Archive
Neuroscientist: Newsweek Guy Sounds Delusional About Heaven Experience
If you pay attention to the Internet, you’ve probably seen commentary on the Newsweek article about heaven written by a neurosurgeon.
–
Sam Harris, who has a PhD in neuroscience, rips this guy (and the integrity of Newsweek) a new one.
Everything—absolutely everything—in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was “shut down,” “inactivated,” “completely shut down,” “totally offline,” and “stunned to complete inactivity.” The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science…
Alexander believes that his E. coli-addled brain could not have produced his visions because they were too “intense,” too “hyper-real,” too “beautiful,” too “interactive,” and too drenched in significance for even a healthy brain to conjure. He also appears to think that despite their timeless quality, his visions could not have arisen in the minutes or hours during which his cortex (which surely never went off) switched back on. He clearly knows nothing about what people with working brains experience under the influence of psychedelics.
I think what Sam Harris is saying is, “I’ve totally done DMT.”
–
I like Sam Harris a lot. I don’t always agree with him but think his simple writing and speaking, while kind of boring, is really effective. This article is probably the most outraged I’ve ever heard his tone. Probably because the guy writing the original article is supposed to be highly educated in brain science.
Anyway, I think I’ve posted this before, but here’s a free printable poster of list of contradictions in the Bible from Sam’s website:
http://www.project-reason.org/gallery3/image/102/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Sorry, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. “Atheist” is still useful.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson spends four minutes in this video trying to disassociate himself from atheism. But he’s ok with “agnostic.” A deluge of Daily Dish readers explain why they’re not mutually exclusive.
There’s a joke, more commentary that funny, I heard somewhere: There are two types of atheists–those say say “none” when asked their religion and those that say “atheist.”
This is Tyson’s first mistake; he pegs “-isms” it to a “movement.” There’s this irrational fear that I noticed, among even the most prominent atheists, that by giving the belief a label it gives it a unwanted connotation as dogma.
Most people don’t play golf.
“Atheism” is useful because 1) It describes a minority. (It might be less useful a term in a country like Sweden that’s largely secular.) 2) While it’s not a necessity, there is still a correlation between lack of religious belief and political ideology. People want to make organizations around common philosophical bonds, and the language is useful to share that bond. 3) It’s just a synonym for non-believer. Stop attaching other assumptions.
On an interesting sidenote, Sweden still had an officially recognized state church until 2000. But as of 2008, only 2% of the population attended regularly. The Netherlands still has a state church. Separation of church and state suddenly doesn’t sound like everything.