. It won't bother me anymore.

George, I will believe you had any experience you told me you had. And I'm more prepared, because of my own experiences, to explore alternate and unconventional explanations -- perhaps leading to revision of epistemological procedures, with consequences on one's ontological and cosmological conclusions -- than some others.

I am also willing to explore different and even unconventional "explanations," provided they actually explain something. A major problem with your theories is that they typically don't explain anything at all. To posit God as an explantion is meaningless, unless we understand something about the causal mechanisms by which God gets things done.

The same is true of many paranormal "explanations," including your account of the mysterious music. For example, where do the "dead" get their violins and other instruments? Do they use material instruments or incorpeal instruments? Can someone learn to play the violin after he "dies"? And how did your father assemble the other musicians needed for his orchestra? Did they need to rehearse? Did they read from sheet music?

Ghs

I have an answer for this last question, because I asked my dad when I visited him in the afterlife. He told me that musical staves printed on paper had been replaced by an electronic musical notation system. I also asked him where he was playing and he told me he was a violinist in the pit orchestra of a puppet show.

*sigh*

When my daughter was little I took her to acting auditions. Almost invariably, in the waiting room for these auditions, there was a TV set playing an animated movie to keep the kids occupied while waiting to be seen.

I bring this up because the transition, for me, found me in much the same situation. I "came to" sitting in what appeared to be a screening room only on the screen was something more like a TV program than a movie.

A young man looking under 20 came to get me. It took me a moment to recognize him because I'd never met him at this age. It was my father. He was 37 when I was born.

He took me out into a hallway and we started walking together. The first question I asked him was, "Is this heaven?" He said yes. It was at this moment that the "dream" became lucid for me. I realized I was asleep and dreaming because I knew my father was dead; and because I knew I was asleep and dreaming I also knew I was awake. All I'd seen so far was the screening room and a hallway, so I asked, "Can I see Heaven?" He said yes.

It was while we were walking I asked him about where he was working, and he told me about being a violinist in the orchestra for a puppet show. I don't precisely remember how the topic of musical notation came up, but he told me it was electronic, not on paper.

We came to a doorway, and when it opened I was hit by a wind of maybe 10 to 15 miles per hour, and maybe 90% F. It felt to me like it would have been too warm for me if it weren't for the breeze.

I looked out on a city that reminded me a little bit like New York at Central Park East, except that it was obviously not New York. There was some sort of park directly in front of me, but beyond that I could see high-rise towers. I started noticing that my sense of sight worked differently than I was used to; if I focused on something in the distance it was like I had a built-in zoom. Off in the distance I saw what looked like a San Francisco cable car, or a Boston trolley, except it was moving at the speed of a bullet train. I had the thought at that moment that design could be entirely esthetic or cosmetic because apparently engineering had progressed past the point of requiring streamlining. I panned to my right and I saw what looked like a superhighway with speeding cars on it, and I saw a collision, where one car smashed up another -- and the moment they separated each one morphed back into its original undamaged shape. I found that engineering impressive.

I started noticing that I was smelling a pleasant baking odor -- heavy in sugar and cinnamon. My dad walked me to what resembled a Cracker Barrel restaurant and store, with a bakery in it. We walked in and I saw a sixteen-year-old girl behind a wooden candy counter. She looked familiar but once again it took me a minute to recognize her. It was my grandmother, who had died in 1969 when I was sixteen and she was 70. I lifted up the wooden separator to get behind the counter, and when I felt her arms around me I was shocked into waking up, and I woke up sobbing, still feeling her hug.

When I told my mother about this later that morning, I started crying again. But my mother told me something that, if I'd known it, I'd completely forgotten: that when my grandmother was a little girl she'd worked in her father's candy store.

The rest of you may now make fun of me for regarding this as anything other than an ordinary dream. Fuck you.

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.

JNS wrote: "That's a broad outline. I'm not prepared to defend it in any great detail."

I believe you. I believe! I'm a believer!

Neil's elaboration of his nonsensical views about perception are a further indication, if any were needed, that he rejects an Objectivist-style perspective on epistemology and knowledge. The book to read refuting representationalism and "diaphanous" notions of perception is David Kelley's Evidence of the Senses.

WSS alludes to "consensus reality." It is possible to have consensus about what exists in reality, but only because we're all in the same reality whether we agree about it or not. Of course, often we observe different aspects of the world and may be logical (me) or illogical (Neil) in our interpretations. I think we can all agree that we can observe reality using our senses only, not also magic and trauma-triggered imaginary peering through portals to other realities.

