 103.9 FM, WOZO Radio, Knoxville. Ladies and gentlemen, Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Hello and welcome to Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, October 11th, 2020. I'm Larry Rhodes, or Douter 5, and as usual we have our co-host, Wombat on the phone with us. Hello Wombat. What's in the box? What's in the box? There you go. The box. Dead cat. A live or dead cat. And our guests today are George, Red Leader, and Doubtfire. Hello all. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, religion, no, humanism and the sciences. And conversely, we also talk about religion, religious faith, God's holy books and superstition. If you get the feeling you're the only non-believer in Knoxville while you're just not, there are several atheists free thinking and rationalist groups that exist right here in Knoxville and we'll be telling you how you can connect with them right after the mid-show break. Also, did you know that there's been a streaming atheist calling TV slash a video show broadcasting in here in Knoxville? It has been for over 10 years. Did you know that Wombat? And it's disappointing too, because the Boy Season One was really good. You can watch Boy Season One and be like, oh, this is really good. This is a good show. It ends on a pretty good cliffhanger. Season two, terrible script. OK Acting, just introduced a bunch of useless characters. They're turning it into a soap opera. And the worst thing is, if you try to find bad reviews for it, Amazon has cleansed the internet and made all the bad reviews just about the release schedule. But there aren't any bad reviews for the RTV show. Oh, it's so bad. It's so bad. It's just a calling show where anybody can call in and talk to an actual atheist. We'll tell you more about that after the mid-show break as well. Also, if you'd like to interact with us during the show, go to Facebook and search for digital free thought radio hour and use the messaging function to send us questions or comments. Wombat, what do you have for us today? So I recently died and had an amazing dream where I saw a bunch of other dead people and we all went to white Jesus. And white Jesus was like, hey, what's up guys? And I was like, oh my gosh, he was white all along. Isn't this amazing? This is great. Then I woke up and I realized it's totally true. That's all the proof you need to establish what we're going to be talking about today. Near-death experiences, which I think is a really, really interesting phenomenon in terms of how popular it is. I think everyone is aware of the term, even if they've never had the experience. It's sort of like taking on sort of like a meme. And we need to also talk about the difference between ghosts and souls, or if there is a difference. I started a topic online earlier this week just to discuss that. And I think we might want to hit that later on. Okay, okay. How about this? We'll start off with some pretty good definitions. That way everybody knows what we're talking about. George, I'm going to throw it out to you first. What do you think we mean when we say near-death experience? I have no idea. That's why we came to you. What do you think we're doing? A near-death experience? Yeah. What do you think? Have you ever had something similar to that? Or what do you even think I'm talking about? Well, I can't say I really do know. Honestly. Be me your best guess. How about that? Well, let's see. It's like almost dying, right? Right. I can't remember having almost died. It's that simple. Sure. I can't talk from experience about this. I just don't have any. Okay. George, we're going to go around. But if you come back and be like, so what's a near-death experience? I would say, hey, you got your shot. That's right. Doubter five, I'm going to throw it out to you. You want to tell me about the basic introduction? Sure. What I understand is that near-death experience is when you almost die, like George said. But in this particular case, a lot of people will point to a hospital setting where a doctor has actually pronounced you dead. And then they keep working with you, try to bring you back. Or even if you just come back on your own and you say, yeah, I was dead, but then I came back. I know it's like to be dead. Yeah. You know, that's anecdotal evidence at best. But a lot of people will point to near-death experiences for their definitions of afterlife. That's pretty good. Doubter, it seems like you want to weigh on this. What do you think of near-death experiences? And have you ever had experiences like that in the past? Yeah. I've never came near-death, fortunately. But near-death experiences are, well, let's look at it. In history, near-death experiences were near-death, like approaching death. But now, because of our technology of bringing back people from cardiac arrest that's been maybe flat-lined for a certain amount of time, they're listed as clinically dead, which is a little different than really dead, I guess. For some people, dead, dead. And then there's clinically dead. And then so there's anecdotal reports and also papers and reviews about people who actually experienced what it was like to be clinically dead. And there's a lot of information on that. And so the description is, they call it the classic near-death experience. Okay. So the classic near-death experience. Classic NDE. Yeah. It contains like certain core universal experiences. That would be meeting dead loved ones, a life review, seeing a light, out-of-body experience, and then having the choice to either stay or come back to life. So those are kind of the core essentials. No matter what culture people come from, basically those core features remain. Some of the coloring of maybe who they spoke to, like I spoke to a light. An atheist might say, I spoke just to some light or something. A religious person may say, well, I spoke to Jesus. Or a Muslim would say, I spoke to Allah. So they interpret the light a little different coming out of it. So