Biggest Scientific Study Suggests Life after Death

"First hint of 'life after death' in biggest ever scientific study", headlines The Telegraph, going on to say: "Southampton University scientists have found evidence that awareness can continue for at least several minutes after clinical death which was previously thought impossible".

Does this prove that there is life after death and that God exists?

Of course not, but it shows without a shadow of a doubt that there are many phenomena and events that science doesn't explain about the nature of consciousness and of the mind in general.

Someone's answer to that migtht be that science will one day explain everything: but that belief requires a deep faith in itself. Even though the object of that faith is science and not God, faith it is.

What is paradoxical about the way in which atheists - "unbelievers" is a misnomer, as they do believe without empirical or rational foundation in many things -, since 19th-century positivism to today's Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking, have associated decline of religion with progress of science is that the advances in the latter, if anything, have demonstrated to us how many things in the universe, life and mind science doesn't understand, most notably their origin. And there are very good reasons to predict that it never will, as they probably require other constructs, other ways of thinking and other kinds of explanantion.

The connection between the brain, a material object, and the mind, or rather how the physicality of the former can produce the non-physicality of the latter, has not become clearer the more it has been studied and researched by science, but in fact the opposite has occurred: the questions have multiplied, while the answers have diminished in proportion.

It's perfectly true that it's in the nature of scientific investigation that every new problem solved, every new question answered gives rise to new problems and questions, which inspired one of the greatest philosophers of science, Sir Karl Popper, to title his intellectual autobiography Unended Quest.

But there is a difference between the type of investigation in which science excels, where satisfactory theories that can survive rigorous tests are reached, and the type of investigation which displays an exponentially increasing discrepancy between problems and their solutions.

What the neo-positivists of the early 20th century, like the Vienna Circle - thinking that they were following Ludwig Wittgenstein but in fact misinterpreting him -, were saying was that questions which cannot be answered by mere logic and empiricism (hence one of their names, "logic empiricists") should not be asked and pursued. Metaphysics and theology were nonsense. This was a way of limiting all intellectual search of knowledge to science.

This position has serious limitations. First a logical one: it is a self-contradictory position. If anything beyond the realm of science is nonsensical, what these philosophers (and their heirs today) are saying is nonsensical too, as it does not limit itself to logic and empirical evidence: they are engaging in metaphysics as well, albeit to oppose another metaphysical view.

And this takes us to its second serious limitation: if even people who have postulated boundaries for intellectual investigation cannot confine themselves to them and remain within them, that by itself is an indication that those boundaries are too narrow and unsatisfactory. And that science cannot provide all the answers that are necessary for a curious mind to be satisfied.

Even more, what if science itself, as it seems to be the case the more it expands and deepens, points to something outside itself?

From The Telegraph article:

The largest ever medical study into near-death and out-of-body experiences has discovered that some awareness may continue even after the brain has shut down completely.

It is a controversial subject which has, until recently, been treated with widespread scepticism.

But scientists at the University of Southampton have spent four years examining more than 2,000 people who suffered cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria.

And they found that nearly 40 per cent of people who survived described some kind of ‘awareness’ during the time when they were clinically dead before their hearts were restarted.

One man even recalled leaving his body entirely and watching his resuscitation from the corner of the room.

Despite being unconscious and ‘dead’ for three minutes, the 57-year-old social worker from Southampton, recounted the actions of the nursing staff in detail and described the sound of the machines.

“We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating,” said Dr Sam Parnia, a former research fellow at Southampton University, now at the State University of New York, who led the study.

“But in this case, conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.

“The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for.

“He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened.”

Of 2060 cardiac arrest patients studied, 330 survived and of 140 surveyed, 39 per cent said they had experienced some kind of awareness while being resuscitated.

Although many could not recall specific details, some themes emerged. One in five said they had felt an unusual sense of peacefulness while nearly one third said time had slowed down or speeded up.