BTW, Neil complains that I give the impression of believing I'm omniscient or infallible or something like that. This is very far from the case. It's only because he's so consistently wrong that I seem so consistently right by contrast. Indeed, I have made many mistakes in my life and wish I knew a lot more than I do--about reality only, however. Sorry for any confusion.

Apparently you think all work on epistemology ended in the 1980's.

How quaint.

But it's worse than that. Apparently you'd also throw out a lot of science on how the brain is hard-wired to modulate perception of reality as well.

Look at the work of UC Irvine cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman, PhD: http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ and http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanPubs.html

I don't believe you at all, partly because I had many similar experiences after my father drowned in a boating accident in 1974, shortly after I had returned to Tucson to rest up while awaiting the publication of ATCAG. He and a friend were swept overboard in a freak storm on Lake Roosevelt while zipped-up in their sleeping bags.

I had nightmares for years (the notion of drowning while confined still terrifies me), but the 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.

Ghs

George, I believe you.

If I told you, in all seriousness, that I was actually hearing the voice of Izanami, the Japanese (Shinto) goddess of death, would you still believe me? I was born in Japan, after all.

Ghs

George, I will believe you had any experience you told me you had. And I'm more prepared, because of my own experiences, to explore alternate and unconventional explanations -- perhaps leading to revision of epistemological procedures, with consequences on one's ontological and cosmological conclusions -- than some others.

The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to bereavement but are rarely discussed, because people fear they might be considered insane or mentally destabilised by their loss. As a society we tend to associate hallucinations with things like drugs and mental illness, but we now know that hallucinations are common in sober healthy people and that they are more likely during times of stress.

The principle of parsimony is biased by the assumptions you start with. But if believing in hallucinations rather than ghosts seems least hypothesis to you, nothing I say can change your mind.

Well, surely we both 'believe' in hallucinations, right?

Yes.

The note about grief hallucinations was written mostly for George. His experiences were distressing and he says he struggled with the notion he was losing his mind.

But nothing in the explanation above explicitly rules out a 'paranormal' alternative set of assumptions. Indeed, I think you can accept, if only provisionally, that hallucinations can account for at least some visitation experiences. Is that correct?

Yes.

If so, then you could, if you wished, lay out details of an alternative that makes most sense to you, that offers a framework for understanding visitation experiences the rest of us can follow. Because you have explicitly set aside faith, have explicitly claimed reason as the best guide to coherent explanation, there is no doubt a coherent framework of explanation that undergirds the conclusion you have made.

So, let's accept that your father's spirit did really appear to you in full sensory form, as told. Let's set aside faith and explore the assumptions that support an alternative explanation.

What are the rough outlines of your explanation, then, Neil -- how do you sketch out how such a visitation is accomplished?

My rough outline of explanation is that the human brain uses a set of algorithms, some of them hardwired, to present a simplified "desktop" of what we call reality, because the reality is far too complex to be directly perceived. I think the functioning of the brain is to narrow and focus consciousness to a common multi-user perception of what is regarded as everyday or conventional reality. Probably greater than 99% of the time that's all anyone needs to function.

I believe that human biological life was designed as a training regimen for conscious beings who need it as a live-fire exercise to learn complex lessons, with limitations on lasting consequences that survive the body's death.

Just as there's a bell curve varying among individuals other talents and perceptions, some individuals have a deeper or widened perception which isn't limited to the conventional "desktop" of common multi-user perception. I think what we tag dreams is the brain's television, with just as much variation in content as between a TV news report and a TV soap opera. This is an analogy; in other ways the Internet might be a better analogy.

I think our type of consciousness actually exists simultaneously in multiple continua or dimensions, and some people are better than others in accessing more than the "common" one you and I are sharing right now. I think consciousness is in some way holographic; I'm not enough of specialist in either physics or neurology to talk about it technically in any great depth.

That's a broad outline. I'm not prepared to defend it in any great detail. I regard it somewhere between a hypothesis and a theory -- your mileage may vary.

WSS wrote: "So, let's accept that your father's spirit did really appear to you in full sensory form, as told. Let's set aside faith and explore the assumptions that support an alternative explanation. What are the rough outlines of your explanation, then, Neil -- how do you sketch out how such a visitation is accomplished?"

This is an example of how ridiculous all interlocutors but me are getting in this discourse. Neil has reported that his father had died by the time he and his mother heard the music. Death, I think we can all agree, is the end of life. That's by definition. The death of an organism involves expiration, an end to its biological processes, including the state of consciousness that is generated by those biological processes. Dead is dead.

