An Interesting Encounter With A Young Lady.

[_marg]

And I believe Storm fabricated his story.

How would you know, marg,

I used the word "believe"

when you said you didn't even read it all?

I skimmed and read enough in my opinion to form an opinion using reasoning based on what I read.

[quote[What have you read about Storm, apart from what I posted here? [/quote]

nothing

You obviously haven't met Storm, either,

right

and neither have I, so by what iron-clad measure do we determine that he made it all up?

What the matter Ray, you can not accept people with differing opinions on this?

"It just sounds fake?" He was never really atheist, and for 20-22 years he was just cranky, intolerable, selfish and difficult to live with, then one day he suddenly has a light-bulb flash - "I could make money out of this - and I'll become a really, really good guy and put on an act of weeping and talking about Jesus and meeting a Being of Light, even though I really hate these things. But I do remember a few things from Sunday School when I was a kid."

My focus was his story, not whether he ever claimed to be atheist or not.

Makes perfect sense now.

And I see you didn't address my question.

Since I find Storm's story nonsense, and have little interest in it, and since you appear unable to accept differing opinions to yours, do not expect me to put much effort into responses to you on this.

[_marg]

Sure, was her experience fact, fantasy, a deluded mind under duress?

Oh I get it now, it was only the options you specifically offered that you would accept.

I find many elements of Storm's experience to have a clear link to other NDEs, which I've studied and continue to study as a phenomenon which still has no definite scientific explanation. I would prefer some intelligent counter-explanations, not the dogma to which Phillip refers.

So you are setting the boundaries of the answers you will accept.

[_Ray A]

Here are most of your core comments through the thread so far marg:

I don't buy her story that she was atheist...ever.

Yes that is my opinion as well. Her story seemed rather pathetic, juvenile in fact, in my opinion.

I only skimmed the story Ray, I wouldn't waste too much of my time on that nonsense unless I found it entertaining in an amusing way, but I don't.

Personally I think she's a liar.

Anyhow I really shouldn't be discussing this story, as it doesn't interest me, it's just nonsense meant to sell to believers because that's the sort of story that appeals to them.

As a non religious individual I know that concepts like "hell" and "God" are not relevant to my life....A believer would talk like that, because they already have "hell" conceptually in their mind and think it relevant to one's life.

I do not believe the girl was ever atheist. I doubt she truly comprehends how an atheist thinks. And I believe Storm fabricated his story.

Yet, contrary to all of this:

My focus was his story, not whether he ever claimed to be atheist or not.

Let me again quote your comment on Storm:

A believer would talk like that, because they already have "hell" conceptually in their mind and think it relevant to one's life.

And it's not about whether he claimed to be atheist?

So you are setting the boundaries of the answers you will accept.

I am not bound to "accept" anything. You are welcome to keep observing and commenting, but if I find your comments questionable is it an offence for me to say that your comments are questionable and sometimes unreasonable?

It appears you won't be happy until I say, "'yes, marg, you are right". You are the most reasonable and persuasive poster on this thread. But in my opinion so far all you've essentially contributed is:

1) I really don't care about this stuff because it's irrelevant to me and my life. (Yet you comment abundantly)

2) Both Storm and the young lady I met are liars.

3) Both Storm and the young lady I met fabricated all of this.

4) "Hell" and "God" are not relevant to your life, but for some reason commenting about it is.

5) You shouldn't be discussing any of this because it's only for gullible believers.

I await your next post marg, on a subject you shouldn't be discussing.

[_marg]

Here are most of your core comments through the thread so far marg:

(omit portion for brevity)

Yet, contrary to all of this (you write):

"My focus was his story, not whether he ever claimed to be atheist or not."

What I generally do is quote and address what I quote. So for example when I said .."My focus was his story ...." I was addressing the quote of your words. Go back and read it please. My comment did not have to do with your passenger client.

Let me again quote your comment on Storm:

A believer would talk like that, because they already have "hell" conceptually in their mind and think it relevant to one's life.

No Ray you will find if you go back that comment related to your passenger ..not Storm as she was the one who talked about having nightmares which must have been what hell was like.

And it's not about whether he claimed to be atheist?

My focus on Storm was that his story sounded fabricated.

So you are setting the boundaries of the answers you will accept.

I am not bound to "accept" anything. You are welcome to keep observing and commenting, but if I find your comments questionable is it an offence for me to say that your comments are questionable and sometimes unreasonable?

Ray you wrote a personal attack against antishock for what amounted to you not accepting his opinion which differed to yours.

It appears you won't be happy until I say, "'yes, marg, you are right". You are the most reasonable and persuasive poster on this thread. But in my opinion so far all you've essentially contributed is:

1) I really don't care about this stuff because it's irrelevant to me and my life. (Yet you comment abundantly)

Absolutely Ray I don't care about this stuff. What is annoying here is that apparently some people can not accept that others may interpret what someone says to be a lie. In both cases, I'm saying essentially both your passenger and Storm are liars. That is my opinion, based upon the facts given me.

2) Both Storm and the young lady I met are liars.

Good you are following me.

3) Both Storm and the young lady I met fabricated all of this.

Yes

4) "Hell" and "God" are not relevant to your life, but for some reason commenting about it is.

You asked for an opinion, at least I incorrectly perceived that to be the case. I gave it, then noticed some people unwilling to accept a different interpretation to theirs and hence was pulled into the discussion on that, not because I had any respect for what Storm or your passenger had to say.

5) You shouldn't be discussing any of this because it's only for gullible believers.

Well I shouldn't be discussing this with believers who do not want to allow for differing opinions they find objectionable.

I await your next post marg, on a subject you shouldn't be discussing.

