FLRW

Well stated, and Double_R, welcome.

Dr. Steven Laureys heads the Coma Science Group at the university hospital in the city of Liege. He and his colleagues published a scientific study on NDEs in 2013.

NDEs feel “even more real than real,” Laureys said. It’s this sparkling clarity and living color of the experience, which many have when they lose consciousness, that he and his team have researched.
But he doesn’t think it comes from a spirit world. Laureys is a scientist, he emphasizes. He prefers not to mix that with religion.
His hypothesis is that near-death experiences originate in human physiology. “It is this dysfunctional brain that produces these phenomena,” he said.

Laureys says. “There is no evidence there can be conscious experience without brain activity,” he said.
Lying in your hospital bed, you have become a true believer, and you are happier for it.
But your brain never died, the doctor tells you. You were in a coma. Perhaps your heart stopped for a while; maybe it didn’t. But that’s not even necessary to have an out-of-body experience.
“Many individuals having had NDEs were not physically in danger of death suggesting that the perception, on its own, of the risk of death seems to be important in eliciting NDEs,” the study said.
It’s enough just to think you’re dying to have one.

Not true, Humans are not designed to be happy, or even content. Instead, we are designed primarily to survive and reproduce, like every other creature in the natural world. A state of contentment is discouraged by nature because it would lower our guard against possible threats to our survival. The fact that evolution has prioritized the development of a big frontal lobe in our brain (which gives us excellent executive and analytical abilities) over a natural ability to be happy, tells us a lot about nature’s priorities. Different geographical locations and circuits in the brain are each associated with certain neurological and intellectual functions, but happiness, being a mere construct with no neurological basis, cannot be found in the brain tissue.

Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth is a compilation of essays by many proponents of historical minimalism or mythicism as Ehrman defines it. It was constructed in order to refute and point out errors in Ehrman's book Did Jesus Exist: the Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazaret

mythicism  is the scholarly opinion that the gospels are mythological expansions of historical data quotations and the habitual practice of attributing everything to mythological causes; superstition, the opposite of rationalism, or of realism quotations

That is because you don't have brain damage. Professor Brick Johnstone of the University of Missouri studied 20 people with traumatic brain injuries affecting the right parietal lobe, the area of the brain situated a few inches above the right ear. He surveyed participants on characteristics of spirituality, such as how close they felt to a higher power and if they felt their lives were part of a divine plan. He found that the participants with more significant injury to their right parietal lobe showed an increased feeling of closeness to a higher power.

You have to look at the logic of his comment, it has nothing to do with his credentials.

In the most recent study,  Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in the School of Health Professions studied 20 people with traumatic brain injuries affecting the right parietal lobe, the area of the brain situated a few inches above the right ear. He surveyed participants on characteristics of spirituality, such as how close they felt to a higher power and if they felt their lives were part of a divine plan. He found that the participants with more significant injury to their right parietal lobe showed an increased feeling of closeness to a higher power.

The following is a review of Did Jesus Exist by S. Mezger

I'll start out by saying that many of the one star ratings say what I want to say better than I can. I'm giving Bart credit for addressing this issue in the first place. Unfortunately, once he got going on his book, it seemed he was on autopilot, repeatedly failing to address the compelling evidence that the Jesus mythicists have brought into public discussion. To him, one important bit of evidence that Jesus was historical was that Paul knew Jesus's brother James, and Peter. That seems to be a direct contradiction to what he said in his wonderful book, Misquoting Jesus. In that book, he made it very clear that we can't trust what the original books of the New Testament said because they were copied and edited repeatedly over their first centuries. We have no originals, so we don't know what was written into them by later Christians. A copier of Galatians certainly could have inserted that Paul knew James, but was James really the brother of Jesus? Was he a real person? Did someone want to plant evidence that Jesus was really a historical human being? I hope Bart continues to think this issue through instead of washing his hands of the evidence for the myth. The rebuttal to this book by mythicists, Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth, is very interesting, and shows what a weak effort Bart put into understanding the wide range of legitimate myth evidence.

