Dogma-Doling Professors Discard or Ignore All Clues That Annoy Them

Shackled by the iron chains of custom, today's professors of science tend to be People of Dogma. They keep promulgating various dogmas that arose centuries ago, such as the dogma that the brain is the source of the human mind, and the dogma that the human species is an accident of blind, purposeless forces of nature. These claims are dogmas because there is no evidence proving them, no sound argument for their likely truth, and also very much evidence suggesting that they are untrue. Today's dogma-doling professor follows senseless rules such as "nothing spooky allowed" and  "discard or ignore all clues that annoy me." 

An intelligent way to analyze observations is to weigh evidence like a jury weighs evidence, kind of keeping in your mind a scale in which items of evidence supporting opposite conclusions are placed on opposite sides of the scale. 

But today's dogma-doling professor does not use such a scale. What such a professor should be doing is keeping in his mind a scale like the one shown below, with two sides, one marked "We are just brains," and the other marked "We are souls." Whenever the professor gets an observation that belongs on the "we are souls" side, he should be placing that evidence on the "we are souls" side of the scale, keeping it there. Whenever the professor gets an observation that belongs on the "we are just brains" side, he should be placing that evidence on the "we are just brains" side of the scale, keeping it there if the observation holds up to scrutiny as robust, replicated evidence produced by best scientific practices (which almost all neuroscience research fails to do). And if the weight of evidence ever tilts things to the "we are souls" conclusion, the scientist should prefer that conclusion, or at least say something like "currently the evidence suggests we are more than just brains, but it's too early to declare a final verdict." 

But dogma-doling professors do not keep such a scale. Instead of placing new observation reports on the appropriate side of such a scale, such professors simply follow the rule: throw away any report belonging on the "we are souls" side of the scale. Such professors also place on the "we are just brains" side of the scale endless examples of poor research following bad research practices, such as experiments with study group sizes way too small for a reliable result. 

You can compare this policy to a wife who acts like this:

January 1: The wife reads a letter on her table from a woman discussing all the sex she recently had with the wife's husband. The wife says, "Those must be lies, because I know my husband is faithful."

January 3: The wife notices under her bed some panties she does not recognize. She says, "I must have bought these panties before, and forgot about buying them."

January 5: The wife hears her husband behind a closed door, telling his mistress that he enjoyed all the exciting sex they had yesterday. Instead of opening the door, the wife says, "That must not be my husband talking, but merely a voice on the television, one that coincidentally matches my husband's voice."

January 7: The wife arrives home unexpected, and sees her husband having sexual intercourse with his mistress. The wife says, "I must just be hallucinating, because I am sure my husband is faithful to me." 

Here the wife is following a rule of "discard all clues that annoy me." And that is just the rule that is followed by today's dogma-doling professor. 

Reality has provided a constant stream of clues that defy the dogmas of such professors. They include the following:

• The accounts of very many thousands of reliable witnesses who had near-death experiences, often reporting the most vivid and life-changing experiences at a time when their heart had stopped and their brain waves had shut down, something that should have prevented any experience according to "brains make minds" dogmas. 

• The accounts of very many people reporting out-of-body experiences in which they observed their own bodies from a position meters away (discussed here, here, and here). 
• The many cases in which medical personnel who did not have such experiences verified the medical resuscitation details recalled by people who had near-death experiences, who recalled medical details that occurred when such people should have been completely unconscious because their hearts had stopped.
• Very many cases of people who saw an apparition of someone they did not know had died, with the witness soon learning the person did die at about the time the apparition was seen (discussed in the 18 posts here). 
• Very many cases when multiple witnesses reported seeing the same apparition (discussed in my series of posts here). 
• The very careful research of people like Ian Stevenson who documented countless cases of children who claimed to recalk past lives, and found that their accounts often checked out well, with the details of the “past lives” being corroborated, with the children often having birthmarks corresponding to the deaths they recalled, and with the children often recognizing people or places they should not have been able to recognize unless they had the reported past life.
• A great abundance of reports in the nineteenth century of spiritual manifestations such as mysterious raps that spelled out messages, tables moving when no one touched them, tables half-levitating when no one touched them, and tables fully levitating when no  one touched them (discussed in the series of posts here).  
• Spectacular cases in the history of mediums, with paranormal phenomena often being carefully documented by observing scientists, as in the cases of Daniel Dunglas Home, Eusapia Palladino, Leonora Piper, and Indridi Indridason.
• Two hundred years of evidence for clairvoyance in which people could observe things far away or observe things when they were blindfolded or observe things in closed containers such as locked boxes. 
• Abundant photographic evidence for mysterious orbs, including 800 photos of mysterious striped orbs, orbs appearing with dramatically repeating patterns, and orbs appearing with dramatically repeating patterns while falling water was being photographed.
• Abundant reports of mysterious orbs being seen with the naked eye, described in the 120+ posts here.  
• A great abundance of anecdotal evidence for telepathy, with large fractions of the human population reporting telepathic experiences. 
• More than a century of solid laboratory evidence for telepathy, including cases discussed here, here, and here.  
• Very much evidence for a phenomenon of materialization, involving the mysterious appearance of tangible forms resembling human forms, sometimes a form with mobility, closely resembling a human body, with multiple simultaneous witnesses reporting seeing such a wonder.  
• An extremely common "deathbed vision" phenomenon in which people report seeing deceased relatives nearby, with the phenomenon occurring to as many as 10 percent to 20 percent of dying people. 
• Extremely numerous cases in which living people report hard-to-explain events and synchronicity suggesting interaction with survivors of death.

What do our dogma-doling professors do with such clues, clues which in one way or another defy the dogmas such professors cherish? They throw away such clues. Such professors ignore such clues, and censor them, so that you do not read about such clues in the papers, lectures and books of such professors, or only hear about such clues in misleading depictions of such evidence. It is just as if their rule is "discard or ignore all clues that annoy me." In this regard, they are just like the evidence-ignoring wife described earlier in this post. 

We don't literally see scenes like the one below, but what goes on is equivalent from an evidence-suppression standpoint.  Every time a professor says there is no evidence for paranormal phenomena which are documented by hundreds of years of scientific evidence, it is an evidence-suppression attempt as bad as the one depicted in the visual below. 

When people point out to scientists their very unscientific tendency to ignore or discard all evidence conflicting with their beliefs, some scientists may defensively state absurd falsehoods to try to justify their indolence in studying observations they should have studied.  So, for example, I read today a scientist who is trying to convince us there is no real data on a topic for which there has been a wealth of data for decades, while also making the very absurd claim that eyewitness testimony is the worst type of evidence (a claim which, if believed, would cause us to free most of the murderers in prison, and also retract almost all experimental scientific papers ever published, since they rely on eyewitness testimony by their authors).