No, we can't all agree that "death" is the end of "life." For over 200 posts in this forum I've made it sparkling clear that I regard human consciousness as surviving the death of the brain, inasmuch as consciousness is not a product of human biology but both precedes and succeeds it.

That statement that "Nobody can disagree" is always a signifier of dogmatic and unscientific assumptions whether it's "We can all agree that C02 causes global warming" or "We can all agree that a human life begins at conception."

That's religion or politics, kid, not epistemology or science.

So disagree all you like, but you don't get to claim universal agreement.

Scherk's inquiry is beyond offensive. If Neil can't cite any evidence for his belief that the being that allegedly mind-melded with him is everlasting, how on earth does Scherk expect Neil to explain how any mere mortal organism's life can continue after the end of its life? Scherk should be more reasonable than this.

Neil has made clear that his stipulated continued acceptance of reason, causality and identity is irrelevant with respect to substantiating any conclusions he has imbibed from the entity he calls God.

Bullshit. I've never stipulated any such thing. All I've stipulated is that certain experiences are impossible to present to others as evidence, and to demand others accept them as real based on nothing more than faith is an abandonment of reason.

To the extent that Neil's new conclusions about the nature of reality flagrantly contradict the nature of the reality that we can all perceive and test and talk about, it's the mutually observable reality which must go out the window, and Neil's fantasy which must trump all evidence, reason and common sense. Why is Scherk being such a jerk here? Is it some kind of quirk? It's not going to work.

Once again your conclusion is nothing more than a restatement of your unsubstantiated assumption.

I have observed direct evidence of what I conclude is survival of human consciousness beyond corporeal death. Others presented with similar evidence dismiss it as hallucinations and torture themselves, wondering if they've gone off the deep end.

You are entitled to regard it as fantasy and hallucination. But when I'm present in the discussion, you don't get away with claiming victory in argument for what despite your claims of superior reason is nothing more than your opinion.

The difference between us is that I'm not the one claiming omniscience.

This post is now redundant.

William Scherk's clever variations on Bach aside, the incident that happened to my mom and me at the FEE convention is a perfect example of why an experience can lead to a least-hypothesis interpretation for me which is a wild-ass complicated explanation for someone else. The "evidence" is so individually tailored that not only is there no one-size-fits-all but the slipper that fits Cinderella is apparently of a size not to be found in any shoe store.

Emphases added.

Now, I know Bach's work intimately, and the violin concerto my mom and I were hearing was not Bach. You can't mistake baroque era violin for the romantic-era violin concerto my mom and I were hearing

[ . . . ]

I said something like, "Look, we know what we heard and it couldn't be Bach.

[ . . . ]

My mom and I know what we heard, and we both heard the same thing: an unknown violin concerto in the style of a 19th century composer

[ . . . ]

Everyone else aside from my mom and me said they heard Bach.

Well, I am willing to add you to the body of thought that finds meaning in Bach, who finds Bach to contain all music, who finds Bach to be divine.

So, perhaps we should put a third explanation on the table for consideration.

Bach was both messager and message on that uncanny night. In other words, using the music of the spheres, Bach reached out from Heaven to announce a connection between the divine and the Schulmans. Using a violin concerto, for a few brief moments, Bach parted the membranes between universes, sent a bolt of pure awareness from the Universal Consciousness to you and your mother, and so showed the whole world that not only are musical miracles possible, but that the Schulmans are antenna to receive the Universal Bach Consciousness.

Isn't it possible, Neil, that Bach is god? that if only we tune our intenna, we can absorb the mystery that glorifies the multiple membranes?

I think that is is most plausible that the voices you heard and the supercognition you experienced is actually the eternal genius of Bach moving in the world of J Neil Schulman! In some ineffable way 'GodBach' is 'RiggenBach' and 'Bach' is Music and Music is Knowledge and Quantum Superposition is Bach and violin concertos are proof of Superstring Theory and John Edward and Uri Geller and all the mysteries of the world.

I get a chill down the spine just thinking of this . . .

In support of this most plausible explanation, I list a few testimonies of the Power of Superstring Bach:

Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars.

- Friederick Chopin

To strip human nature until its divine attributes are made clear, to inform ordinary activities with spiritual fervor, to give wings of eternity to that which is most ephemeral; to make divine things human and human things divine; such is Bach, the greatest and purest moment in music of all time.

