Edward O. Wilson, a world-renowned expert on ants, is the idol of a certain intellectual class that holds to 
a version of the scientific dogma of atheistic materialism that is softened by lofty and optimistic ideas. Human beings are alone in a clockwork universe, just the random products of evolution, but nevertheless we are unique random products. Wilson’s latest book is apparently entitled The Meaning of Human Existence, which seems to sums up his philosophy: we are random dust, true, but we are what you might call a higher class of random dust.
I wish I wanted to read his book. He has given it such a wonderful title! But one quotation from a review in Scientific American lets us know that Wilson’s ideas sadly still are based in the Luddite thinking that investigating only part of the evidence so we can preserve our scientific dogmas will nevertheless give us sufficient knowledge to let us grandly pontificate. Apparently Wilson says:
“Hope and wish for it otherwise as we will, there is no evidence of an external grace shining down upon us, no demonstrable destiny or purpose assigned us, no second life vouchsafed us for the end of the present one. We are, it seems, completely alone. And that in my opinion is a very good thing. It means we are completely free.”
Now, any writer who pens those words – and I take them from a review, so I preserve some small hope that they did not actually come from Wilson – is proclaiming his adamant adherence to ignorance. It is impossible for any western human being in the twenty-first century not to have encountered near-death experiences (NDEs), out-of-body experiences (OBEs), deathbed visions, afterlife communications, and all the enticing bits of evidence that the brain does not generate the mind. For Wilson to be aware of these phenomena, as certainly he must be aware, and still blithely to state that “there is no evidence” is the clearest testimony I have seen in awhile that orthodox science is dying before our eyes of self-inflicted wounds.
The problem that scientists face as they continue to refuse to consider evidence that is highly relevant to their work because that evidence does not fit their dogmas is that a picture painted with beliefs-based paints is not a picture of much of anything. Using the purely materialist approach to trying to understand reality is like attempting to figure out why the floor is wet by earnestly examining the walls while refusing to admit that the state of the roof might also be relevant to our inquiry. Science that is based in adamant materialism is exactly that limited and that foolish.
Apparently Wilson even approaches some evidentiary areas, but then because his focus is so limited he has no clue what to do with them. Scientific evidence is abundant now that on a conscious level we seem to have no free will. Our bodies begin to move before our brains are shown to register them directing those movements. So scientists conclude that we must have no free will. Now, anyone whose intellectual reach was not hobbled by scientific materialist dogma would know immediately that since our movements are not random flailings, but are instead the deliberate acts of sentient beings, someone or something must be directing them. And indeed, the evidence is strong that much of our eternal minds are what we might call a “superconsciousness” while we are in bodies, and most of our less important decisions are made there so we don’t have to be constantly distracted by thinking about moving our feet, blinking our eyes, typing, chewing. But for Wilson and his ilk, apparently deep thinking in areas where there is the remotest risk of inadvertently finding God must give way to airy-fairy waffling.
“So does free will exist?” he asks. “Yes, if not in ultimate reality, then at least in the operational sense necessary for sanity and thereby for the perpetuation of the human species.”
For anyone who loves scientific inquiry, watching the floundering that has been going on in mainstream science for most of a century is heartbreaking. During some parts of human history, when Christianity held state-supported power, for scientists to erect a wall against that power did make considerable sense. But when in the first part of the twentieth century universities began to consider it necessary to make atheism a “fundamental dogma” – and yes, you can find that term in print – Christianity was no threat at all. The motive then seems to have been to protect current scientific theories from complications that might arise if they had to incorporate into their field of study evidence derived from the afterlife communications that then were being produced in abundance.
Reportedly Wilson also cheerfully says, “We have enough intelligence, goodwill, generosity and enterprise to turn Earth into a paradise.” A hopeless and pointless paradise, mind you. One that Wilson himself admits lacks “destiny or 
purpose,” since from the materialistic science point of view, human existence is an altogether random and inevitably terminal condition.
The harm that is caused by this sort of bastardization of what should be an open-minded pursuit of the truth is manifold and tragic. For now, please only be glad to know that mainstream science has chosen to limited itself to the lesser role of mere belief-system. Therefore it is safe to say that its pronouncements about humanity’s randomness are ignorant garbage, and can be ignored. When all the facts are considered, including a lot of solid evidence that mainstream science now sees as taboo, it is obvious that you are an eternal being and you are infinitely loved.