Some recalled seeing a bright light; a golden flash or the Sun shining. Others recounted feelings of fear or drowning or being dragged through deep water. 13 per cent said they had felt separated from their bodies and the same number said their sensed had been heightened.

Dr Parnia believes many more people may have experiences when they are close to death but drugs or sedatives used in the process of rescuitation may stop them remembering.

“Estimates have suggested that millions of people have had vivid experiences in relation to death but the scientific evidence has been ambiguous at best.

“Many people have assumed that these were hallucinations or illusions but they do seem to corresponded to actual events.

“And a higher proportion of people may have vivid death experiences, but do not recall them due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory circuits.

“These experiences warrant further investigation.“

Dr David Wilde, a research psychologist and Nottingham Trent University, is currently compiling data on out-of-body experiences in an attempt to discover a pattern which links each episode.

He hopes the latest research will encourage new studies into the controversial topic.

“Most studies look retrospectively, 10 or 20 years ago, but the researchers went out looking for examples and used a really large sample size, so this gives the work a lot of validity.

“There is some very good evidence here that these experiences are actually happening after people have medically died.

“We just don’t know what is going on. We are still very much in the dark about what happens when you die and hopefully this study will help shine a scientific lens onto that.” [All emphases added]

It's Not Bias that Makes US Whites Wary of Blacks

Whites walking down Main Street with an AK-47 are defenders of American values; a black man doing the same thing is Public Enemy No. 1.

These are the words of Charles Gallagher, professor at La Salle University in Pennsylvania and "a sociologist who studies race", according to a CNN article on guns-race relationship.

The assumption is that Americans are biased against black people.

The reality is very different. The picture above, taken in August of this year, shows some of the over 30 members of the all-black Huey P. Newton Gun Club "gathered to march through South Dallas with rifles, shotguns, and AR-15s. The group eventually entered a restaurant with their weapons while Dallas police officers were inside eating lunch."

But the police hardly looked at them.

Sociologist Gallagher doesn't accuse white Americans buying a gun of being racist en masse, only of "being human, of unconsciously absorbing stereotypical attitudes about black men and violence that are as old as America itself."

But here as well what he says is far from the truth. You don't find those stereotypical attitudes in US white culture, dominated by political correctness and guilt feelings about American past.

Quite the opposite. Hollywood portrays much more frequently whites than blacks as criminals. The mainstream media are so sensitive to this issue that The Associated Press Stylebook, containing the United States' (and internationally) most authoritative guidelines for reporting, prescribes:

Racial identification should not be included in any story unless such reference is clearly relevant to the story or when part of a detailed description of a fugitive.

Gun Watch comments:

The downplay of black predominance in crime is so great, that most people in urban areas now assume that if the race of the perpetrator is not mentioned, they are black. It is an open joke. The AP attempt to prevent a stereotype, has become emblematic of the social engineering by the old media. It has had some effect, but reality overrides it.

The reality is represented by the official statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice:

[For homicide] The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).

American blacks perpetrate almost 8 times more murders per capita than whites.

And this is not the only relevant figure. You'll find more of them here: US Racist and Capital Crimes Have a Black Hue .

Clacton Question Time Possible Bias

If you've ever watched the political debate program Question Time on the BBC, you'll have noticed that the audience in the studio - that asks the panelists topical questions - is constantly predominantly belonging to the Left and extreme Left of the political spectrum, and doesn't seem to be in tune with - let alone representative of - the general public opinion.

To dispel doubts of bias, the BBC once explained that its criterion for choosing the audience is that the latter should represent the various proportions of political views of the local population. Each show has a different location in a British town or city and, according to this criterion, when the broadcast is in Bath, the studio audience should include roughly the same proportion of Conservatives, Labour etc found in Bath.

How can the BBC explain, then, the kind of treatment (not quite lynch mob but getting there) reserved by the members of the audience to the UKIP's Economic spokesman and MEP Patrick O'Flynn on the last Question Time, Thursday 9 October in Clacton on Sea, Essex?