- Pablo Casals

And if we look at the works of JS Bach - a benevolent god to which all musicians should offer a prayer to defend themselves against mediocrity - on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered. And in his works we will search in vain for anything the least lacking in good taste.

- Claude Debussy

...the greatest Christian music in the world...if life had taken hope and faith from me, this single chorus would restore all.

- Felix Mendelssohn

Bach is the beginning and end of all music.

- Max Reger

I had no idea of the historical evolution of the civilized world's music and had not realized that all modern music owes everything to Bach.

- Niccolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Music owes as much to Bach as religion to its founder.

- Robert Schumann

...the most stupendous miracle in all music!.

- Richard Wagner

Bach is a colossus of Rhodes, beneath whom all musicians pass and will continue to pass. Mozart is the most beautiful, Rossini the most brilliant, but Bach is the most comprehensive: he has said all there is to say. If all the music written since Bach's time should be lost, it could be reconstructed on the foundation which Bach laid.

- Charles Gounod

Study Bach. There you will find everything.

- Johannes Brahms

If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach...

- Aaron Copland

If Bach is not in Heaven.....I am not going!

- William F. Buckley

Whether the angels play only Bach praising God, I am not quite sure.

- Karl Barth

I do not honestly think there is the slightest possibility that [J Neil Schulman or I] could hear a Bach violin concerto and think it was written in the late 19th Century.

- Jeff Riggenbach

A plausible thesis. I'll reconsider. :-)

Jeff Riggenbach, I know you read this forum. Do you honestly think there's even the slightest possibility I can't tell the difference between Bach and a late 19th century violin concerto? I know that you could in about five seconds.

I do not honestly think there is the slightest possibility that either of us could hear a Bach violin concerto and think it was written in the late 19th Century.

JR

Fritz Kreisler successfully passed off a work of his own as a violin concerto by Vivaldi. I agree with the main point though, if you're mixing up Bach and Tchaikovsky, you don't know diddly about classical music. What's this have to do with God? I haven't been following the thread.

For the thread, see my Message #664 in reply to William Scherk's Message #659.

I have yet to find in any of my readings or discussions anyone else who claims that God entered his body for eight hours and conflated our personal identities, shared multi-dimensional cognition including the ability to look at other people's past and "central motivating factor" future; and uploaded to me a database of information which ended up unfolding over the subsequent years.

I haven’t been posting on this thread because I feel I should read the linked interview first, so I don’t mean to be rude just popping in and asking a couple basic questions. First, in allowing you to learn about the future, did God give you some winning Powerball numbers? Why not? That’s the database field I’d really like to have uploaded when it happens to me. Whatever the supernatural voice tells me to do, I’m game so long as it’s accompanied by winning lottery numbers. Hear that, Mephistopheles?

Second, where you on drugs? LSD or mushrooms, particularly? Had you used them before, and maybe had a flashback?

You can read Neil's discussion of his experience (one of several tellings, one of several experiences) in Chapter Six: Mind Meld.

I think it is accurate to say that Neil was physically and mentally stressed around the time of the Mind Meld. In the passage below he gives the most expansive version of events.

Beyond the obvious priming for the event (for which you will need to read the whole account), I am struck by Neil's interpretive options. It seems like he saw only two choices: I met god or I am crazy. Although he asserts that Occam's razor is no use to anyone in interpreting experience, I figure the razor cuts cleanly.

Considering the unusual mental state he found himself in -- paranoid, dehydrated, sleepless -- it seems likely to an outsider like me that the one state led to the other, and no spirit beings were actually involved.

Your mileage may vary.

Going back five months before that, I started a diet. I had put on weight, probably as a consequence of the unhappiness of going through a divorce. I put on weight and I started a severe diet, and it was a diet which had worked for me before in my life very, very effectively. A diet of reduced calories, usually under 900 calories a day, but also restricting carbohydrates as well to under maybe 30 or 40 grams a day. In addition to which I was walking, exercising.

So the combination of restricted calories, restricted carbohydrates, and exercise put me into the state which the Atkins Diet and the Atkins diet books and Dr. Atkins talk about, which is you go into a state of ketosis.

Within a couple days before February 18, 1997, which was a Tuesday, I have been in the hospital emergency room because I feel myself fainting. I feel my heartbeat is irregular. I feel in serious danger. And so I go into the Emergency Room and what do they do? They say you’re dehydrated and they rehydrate me by putting an intravenous saline drip into me to get me back up to rehydration.