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insane achievement, like the time when I was terrified of heights but still I climbed on an open staircase to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral dome. I really loved St. Paul’s Cathedral! And who knew when I might make it back to London?
updated appendices and a wonderful Foreword by Victor Zammit, the great afterlife researcher who is one of my heroes. We have nearly 200 years of abundant and consistent communications from people we used to think were dead, and when combined with insights from quantum physics and from cutting-edge consciousness research, these communications give us a breathtaking picture of the glorious reality that we enter at death. But even beyond coming to understand death, we are learning so much more! What afterlife researchers have discovered is a whole new branch of science, a third wave of physics that is consciousness-based. We are learning things about human nature, the nature of God, and the nature of reality that are surprising and beyond-belief wonderful.
and also the many methods we have for contacting the dead proactively, including some just being developed that are going to make it impossible for anyone to still insist the dead do not survive. This book’s Foreword is by Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D., of the University of Arizona at Tucson, who has done more than anyone else alive to prove that the dead are in communication with us.
re-recreation of Martha Jefferson’s journal. Conveniently, Thomas Jefferson’s marriage spanned the Revolutionary War, so My Thomas gives us a close perspective on the formative years of the United States from the perspective of a participant who was married to the author of the Declaration of Independence. This is one of history’s great true love stories! After Martha’s death, the evidence is strong that Thomas never married nor even loved again. He went on to become the first Secretary of State, the second Vice President, and the third President of the United States, but all of that was by his own account a consolation life. Forty years after his cherished wife’s death, Thomas Jefferson still referred to that decade of Revolutionary chaos and war as “ten years of unchequered happiness.”
core is the success of a woman from disadvantaged circumstances who by dint of pure determination builds such a successful business that she is a multimillionaire before the age of thirty. And this was back before the high-tech boom: her business delivers gourmet meals! Kim’s love story is a complicated one. There is a lot more going on than moonlight and roses. But like all my novels, this is a love story. People have been asking me to write a sequel because they want to see more of Kim Bonner’s happily ever after!
evolved to perfection. This trilogy spans almost forty years of the life of a man named by Time magazine the richest American under the age of forty when he was twenty-six. He owns Atlantica, but it is his star-crossed lover who becomes obsessed with the island, and then their son who helps us understand it. Although this trilogy tells a single story, all the Letter novels are independent of one another. They can be read in any order. 
loving, then how can so much evil exist?
stable. The process was fascinating to watch.
that other things can activate. Oddly, this seems to be true even of nonphysical fears, like social embarrassment or the loss of a job.
wrong turns eventually they would stumble upon the truth. Law of averages. Just made sense. They couldn’t insistent on being wrong forever.
So it begins to appear that scientists have begun to stumble in the right direction, which makes it discouraging to read Scientific American’s 
than like a great machine.” Physicist John Wheeler said, “A life-giving factor lies at the center of the whole machinery and design of the world.” And the great Erwin Schrodinger, winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics, said, “Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind… ” “Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe.” Every quantum physicist with a free and creative mind must have had this notion as at least a passing thought!
torture ever devised. Then it concludes that when every aspect is considered, including the intensity and duration of the pain inflicted and the degree of psychological suffering, the very worst possible way to die is the way that most of us will die. It notes that today “the leading causes of death are heart disease and cancer, which together accounted for 63 percent of all deaths in the US in 2011. People with these and many other diseases often live longer than their ancestors, but those final increments of life are more drawn-out and painful.”
asleep as the dawn was breaking.
establish evidence-based opinions on a great many things. At one time, I had little concern about capital punishment. So long as we executed only the guilty, what was the harm? To read of the despicable crimes that some of these criminals had committed made you feel almost as if the government were doing little more than eliminating vermin.
chair. Hovering busily, getting him attached to the mechanism that will end his life, are four middle-aged guys who are dwarfed by the robust health and the sheer charisma of the man who is about to die. What gets you is his face. He looks like your son or mine in the principal’s office, close to tears and gazing off into the distance, pretending to be anywhere else. I want to hug and comfort him. Even if I didn’t know how harmful it is to free criminal minds, that one photo would be enough to turn me adamantly against capital punishment.
whether we can have post-death sex. After all, the whole area of sexual relations is so important to our earthly lives. Isn’t it central to who we are?
research, the rehabilitation of that genitally-injured soldier is the only account I ever have read of actual physical sex after death.
