The Dark Side Of The Paranormal

I've often made the point that one of the issues that needs to be addressed more in discussions of the paranormal is the negative nature of much of what's involved. Stephen Braude makes some comments relevant to that subject in his new book:

In fact, over several decades of public lectures, I've had many opportunities to see how much distress I cause when I simply raise the issue [of the potential for using psychic powers for bad purposes] with my audiences. Significantly, that reaction has been especially intense at various New Age conventions where attendees focus exclusively on the potential benefits of psychic influence, apparently refusing to acknowledge the obvious point that no power can be used only for the good. I must confess, I've found it mischievously satisfying on those occasions to play the role of spokesperson for the Dark Side. With gratifying regularity, I've sent some in my audience home in tears….

I'm aware that many people accept the possibility of psychically influencing normal, everyday states of affairs, at least when the effects are salutary - for example, in the realm of healing or meditating for crime reduction. But of course, no force can be used exclusively for the good. So it's both interesting and revealing that few of those who propose beneficial applications of psi consider equally seriously the potential for pernicious uses of the same power.

(Dangerous Pursuits [San Antonio, Texas: Anomalist Books, 2020], 5, 149)

Dembski on Eben Alexander's "heavenly" NDE

I'm going to discuss Dembski's analysis of Eben Alexander's reported NDE:

https://billdembski.com/theology-and-religion/faces-of-miracles-chapter-4/

This is one of the most interesting cases for all the reasons detailed in Dembski's chapter. I'll begin by laying my cards on the table, although I'm not saying anything I haven't said before:

1. I think some people encounter God, heaven, or hell during NDEs. It's the real thing. 

2. I use the Bible as a benchmark to interpret and assess NDEs. 

3. Another consideration is what they come back as. Does an unbeliever prior to the NDE come back a Christian or a New Ager? That affects whether I think this is from God.

4. I think it's undoubtedly the case that at least some children have heavenly NDEs. That's not based on any particular report, but the fact that children have immortal souls. Their minds don't pass into temporarily oblivion during brain death.

5. That said, I put no stock in reported NDEs about kids. If it was my own kid, then depending on the details, I might find his report convincing–because I'm getting it in his own words. And he's telling me what he remembers right after the event. But when it comes to books by parents, I'm highly skeptical. 

6. Some NDEs reportedly penetrate much deeper into the beyond than others. In many cases it's the tunnel of light, meeting a luminous being, and not much more. In other cases the patient claims to have seen far more. 

7. Some Christians chalk it up to the demonic. That's worthy exploring, but I'm going to pursue a different approach.

8. From what I've read, there seems to be a false dichotomy in the explanatory options. According to physicalism, NDEs are hallucinations. Figments of a delirious brain. 

It is, of course, true, that people hallucinate under certain circumstances, but that typically involves an intact, functioning brain, not a brain with no higher cortical functions or no neurological activity at all.

Veridical NDEs pose another problem for a physicalist explanation. According to physicalism, the only sources of knowledge are instinct or sensory perception. But some NDEs report seeing or overhearing things in the ER, or other rooms of the hospital, or miles away at home. But that requires ESP, which physicalism disavows. Another cliche line of evidence is the patient discovering a relative in the afterlife they didn't know existed. 

9. As a result, Christian apologists argue that these experiences can't be subjective or merely psychological. They can't originate in the brain. So they must reflect objective encounters. 

And I think that's true in however many cases. But it overlooks a third explanation. Either memory and imagination are located in the brain or else they are located in the soul. If we have an immortal, immaterial mind, then in some cases the NDE could still be "imaginary". 

That would explain the cartoonish or unorthodox "heaven" that some patients report. When higher cortical functions shut down or when there's a complete cessation of neurological activity, the mind may remain active, and what they perceive is like a dream. 

Many unbelievers have a preconception of heaven. They don't believe in heaven, but they think that's what heaven is supposed to be like if only it was real. That's "heaven" in their imagination. In this case, the "heavenly" NDE doesn't originate in the brain but the mind. Their mind already has stock imagery and characters about heaven. A generic, pop cultural notion of heaven. 

Seeing freaky things in mirrors

I'll begin by assessing some comments by Hume, then apply that to a specific case:

Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of witches, or hobgoblins, or fairies, and canvas particularly the evidence? 