it's kind of like a post-hoc interpretation of what happened. Yes. The core essential experience is all the same. It's all common. That's what I understand it to be. That's a great, fantastic answer. Doubt or five. Doubt or five and doubt fire. Scott and Larry. Both great answers. Dale, I want to throw it out to you. You're on mute. Mind taking yourself off mute. And I want to know what's your opinion on what a near-death experience is and have you ever had one or something close to it in the past? Well, I've definitely had a near-death experience, what you're calling that. I used to work for a cardiologist named Dr. Raymond Moody who wrote a book called Life After Life because he documented a lot of the experiences that people had being a cardiologist and me being a cardiopulmonary technician. We both had a lot of experience bringing people back from death. I would like to make a few corrections. Clinical death is no longer defined. Clinical death used to be not having a breath. Then clinical death used to be not having a heartbeat. Then clinical death eventually became brainwaves. So that's sort of an old idea. Also, the idea that people experience things in a universal pattern, seeing people, having the choice of coming back. That's just not true. Anybody can experience it by a loss of blood pressure. Test pilots experience it all the time, especially if you're put in a centrifuge. What happens is you have a drop in blood pressure. When you have a drop in blood pressure, you start to have tunnel vision. Tunnel vision, meaning all of your peripheral vision starts going away. The parts of your eye that are most important, that being the center, the part where you read, becomes the last to go away because it gets the most blood supply. Consequently, what you have is a tunnel that's dark on the sides, but whatever light you have is in the center. So you interpret it as a tunnel of very bright light. Wow, that's very cool. That's a great explanation. And you said you had one. I have had one. Yeah, actually it is. What happened to you? Oh, so I used to be in the Boy Scouts and we went up to this campsite when I was around 12 and we would do our swimming merit badge certifications. Basically like, hey, get in this lake, make sure you consume from one side of the lake to the other side. And if you can do that, then we can start doing our merit badges for swimming. The thing was we started really early in fall and the lake water is really cold. And the lake's distance was pretty long. It was like maybe the maybe two standard swimming pool lengths. And so when I got in the water, my 12 year old body, you know, I'm swimming, I'm getting cold. I make it to one side of the lake and I'm coming back, but my legs start like feeling a lot heavier and I start sinking in the water. And I'm actually like physically drowning. Like I'm getting oxygen deprived. I can't get back up. And there's a period where I'm just under the water and I'm like, ah, man, this sucks. And it's embarrassing. But then I felt really, really, really calm because like my body is going into like, hey, let's check out mode. And I have all the hormones just kicking off all at once. And it felt really peaceful. Like I always thought drowning was like this really horrific experience. But there's a point where it's like, eh, it's okay. Your body just like take a chill fell. Here's some drugs. Here's some mental things we've been holding in your gut for a while. And I was in that state until I got pulled out of the water. I had a lifeguard pull me out and do the whole check on me and stuff like that. But I was a hardcore Christian back when I was like 12 or as much as you could be when you're a child. And my near-death experience was very much, hey, I felt really calm when I was under the water. But it wasn't until I was informed by other people's near-death experiences that I started to like, re-remember the experience I had and started to borrow things from their stories. And then all of a sudden, oh, but I was under water and I felt really calm and there was a white light. And there were voices talking to me. And I'm like, in my head, it's like, that's not really how I remembered it the first time. It's just sort of like what I'm borrowing from other people's stories. How like I'm re-picturing the narrative. Now when I look back at it now, like in my 30s, it's like, no, I just, I got too cold. I couldn't swim very well. And my body went into a like a survival sort of like, here's all your comfort hormones. Just stay calm, you know, like don't freak out as much anymore. And maybe you'll get rescued. And that's what happened. But it's very easy for people to misremember things. And I find it also alarming. And Dale, maybe you can weigh on this. It's sort of like the image that people had of aliens before that one famous movie came out with the gray men. People's impression of what an alien would look like were vastly different, but it wasn't until that movie came out with the big round head and the black eyes that everyone's impression of aliens suddenly became the new like very similar thing and coalesce into a similar thing. And I feel like near that to experiences are sort of in that same realm where they're informed by the ideas of the public. Dale, do you think there's any argument there? I believe that anyone who tries to remember things are going to remember them differently. We have, there's one documented case, a girl was drowning and she saw her tunnel as having little tiny squares all over it. And more than likely what was happening is she was having tunnel vision and she was seeing the sides of the pool that had tiles on it. But your thing about what we interpret clouds and it's the same way you interpret things that are going on. However, what most people talk about is the clinical experience where you have a loss of blood pressure in an ER or in a surgery and you are partially awake. One of the last things to go is the hearing. So people