Why the "You" in an Afterlife Wouldn't Really Be You - Scientific American

The Discovery is a 2017 Netflix film in which Robert Redford plays a scientist who proves that the
afterlife is real. “Once the body dies, some part of our consciousness leaves us and travels to a new plane,” the scientist explains, evidenced by his machine that measures, as another character puts it, “brain wavelengths on a subatomic level leaving the body after death.”

This idea is not too far afield from a real theory called quantum consciousness, proffered by a wide range of people, from physicist Roger Penrose to physician Deepak Chopra. Some versions hold that our mind is not strictly the product of our brain and that consciousness exists separately from material substance, so the death of your physical body is not the end of your conscious existence. Because this is the topic of my next book, Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia (Henry Holt, 2018), the film triggered a number of problems I have identified with all such concepts, both scientific and religious.

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Why the "You" in an Afterlife Wouldn't Really Be You - Scientific American

9/11 Tribute - Amazing Grace

The True Core Of The Jesus Myth

Are far left and far right equivalent?

This commentary was originally published at American Thinker.

 

By John Dietrich

 

President Trump has committed the unpardonable sin of implying that the far left is as violent as the far right.  This can be a career-ender.  New York Times domestic affairs correspondent Sheryl Gay Stolberg may have learned this the hard way.  "The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding 'antifa' beating white nationalists being led out of the park," Stolberg wrote.  She was immediately set upon.  She had contradicted the progressive narrative.  Perhaps she can be forgiven because her comments were made early in the dispute.  The progressive narrative is that this was a demonstration by white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and KKK protesting the removal of statues of slaveholders.  They were opposed by "civil rights protesters," defenders of the American Way.  In Stolberg's revised comments, the protesters were "standing up to hate."

Even Mitt Romney endorsed the progressive fairy tale, tweeting, "No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes."  Former vice president Joe Biden tweeted simply: "There is only one side. #charlottesville."  This narrative has been repeated endlessly.  All demonstrators were hate advocates.  There was nobody demonstrating against the removal of monuments dedicated to their forbears or people aware of the left's true agenda.  Perhaps they should have known that an event organized by Richard Spencer, a known white supremacist, would not be a tea party.

The president's original statement was, "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides."  This allowed critics to suggest he was drawing a moral equivalency between the right and the left.  After massive criticism he appeared to have capitulated.  On Monday, he condemned the attack and specifically mentioned the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists.  Unsurprisingly, this did not satisfy his critics.  On Tuesday he appeared to revert to his original position with a vengeance.  He asked reporters, "When you say alt-right, define alt-right for me.  What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?  Do they have any semblance of guilt?"

Trump added, "Not all of those people were neo-Nazis."

He then touched on a problem few conservative commentators have mentioned.  The entire progressive exercise is based on one goal: the acquisition of power.  Trump continued, "Many of those people were there to protest the taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee.  So this week, it's Robert E. Lee; I notice Stonewall Jackson is coming down.  I wonder: is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?  You really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?"  Al Sharpton has already targeted Thomas Jefferson.

There is no moral equivalency between left and right.  Those on the left have repeatedly demonstrated that they are more violent than the right.  The left is held to an entirely different standard.  Black Lives Matter ("Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon") can be invited to the White House by President Obama.  President Trump cannot even criticize them.  Mayors often tell their police forces to "stand down."  They give protesters "who wished to destroy space to do that as well."  Genuinely conservative demonstrations do not usually end with burned out liquor stores.  Leftist speakers do not fear being assaulted when they pay a visit to a college campus.  The left controls the establishment media.  It can therefore suppress or emphasize information that it believes will further its cause.  Che Guevara, Mao, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot do not receive the attention they deserve.

President Trump's exchange with the press at Trump Tower did not reflect well on the press.  The question "Are you against the Confederacy?" was entirely ignored.  After President Trump condemned white supremacists several times, a reporter asked, "I didn't understand what you were saying.  You were saying the press has treated white nationalists unfairly."  Reporters hear what they want to hear.  If they are incapable of listening, they cannot report accurately.

John Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (Algora Publishing).  He has a Master of Arts degree in international relations from St. Mary's University.  He is retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.

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Friday Funnies

Is it possible that the Civil War was about more than just slavery?

By William Sullivan

In one of my favorite Simpsons episodes from my teenage years, the friendly, if perpetually price-gouging, Kwik-E-Mart clerk Apu Nahasapeemapetilon endures a line of questioning from an examiner in order to attain U.S. citizenship:

Examiner: Here’s your last question. What was the cause of the Civil War?

Apu: Actually, there were numerous causes.  Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and inter…

Examiner: Wait, wait… just say slavery.

Apu: Slavery it is, sir!

The writers’ jab here is pretty simple.  Apu, though an immigrant (albeit, one with a PhD), knows more about America and its history than many of our own citizens.

I understood this joke as a kid, so it’s mind-boggling to me to hear incredibly smart Americans play the role of the examiner in the above comedic bit in response to any suggestion that there might be a more complex, nuanced rationale for the Civil War.    

Great thinkers on the right routinely tout that Abraham Lincoln led the war against the South to free the slaves. And because the South was Democrat and the North was Republican, it’s somehow this great historical honor that we Republicans own.

Never do they address the problems with that assertion.  That is, if the Union’s war was a moral war intended to eliminate slavery (which it most certainly was not, at least in the early years of the war), that still presents potentially problematic constitutional implications of federal overreach.  If it wasn’t a war intended to eliminate slavery, the other factors involved must be considered, and a more evenhanded appraisal than “the North was good” and “the South was evil” must be discussed.

I will begin by conceding an important point.  Slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War, particularly insofar as Lincoln’s election in 1860 was the tipping point in a longstanding and bitter debate over slavery in which the two sides had, going back to the American Revolution, been defined as “slave states” and “free states.” 

But to suggest that there weren’t other, very serious factors involved which led to the conflict is an intellectually obtuse position.

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