Keith Augustine's Response To Neil Grossman's Article In The Journal Of Near Death Studies

Here's some citations from Neil Grossman's article. Unforunately as Michael Prescott says his article is not online.

http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2008/11/four-errors.html

Let me go though some of Keith Augustine's responses in the comment section he made in Michael Prescott blog.

Keith Augustine says, "being unconvinced of the reality of the supernatural, paranormal, or survival doesn't make one a dogmatic, close-minded, or "hard-core" skeptic; it simply makes one a skeptic."

Really a lot of scientists were skeptical of survival, paranormal and the supernatural until they could no longer ignore the massive amounts of evidence. Also, Keith is trying to protect an outdated worldview. We know now that reality is much bigger than we ever imagined.

Keith calls people a pundit because they disagree with him. No one likes to be called names.

I have always considered that materialism could be true. Of course you can say I don't consider materialism which is downright false.

Also I think we know the evidence Keith, it was summarized in the article the case against immortality. Their is ways to falisfy the transmission theory one would be to demonstrate that the brain is a generator. Now you can say that has already happened. But what most of us argue is that the brain is a complex receiver of consciousness.For example some of the evidence Keith uses is from the brain split experiments and Wilder Penfield's experimental findings. Benjamin Libet's finding that brain activity precedes a conscious decision, which is routinely presented by sceptics, in their dull way, as 'another nail in the coffin for dualism' (Blackmore, Dying to Live, p. 237), and which of course is open to contrary interpretations, as Libet himself pointed out. Wilder Penfield's experimental findings on the neurological basis of memory is also used by sceptics in an anti-dualist sense which Penfield himself did not endorse.

“Edwards puts the last nail in the coffin for a version of astral body theories when he observes that:”
“If the astral body is an exact duplicate of the regular body it must die along with the regular body ... If the secular body died as the result of a brain tumor or as the result of being shot through the heart, the astral brain and astral heart must have been similarly injured (22).”

Wait a second, what dualist says the astral body is made of ordinary matter?. None that I know of. This is a straw man. I see the astral body as a different type of matter but isn't affected by death. But this different type of matter can mimic the physical body.

I found an interesting comment down in the footnotes that read: "[1] We have no more reason to believe that human consciousness continues to exist after death than we have to believe that water buffalo or other animals continue to have experiences after they have died."

Umm no reason to believe?. How about our inner life?, experiences, empirical evidence that support psi and survival after death. Now if that isn't reason to believe that what is?. Also, the multiverse theory doesn't fit well with materialism. I mean the mystics have been saying for a long long time now that their are other realities/universes/dimensions.