often say they flowed it or it has been reported they would float above their bodies and they could see the doctors working and all of this and they could see their bodies. What is actually happening is, is they're hearing the dialogue of what's going on around them and their brain always trying to put things in a logical order starts to assemble a scene much in the same way you would do in a dream when the television is on. So one doctor creatively put a tile above the bed in the ER, above all the beds as a matter of fact, and it had a message on it. And he definitively said, well, if anyone wakes up and can tell me what that message is, I'll think maybe they have something. But this is just a phenomenon. Also when you do actually start having oxygen deprivation, I said lack of blood pressure is most common in the clinical setting, but when you have oxygen deprivation, it's actually the exact same way. Excuse me, it causes the exact same effect. I'm also going to throw out one extra thing. The stories of floating seems to be coinciding with loss of equilibrium. Like I know when I lie down in a swing pool or if I'm swimming on my back, it feels like I'm floating just because the juices in my ear to avoid technical terms keeps me from realizing what's up and what's down and my brain's like, hey, you're flying, you're floating. I don't know what's going on. And that's the same sort of like uneasiness. But I want to throw out the Doubtfire. What do you have? Doubtfire, Scott, are you willing to play some devil's advocate with us here because I don't want us to go around in a big old echo chamber. Let's keep it interesting. Yeah, that's right. So the thing about it is I'm Doubtfire. So I believe in healthy skepticism, but I'm also skeptical of my own skepticism. Nice. It's good to question everything and look at it. So first thing, if we're looking at science to kind of understand how the world works, right? So what does science actually say on the matter? What do we have? So then a little bit of preparation for this. I don't know if you guys are familiar with NCBI. It's a site that means what it stands for is the National Center of Biotechnology and Information. And so what they do is they put out peer-reviewed journals. So these could be like Medicine, PubMed, peer-reviewed. You know, you'll have journal citations and papers and things like that. So they have papers on near-death experiences. And what have they found? Like one of the latest ones is from Jeffrey Long, who is a medical doctor. And his conclusion, and I'll just, and I, you know, for the audience, say if you're interested in this kind of stuff, go to NCBI and just look up near-death experience and you'll find it. But his conclusion is this. Let me just drop down because I'm kind of reading through it. There's basically six lines of evidence to kind of explain what NDEs really are. Now, it's good to note also as well that there's only like 20% of people that actually remember their near-death experience. So that's the first thing. And that's another question in and of itself. But Jeffrey Long, and I'll quote him, he says that, hold on, I just missed it. Oh, I'm sorry. Keeping this exciting, Scott. Yeah, keeping it exciting, man. So basically what he's saying is because of the six lines of evidence, there's reasonably convincing evidence that something inexplicable is going on that's different than just oxygen deprivation. Oxygen deprivation gives you a few of those biological that results from, you know, our biology and losing, like the tunnel vision, like was just mentioned. But there's other parts of the near-death experience that is that are inexplicable. That's what the conclusion is. They don't really know what's going on. But for all intents and purposes, NDEs are real experiences as far as we define real. Yeah. So there is this overlining when it comes to a scientific report. It's sort of like UFOs. Like if people can see a UFO as an unidentified flying object and those exist, no doubt. But it's not good proof of visitation from intelligent life. Right. That's exactly what I'm saying is that we can be skeptical. We can say we don't know if the attribution is really what we're talking about is real or but we do know the experience is inexplicable. Yes. People do have experiences when they're near death. There you go. And there seems to be some commonality between the stories. What's causing this and what is it percluded? Like doubt or fire? May I ask? Right. May I ask? Doubt fire? Yeah. Doubt fire. What are these things that are inexplicable? The inexplicable is in the paper. I don't want to go through. I don't want to be too long on it. But some of these are going to be the veridical experiences. Veridical. What? Veridical. Veridical. You have to refine this. So veridical means that it's a shared experience. Ah, okay. So doctors in the laboratory. Veritable. Yeah. So they can say, so for example, let's say a patient says, Hey, I know what this instrument looks like on the table that you were using to split my skull open or something like that, which is one of the examples that we're putting this paper. No one talked about it. No one, they didn't see it obviously at any point. Yet the person says, you know, at this particular time, you guys were talking about this and then you pulled out this particular instrument that looks like that. And it was just inexplicable. They couldn't understand how did this person, how was this person able to describe that instrument the way they did if they didn't see it. And there's a lot of different, there's a lot of different examples like this. And we're going to go to doubt or five, but in science, there is room for things to be inexplicable. It just doesn't mean that the next best assumptions, the correct answer just can't explain this for now. That is correct. What do you got? Well, for that particular instance, I would say maybe he's seen it on some kind of crime show or some kind of a medical show. And