I am coming to think that the leading intellectual challenge of our time, and perhaps the foremost barrier to any further human progress, is the insidious notion of dualism in the study of reality. We all take for granted the idea that there is a scientific way of approaching reality, and also a religious point of view, and each occupies a separate sphere. Modern science has devolved into the belief-system of materialism, while Christianity is a belief-system based in the culture of first-century Jews; but these flaws at the core of each approach to the study of reality are ignored by their impassioned advocates. Indeed, both sets of belief-systems have adherents so deeply invested in them that some who now are reading these words are framing indignant rebuttals (bring it on!).

So, even today, we still find ourselves debating which view of reality should be dominant, whether reality arose in some material fashion or whether God must have created it all. There are few who realize that the prevalence of dualism in our study of reality means that neither Christianity nor materialist science is adequate to the task on its own. Ergo, both of them must be wrong.

Once you begin to look for them, you find examples of this dualism everywhere. To choose just one from the handful that my internet grazing produces daily, Christians suggest that the prevalence of religions in history must mean that we are hard-wired to believe, so scientists then feel forced to prove that religions have not been so prevalent after all. And for good measure, they study the brain to try to find the specific defect that causes religious notions to arise. Unlike science, Christianity doesn’t look for support for its position in logic or in facts, but rather it defends itself by enforcing its dogmas and by “othering” non-believers. The fierce political divisions now rending the United States don’t come from the dualist error alone, but dualism is making them more intractable. If there are two competing approaches to understanding reality, then of course adherents to each of them will portray the others as beyond the pale.

Afterlife researchers can demonstrate now that both Christian and materialist orthodoxies are wrong. There is no anthropomorphic God. And everything that we think of as “matter” is actually not solid after all, but instead it is a form of energy. We should have seen the end of the dualist fallacy long ago, but our problem is that by now nearly everyone is so emotionally invested in one point of view or in the other that it is assumed that if you are not in my camp you have to be on the other side. If I am a Christian, I will try to convert you to save you from eternal damnation; and if I am a science groupie, I will assume that your skepticism about my science must mean that you hold an entire panoply of Christian beliefs that I can smugly attack.

Dualism is a divisive blind alley. What all of us must start to do if we are ever to find a way forward is to abandon both Christian and scientific dogmas as the discredited false beliefs that they are. What we must begin to do now is to study reality open-mindedly, without dogmas or beliefs in the way.

It is only lately that I have come to see that the hobby that propels my life is going to be the solution to the dualism problem. Thanks to impending developments in the burgeoning field of afterlife studies, both Christianity and materialist science will fairly soon be going down.

Christianity’s impending fall saddens me. I was a devout Christian for most of my life, and even today I love the religion! It has taken me awhile to accept the fact that Christianity does not follow Jesus, and that its modern-day adherents have carried their religion to a fatal extreme. Here is what is about to happen:

• Christianity will Die. The afterlife evidence demonstrates that no Christian dogma is based in fact. The Christian God does not exist; the only post-death judge is oneself; and the death of Jesus on the cross has never saved anyone from anything. We are told by the teams of dead experts who are working on communication technologies now that electronic communication with the dead that does not require a medium will be widely available soon. It might be no more than a decade or two before the truth about what happens after death will be so commonly known that the religion will shrivel.

• Materialist Science will Die. The advent of good electronic communication with people most scientists still insist are dead is going to deal materialism a fatal blow. But even beyond that, as quantum physicist Max Planck famously told us, science advances “one funeral at a time.” He said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” And once again, Max Planck was right. According to a recent study of scientific progress, “when a prominent researcher suddenly dies in an academic subfield, a period of new ideas and innovation follows.” For scientific gatekeepers to adopt materialism as their “fundamental dogma” a century ago was a foolish and counterproductive step. Expect funding soon to begin to flow toward the scientific study of reality without reference to the materialist dogma. Expect what follows to be nothing short of the explosion of knowledge and of Nobel Prizes that came with the advent of quantum physics.