Suppose supernatural or occult entities really exist. Suppose hobgoblins and fairies are part of the cultural folklore. That means that if somebody were to experience a supernatural or occult entity, he might automatically classify his experience as a personal encounter with a hobgoblin or fairy because those are the available labels and categories. The fact that hobgoblins and fairies are imaginary doesn't mean that a reported experience using those designations is necessarily or even probably bogus. The folklore may have a elaborate and fanciful backstory about about the origin, nature, and social life of hobgoblins and fairies that's sheer mythology. But if that's the cultural frame of reference for naming types of paranormal, supernatural, or occult experience, then that's the default classification scheme. You need to differentiate the conventional narrative from the underlying experience. 

Cannabis

Some New Age types try to prooftext smoking weed from Scripture. A few quick observations:

1. I don't have a personal stake in this debate. I don't smoke or drink. I think alcoholic consumption in moderation is permissible. I think the occasional cigar (or pipe tobacco) is okay. Chain-smoking carries serious risk of lung cancer and emphysema.

2. I don't have a deeply considered position on marijuana. I think it's a prudential issue rather than a matter of intrinsic morality. As a rule, it's imprudent to use a potentially addictive substance. That's a gratuitous risk. But that's not absolute. 

3. Some people claim the anointing oil in Exod 30:23ff includes cannabis as an ingredient. However, as recent commentators like Duane Garrett and Victor Hamilton explain, the identification of the ingredients is quite doubtful at this distance. 

4. Some people claim Jesus used cannabis oil to heal the sick.  

i) To begin with, that piggybacks on the false assumption of Exod 30. 

ii) As the Gospels make abundantly clearly, dominical healings were due to Christ's divine power. In only two cases does he even use any object lesson. In every other case, it's by touch, or his word. Sometimes healing at a distance. 

5. Appeal is made to Gen 1:29 & 1 Tim 4:3-4

i) Some plants are edible to one species but inedible to another species. Some plants are toxic to humans. So Gen 1:29 and 1 Tim 4:3-4 are hardly meant to be a blanket endorsement. 

ii) Due to adaptation, hybridization, and horticulture, many plants exist today that didn't exist in the past. Young-earth creationists, old-earth creationists, and theistic evolutionists all take that position. 

That doesn't mean it's forbidden to eat fauna and flora which don't represent the first generation of God's creation. But Gen 1:29 & 1 Tim 4:3-4 can't be quoted to backdate all species. Those texts don't cover every conceivable variation–past and future–but state a general principle. 

New Age Jesus

http://standupforthetruth.com/2014/11/changing-jesus-calling-damage-control-false-christ/

Going native

There's a tension in traditional anthropology, especially concerning the study of religion. Western anthropologists are secular. So they remain detached observers rather than participants. Diffident or disapproving outsiders. Yet this judgmental attitude is at odds with their cultural relativism.

Edith Turner is a noted anthropologist. Unlike the typical anthropologist, she crossed over. Frankly, it's terrifying to see a woman give herself over to the dark side, by embracing witchcraft. At the same time, this does afford an independent witness to the reality of occult forces.

One thing that's unclear to me when she refers to supernatural experiences among the Eskimo is whether she's describing Christian Eskimos, folk medicine, or a syncretistic amalgam of Christian theology and indigenous paganism. Modern Eskimos aren't like Eskimos from 500 years ago. Missionaries brought the Gospel to Alaska. There are churches in Alaska. You can watch televangelists. So it would be useful to see a more discriminating analysis.

In the past in anthropology, if a researcher "went native," it doomed him academically. My husband, Victor Turner, and I had this dictum at the back of our minds when we spent two and a half years among the Ndembu of Zambia in the fifties.

All right, "our" people believed in spirits, but that was a matter of their different world, not ours. Their ideas were strange and a little disturbing. Yet somehow we were on the safe side of the White divide and were free merely to study the beliefs. This is how we thought. Little knowing it, we denied the people's equality with ours, their "coevalness," their common humanity as that humanity extended itself into the spirit world.

Try out that spirit world ourselves? No way!