he just remembers seeing it several times when people were operating on other people. And then when they mentioned it, he drew the image from the memory. Yeah, that's true. But going back to the UFO thing, a lot of this is interpretation. So many people will hear the word UFO, and they won't think unidentified flying object, they think flying saucer. I mean, it's like that UFO is another word for flying saucer for them. Unfortunately. For aliens. Yeah. And it's not the same thing. When someone says UFO, it means there was something in the air that they couldn't identify. Now, have you ever seen a UFO, Larry? And maybe we can transition. I've never seen, well, I've seen things that I could not identify. Yes. Yeah. Some like later on, like one time I saw a light going across the sky like a UFO. And then, you know, I realized it was the sun, which was setting, was hitting that plane against a dark background. Oh, that's interesting. I couldn't see anything but a reflected light. Oh, that's good. And then after I waited for a while, I could see that it stopped reflecting and then I could see the plane. You know, things like that. George. We don't know. There's been a while since you jumped into the conversation. You might amuting yourself. I want to know, have you garnered anything from our discussion about near death experiences? Do you have a better idea of what it might be? And then on a fun level, have you ever seen a UFO? Well, I'm old enough, believe it or not, that I remember seeing barrage balloons above New York City, above Brooklyn, New York. Wow. And I just remembered that recently. That's the closest thing I've ever seen to a UFO, but there were strings attached to them. You know, they're like Flash Gordon's rockets. When you see the rocket ships in the Flash Gordon movie, you can sort of identify that they're dangling from strings. Wow. And these were tethered by ropes from the ground. Because I'm talking about World War II. Now, about UFOs? No. Have I gleaned anything? Yes. You know, what seems to amount to scientific observations have been quite interesting to me. So that's all I can say. I saw Hillbop's comment when I was seven years old, which means I'll be able to see it again when I'm around 70, if I make it that far. And that was my first UFO because I looked up and I'm like, that is not like anything else I've ever seen in the sky. It's like a solid meteor shower that's just frozen in place. It doesn't look like the moon. It doesn't look like any of the other stars. It's not airplane. What the heck is that? And there was no internet that was reliable back then. So it's just like our whole neighborhood's like, what's going on? We're getting new as an encyclopedia. The only thing we had were like smart people in the library to tell us what the thing was. And that was it. Are you guys familiar with the disclosure in February? No. What's that? The disclosure of otherworldly vehicles. No. Talk to me. Not familiar with that? Right. Yeah. Yeah. There's a big circulation back in February that they've released video of, of air pilot interception of unidentified flying objects. They call them aerial remote off-world vehicles. And these things would, would from what the video showed, they would go from zero to 10,000 feet in less than a second, breaking all the laws of physics. And they would show this stuff on a video. Just got to look it up. I don't know what it is. Nobody's really saying it's, but apparently the Pentagon is calling it off-world vehicles. I don't know. They are not. Yeah. I mean, that's what they say. But the video is kind of interesting. It shows some sort of technology that it definitely isn't a bird. It definitely isn't a plane that we're aware of. But yeah. I just thought I'd throw that in there. That or five. Go for it. And then I'll say one thing. Yeah. It's kind of funny that we started off talking about near-death experiences and souls and ghosts and end up in UFOs. But there is one thing that, since we are talking about UFOs, I'd like to mention, there's a footage, actual footage of a battle, battle of Los Angeles during World War II, the UF literally fought a UFO. Go to, just search for the battle of Los Angeles. And you'll see that there was something that we were firing at up and down the western. Was it Venus? The left coast, huh? Was it Venus? No. I mean, they caught it in cross, what do you call it, search lights. Multiple search lights focusing on this thing, firing artillery at it for hours. And they have video of it on the radio. Battle of Los Angeles. Battle of Los Angeles. Check it out. There we go. I'm all going to fit. Go right here. Sorry. Barbara, I do want to say one thing about science is I think it's really cool. In science, there are such things as undefined terms, undefined variables, unknown things, explicable things, things we don't know the answers for, just unknowns in general. And these aren't necessarily pointing at the most popular, you know, conspiracy theory. It's just a recognition that science doesn't have an answer for this yet, which means that we have places to work on. Science is, like I said, it always involves a process, but we got to make sure that we make the distinction of, hey, man, there's just some things and science doesn't know what it is. So maybe it's from Mars. It's like science isn't going that far. Science is just recognizing, hey, we don't know what this thing is. We're going to figure it out eventually, but right now it's an unknown and it goes into the big vault of unknown things that we're still trying to figure out. I shouldn't say that. It's correct. It's a very open door house, but it is fun to think about what could be, but after that point, we're outside of the realm of science and just having fun talking with each other. And there's always room for creativity like that. Larry, I think we're at the bottom of the half hour. How about we come back and we will do our own invocation and then local news and a whole bunch of other fun stuff. This is the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WZO Radio 103.9 LPFM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. And we'll be right back after this short break. After the second half of the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WZO Radio 103.5 LPFM, that's 103.9 LPFM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. I'm Dider Five. This is Sunday, October 11th, 2020. And let's talk about the Freethought groups that you can join here in Knoxville. First, there's the Atheist Society of Knoxville, founded in 2002. We're in our 18th year. Ask has over a thousand members and you can find us online at KnoxvilleAtheist.org. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you could still go to Meetup and search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one? Start! Another Freethinking group here in Knoxville, the Rationalists of East Tennessee. To find out more about them, go to Rationalists.org and click on their upcoming events. Earlier in the show, we'd said we'd talk about the Knoxville Atheist called in TV show. Well, it's called Freethinkers United Coalition of Knoxville and you can find it at YouTube by searching for those words. Could you spell that out for me? No. Well, it's Freethinkers United Coalition of Knoxville. Also, you might want to do a search for Freethought Forum Knoxville and you'll find ten years of archives of our TV show that we had before we went video. Also, if you're interested in getting involved with the TV or this radio show, just come to an Ask Meetup, RET meeting, come to our website, Facebook page, whatever, and tell us you want to be involved. With us on the show today, we have Dot Fire, we have George, Red Leader, and as ever, Wombat. Take it away, Wombat. So, we were talking about Braveheart, which was a really great movie. I love the scene where William Wallace is on his horse and he's just like, yes, you might fight and you might die today and dying in your dead many years from now, you'd be willing to trade all those days from this day for this one chance. Just one chance to come back here as young men and tell our enemies. But where is the love? Guys, we had really listeners. We got some time for feedback from our listeners today. Last episode's show was called I Don't Need Evidence for My Beliefs and that was a fun talk. I got to be honest with you, we had a full house on that one and we had some really good love back from that. So, what were some comments that we got back? Dot Us Trading Room says, Romeo, Romeo, where for out that Romeo? Hey, did you know that where for actually means why? It's the literal meaning is that Juliet is agonized to think he really wishes for him to come back to the other tribe or go back to the other tribe. And so I said, that sounds cool because the last joke we did was a Romeo, Romeo, Juliet thing. Nathan Matthews says, blind belief, there's got to be a better way. I mean, as Wombat said recently, doubt is your best friend. It strengthens your belief in true things. It keeps those pesky contradictions away. I've got enough stress as it is. And it's true, this year has been kind of a crazy one. There's also been a really fun excerpt that was pulled out of our last show. It was SE Minute, how you can do SE in about five minutes and I said, hey, you can do SE in five minutes. All you need to do is just ask, one, what do you mean by that? It's a great way to get people to think about what they're actually saying rather than for them just reiterating things that other people say. You can also say, how can we test that? And then also, how reliable is that test? And it's really important that you stress, how can we test that? Because you want to make it a group project where you're both working together to figure out how someone's using a methodology to come to a conclusion. And then how reliable is that test? Ketz puts that focus not on their conclusion or them as a person, but on that test specifically. And that's what SE is all about. What do you mean by that? How can we test that? How reliable is that test? Fantastic set of questions. Black Picket Sign says, I love Let's Chat and I'm slowly learning even sign language because of your videos. I love sign language and I love SE. And I think they're both weirdly intuitive. I think it's great that you're showing me a number of wonderful things that I can incorporate in my life. Thank you. Thank you, Black Picket Sign. I appreciate that. Ryce Coran also says, I have been studying SE for about four years now. And I've even taken two workshops under Magnobosco. Trust me, SE is not complicated to learn, but the effective implementation of it is quite another beast. I've realized that in no uncertain terms I am not clever or amiable enough to ever manage and affect or talk with anyone. That's why I support those who can have those SE conversations and respect the hell out of them for their beliefs. Keep going on, guys. And to that I just made a quick comment to Ryce. I said if you just keep your SE down to like variations of those three questions, what do you mean by that? How can we test that? And how is that test reliable? That's SE. Really, it's just asking someone, how did you figure that out? And anyone can ask that. You don't need to have a YouTube channel. You don't need to have, you don't need to have cameras in front of you. Ask someone how they figure that out and you're already doing SE. It's not that bad. All right. We were coming back from this show. Oh, Dill, do you want to make some comments? Don't forget to unmute yourself. Go for it. Yes. For your viewers who are curious about SE, have you ever recommended the book by Peter Bogotian? Me personally, no. I actually think the best way to learn SE is to watch videos of people doing SE. I find Peter Bogotian is great to be a great way to understand how it started, like historically. But it's very much outdated in terms of like the suggestions that it makes. And