This happened twice, at least once before the 18th and I’m not sure exactly which day but it probably would have been the Saturday before. I think it happens within a day or two after the event, on around the 19th or something like that.

So two times during this period, I am in such ketosis of blood poisoning from the excess of ketones in my blood caused from five months of severe diet and exercise and just before and just after that I am dehydrated in ketosis and breathing shallowly.

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: But in essence the precondition for what appears to happen to me appears to have a physiological component to it and it is described in the Bible and I unwittingly, simply by trying to take off weight, have put myself in the same situation as if I’d gone out to the desert to fight the devil.

Fasting puts you into ketosis. Apparently the ketones have some toxic effect on the brain, which enables something to happen.

This is not a drug experience. We’re not talking about taking an artificially engineered substance, or even a natural plant substance, into the body, to produce some sort of effect. We’re not talking about my taking Peyote or Marijuana or LSD or anything like this. This is something, which is in the body’s mechanism, itself, which can be triggered by a specific technique, and that technique is denial of food. And something happens in the brain.

Now, on the Monday before, when I go to the Karl Hess Club, suddenly it occurs to me I have done things over the previous few days. I have, in essence, sent out information to various different people. I have met during that previous week with detectives at the L.A.P.D. and presented my theory to them. I have presented it to O.J.’s attorneys. And that night it occurs to me, if this has gotten to Ron Shipp, if this information that I am presenting a theory that Ron Shipp was involved in these murders and framing O.J., I could be in physical danger.

BRAD LINAWEAVER: I remember you from that period and I remember I’ve never seen you more paranoid.

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: Right, because I suddenly thought, “what have I done to myself? I’ve exposed myself, I’ve exposed my family here, and I need to take immediate action to batten down the hatches before because if I am vulnerable I wouldn’t know about it.” In essence I go to high alert.

That night I went to my bank, I withdrew cash, got into my car and started wondering where should I put myself for the next few days, while I’m making further contacts? Who can I go to who I wouldn’t necessarily be traced to, if I were to go there as a safe house? Should I drive to Jean, Nevada, and stay in one of those $18 a night hotel rooms, which I could easily afford to do? Is there some friend who could be useful to me?

What I essentially decided to do that night was drive out to Randy Herrst’s house and ask him for help. I drove out late at night to Randy’s. He came down with me, and we basically sat in my car, and I laid out all of this to him. And I said, “Look, am I just being paranoid or is there a real possibility that I’m in danger here?”

He said, “Neil, the point is that you have no way of knowing, and so, yes, you were right to take protective steps. Now let’s figure out what we’re going to do, to resolve this quickly, in such a way that you don’t have to go into hiding if somebody really is pissed off with you and is going to take some action.”

So around 10 o’clock in the morning of February 18th I’ve been up all night talking with Randy and strategizing this. So now in addition to the physiological condition of ketosis and dehydration, which I’ve been experiencing, I’ve now gone without a night’s sleep.

And we go have the meeting with this attorney in Beverly Hills. He says, “Well, look, I know another attorney who has a direct contact with Gil Garcetti at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office. Let’s present your material to him.”

And so we make an appointment for me to go back to his office later that day and meet with him again.

Now, having had this first meeting with Randy and this attorney, in the morning of February 18th, I need to get some sleep. Randy thinks it’s a good idea if I not go to sleep unprotected. That I not go to sleep and simply be alone.

BRAD LINAWEAVER: You mean have somebody on guard?

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: Have somebody on guard. This is Randy’s suggestion. Randy is acting in essence as my bodyguard at this point. But Randy also has gone a night without sleep and he needs to go home and sleep as well, before this meeting, and so we called up another friend of ours, Dafydd ab Hugh, and I said, “Dafydd can you come over to my place?” and I explained the situation in brief. I said, “There’s some potential for danger. I don’t know exactly how to calculate it. It may be a small potential. It may be a large potential. But we don’t know. Could you just come over to my place and just sort of watch my back while I get some sleep?”

And Dafydd said, “Yes,” and he came over.

Dafydd gets there around 11:30 or 11:45 in the morning. And Randy says, “Okay, I’m going to go home and get some sleep and I’ll meet you later today, and we’ll go over to the attorney’s office again.”

So Dafydd is out in the living room, and I say, “Okay, I’m going to lie down.” And I go into my bedroom, and I close the door to lie down and get some sleep before the meeting.

And I lay down on my bed, and about ten seconds later — almost immediately — something has happened and I sit up in bed.

The first impression I’m having is that I have just traveled a long way, and I’ve just arrived.