Have you ever been put under by general anesthesia? So the mind is grounded in physical realty.

The future of the police force is artificial intelligence. When I graduated from high school, all the bullies that were too stupid to go to college became 

police officers. 

See article below:

Robo Cops Make their Debut
There’s a new officer in Dubai to help fight crime, but although he wears a police cap, he’s 100% robot. Dubai police plan to have robotic officers make up a quarter of the force by 2030. It can speak six languages and is designed to read facial expressions. It has a computer touch screen where people can report a crime. The robot is deployed mainly to tourist spots and is equipped with a camera that sends live images back to police headquarters to identify wanted suspects. Although the robo cop can help deter crime and relieve some tasks from its human counterparts, humans are still expected to make arrests.

When asked the secret of his longevity, 91 year old American Actor Ernest Borgnine answered "I masturbate a lot".

Mississippi is the nation’s poorest state, says the US Census Bureau . Most people earn around $39,680 a year. Maryland ranks as the richest state, where most people earn around $73,971 a year. In addition to Mississippi, the three poorest states include West Virginia and Arkansas.

The concept that a God who created 70 thousand million million million - or seven followed by 22 zeros - stars visible from the Earth through telescopes, impregnated a virgin

to create his only son is laughable.  Listen to the real greatest Jew that ever lived:   “The word God is for me nothing but the expression of and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends, no interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change anything about this.”- Albert Einstein 1954

Well, then again Hitler's troops had belt buckles that said "God is with us".  So maybe morals are objective.

 Nazi loyalists supported the systematic murder of Jews. Doesn't that prove that morals are subjective?

At birth, the human brain is in a remarkably unfinished state. Most of its 100 billion neurons are not yet connected in networks. Forming and reinforcing these connections are the key tasks of early brain development. Connections among neurons are formed as the growing child experiences the surrounding world and forms attachments to parents, family members and other caregivers. This is why it is moral to abort fetuses.

You do know that if there were smartphones 2000 years ago there would be no Jesus, don't you?

Now that these forums are permanent  electronic records, researchers a thousand years from now will be able to verify that there

was a subspecies of humans that believed in the long discredited concept of a God.

Yes, that is who Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy is named for.

Alright, I will ,Christian moral rules, for instance, essentially derive their existence and authority from faith in, respectively, divine command and punishment. This means that Christian moral theory, while it offers substantial content, is limited in reach to those who actually believe in the axiomatic premise of that theory, Christian dogma. It cannot effectively reach those who do not believe that God laid down those rules and will punish those who do not follow them. The goal of naturalists, then, is to discover rules that have universal reach and that anybody must agree with, irrespective of faith—rules that are based on the premise of self-evident moral Truths deriving from Reason. But do these Truths exist, and can we find enough of them to create substantial moral content?
Hugo Grotius was a pioneer in this respect, as he developed rules of international law that were supposed to be rationalist and minimalist enough that they could stand etsi deus non daretur (even if God did not exist). He justified this by suggesting that the rules drew their existence and authority from rational principles of national self-preservation said to be so fundamental that no one could disagree with them ‘without doing violence to himself’. Grotius’ approach was so successful in establishing a moral consensus across religious denominations that he is today remembered as the ‘father of modern international law.

Yes, good evidence exists for at least functional deception in primates.
Deception can be passive or active. In passive deception, an animal refrains from a particular behavior so others will not detect their presence or actions, for example, hiding facial expressions, or withholding food calls. Although such behavior is ‘passive,’ it may indicate that the animals have awareness that they can manipulate their communicative displays. On the other hand, individuals may also actively mislead or provide false information to others. False alarm calls are a common form of active misleading. Cheney and Seyfarth report a vervet monkey giving an alarm call in the middle of an intergroup encounter (but in the absence of a predator) that stopped the dispute when the combatants fled. Capuchin subordinates use alarm calls to distract more dominant individuals during competitive situations, reducing some of the costs associated with competition for food in the wild. Although these forms of deception function to manipulate others’ behavior, there is no evidence that the intention is to manipulate their psychological states.
Finally, there is some evidence for counterdeception, or individuals taking active countermeasures against a conspecific's deceptive act. For instance, others may learn to avoid the calls of deceptive callers in food or aggressive contexts. In an experimental study involving chimpanzees, one chimpanzee in a group knew the location of hidden food and soon learned to keep the food's location a secret to avoid having it stolen by her ignorant partner. The ignorant chimpanzee then began to follow the knowledgeable chimpanzee, ignoring her attempts at misleading, indicating that he anticipated her attempts at deception. In other experimental procedures, chimpanzees have learned to withhold information – and even provide false information – to competitive human experimenters who do not provide food to the subject in experimental tasks.