That same day, the by-election held in the Clacton constituency had returned a massive majority for UKIP with nearly 60% of the votes, the highest ever percentage increase (from 0 to 60) in a by-election in British history.

And yet, anyone watching the program would have thought that the people of Clacton viscerally hate the UKIP and love Labour, which came a lame third in the electoral results with just over 11% of the votes.

The possible explanations are prima facie two: either the BBC takes a long time to catch up with public opinion, or the apparently impartial criterion it indicated as the basis for its choice of audiences is not the one actually used.

London Says "Ban Jihadis" as New Terror Plot Is Discovered

Last Tuesday 7 October counter-terrorism officers and armed police have arrested four jihadists plotting a "significant" terror attack in London, and are still interrogating them.

One line of enquiry is that the group was plotting a Mumbai-style gun attack in the capital.

Scotland Yard and the MI5 suspect that the plot was linked to the Islamic State, the first plot directly inspired by the IS. At least one of the four men in their early 20s arrested had recently returned to Britain from Syria.

The police are convinced we are in a more intense phase of Islamic terrorism, increased by the threat of Muslim fighters coming back from their involvement in the Syria and Iraq violence.

Referring to the latest foiled plot, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, speaking to BBC London Radio, gave a grave warning: "[I|t is a quite serious case.

"It is one of a series of arrests that we have had over the last few weeks which taken together for me confirm that the drumbeat around terrorism has changed.

"It's a more intense drumbeat - we are having to be more interventionist and a lot of it is linked back to Syria and Iraq."

It looks like public opinion is getting the message loud and clear, as a Wednesday's YouGov poll showed that three out of four Londoners (74%) think that Britons who have travelled to Syria or Iraq to fight with extremist groups should be banned from returning to the UK.

This is what my party Liberty GB says, and it's been part of our policies regarding Islam since the beginning of the present crisis.

If we break down the survey results, it's interesting to see that women (at 77%) more than men (70%) are in favour of banning jihadists from entering the country.

But only 49% of people aged 18-24 support it, which is the unmpteenth confirmation that lowering the voting age is a bad idea, and it should in fact be increased.

In the last few weeks extra armed patrols have been employed all over London due to fears of increasing Islamic terrorism.

This plot has been foiled, but how long before another one cannot be stopped and we have a new atrocity?

And how long before the public realises that Islam is the problem and the number of Muslims who are sworn enemies of Britain - tiny minorities or not - is very large and counting?

Politically Correct Language Thoughts

If a prostitute is a sex worker, is a thief an expropriation worker? And a hitman a dispatch worker?

If a homosexual is gay, is a necrophiliac happy?

If Before Christ is Before the Common Era and Anno Domini is Common Era, is Jesus Christ a common good?

If a person who criticises Islam is suffering from Islamophobia, is a person who criticises him suffering from Islamophobiaphobia?

If someone opposed to Third World immigration to the West is a racist, is someone in favour of it a Westist?

If believing that a woman should cook is misogynist, is believing that a man should do the dishes misandrist?

If someone who researches evidence on the subject of the Holocaust is a Holocaust denier, is someone who is engaged in research on any historical subject a history denier?

If a person who doubts anthropogenic global warming theory is a climate change denier, is a person who doubts flat earth theory a flat earth denier?

YouTube without PC Censorship

I want to tell you about a free-speech answer to YouTube: it's called LivingScoop.

The people behind it have contacted me asking me to spread the news of its existence and its need of promotion and financial support.

LivingScoop declares to be "the first and only video sharing site with unlimited free speech and freedom of all expressions".

The problem with YouTube is that it is relatively easy to violate its terms of service. How many times have we clicked on a link to a YouTube video and found that it had been taken down? Counterjihad and other politically-incorrect clips are particularly vulnerable to this fate.

