Tekto9

Welcome!

"As long as religious values are presented as merely religious values, then it is easy for popular culture to ignore them or give them minimal lip service on Sunday mornings. But if these same religious values are presented as empirically verified scientific facts, then everything changes. If the belief in an afterlife were to be accepted not on the basis of faith or on the basis of speculative theology, but as a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis, then this could not be ignored by our culture. In fact, it would mean the end of our culture in its present form."

— Prof. Neal Grossman in Who's Afraid of Life After Death?, U.S., 2002 (HTML file)

"I have said that the evidence for survival is so strong that anyone who cares to study it is likely to end up convinced. But why do we not yet have evidence so conclusive and so repeatable that even the most hardened sceptic has to accept its reality, evidence so compelling that it would sweep away the materialist-reductionist philosophy that dominates society and so much of Western civilization, and which as I said at the outset has done such terrible damage to almost every aspect of life on this planet? Why isn’t the final piece of the jigsaw in place? Why is there still opportunity for the sceptic to suggest a normal explanation for the phenomena observed, however far-fetched and unlikely this normal explanation happens to be? The presence of these normal explanations and our failure so far to produce the final clinching piece of evidence led William James, one of the founding fathers of psychology and probably the finest mind ever to be attracted to the study of the paranormal, to say in exasperation over a century ago that it rather looks as if the Almighty has for ever decreed that this area should retain its final mystery. The answer that occurs to me is that the search for evidence of survival - and thus for an answer to the fundamental questions about the nature of our own being - is of value in and of itself. (...)"

— Prof. David Fontana, in Does Mind Survive Physical Death?, U.K., 2003 (PDF file)

I have entered into a permanent-definitive(?) wikibreak period.

Apparently not yet (!) —--Tekto9 (talk) 09:29, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

• my geo-location: Portugal (EU)
• main working field: systems and networks administration in Education