And I’m looking around and I’m thinking, “Where am I? What’s going on?”

Remember, all of this is from my internal perspective.

Okay. I am sitting up and saying, “Huh! Now I’m here. I’ve just arrived.” But I wonder what’s going on.

And suddenly I sit up, stand up, and I remember that I am God.

I’m realizing as this is coming along, as my mind is sifting through all the new stuff, that J. Neil Schulman is a fictional persona, which I have created my entire life, because up until that moment I was hiding from myself the fact that I was God.

This is what is going through my mind while this is happening.

Now. One can say that I’m going through a psychotic episode at this point. Certainly the physiological conditions for a psychotic episode — ketosis, dehydration, lack of sleep — all of these various things can add up and say that I’m having a break with reality.

But the problem is that I’m not experiencing it as a break with reality.

You had a psychotic episode, Mr Schulman. They are experienced as reality.

Yours is Message 665 in this forum. It doesn't surprise me you haven't found my reply to this point, though it's been made many times. If this incident had been a one-time deal, and only while stressed and suffering from dehydration and ketosis, I would have concluded the same thing.

But it wasn't the only incident. It's the keystone in a long series of life experiences.

I conclude otherwise. In the absence of evidence, you have no good basis to agree with me.

An indication of how Neil approaches the reality of the pixies and sprites and psi-conductors is seen in his much-elaborated tale of psi-sprites at the audio lectures table in 2002.

Here we are instructed that he is a world expert on violin concertos, and that it was pretty near impossible that he or his mom could fail to identify Bach. Since the evidence was that there was only Bach, Neil had the choice of 'I was mistaken' or the choice of mysterious intercontinua pixie-jokesters who played a special song that only he and mom could hear.

Given the choice between pixies and human fallibility, he chose the least likely explanation.

Apparently this was an example of his marvelous discernment. Folie a deux is the kindest way to characterize this kind of stubborn refusal to entertain the obvious.

Can you tell the difference between a lead pencil and a Sharpie? A Porsche and a pick-up truck? A penis and a vagina?

After living with my father for a lifetime, that's about how hard it is for my mom and me to know the difference between Bach and Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Sibelius, or Glazunov.

Anyone else here know enough about classical music to explain this to Mr. Scherk?

Jeff Riggenbach, I know you read this forum. Do you honestly think there's even the slightest possibility I can't tell the difference between Bach and a late 19th century violin concerto? I know that you could in about five seconds.

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.

There are many names for this kind of experience, and it appears to be quite common. It can be called 'grief hallucinations' or 'bereavement hallucinations' -- it is extremely common in the elderly bereaved and can also occur years after a death. Sometimes it can be as simple and as profound as a feeling of presence, or visitation, sometimes a fully sensory experience.

There is a wonderful story in Scientific American that underlines the ubiquity of such things in human experience.

The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to bereavement but are rarely discussed, because people fear they might be considered insane or mentally destabilised by their loss. As a society we tend to associate hallucinations with things like drugs and mental illness, but we now know that hallucinations are common in sober healthy people and that they are more likely during times of stress.

The principle of parsimony is biased by the assumptions you start with. But if believing in hallucinations rather than ghosts seems least hypothesis to you, nothing I say can change your mind.

[Later addendum] There is one other explanation, namely, that your psychic powers were tuned into your father playing the violin in the land of the not-so-dead. Another perfectly reasonable explanation, of course.

That's close to what my mother and I have believed -- that we were hearing a performance my dad was somehow piping directly to us from the other side. You won't believe me when I tell you that I later met my father on the other side, in a full-sensory experience that included seeing, hearing, smelling, and even feeling a gentle summer breeze and a hug. You can dismiss it as a dream. I can't.

But what sort of dream is it that happens to two people at once, not drinking, not on drugs, not experiencing dehydration or ketosis, when they're awake and walking through the dealer's room at a libertarian conference?

I don't believe you at all, partly because I had many similar experiences after my father drowned in a boating accident in 1974, shortly after I had returned to Tucson to rest up while awaiting the publication of ATCAG. He and a friend were swept overboard in a freak storm on Lake Roosevelt while zipped-up in their sleeping bags.

I had nightmares for years (the notion of drowning while confined still terrifies me), but the 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.

Ghs

George, I believe you.

In May 2002 I was a speaker at the national convention of the Foundation for Economic Education in Las Vegas. I was accompanied by my mother, Betty, at that time 77 years old, and before she had problems walking or severe age-related memory problems. After an extended illness, my dad, Julius Schulman -- a concert violinist (see his web page at http://www.juliusschulman.com)-- had passed away 18 months earlier.