It seems that many videos violating YouTube's guidelines can remain on the website without any trouble, as long as no-one complaints. But, if there is a sufficient number of complaints about a video, it will be removed until it's reviewed by YouTube's staff. And we know how good Muslims and Leftists are at acting in concert to get what they want (just look at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in the United Nations).

Besides, YouTube is owned by Google, which is itself an ideologically Left-of-centre company, a fact that shouldn't inspire total trust.

LivingScoop is different. The LivingScoop management has sent me this message, which I reproduce faithfully:

Livingscoop is one of the key front line Websites in the fight against Islamization of Western countries. Very big blogs like PI-News in Germany use Livingscoop to host their videos safely, and Livingscoop was also notably used to host video interviews with Robert Spencer or with Wafa Sultan.

Meanwhile, these days Livingscoop needs support over the short term in order to face costs, and provide support for necessary technical improvements on the mid-term.

Please, donate to Livingscoop to help us develop and add technical improvements, such as a new own video player, a general HTML5 video format working better with iOS devices, and an upgraded great version of our â "Live Reporter" real time streaming app, etc.

>>> Use the Paypal "Donate" button visible on all pages of Livingscoop. <<<

Feel free to pass on this message to your friends, relatives, networks.

The more support Livingscoop gets, the more sustainable and efficient it is to provide everyone's daily freedom of expression and to offer a strong, safe and reliable platform for anti-jihad videos.

Thanks!

www.livingscoop.com

No Free Speech in English Schools?

New, dangerously anti-free-speech regulations have come into force in English schools on the 29th September 2014. They are contained in the new Independent School Standards regulations, which change the legal framework for academies, free schools and private schools. Ofsted has been asked to enforce the same minimum standards for all other schools.

Among them are the requirements that schools actively promote:

(v) further tolerance and harmony between different cultural traditions by enabling pupils to acquire an appreciation of and respect for their own and other cultures;

(vi) encourage respect for other people, paying particular regard to the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010.

The former is very good in theory, if we didn't know that the "tolerance" and "respect" are not mutual but one-directional, at the expense of British culture.

As for the latter, the new standards will only be met if a school in England "actively promotes" the rights enshrined in the Equality Act.

Colin Hart, Campaign Director of the Coalition for Marriage, explains what this innocent-sounding regulation means in practice:

As a result, schools will undoubtedly be put under pressure to promote same-sex marriage. Advice from a senior QC confirms this.

Indeed, the Government Consultation Documents are specific about what these "protected characteristics" are. A clue: think of words that are often used in conjunction with the suffix "phobia".

a. Para 3.2.2
b. “The new requirement for schools to actively promote principles which encourage respect for persons with protected characteristic (as set out in the Equality Act 2010) is intended to allow the Secretary of State to take regulatory action in various situations: for example… failure to address homophobia; or where prejudice against those of other faiths is encouraged or not adequately challenged by the school”.

The protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010 are age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation (s4 Equality Act 2010).

Hart elaborates:

This all conflicts directly with previous good guidance issued by the Government. But earlier reassurances can’t disguise the fact that schools will now have to comply with the new minimum standards...

If schools were required to promote respect for people as people there would be no problem. But the additional requirement of “paying particular regard to the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010” transforms the duty in an alarming way.

One of the ‘protected characteristics’ in the Equality Act is sexual orientation. It could easily be alleged that a teacher who says “I believe same-sex marriage is not real marriage” has shown a lack of respect for people of a same-sex sexual orientation.

Schools will come under immense pressure to endorse same-sex marriage in order to comply with these regulations. Since the equality rights must be “actively promoted”, they will undoubtedly change what is taught in schools.

Under existing equality law, schools cannot discriminate against pupils but governments have carefully excluded the school curriculum from the Equality Act. The regulations break the seal around the curriculum for the first time. Now activists could launch a discrimination claim over the content of lessons.

This is why the Association of School and College Leaders has warned about the harmful implications for freedom of expression in schools.