[/quote]

Please see above

[_Ray A]

Absolutely Ray I don't care about this stuff. What is annoying here is that apparently some people can not accept that others may interpret what someone says to be a lie. In both cases, I'm saying essentially both your passenger and Storm are liars. That is my opinion, based upon the facts given me.

And do you accept that I accept they are not liars? Without referring to me as a "guillible believer"?

So here is my verdict: I don't accept that they are liars, especially the young lady, since I was the one who spoke with her.

You okay with that?

[_marg]

Absolutely Ray I don't care about this stuff. What is annoying here is that apparently some people can not accept that others may interpret what someone says to be a lie. In both cases, I'm saying essentially both your passenger and Storm are liars. That is my opinion, based upon the facts given me.

And do you accept that I accept they are not liars? Without referring to me as a "guillible believer"?

I can accept you don't think they are lying..obviously.

I don't know how much you buy into Storm's story. But for argument sake I'll assume that you do but let's say you don't think it really happened you think it only a dream or an hallucination, I wouldn't call you gullible on that.

So here is my verdict: I don't accept that they are liars, especially the young lady, since I was the one who spoke with her.

You okay with that?

Look Ray, do you believe that sleeping with a Bible will get rid of horrendous, hellish nightmares? Do you believe that turning Christian and believing in the Christian God will get rid of those same nightmares.

Do you think those nightmares she claims to have had...would have disappeared because of the reasoning she gave?

[_Ray A]

I don't know how much you buy into Storm's story. But for argument sake I'll assume that you do but let's say you don't think it really happened you think it only a dream or an hallucination, I wouldn't call you gullible on that.

I think it's fascinating and interesting, but I have no final verdict on its veracity. The similarity to the young lady's experience was interesting to me, hence the title of the thread, "an interesting encounter".

Had I titled it, "Proof of Afterlife", I could understand your and AS8's consternation. But, apparently, an "interesting conversation" with some parallels I noticed, is turned into a young lady who is a fabricator, liar and deceiver who was ONLY out to "evangelise" me.

All I can say is - WOW!

Look Ray, do you believe that sleeping with a Bible will get rid of horrendous, hellish nightmares? Do you believe that turning Christian and believing in the Christian God will get rid of those same nightmares.

Do you think those nightmares she claims to have had...would have disappeared because of the reasoning she gave?

So now we get to the crux of the matter, "do I really believe???" (gullible believer again).

Let me again remind you of the title of the thread, "an interesting conversation.....", especially for AS8:

There's so much more out there." As a result of her experience she's now a Christian (I was glad I didn't get any proselyting approaches, however).

But, apparently, I'm too gullible, and she WAS really "evangelising me", and AS8 "knows this", and I don't. WOW! I am really, really dumb.

And once more with vigour, for you and AS8:

I should add too that I really liked the sincere and non-preachy way she talked to me. It was all so matter-of-fact. She has only been going to Church for six months, and I just hope she doesn't get tainted later on by the facade and corruption and ulterior motivations of so much in religion, and which turns so many off and often makes them narrow-minded bigots.

But I'm really, really, dumb. You and AS8, on the other end of cyberspace, who never met the lady, and ignored what I wrote in the OP, jump in with "liar, Evangelist, fabricator, deceiver, juvenile, puerile....."


WOW! Is all I can say.

[_richardMdBorn]

Here's an interesting article

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God
Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset
Matthew Parris

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece

[_Ray A]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece

That's a very interesting article, and in my opinion it shows one important thing, that more honesty, on "both sides of the fence" is really needed.

[_Ray A]

For those interested in the NDE phenomenon, here is Dr. Susan Blackmore's announcement of retirement from this controversial field:

First Person - Into the Unknown


New Scientist, 4 November 2000, p 55

At last, I've done it. I've thrown in the towel, kicked the habit and gone on the wagon. After thirty years, I have escaped from a fearsome addiction.

To be truthful, I'm not really sure I've gone cold turkey yet. Only last month I was at a psychical research conference. Only days ago, I emptied the last of those meticulously organised filing cabinets, fighting the little voice that warned: "Don't do it, you might want to read that again" with a stronger one that urged: "You've given up!" as I threw paper after paper on ESP, psychokinesis, psychic pets, aromatherapy and haunted houses into the recycling sack. If cold turkey does strike, the dustbin men will have taken away my fix.

Come to think of it, I feel slightly sad. It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena - only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic.

So why didn’t I give up then? There are lots of bad reasons. Admitting you are wrong is always hard, even though it's a skill every scientist needs to learn. And starting again as a baby in a new field is a daunting prospect. So is losing all the status and power of being an expert. I have to confess I enjoyed my hard-won knowledge. Yes, I have read Michael Faraday's 1853 report on table tipping, and the first 1930s studies in parapsychology, and the latest arguments over meta-analysis of computer-controlled ESP experiments, not to mention the infamous Scole report (Feedback, New Scientist, 22 January). Should I feel obliged to keep using this knowledge if I can? No. Enough is enough. None of it ever gets anywhere. That's a good enough reason for leaving.

But perhaps the real reason is that I am just too tired - and tired above all of working to maintain an open mind. I couldn’t dismiss all those extraordinary claims out of hand. After all, they might just be true, and if they were then swathes of science would have to be rewritten.

Another "psychic" turns up. I must devise more experiments, take these claims seriously. They fail - again. A man explains to me how alien abductors implanted something in his mouth. Tests show it's just a filling, but it might have been…

No, I don’t have to think that way. And when the psychics and clairvoyants and New Agers shout at me, as they do: "The trouble with all you scientists is you don't have an open mind", I won't be upset. I won't argue. I won't rush off and perform yet more experiments just in case. I'll simply smile sweetly and say: "I don't do that any more."

Link.

I was particularly interested in the bold portion, which I emphasised.