Originally Posted by nighthawk
there are peer reviewed scientific studies of near death experiences and terminal lucidity you have to deal with.



Not really, nothing has been proven. Nobody doubts the phenomena of NDE's and out of body experiences happen, but the evidence supports that these are a brain induced experience, a form of lucid dreams or visions. Both NDE's and OBE's have been induced in the lab using both hallucinogenics and electrical brain stimulation.

For example;
''What happens when you die? As she lay blindfolded in a seat in a dimly lit room, Anna* came close to finding out.

But Anna wasn't dying, or even close to death, when she entered what she described as an alternate realm. Instead, she was among 13 volunteers who had agreed to take the powerful hallucinogenic dimethyltryptamine (DMT) for a study conducted by the psychedelic research group at Imperial College London, U.K.

The researchers, who watched Anna surf her consciousness in the low light of the research room at one of the world's most prestigious research institutions, pumped the volunteers with the psychedelic to learn how close DMT could bring a person to the sensation of skirting death.

DMT's trip is said to mimic the feeling of almost dying so accurately that those who take it describe hallucinations that mirror near-death experiences—psychological events reported by people who have come close to or believe they have come close to dying.''

Originally Posted by nighthawk

No, not that th Greeks had all the answers, but since the ancient Greeks formed the basis of Western thought you have to do battle with them first.

There are five Transcendental Desires that were recognized around 400 BC by Plato and Aristotle. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and many other philosophers have spoken of these same desires through the centuries.

What are these transcendental desires? They are our built-in desires for:

Perfect and unconditional Truth
Perfect and unconditional Love
Perfect and unconditional Justice (Goodness)
Perfect and unconditional Beauty
Perfect and unconditional Being (Home)

How can we have transcendent desires without some sort of transcendent nature?


There is a problem with reason alone. The Greeks were great at logic and reason, but did not have the tools with which to test their own premises. Pure reason without verifiable evidence and testing has led to all sorts of false conclusions.

Within the scientific community, "reason alone" is dead. It died with Descartes. The only way toward objective truth is reason combined with empirical observation and experiment. It's not enough to have a "great idea." One has to provide testable and explanatory hypotheses that are both verifiable and falsifiable to have any claim to objective knowledge.


False Premises;
''A false premise is an incorrect proposition that forms the basis of an argument or syllogism. Since the premise (proposition, or assumption) is not correct, the conclusion drawn may be in error. However, the logical validity of an argument is a function of its internal consistency, not the truth value of its premises.

For example, consider this syllogism, which involves an obvious false premise:


If the streets are wet, it has rained recently. (premise)
The streets are wet. (premise)
Therefore it has rained recently. (conclusion)

This argument is logically valid, but quite demonstrably wrong, because its first premise is false - one could hose down the streets, the local river could have flooded, etc.''