it's way more effective to just watch people do it on YouTube. Figure out what you're comfortable with and then take some things from different people and incorporate into your own style. SE is not something you can learn from a book. It's only going to be something you learn from going out and learning yourself and learning how to talk to people. That's the best way to do it. Michael Schirmer on his show was a science salon number 83 as an interview with him that lasts an hour and a half about how it started and how to talk with difficult people about anything. And I found it to be very enlightening. Good. You coined the term SE. And one thing that kind of helps me is the bad term. It's a really complicated word for just talking to people without sounding like a jerk. I prefer Socratic Examination myself. That fire, what do you think? Yeah, I was just going to say that it's good to not have your own preconceived beliefs going into the conversation because it makes it emotionally charged on your part. So like if I'm talking to a witness and I have a bias against Jehovah's Witnesses or Christianity or something like that well if I take that attitude with me talking to them then I'll become a little bit more challenging and we're not there to challenge people on their beliefs we're just there to question. Yeah. A lot of times the question will challenge and you can't take a umbrage to that. Yeah, you've got to choose your mind field. You're going to challenge either way, but there's a way to be like at least I'm going to challenge the method and not you personally or at least your conclusion. There's a way to get past that that very brittle ego mindset and get us both working towards how do you get this better because right now you can I can see that there's a problem here that's why you're dancing. What can we do to keep this dancing from happening and that's fun in my opinion it's it's only exhausting when you try to extend a conversation longer that needs to be or you take on too much burden of I'm going to change this person's mind in five minutes. Essie's not about that. You are just there to help a person think about why they believe stuff and have good methods and good results from their method. We would not want to know about that. Exactly. It would help change our view on the subject. Yeah and there's still room for argument and debates. I think debates have a great role in society as well as argumentation and you can even throw in argumentation counter apologetics etc into your Essie approach but it's just good to know that you have another option and that's why I advocate Socratic Examination as a good way to talk to people. Okay so we were talking about hey if I have a dream and I see a ghost or if I become a ghost and I see my spirits, my dead parents that's absolute proof that they exist. Isn't that right Larry? Absolutely not. No that's a near death experience. We were just talking about that for the last half hour. I'm confused. You're changing your tone. What's going on here? Sorry I didn't. What's that face? No it's proof you have an experience but how do you interpret that experience interpretation? Mirror the truth or it cannot? We can throw out the same Essie questions like how do you test that? Is now reliable is just a couple of dreams? People that said you know they've been in a haunted house I said how do you know that while I was sitting in this chair and a ghost passed over me how do you know that? Well I got I got cold. What do you mean by that? I got a cold spell and that's what happens when a ghost passes over you. Well they're talking about experiences and interpretation and results and how they interpret the results gives you the experience gives you the mindset and one does not lead to another it's non-sequit but in their mind you know ghost one of the attributes of ghosts is that they cause cold and we've never had a ghost to examine we've never had a soul to examine we can't talk about the attributes of anything until we examine one and find out what those attributes are but the stories they've heard the anecdotal evidence is all they need for but actually do like the guidelines of hey whenever you feel cold or like whenever you're sitting down and you suddenly feel cold that's a ghost passing over you I'm thinking to myself hey okay at least now we have an actual test that we can do maybe we can see how repeatable it is we can test to see how reliable it is and in the event that I sit down in like a graveyard and I don't have a cold flash is that what is that an indication of and could you give me a point where it's like 100% chance you're going to be passed over by a ghost no I don't feel it I was like let's get another person to see if they feel anything it ends on where the graveyard is yeah it's like are we going to warm our way out of a conclusion so that we can keep it with a hypothesis or we're going to just say that this test that we have isn't reliable maybe there are ghosts but this way that we're testing it isn't the best way to go about it the thing about it is how do you even know that ghosts cause cold until you have one to examine to find out it's just an assertion a claim it's a sort of thing that makes it even more complicated to test for sure though we are talking about near-death experiences we do have this commonality of people saying hey you know I did have a conversation with a person who was about to die and when I woke up they died and they were telling me hey it's going to be alright I'm fine it's good and then they wake up and like that person's dead maybe they worked in a hospice or they were a nurse that story I've heard on the internet on multiple occasions what are you saying at that point um are you I'll throw this out to you first are you just saying that they're all wrong right so for me it comes back to how are we defining our terms like real and everything because I mean think about it I saw a really good tech talk from a neurologist