But at intervals, that world insisted it was really there. For instance, in the Chihamba ritual at the end of a period of ordeal, a strong wave of curative energy hit us. We had been participating as fully as we knew how, thus opening ourselves to whatever entities that were about. In another ritual, for fertility, the delight of dancing in the moonlight hit me vividly, and I began to learn something about the hypnotic effect of singing and hearing the drums.

Much later, Vic and I witnessed a curious event in New York City in 1980, while running a workshop at the New York University Department of Performance Studies, which was attended by performance and anthropology students. With the help of the participants, we were trying out rituals as actual performances with the intention of creating a new educational technique.

We enacted the Umbanda trance session, which we had observed and studied in one of the slums of Rio de Janeiro. The students duly followed our directions and also accompanied the rites with bongo drumming and songs addressed to the Yoruba gods. During the ritual, a female student actually went into a trance, right there in New York University. We brought her 'round with our African rattle, rather impressed with the way this ritual worked even out of context. The next day, the student told us that she had gone home that night and correctly predicted the score of a crucial football game, impressing us even further.

Since then, I have taken note of the effects of trance and discovered for myself the three now obvious regularities: frequent, nonempirical cures; clairvoyance, which includes finding lost people or objects, divination, prediction, or forms of wisdom speaking; and satisfaction or joy—these three effects repeating, almost like a covenant.

What spirit events took place in my own experience?

One of them happened like this. In 1985, I was due for a visit to Zambia. Before going, I decided to come closer than on previous occasions to the Africans' own experience, whatever that was—I did not know what they experienced. So it eventuated, I did come closer.

My research was developing into the study of a twice-repeated healing ritual. To my surprise, the healing of the second patient culminated in my sighting a spirit form. In a book entitled Experiencing Ritual¹, I describe exactly how this curative ritual reached its climax, including how I myself was involved in it; how the traditional doctor bent down amid the singing and drumming to extract the harmful spirit; and how I saw with my own eyes a large, gray blob of something like plasma emerge from the sick woman's back.

Then I knew the Africans were right. There is spirit stuff. There is spirit affliction; it is not a matter of metaphor and symbol, or even psychology. And I began to see how anthropologists have perpetuated an endless series of put-downs about the many spirit events in which they participated - "participated" in a kindly pretense. They might have obtained valuable material, but they have been operating with the wrong paradigm, that of the positivists' denial.

[...]

Later, in 1987, when I went to northern Alaska to conduct research on the healing methods of Inupiat Eskimos, I similarly found myself swamped with stories of strange events, miracles, rescues, healings by telephone hundreds of miles away, visions of God, and many other manifestations. It was by these things that the people lived. Their ears were pricked up for them, as it were. I spent a year in the village acting as a kind of pseudo auntie, listening to, and believing, the stories. And naturally, those things happened to me about as frequently as they did to them.

[...]

Ernie often accused me of not believing in these manifestations, but I protested that I did. How could I help it? Ernie usually had a bad time from Whites, who labeled his experiences "magical beliefs." But by then, I myself was within the circle of regular Eskimo society and experienced such events from time to time. I am now learning that studying such a mentality from inside is a legitimate and valuable kind of anthropology that is accessible if the anthropologist takes that "fatal" step toward "going native."

[...]

But we eventually have to face the issue head on and ask, "What are spirits?" And I continue with the thorny question, "What of the great diversity of ideas about them throughout the world? How is a student of the anthropology of consciousness, who participates during fieldwork, expected to regard all the conflicting spirit systems in different cultures? Is there not a fatal lack of logic inherent in this diversity?"

The reply: "Is this kind of subject matter logical anyway?" We also need to ask, "Have we the right to force it into logical frameworks?"

Moreover, there is disagreement about terms. "Spirits" are recognized in most cultures. Native Americans refer to something in addition called "power." "Energy," Ki or C'hi, is known in Japan and China, and has been adopted by Western healers.

"Energy" was not the right word for the blob that I saw coming out the back of a Ndembu woman; it was a miserable object, purely bad, without any energy at all, and much more akin to a restless ghost. One thinks of energy as formless, but when I "saw" in the shamanic mode those internal organs, the organs were not "energy." They had form and definition. When I saw the face of my Eskimo friend Tigluk on a mask, as I saw it in a waking dream, and then saw Tigluk himself by luck a few minutes afterward, the mask face was not "energy," laughing there. It was not in the least abstract.