In between speakers and panels my mom and I walked through the dealer's room. Escape from Heaven was just published and in addition to speaking at the con I was passing out copies of the new novel to friends and for promotional purposes. Laissez Faire Books had a table there and I dropped off a copy. I also gave copies to Teller and Kerry Pearson. Lots of friends were in attendance, including SEK3.

Near the front of the room was a dealer selling audio lectures on Austrian Economics in Spanish. They had CD's playing music to draw people to their table. As my mom and I got closer we both heard what sounded to us like a 19th century violin concerto with orchestra composed in the style of someone like Tschaikovsky or Mendelssohn, and it was being played by a first-rate solo violinist. There were two things that struck my mom and me simultaneously. First of all, it sounded like my father's style of playing, which after a lifetime of exposure we were both experts on. Second, it was a violin concerto that neither of us had heard before -- and this is also near impossible, given that we're both experts on violin repertoire -- especially the 19th century.

In something that reminds me of the scene near the beginning of Atlas Shrugged where Dagny Taggart asks the brakeman what he's whistling, I walked up to the guy at the table and asked him what the CD was he was playing. He said, "It's Bach."

Now, I know Bach's work intimately, and the violin concerto my mom and I were hearing was not Bach. You can't mistake baroque era violin for the romantic-era violin concerto my mom and I were hearing. I said so and asked to see the CD they were playing. He said he was just watching the table until the owner came back and if I returned in a half hour I could ask him.

So, a half hour later I returned to the table and asked the owner what the CD was that was playing when my mom and I walked by their table for the first time. He said, "Bach." I said something like, "Look, we know what we heard and it couldn't be Bach. Could I look through your CD's?" He said yes.

The CD in the player was Bach.

Every other CD they had at the table was Bach.

There was no CD at the table with any romantic 19th century violin concertos.

Draw your own conclusions. My mom and I know what we heard, and we both heard the same thing: an unknown violin concerto in the style of a 19th century composer -- the exact sort of violin repertoire my dad most loved to play, and which sounded like him playing -- coming out of a CD player that the owner's claim -- and the immediate evidence -- could not have been playing.

Everyone else aside from my mom and me said they heard Bach.

So what is the point of this story? Most people have had unusual experiences that they cannot explain. I have had experiences much weirder than the one you describe.

I would suggest some explanations, but I have little doubt that you will have claimed to have covered all the bases -- the explanation could not have been x, y, or z, because you absolutely ruled out all such possibilities during your intensive and meticulous investigation at the time -- so I don't want to waste my time.

I suppose, therefore, that there can be only one explanation: God must have done it. For some reason God decided to compose and play a violin concerto in the Romantic style that only you and your mother could hear. This is where this story eventually leads, is it not?

Ghs

[Later addendum] There is one other explanation, namely, that your psychic powers were tuned into your father playing the violin in the land of the not-so-dead. Another perfectly reasonable explanation, of course.

That's close to what my mother and I have believed -- that we were hearing a performance my dad was somehow piping directly to us from the other side. You won't believe me when I tell you that I later met my father on the other side, in a full-sensory experience that included seeing, hearing, smelling, and even feeling a gentle summer breeze and a hug. You can dismiss it as a dream. I can't.

But what sort of dream is it that happens to two people at once, not drinking, not on drugs, not experiencing dehydration or ketosis, when they're awake and walking through the dealer's room at a libertarian conference?

Another good overview from GHS (post #644). Unfortunately, it merely hit the bullseye, which isn't good enough in this case.

Neil denies he's accepting anything on faith, but he makes many claims in his memoir (and here) for which he offers no evidence whatever, except, one must suppose, the testimony of the God-voice.

It's not clear to me whether Neil really believes in the multiple universes (with regard to which he currently erroneously claims that some but not conclusive evidence has been discovered) or was just proposing the multi-unis as one of many come-up-with-able deus-ex-machinaic mechanisms for salvaging mystical identity-violation from the charge of being mystical and violating identity.

But take, for example, his notion that God ("spirit" in his essential nature) is "everlasting" (albeit in a way co-extensive with the universe rather than antecedent to it). How does Neil know this about the God-being? Did the God-voice say, "I'm everlasting"? How did Neil confirm that the God-voice's claim is "true"? Is Neil just taking it on faith? Did God at some point say, "By the way, everything I'm saying and/or every characteristic and every value and every purpose you're imputing to me in consequence of this experience is true and there is no need, no need at all, to confirm it in order to affirm it, trust me on this"? Or did God offer proof that he is everlasting? If he communicated this proof to Neil, what is this proof? Or does the proof exist only as a foggy, hard-to-articulate quasi-memory of Neil's mind-meld with the God-thing?

