Biologists have misled us in many different ways. I describe dozens of those ways in my post here. One of the worst ways in which biologists have misled us is by again and again visually misrepresenting the degree of complexity and organization in cells.  Again and again in the books and articles and school lessons of biologists, we see phony cell diagrams that make cells look 1,000 times simpler than they are. Such diagrams give people the idea that cells contain only a few components called organelles.  Most of the more complex cells in the human body contain more than 100,000 orga ..read more

 My 2021 post "They Said They Saw a Wife's Apparition" describes many accounts of people who claimed to see an apparition of their wives. It's time I did a similar post looking at such reports coming from females.  The Chronicling America web site allows you to do text searches of American newspapers from 1756 to 1963.  Searching for the phrase "apparition of her husband" on the site produces 45 matches. For example, in one newspaper account we read this: "Calling together her friends and neighbors, she told them she had just seen an apparition ..read more

An interesting question is: if life or mind worked very, very differently, would viewpoints change about philosophical questions such as the existence of God, life after death and whether life is purposeful -- and if so, how would they change? Prelude: The Reality We Find Ourselves In First, let me make a little sketch of the reality we find ourselves in. Some may disagree with some of my statements, but at least this little sketch will "set the stage" for some of the interesting thought experiments to come, in which I discuss alternate realities very different from our own.  Physic ..read more

 There was recently in the science news the latest results of the search for dark matter. Once again, scientists failed to find any evidence for it. If there were a magazine devoted to the search for dark matter, it might look like this: A quote from the journal Science gives us a hint of the dysfunction and lack of candor that is occurring. We read this: "Once again, physicists have used an ultrasensitive underground detector to hunt for particles of mysterious dark matter—and come up empty. The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment searched for so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP ..read more

 At a site I read I got a link to a PhD dissertation on the topic of near-death experiences. The dissertation is entitled "Are Near-Death Experiences Veridical? A Philosophical Inquiry," and is by Monika J. Mandoki of the University of Western Ontario. I cannot recommend reading the document, which does a poor job of giving us relevant scholarship on the topic mentioned in its title. We get a 315-page document that wanders all over the map, without giving us much in the way of a discussion of the topics the author should have been writing  about to properly address the ..read more

 Darwinist materialism helped pave the way for bloodshed, cruelty and oppression in a variety of ways: (1) Creating the myth that human origins had been scientifically explained, Darwinism helped paved the way for totalitarian atheism, which in Russia, China, North Korea and Cambodia proved to be history's most enormous engine of mass murder and oppression, cropping up tens of millions of dead bodies at the hands of people like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, along with millions of others who were put in the living hell of places such as the Soviet gulag prison camps. For example, in the wi ..read more

 Below is a startling news report from the November 1, 1899 edition of the Washburn Times: You can read the report on its original page using the link below: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85040437/1899-11-01/ed-1/seq-2/ At the link here, we read some testimony from a Bishop Fallows of Chicago who stated, "My father and mother separately saw the apparition of a young man who died in England."  At the link below, we read a story of an apparition seen by multiple witnesses: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026844/1891-08-05/ed-1/seq-6/ Below is part of the accoun ..read more

A recent article on the Aeon web site is entitled "Building Embryos." It is written by a molecular biologist (John Wallingford) who is the past president of the Society for Developmental Biology.  The story includes misleading suggestions that developmental biologists are making big progress in understanding how the human body develops in a human womb. The subtitle of the article says, "Now there is a revolution underway." We hear that "influential biologists are making huge strides," and we have a claim of "truly explosive advances in human embryology." The boasts are not subst ..read more

The Chronicling America web site and other web sites allow full-text searches of old newspapers. Using such sites, I found some interesting old newspaper accounts of out-of-body experiences. For example, there is the account below of a man claiming to have out-of-body experiences in which he traveled to the 1905 World's Fair in St. Louis.  You can read the full account here: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85058130/1905-02-05/ed-1/seq-18/ Below is a 1903 account of a dying boy (Walter Smith) who reports a trip to Heaven during a close brush with death that was soon followed by ..read more

Recently I watched on TV the 2015 film "The Hunger Games -- Mockingjay Part 2."  The film has a fascinating plot twist near its end (spoilers ahead), although to properly understand the plot twist you have to watch the last part of the film very carefully.   The movie involves the participation of the hero of the film series (Katniss) in the overthrow of the tyrant Coriolanus Snow, who started the "Hunger Games" rather resembling the games of the old Roman Colosseum.  Katniss (played by Jennifer Lawrence) works with a rebel leader named Alma Coin to try to achieve the overt ..read more