The old-fashioned term, "spirit manifestation," is much closer. These manifestations are the deliberate visitations of discernable forms that have the conscious intent to communicate, to claim importance in our lives. As for "energy" itself, I have indeed sensed something very much like electrical energy when submitting to the healing passes of women adepts in a mass meeting of Spiritists in Brazil.

(Source)

Totemic animals

As Kenneth C. Way documents in Donkeys in the Biblical World, certain animals had an "ominous" (i.e. omen) or divinatory significance in ANE paganism. This includes talking animals. 

I wonder if there's a conceptual parallel with the role of animal spirit guides in so-called "Native American spirituality." From what I've read, these "totemic" animals aren't confined to American Indians. This is, of course, very popular in the New Age movement. According to this paradigm, animal spirit guides are able to communicate (telepathically) with receptive humans. Likewise, various techniques can be employed to induce a trance, putting one in a receptive state to receive communications. In witchcraft, the tradition of "familiar spirits," which sometimes assume bestial form, intersects with this outlook.  

One wonders, in this connection, if Num 22 might not be, among other things, a polemic against totemic animals. Balaam is a heathen seer, steeped in the occult. Gen 3 may trade on the same sinister connotations. 

I don't know if anyone has ever investigated the connections, if any, between "ominous animals" in ANE paganism, "familiar spirits," in witchcraft, and "animals spirit guides" in American Indian paganism.  

New Age Arminianism

On Facebook, Arminian philosopher Jerry Walls plugged this interview:

Jerry Walls Yesterday at 8:21am · Edited ·

Part 2 of Tom Morris's fascinating interview with Patricia Pearson, author of "Opening Heaven's Door." 

https://www.facebook.com/JerryLWalls/posts/10152647158010676

I don't object to investigating NDEs. I'd add that Pearson has some useful statistics and interesting anecdotes. 

But the study of NDEs also requires us to sift and evaluate the evidence. For instance, consider the following excerpt from the interview that Walls is promoting. Does he agree with his? Given his views on purgatory and postmortem salvation, maybe he does. 

If not, doesn't he have some responsibility to his groupies to winnow the wheat from the chaff?  

Tom: Ha! Good point. In these accounts that you've heard and told us about, there's always a measure of mystery, or uncertainty, which most people think of as a bad thing. And, yet, perhaps it's a good thing. What do you think? 

Patricia: Well, there are a number of ways to answer that question. From a spiritual perspective, as the 19th century Baha'i prophet Bahaullah said, "If I told you what paradise was like, you would slit your throats to get there." Islamist suicide bombers believe they know what paradise is like, and are eager to arrive ASAP and wallow with virgins. They clearly have no idea what's entailed in being a spiritually mature human being. So what advantage is there in a false certainty that strands us with people like that? 

Humans are in their spiritual adolescence right now, in the Baha'i view. They may be smart as hell, but they're dumb as beer-addled teens in speedboats. How would you trust them with the certain contours of another realm when they would view it as a simple opportunity, and not understand the complex obligations of spiritual maturation that should precede it? 

Tom: That's an excellent point. It reminds me of an old expression: "just enough light for the step I'm on." And then, there's a new expression, "What got you here won't get you there." 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-morris/interview-with-a-philosop_5_b_5551470.html

Do potted plants go to heaven?

Jason Pratt is a member of the CADRE. He's also a universalist. But I didn't realize until now that he also subscribes to a form of animism or panpsychism:

Jason Pratt said...

"I don't mean by this that I think no other animals are conscious than humans; on the contrary, I think even normally unconscious species can sometimes be wakened to consciousness by the love of other conscious entities, and I am entirely prepared to include not only animals but even (speculatively and ideally) plants or even non-organic complex systems (like, for example, ships)."

http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2009/11/if-god-used-evolutionary-process-to.html#c2630579779930873765

This raises some intriguing possibilities for universalism. Do all potted plants go to heaven when they die? Or only those their owners spoke to? What about that muscle car I spent so many hours in high school washing and waxing and tinkering with? Is it a conscious being? Did it bond with me under the hood? Like Stephen King's Christine?