But there’s no consensus on what lies behind near-death experiences, even though they are being increasingly reported. Are they, as some people are convinced, signs of the soul leaving the body? Or are they, as others suggest, the last, dreamlike act put on by a dying brain?

So to many Americans, dreams are  full of meaning …even though, in typical schizophrenic fashion, they know they can’t rely on them as predictors of future events: Most People Believe Dreams Are Meaningful

“In other words, people attribute meaning to dreams when it corresponds with their pre-existing beliefs and desires … people who believe in God were likely to consider any dream in which God spoke to them to be meaningful; agnostics, however, considered dreams in which God spoke to be more meaningful when God commanded them to take a pleasant vacation than when God commanded them to engage in self-sacrifice. …Most people understand that dreams are unlikely to predict the future but that doesn’t prevent them from finding meaning in their dreams, whether their contents are mundane or bizarre.”

It’s like classical Christianity, then: God is in charge…except when he isn’t. He gets credit for anything good that happens but the bad stuff has to be put on something/someone else – free will, Satan, anything.

This is part of how we get the idea that dreams somehow predict things: When we dream of dramatic things that don’t happen (99 percent of the time), we forget about the dream. On the rare occasion when we dream about some weird event that later takes place (the time frame doesn’t matter much) we think, ‘OH, I had a dream about that! I must have been predicting it!‘ …Except…not.

“According to police, Oumar Lam’s 26-year-old girlfriend arrived at their Queen Anne apartment Sunday to find him lying naked on a couch near a candle-lit altar. The woman told police she was seated on a bed when Lam attacked her from behind, pulling a pillowcase over her head and attempting to suffocate her.”

Oh sure, Pat Robertson, James Dobson and others will screech and whine, but I’ve already shown conclusively that their extremist evangelical doctrines WILL lead to human sacrifice cults. It’s only a matter of time.

The question is, what are we going to do about it?

Finding Christ in the kitchen

“Antonia Baker saw the image in the floor of her Lakes home for the first time three years ago during the Christmas season while she was recovering from surgery for an eye injury. Doctors said she had to keep her head down to allow her retina to heal. She wasn’t allowed to read or use the computer, so she had to stare at the floor for three weeks.”

Okay, sure… Jesus is on the woman’s floor… and he can’t get up! Look, if Jesus Christ is/was truly the Son of God, as opposed to just a story or some poor self-deluded fellow, you’d expect some sort of evidence for that, wouldn’t you?? WELL… here you go!

It’s the best you’re ever going to get, so enjoy it.

“When a social studies student asked about the German public’s responsibility for the rise of the Third Reich, Jones decided to try and simulate what happened in Germany by having his students “basically follow instructions” for a day.

“But one day turned into five, and what happened by the end of the school week spawned several documentaries, studies and related social experiments illuminating a dark side of human nature – and a major weakness in public education.”

Ultimately, the roots of fascism and religion are the same: It begins with the idea that “it can’t happen here,” and “they must be telling the truth because look at what they’ve sacrified…” It is facilitated the the authority figure whether pastor or political leader who is willing to say with false confidence, “I have the answers” – and it ends with the enslavement of the human mind.

The subject of death terrifies most clear-thinking people – which also allows death to be used as a big nasty club, a weapon against those who would ask too many questions and possibly demand actual evidence as part of the answers. Thus, all you have to do is listen to some sincere religious person trying to convert you to realize that mortality is the driving force behind religious conversion.

People are scared to death of death; they can’t handle the thought that they will cease to exist as a conscious entity. That great terror is what drives people to religion. As the centerpiece for the reason religion exists, one would expect to find many lurid descriptions of death and dying religionist tomes such as The Bible, and you won’t be disappointed.

Succinctly stated: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death-that is, the devil- and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” (Hebrews 2:14,15)

An honest statement from the author of Hebrews: It is all about the fear of death. That’s the hammer that religion always has against reason. Fear is also used as a club to promote the other purpose of religion; its purported social control. i.e., without religion, they say, people would go wild and do all kinds of crazy things like commit incest and genocide.

Now, the amount of social control exerted by the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition is somewhat limited and even rather dubious due to the fact that these faiths hold to a rather extreme form of moral relativism, but nonetheless this fear works to some degree for social cohesion and control. Perhaps I will deal with the moral relativism of Christianity in some future post but let’s stay on track for now…

The fear of death is both the club and the carrot, simultaneously wooing the believer with the promise of overcoming death while threatening him/her with the same if they depart from nominal compliance. Death is natural and inevitable and religion has done nothing to change that, nor is this ever likely to change.

