Hate Mail

Even trying to keep things I might want to reference for these posts in order, I can't find where I read an atheist misrepresent a passage that comes early in Hans Kung's book about the afterlife, Eternal Life?  It contains a brief claim that is one of the few instances in which I think Kung's evaluation of a topic is less than complete.  Hans Kung, as with so many great contemporary theologians, are less frequently guilty of that.  When it comes to reading contemporary secular philosophers and the highest levels of current theology, I would't hesitate to say that the general level of theological writing is far, far more rigorous and honest and responsible in the range of its cited resources and modest in the use they make of them.  

The passage comes on page 13 in a discussion of the early books dealing with "near death experiences" by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Raymond Moody, the atheist transforming statements calling for scholarly caution into declarations of atheist-secular style pseudo-skepticism on behalf of one of the most famous of modern theologians.  

As I recall, the atheist use of the passage - which I would suspect was taken from another atheist-"skeptical" source and not from the text, annoyed me because it left out the entire previous paragraph that ends:

The only question is whether this belief [in the reality of reported near death experiences] is justified in the light of the experiences of dying described here, which are by no means to be a priori disputed.

In this connection the theologian in particular must be careful not to indulge in wishful thinking, must avoid a hasty appropriation of medical conclusions for theological purposes and must judge the phenomena described with the utmost caution and solicitude.  It is a question therefore of objective analysis.  

That isn't a statement of the kind of dogmatic rejection of what people say about their own near death experiences, which no one is in any position to honestly "a priori" dispute.  A person is THE ONLY POSSIBLE WITNESS of their own, internal experience, they are the only possible expert in that experience.  The question is whether or not any particular, a number of or any reported near death experience can be used to come to scholarly conclusions about them.   And the answer to that is no one can know.  The literature on "near death experience" I've read is everything from very restrained and scrupulously responsible to something that seems like it's irresponsibly inclusive.  BUT THAT IS ONLY MY PERCEPTION OF IT, I AM IN NO POSITION TO JUDGE THE ACCURACY OF SOMEONE DESCRIBING AN INTERNAL EXPERIENCE.   The question Kung is concerned with is how that literature is to be used in responsible scholarly study. 

I would point out, as one of the rare criticisms of Kung that I would make, that he, on the same page, in discussing parapsychological research he mischaracterized the status of the research at the time he wrote his book.  Considering how much he cited the literature of conventional psychology in his great three volume work of which this book was the third, even in the 1970s the body of rigorously controlled research into parapsychology was, in every way, more rigorous, more careful, more scrupulous in including the critiques of even the most conventionally precisian of critics, such as the psychologis Ray Hyman, not to mention the dishonest ones, such as the liar, sleaze and conman James Randi, and no matter how many restrictions and controls meant by their critics to make the phenomena they documented disappear, they didn't.  The critics were forced to lie up cheating and non-existent "file drawer effects" to reject the research, even after those accusations were made, addressed and more than met.

Like it or not, the controlled science into various "para-psychological" phenomena is about the most exhaustively documented area of supposed scientific study of minds and behavior, yet it is that research which is made disreputable by the sleaziest of lies and dishonesty.  I don't like it or not, I have just read many of the research papers as published in the normal ways of science and responsible academic research and some of the meta-analytic data and some of the books written by those with the credentials and CVs to be credible on the subject and every part of it looks better than the conventional psychology I've read, not to mention the other "behavioral sciences".  

I was brought to read about that through my developing interest into the uses of authoritative and peer-group coercion in the allegedly rigorous culture of modernism, about the same time my research into the post-World War Two lie of the eugenics-free, racism-free, non-Lamarckian Darwin started.  

Modern man is as bad a devotee of allegedly scientific methods, especially in the popular culture, as medieval and, even more so, Renaissance and Baroque Christians were at adhering to what they claimed to be devoted to, the words of Jesus.  And, like those violent, often criminal "Christians" their reliance on mouthing their faulty and dishonest allegiance to what they call "science" blinds them to any kind of critical evaluation of their positions.  Christians, certainly Catholics, were supposed to constantly consult their conscience as enlightened by the Scriptures, something that in practice was often more miss than hit.  I think modern, self-declared devotees of rigorous "objectivity" of scientific or, in many cases, even academic methods and standards are probably even worse at it.    I think in a lot of the cases it's got a lot more to do with wanting to be fashionable and to avoid being considered as having intellectual cooties than anything else.  

As I pointed out in the passage you objected to so stupidly, even after people fall short of following the words of Jesus, The Law, The Prophets, those standards are still intact, are still and always will be the only means of defining genuine Christian conduct.  You can't say that Marxists, Darwinists, etc. who kill lots of people, who do other terrible things are falling short of the mark of genuine Darwinism or Marxism. 

As you can see from this piece, I couldn't care less if people figure I've got cooties of that kind.  I find it encouraging when you declare that I do.