The prefrontal cortex is critical to many cognitive abilities that are considered particularly human, and forms a large part of a neural system crucial for normal socio-emotional and executive functioning in humans and other primates. The prefrontal cortex matures later in development than more caudal regions, and some of its neuronal subpopulations exhibit more complex dendritic arborizations. Comparative work suggests that the human prefrontal cortex differs from that of closely related primate species less in relative size than it does in organization. Specific reorganizational events in neural circuitry may have taken place either as a consequence of adjusting to increases in size or as adaptive responses to specific selection pressures. Living in complex environments has been recognized as a considerable factor in the evolution of primate cognition. Normal frontal lobe development and function are also compromised in several neurological and psychiatric disorders. A phylogenetically recent reorganization of frontal cortical circuitry may have been critical to the emergence of human-specific executive and social-emotional functions, and developmental pathology in these same systems underlies many psychiatric and neurological disorders, including autism, schizophrenia and the belief in a God.

Daniel Dennett and Joseph Fletcher are among many who specify that intelligence is a key component of defining human persons. Although definitions vary, intelligence may include but is not limited to the ability to create memories, attain or retain knowledge, use logic, employ abstract thought, and communicate. In his “Conditions of Personhood” essay, Dennett requires humans to have a certain level of intelligence. Without it or without a “sufficient” level of intelligence, a human being lacks personhood, and he argues thus that a fetus is not a person. Fletcher also argued for the criterion of intelligence in describing “humanhood” among his personhood criteria. In fact, he explicitly states exact, albeit arbitrary, intelligence quotient scores he believes necessary for personhood .  And no, I am not going to comment about Trump voters and personhood.

Didn't H L Mencken in 1920 predict the Trump presidency when he said:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

The refutation of Dr. Mary Schweitzer's (A devote Evangelical Christian) findings is that protein and soft tissue decomposition rates vary enormously, depending on the conditions. Some academics have done lab studies of protein degradation using accelerated conditions of high temperature and high acidity, but it is not valid to extrapolate those results to proteins locked in the pores of dinosaur bones. The reality is that we don’t know, with any precision, how fast proteins degrade under the conditions found in dinosaur fossil bones. Thus, it is incorrect to claim that we know that it is impossible for soft tissue to survive in any form for 80 million years. In contrast, the rates of nuclear decomposition of elements have been measured over and over again, and found to be essentially constant. There are a few conditions where nuclear decay can be accelerated, but these conditions are known and predictable, and do not apply to the rock layers in Montana where these dinosaur fossils were found. Thus, it is absurd and insupportable to set aside the radioactive dating of these rock layers because some partly degraded soft tissue has been found in dinosaur fossils from those layers.

So the bottom line is, and this  drives Schweitzer crazy. geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it.

So, don't all miscarried or aborted fetuses go to Heaven?

Wouldn't that be better than the 3 million children that suffered from dying of starvation last year?

Oh that's right, God loves suffering. He didn't save his only son from suffering.

Tony-nominated Broadway star Nick Cordero died on July 5 in a Los Angeles hospital from complications of COVID-19. He was 41.

It's called brain lesions. As we age our brains shrink in volume, particularly in the frontal cortex. As our vasculature ages and our blood pressure rises the possibility of stroke and ischaemia increases and our white matter develops lesions.