Fear is also natural and can be a good thing at least SOME of the time: That panicky flight-or-fight reaction is often the only thing that saves a person caught in a life or death situation. Of course, if you are having a heart attack, fear doesn’t really help. But nature is not working according to a plan – it is just working.

So we need to remember that fear is a lifesaver sometimes, and is perfectly natural and even good as long as you don’t become so obsessed with fear that you are driven to irrational acts.

Now I want to talk about reality of death and dying, and this will probably send a few of you running to church. Every religion has some beautiful stories about the greatness of dying in order to be with God in Paradise/Heaven. You’ve heard those stories a thousand times, though, so I am only going to stick with what we actually KNOW about death and dying.

THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF DEATH

The first thing you should realize is that you’ve been practicing for death all of your life. We don’t usually call it practice; we just call it “sleep.” And so does the Bible…

“You sweep men away in the sleep of death.” (Psalm 90.5) Jesus calls death “sleep” in John 11. In 1 Cor. 15:51 Paul claims “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” Here, Paul clearly means sleep to be understood as synonymous with death, and he is thinking that some readers in his own time would still be around at the Second Coming. He was wrong about that, but he apparently believed it.

People who have had near death experiences often describe the feeling of “needing” to sleep and of going to sleep. It isn’t just a metaphor. Sleep is very much like death. It is so much like death, experientially, that there are really only two differences:

1. When you sleep, you have periodic episodes of dreaming. You don’t remember most of most of your dreams, but they happen nonetheless. Dreams are how the brain reinforces memory pathways. During the dying process, you may well have some vivid, emotionally-charged dreams about meeting dead relatives, or living ones, or God(s) or experiencing unconditional love. Thank you, dopamine! Some people have even reported dreams of going shopping. If you are really dying, however, the dreams will eventually stop.
2. When you sleep, you eventually wake up.

THINK DIFFERENT

If you aren’t afraid to go to sleep… I want you to question your fear of death. We can think of death as a natural and even liberating process if we choose. For those of us who enjoy a good sleep, death is the biggest nap of them all, and just as free of fear, suffering and pain (as The Bible promises).

Still, I’m not asking you to embrace your death, but to consider it in a different light. For readers who haven’t already left for church in a panic, I will make you the same offer that the churchies will make you: everlasting life.

But my offer isn’t based on fantasy fiction.

People at church will tell you that you won’t really die – a Super Guy in the Sky will instead transform you with his magic power over death. It’s really a very comforting story, isn’t it? And you can see why the terror of death would drive otherwise sane people to embrace these stories as reality, no matter how silly they sound if you bother to pick them apart.

Of course, that’s why religionists get so angry when you start pointing out contradictions in their beliefs, or otherwise expressing your doubts: You aren’t just pointing out factual errors, as you might think, instead you are assaulting the only thing that keeps them from going insane with terror.

As I have pointed out in the past, the violent anger that any expression of doubt generates in believers is strong evidence suggesting that they too have their own, higly-repressed doubts, and MAY in fact know (or fear) that their espoused beliefs are partially or entirely false. Clearly we must do more to disarm fear without resorting to fairy tales.

You don’t need an invisible magic friend to save you…

Consider instead that the universe springs forth from a unified, connected state; the Cosmic Membrane. If you need a more familiar handle, you can call it The Force. Those of you who have enough interest can investigate quantum physics for a better understanding of how all things are connected, and I’ll throw in a couple of links for good measure.

For the still-timid among you, I grant you permission to rename the Cosmic Membrane “God,” although such a name gives the force much too much credit for having purpose and direction, in my opinion, unless you can wrap your brain around the idea of a God who doesn’t know or care about anything.

The membrane, as far as anyone can tell, is an active force but not an active intelligence. Nevertheless, if all things are connected in this manner, then you must be connected as well. In fact, every part of your being is a manifestation of the Cosmic Membrane.

Therefore, the essence of all that you are cannot die, because the membrane is not a force that is expended. It does not have any beginning or ending point that we can determine. Now, this does not imply a conscious existence, but it is very much analogous to dreamless sleep. You are still there, all of you, as part of the Force that connects and manifests everything – the source and essence of all that is.

You are just sleeping…

How did this happen?

Recent studies have suggested that there is a biological component to religion. This religiosity seems to lie in the temporal lobes. The more active a person’s temporal lobes are, the more religious they will be. But this does not explain how any particular religion – with all its rituals, rules and complexities – can develop apparently from nothing.