who said basically we hallucinate our entire reality our whole experience is kind of like a hallucination I could see you watching that Ted talk at least three times yeah dude I watched it and the way he breaks I mean it sounds kind of kind of crazy at first but the way the guy breaks it down he kind of puts it all in perspective for you and everything but basically though still the the core essential is there when people dream dreams feel real they feel like you know when you dream of falling off a mountain in your sleep I mean you're literally terrified okay so there's an emotional your brain fires up I mean all these things become a real experience for you so when these people have these near-death experiences are they real well what do you mean you mean is does this mean the afterlife is real or are you talking about is the experience real or are you just making it up or maybe embellishing it I don't know I mean I've never had a near-death experience so I really can't say I know what it's all about or anything like that but I can read some of these scientific journals and we can take that route and they can say look they it seems like these people are having a real experience these commonalities are inexplicable but that's as far as they go with it because I mean consciousness is something we can't really predict with physics I mean consciousness is an internal experience it's subjective there's no science by nature is objective consciousness by its nature is subjective so right now we've got a little gap there so I don't know my personal take on if you were to ask me my personal take I'd say I'm 50-50 I don't know anything I do know that there is a difference between imaginary things and real things out there in the world like you know there's a difference between a dream and my waking life I can tell that there's a difference one I can control others I can't you know I can't jump off a mountain and fly like I can in my dream so there's a difference there so you're working by different set of rules right different set of rules so it seems like this NDE thing is kind of like a dream in a way it's not really out there no one can see these dead loved ones but the person themselves that are going through it but let me say this I kind of think about this stuff in my life it kind of helps me even if I don't believe in an afterlife I have no reason to think I'm going to live on after my death none have none but if I thought that I was going to have a near death experience at the end of my life and there's this life review thing that happens that I'm pretty sure does happen then it kind of makes me feel like I want to be a good person I don't want my last experience to be you were a bad person to this guy and that guy you know I don't want that I don't I definitely don't want I want to go off with on a good you know note okay hey that's an interesting set of questions I'm going to fill this out to George first would you now this isn't a question of do you think near death experiences actually exist this is more of would you like to have one when it's your time I have no idea don't say that come on you know you're not surprisingly surprised with one yeah okay I'd like to be pleasantly surprised but you know in listening to some bits and pieces of what people have been saying right now I'm thinking about shared psychopathy like that I'm living in a world now that is a cult it's just this big huge cult of shared beliefs because people have heard them repeated so many times you know this I think is coming forward from I believe we had a discussion last week where this is I think we were mentioning something like if if something was repeated enough times people would begin to believe them yep absolutely true I believe that that's the hallucination I believe that yeah that's the hallucination factor we construct our reality based on our experiences what we're told our influences our genetics blah blah blah I'll throw this out just real quick to just add on to George's story at this point like I remember talking in to an electrician who was at her job and we were talking about old presidents and I was like yeah isn't it funny how like a lot of people believe that Ben Franklin actually flew a kite with a a key at the end of it in a lightning storm and he was hit with lightning but all the lightning just stuck and he was like I discovered electricity like isn't that a silly story and the electricity looks at me like that actually happened and I was like no way no way is that even feasible you would be a dead human being on the spot you know how much yeah yeah but Tyrone it's in all these Tyrone it's in all these books I mean we've we've heard these stories I must tell the truth I chopped down the cherry yeah that never happened either we've been indoctrinated and it's you know it's like my ex-wife was an editor was an editor and a very good one and at one point she was editing plant books for a very well known publisher of plant books and I was helping her on one of these projects and she explained to me that the people who write plant books steal material from each other and they steal material from other books and so plagiarism is rampant in that field and so what they do is they make up some they make up some falsehood about a plant and they bury it in something that they wrote about to see where that falsehood is repeated and then it's like now I know you plagiarized me because I made this up that's right exactly and so you know what brought this to my mind now was when Larry said this thing about when a ghost passes overhead you feel cold where the hell does that come from you know who started that meme is it we call it an old wives tale in 2020 or should we just call it like a really bad rumor or just why are they always wearing chains I never thought about chains I never thought about them I thought white sheets at most I'd like to get back to what you were talking about on memory you remember things this