 My weekly podcast is called Seek Reality. I am coming to suspect that it won’t be long before all of humankind will be doing just that! Perhaps then I will have to begin to call my podcast something else….

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photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/78845880@N06/15530193057″>5 ноября 2014, Литургия апостола Иакова / 5 November 2014, Divine Liturgy of St. James</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The foolish adherence of mainstream science to the false dogma of materialism is now more than a century old. And materialism has brought us so much pain! It has forced brilliant scientists to waste their careers in pursuing baseless dead-end theories while it continues to keep humankind in unnecessary ignorance and fear.

The damage caused by that dogma of materialism is evident across all of scientific inquiry, from the diagnosis and treatment of disease through our efforts to better understand the cosmos. But perhaps the field in which it is most patently ridiculous is neuroscience, were yet more careers are being wasted in the expensive study of nothing much.

The fact that the human mind can function independently of the brain is at this point established beyond question. There are so many well-documented cases of out-of-body travel that include observations that would not have been possible if the mind had not been separate from its brain. Every scientist must by now be aware of them! Near-death experiences? The pioneering work being done at The Monroe Institute? Prominent NDE-er Eben Alexander is himself a neurosurgeon, for heaven’s sake! The fact that every neuroscientist must know that evidence has been reported which suggests that the mind is not generated by the brain has to be our ironic backdrop as we consider two examples of what passes for modern scientific inquiry:

* Do You Have Free Will? If we study only the brain, then it is obvious that free will is an illusion. To quote an article that sums up recent experimental results, “our minds appear to be making decisions before we’re actually aware of them — and at times by a significant degree.” Well, sure. As afterlife research abundantly indicates, and as quantum physicist Max Planck said a century ago, human minds must necessarily pre-exist matter. When you take a brief stint in a material body, you leave most of your eternal mind behind as a kind of super-consciousness that your awareness cannot access while it is attached to a brain. The extent to which your decisions are made beyond your awareness for efficiency’s sake is a topic for another day, but it is patently clear that most bodily decisions are made beyond our conscious ken. Imagine how inefficient our lives would be if we had to consciously deliberate about which muscles to activate, and in which order, every time we wanted to stand from a chair and go and fetch a book from a bookcase! There are important inquiries to be made into the ways in which our super-conscious minds interact with our brains, but scientists can do none of that research while they still willfully mischaracterize the mind.

* Where and How Are Our Memories Stored? Perhaps the strangest scientific pursuit of all is the hesitant study of the brain itself. As befits mainstream science’s fundamental dogma, all such research must be matter-based, so a typical article begins

with a bald assertion like, “The human brain has a capacity that is ten times greater than first thought.” Then we read the rest of the article, and we find that this assertion is  based on math and speculation and has nothing to do with the actual measurement of memory storage. To prove that they aren’t straying from materialist rules, the authors assert without evidence that “our memories and thoughts are the result of patterns of electrical and chemical activity in the brain.” They do admit, though, that the very brain synapses they are studying “are still a mystery, though their dysfunction can cause a range of neurological diseases.” Of course, the fact that our minds survive our deaths and are greatly enhanced once our awareness merges with our super-consciousness soon after death gives the lie to this whole field of inquiry. And the fact that our memories from past and future lifetimes are accessible to us after death is further proof that our brains are not for storage. At best, scientists might be able to figure out how our brains sort and encode our more important new memories for storage “in the cloud” (as it were), but that kind of productive brain-research must wait. For now, what is being reported is investigations that are fully as foolish as it would be for us to reverse-engineer our television set in an effort to find that guy who reads the six-o’clock news.

A decade ago, I read articles like these and found them funny. Now, though, all I can see is another decade sadly wasted. At its core, a belief-system is just a religion! Until mainstream science stops worshiping matter and returns to open-mindedly pursuing the truth, it can be of little further use to humankind.