Another not exactly neo-Randian epistemological weirdness arises when Neil seems at times to claim that the most critical criterion for determining the validity of a perception of a God-ish entity is an ethical one. Even if a mind-meldee's perception or "rational" interpretations of his experience with a purported God-being are important, these cognitions are nonetheless, in Neil's apparent view, insufficient warrant for accepting that one has mind-melded with God. For if the cosmic entity who is mind-melding with a person encourages that person to do very bad things, then, according to Neil, that being can't be God. Yet I would myself never dismiss the existence of something, say a person, whom I have every reason to believe does exist, simply because that person is someone I would assess as evil.

So: What if all the epistemological criteria that Neil says his God-experience has met were indeed also met by the God-experience of someone claiming to have been visited by a being Neil-God-ish in every respect except for being wicked? Given all the other outre metaphysical assumptions we're being asked to swallow, what would be so impossible about a God who enjoyed being sadistic, treating human beings as his playthings, threatening to kill humans who try to "make a deal with me," etc?

Starbuckle, what were your intentions and expectations when you started this topic with my name in the headline? Were you expecting me to walk on water for you? Part a river? Draw down locusts? Turn water into a nice vintage wine?

You'd already read the interview with me. I made no claims to be able to present anything more than what I learned in a "mind-meld" with God. Maybe you never watched Star Trek and are clueless how a mind-meld was portrayed on that TV series. It was shown as a conjoining of thoughts and personal identity, two minds operating as one and having access to the other's memories, active thoughts, cognition, and feelings.

All this analysis is after the fact, either by me or someone else. I have the advantage in analyzing it that I was there. That's why there's the potential for my analysis to be convincing to me. I've said till the cows come home that nobody else, since they weren't there, can possibly have any basis to find my report convincing, unless something in their own experience makes it ring true.

C.S. Lewis wrote that the only person he'd ever met who'd seen a ghost didn't believe they existed. One doesn't have to have a prior belief system to have had experiences that can open the mind to the possibility that there are modes of existence beyond what we normally experience, and that what we are by nature makes it possible for us to perceive them by means we can't yet pin down in a laboratory.

I had no expectations that my account would be believed here, but I did expect more open-mindedness to the possibilities that my account could be true than I met.

But if you set up this forum merely to make yourself more comfortable in your skin by rationalizing a way to dismiss anything you don't already believe in, I'm the least of your problems.

I'm not the scholar George Smith is on the history of religion. But despite my best intentions to remain an atheist, after reading his book, something happened to me that convinced me we were both wrong. I don't blame George for disagreeing with me. If the roles were reversed I'd be where he is. But I'm not a fool and I know shit from shinola. Yes, I've made a serious study of epistemology. And I stand by my understanding of what I experienced, regardless of whether what I say is convincing to anyone else.

Louis Armstrong was once asked to explain jazz. He said, "If you don't know, I can't explain it to you."

That's a totally unsatisfying answer. But it's a lot like that. Some experiences don't lend themselves well to explanation. And if you don't believe me, try explaining Rembrandt to the blind, Prokoviev to the deaf, or what an orgasm feels like to a castrato.

Mr Shulman,

Excuse my butting in here, and going over any ground already covered.

Now, there is nothing like an 'argument from personal experience' (if you like) to throw me off my stride, and that's not a bad thing.

Not knowing your past as many here do, I've impartially come to the conclusions that you are no grandstander, and are highly rational - up to this point of contention.

I accept unreservedly that you believe what you believe, and you believe you experienced something extraordinary.

But,of course, this kind of claim requires extraordinary evidence.

Question:

How, on this type of forum, did you think you could prove your claim, or impart your experience?

Second, why? Have you a desire to spread the word, despite the opposition you knew you'd get?

Whatever - personally, I respect the courage it took.

Also, I thank you for this challenge to re-check my atheistic fundamentals; I had to dig deeper than I have done for a while...

All the best to you,

Tony

Tony, I came to this forum because it was titled "Is J. Neil Schulman justified (logically) in believing in God?"

I didn't start this forum. I just came to answer questions which Starbuckle, who started it, said were left dangling from an interview with me published several years earlier.