The Government keeps talking about “British values” but seems to think this means promoting political correctness.

In its alarming consultation document, the Government lets slip some of its thinking.

3.2.2
PART 2 – Spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of students

… Schools will be expected to focus on, and be able to show how their work with pupils is effective in embedding fundamental British values. ‘Actively promote’ also means challenging pupils, staff or parents expressing opinions contrary to fundamental British values.

It’s astonishing that the Government thinks schools should challenge the personal beliefs of parents for being contrary to political correctness. This could lead a head teacher to reprimand a parent who tells their child that marriage is for a man and a woman.

The new requirement for schools to actively promote principles which encourage respect for persons with protected characteristics (as set out in the Equality Act 2010) is intended to allow the Secretary of State to take regulatory action in various situations: for example where girls are disadvantaged on the grounds of their gender; failure to address homophobia; or where prejudice against those of other faiths is encouraged or not adequately challenged by the school.

As we know from recent history, reasonable opposition to same-sex marriage is routinely described as ‘homophobia’. Does the new equality requirement mean a school must discipline or dismiss a teacher who voices support for traditional marriage? Will parents of prospective pupils be interrogated about their beliefs before their child is granted a place at school?

The plans also slip in another attack on parents by demanding that in future private schools must conform to ‘national norms’ rather than the expectations of parents.

Any school with a religious ethos which upholds traditional marriage will now have to defend itself against the new rules. Schools could be harassed by inspectors or even have their governors removed by the Secretary of State.

The regulations are a fundamental change of approach in our education system, which have been slipped out under the radar. It is vital that these dangerous plans are opposed and exposed. [All emphases added]

In short, the new regulations are written in such ambiguous terms that any opinion about an institution - like same-sex marriage - may be taken as a lack of respect for some people - homosexuals.

As John Bowers Q.C. explains:

The Regulations are not framed as a duty to promote the protected characteristics but instead as a duty to promote respect of people, having particular regard to those protected characteristics. It adopts much of its language from the human rights case law (tolerance, respect etc). It is however a small step as a matter of interpretation to elide the respect for a person to respecting the beliefs and practices of the group to which that person belongs and this is especially so given the reference to active promotion, a concept to which I refer below in more detail. It may also be said that the words “paying particular regard” shift the duty beyond that of merely respecting people since otherwise it could have been framed simply as a duty to respect persons. [Emphasis added]

Mr Bowers also remarks that the curriculum is in danger of becoming politicised,

because respect for some protected characteristics (or more correctly respect of those with different protected characteristics including faiths and beliefs) may be highly contentious. The law has thus far stayed steadfastly outside the classroom door (and indeed from promoting respect in the classroom) and this has been the policy of governments of each political colour. [Emphasis added]

It's been an article of faith of successive governments that the curriculum should not be a political football and that teachers should not even potentially be the subject of litigation. But all this could be an unintended consequence of the amendments.

Mr Bowers provides examples of situations in which teachers may fall foul of the standards because what they say may be perceived as a lack of respect for people who hold the corresponding beliefs: portraying jihad negatively, dismissing the concept of man-made climate change, making jokes about veganism. He concludes:

The danger of litigation is exacerbated by the vagueness in the proposals arising from the concept of active promotion.

41. The inevitable result is to open teachers up to increased scrutiny, pressures and complaints. There is a real risk of major litigation over what happens in the classroom. Further the contents may undermine their academic freedom.

I find the concept of "protected characteristics" entitling the persons who possess them to "particular respect" a bit politically-correctly sinister, implying that some groups of people are more equal than others. We already know that Muslims are more equal than non-Muslims and homosexuals are more equal than Christians - we've seen it repeatedly demonstrated -, but now it could be enshrined in government's school regulations.

In the end, all this means one thing: much more power to the government and less freedom of expression to people. We are on a slippery slope to totalitarianism, and plenty of progress on that route has already been made.