The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are In a Video Game Paperback $13.79

Written by well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur and MIT-educated computer scientist Rizwan Virk, The Simulation Hypothesis brings together disparate fields to explore one of the most daring and consequential theories of our time: The Simulation Hypothesis. Whether you are a computer scientist, a fan of science fiction like the Matrix movies, a video game enthusiast, or a spiritual seeker, The Simulation Hypothesis touches on all these areas. The Simulation Hypothesis is the idea that our physical reality, far from being a solid physical universe, is part of an increasingly sophisticated video game-like simulation, consisting of pixels with its own internal clock.In the Simulation Hypothesis, the mysteries of quantum science, the path of artificially intelligent consciousness, the evolution of VR and quantum computers, along with previously taboo subjects like consciousness and karma, are brought together into a cohesive, information-based computer science framework. Leading figures like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have advocated the Simulation Hypothesis.

So Plantinga himself, tells us how his argument can fail.

ebuc is talking about  the significance of prime numbers in the occult.  Prime numbers have been used in the occult that have no divisors other than itself. They are believed by the Masons and the Illuminati to have special powers.  OMG, you don't think ebuc is Kanye West do you?

Yes, in philosophy, a noumenon  is a posited object or event that exists independently of human sense and/or perception.

Not true. Non-Israelite slaves are acquired either by purchase (Exod 12:44) or captured during war (Deut 20:14) and remain so permanently (Lev 25:44-46). Foreign male slaves are circumcised and allowed to participate in the Passover sacrifice (Exod 12:44).

A new comparison of the human and chimpanzee genomes suggests that after the two lineages separated, they may have begun interbreeding... A principal finding is that the X chromosomes of humans and chimpanzees appear to have diverged about 1.2 million years more recently than the other chromosomes.
The research suggests:
There were in fact two splits between the human and chimpanzee lineages, with the first being followed by interbreeding between the two populations and then a second split. The suggestion of a hybridization has startled paleoanthropologists, who nonetheless are treating the new genetic data seriously.

Is that from the University of Phoenix?

ebuc and I are staring at the stars with big smiles on our faces

I see what you are saying, pass me the pipe.

(The Age of Aquarius is playing in the background)

Tell QAnon that.

Agree!

T0 LEARN TO SPELL?

Spiritualists often set March 31, 1848, as the beginning of their movement. On that date, Kate and Margaret Fox, of Hydesville,  New York, reported that they had made contact with a spirit that was later claimed to be the spirit of a murdered peddler whose body was found in the house, though no record of such a person was ever found. The spirit was said to have communicated through rapping noises, audible to onlookers. The evidence of the senses appealed to practically-minded Americans, and the Fox sisters became a sensation. As the first celebrity mediums, the sisters quickly became famous for their public séances in New York.  However, in 1888 the Fox sisters admitted that this "contact" with the spirit was a hoax.

Yes, as long as one can hear. Many blind people build pictures using their sense of touch, a technique called echolocation.

For blind people who are adept at echolocation, sound information routes through the visual cortex as well. Their brains use echoes to generate spatial maps, which are sometimes so detailed that they enable mountain biking, playing basketball and safely exploring new environments. In fact, last year, Canadian researchers discovered that even when blind echolocation experts listened to audio recordings of their tongue clicks echoing off different objects, they could easily identify the objects that had been present at the time of the recordings. Scans with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) showed activity in areas of their brains associated with visual processing. In other words, their brain scans resembled those of a sighted person identifying an object in a photo.

Yes, The human brain, the most complex object in the universe, comprises a hundred billion neurons linked in networks that give rise to intelligence, emotion, consciousness, memory and creativity. Emerging from the collective activity of all brain regions is the most fascinating neurological phenomenon of all - "the mind."

No, the mind is not separate from the brain, and that is the reason why anesthesia works.

Your afterlife will be the same as your beforelife.

Don't forget Trump's republican values of increasing unemployment from 4.3 percent when he took 

office to 6.7 percent when he will leave. And he increased the National Debt by $7.8 trillion.

But then what else would a low intellect con-man do?

Didn't Adam and Eve's children inbreed?