way or that way there was a quote that I like to bring to the table on that it says memory is not a recorder people think of it as a recorder but it's more like a wiki page not only can you change it but other people can change it too George loves that he's laughing so hard right now I'm laughing because I don't know I love wikipedia but there's BS on there Larry to modify that I wouldn't say memory is a wiki page I would say it's more of like an improv sketch troop that hasn't just recreated on the spot they just got the little card third grade recital let's go that's the way that happened it's very fine with this it can actually change after after you have some kind of conversation with other people who were theoretically there and tell you their version of it all of a sudden you start working their version into your memory you can sit down and just say I'm going to remember something that happened in my past but I'm going to do it with a red shirt on now I'm going to do it with a blue shirt on it's so easy to do you have to be aware of the fact that your brain is pulling together all the time and that the memories that you have are just recreations that your brain is just pulling together and putting confidence on so that you feel like you did something like they're amazing or cool or something, the things that you don't want to remember get murkier and like fall away with details but just be aware of that Dale, what's the final words on near-death experiences from our talks today do you feel like there's validity and saying hey I know you had an experience but there's not much to correlate that with an objective reality do you think that's fair to say oh man near-death experience what? no it looked like you were cutting out go for it go for it I think it's fair to say that unlike ghosts you can create near-death experiences anytime you want to I could give one to doubt or five with just about three minutes of training if that's a little bit dangerous it's easy to do and the pilots reproduce it all the time so I really don't spend a lot of time like I said I worked for a guy that wrote a book on it he was a Christian he himself admitted that the lack of oxygen and blood pressure is what creates them but from a Christian point of view he wanted to go with how did this near-death experience affect this person's life did they convert to Christianity so forth and so on that's all I got to say about that nice so we have four minutes left in the show I'm just going to round out Larry you got the last words doubt or fire we got to figure out some way to go around this but doubt, fire, Scott any last words on near-death experiences I just think that they're fascinating man I've looked into them for years near-death experience is what really triggered it all off and it's just inexplicable I don't really believe that we live on but that might be just my own personal incridulity argument I don't care it is what it is there's nothing I can do about it anyways but I tell you what I don't want my last experience to be negative if I'm one of those 20% of people that have this experience I don't want to be one of these people with a negative experience it kind of helps me think about being a good person each day it has a value George any last words on near-death experiences no I'm too busy listening fair enough, fair enough I would say this you can draw a lot of comfort from the idea that your death will be more of a transition than a final period and I find a lot of correlations between near-death experiences and theistic-based religions in general whereas people trying to make sense and rationalize a reality that is very much inscrutable and is filled with a bunch of unknowns and there is comfort in believing in a god that's watching out for you and has a plan for you and will show you a video of all the good deeds you've done at the end of your life or establish that when you do die you are just changing your address and going to a different place but there's not good rationale to believe that it might be true but there's not a good reason to believe that at this point and I care more about believing things for good reasons than believing things because they're comfortable and I can find many good reasons to be comfortable without a near-death experience supporting that or to be nice to people or to have a reason to be kind to others and I think people should just be aware that there's very good options to you even if you don't believe in a god or a near-death experience to be a good person out of five I believe that the I the we, the mud the myself is a mind that a working brain produces when the brain dies the mind ends there's no we have no trouble believing that everything else in the world dies when it dies and does not continue but we have to have special pleading we live forever we can't die and it's just hubris by my count put it that way this has been as we're going to go ahead and close out the show this has been the Digital Freethought Radio Hour be sure to visit the digitalfreethought.com for our little I can't talk Radio Show Archives, Atheist Songs and many other articles on the subject my book is called Atheism What's It All About it's available on Amazon I want to welcome all the old and new guests back to the show please come every Sunday morning when we do this recording if you're having trouble we're leaving religious beliefs behind visitrecoveringfromreligion.org they have help for you if you have questions for the show then you can send them to ask napistatnoxwellapist.org and we'll try to answer them on future shows you can also if you're watching these on YouTube list them in the comments below and we'll get to them then remember everybody's going to somebody else's the time to worry about it is when they prove that heaven sent hell sent souls are real until then don't sweat it enjoy your life and we see you next Wednesday say goodbye everybody goodbye everybody goodbye everybody that's right