I began wondering about the many varieties in religion about the time I received my first Bible Studies diploma – around age 11. I couldn’t answer the question then, but I certainly found it to be perplexing. Over the years I continued to poke and prod at this issue.

Religion clearly flows from the nature of humans, as suggested, but the form of each particular faith is created initially by one person (the founder) and then taken in new directions by his/her disciples (the Inspired ones). So what we now see is that religion is created from two components: One socio-psychological and the other neuro-psychological. In this article, we will concentrate on the sociological process for the creation of a religion.

It has taken a lifetime of study for me to discover that a religion typically happens/arises/becomes “reality” in one of two ways. When you read about this process, you will immediately see just how natural it is.

Method One: Time Fog – Stories become real. Humans love to invent tales to entertain themselves and others. Go shopping at any bookstore and you will see this. This propensity to invent certainly isn’t new. For as long as we’ve had writing, people have written stories. And before there was writing, oral tales entertained and enthralled us for thousands of years.

Of all ancient stories, a tiny fraction became popular enough to have a devoted multi-generational following. Early storytellers surely understood that they were sharing fiction for entertainment purposes, but later tale tellers – and the hearers of those tales – may not have been so sure.

With the old-line religions (Judaism, Christianity) it took a long time for people to start believing that those stories were anything more than interesting tales. At a minimum, a generation passed (in other words, everyone knowing the real history was DEAD) before the seed of fiction germinated to become the Tree Of Knowledge and people began saying, “It really happened.” I call this pathway to religion-birthing, the Time Fog Method. (For a discussion of how this relates to the Christian Bible, visit The Bible And Christianity, Historical Origins.

Anything old has a certain amount of Time Fog. A good contemporary example is that of the tales of King Arthur and The Knights of The Round table. Here, we have stories that were labeled as fiction in the past but today are increasingly presumed to be fact (or fact-based) because just enough time has passed so that people aren’t sure anymore.

The argument you hear after Time Fog begins to kick-in goes something like this: “Well, it was a long time ago and you weren’t there. I wasn’t there, either, but the stories are written as if they actually happened and they even mention some places we know existed. Many people TODAY believe that those things actually happened, and there is no surviving work from the same time period that says those stories didn’t happen. So… they MUST be true!”

Now ask yourself, was fiction just invented last week? Silly question – but why do we automatically think that Harry Potter is a fictional character yet Jesus and Moses are real? People will make a lot of excuses for this double standard, mostly amounting to “well a lot of OTHER people believe they are real.” Yet we wouldn’t consider taking a popular vote to determine the reality of a Stephen King novel. This is Time Fog.

Time Fog makes people think, “if it is old, it must have really happened,” even though there is no more evidence for this assumption than one would have for believing that there is truth behind The Lord of The Rings. Oh, and all those “other people” who believe in old stories have no more information than you do about ancient tales: They too believe because others have believed – and it happened a long time ago, so that “you can’t prove it isn’t true.”

You see then how time gives life to all stories …just keep repeating and wait…

Method Two: Sharing Delusion – if you have brass balls, anyone can do it. Mormonism and Islam come from this category of religion formation, what I call the Brass-balls Method. In this religion-hatching scheme, instead of stories that were gradually mistaken for reality due to Time Fog, you have a con man/fabulist who simply declared himself to be a Prophet of God and demanded that others believe in him. In each case, the vast majority of his contemporaries did not believe. Instead, they recognized the self-proclaimed prophet for what he was; a delusional egomaniac.

Human nature is imperfect at best, however, so you always have a percentage of “true believers” out there – sometimes referred to as sycophants – ready to follow anyone who looks like a spiritual leader. If only one person in a hundred – or even ONE PERSON IN A THOUSAND – is sufficiently gullible, you still get a good-sized cult out of it. And the fact that most people see these new beliefs as crazy and irrational only increases their attractiveness to certain people because so many of us thrive on group identity – which is only enhanced by a sense of persecution. If you want to form a religion from which you may immediately profit, this is the way to go.

And finally, given enough time, any cult can become an accepted religion. Here is where we get a confluence of religion-forming methods: The cult of today eventually turns into a respectable religion over a generation or two via Time Fog as long as the cult leader attracts a sufficient number of followers during his/her lifetime.

The Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology are contemporary examples of the “Brass-Balls” path: Both were originally seen as fringe cults built by lunatics and now they sit on the edge of general acceptance. Eventually they – as Islam has done and as Mormonism is doing – will also become respectable and possibly even dominant religions as Time Fog turns them into “reality.”

After all, it/they “happened” a long time ago and other people believed them at the time, so it MUST be true!