I've turned the Paul Edwards book back into the library, so I'm pretty much writing this off the top of my head. Also, since I don't have to turn this in to be graded, it will be more informal and less organized, but it should still be understandable.

First, I'll more fully explain my own biases. From about the age of 18 until fairly recently, I've believed in reincarnation and karma. Within the last few years, I've begun to doubt karma (having come up with an "alternative explanation": if you believe you deserve punishment, you will attract punishment to yourself. If you had no conscience, you could get away with anything. However, maybe even the most ruthless criminals still have some spark of conscience which causes them to get caught. Anyway...), and now, within the last year, I've begun to doubt reincarnation as well, since my "displacement possession" idea can't be disproved. In any event, though, I am strongly biased against materialism.

This is my impression of what Robert Anton Wilson in The New Inquisition calls "funda-mentalist materialism": they already know a priori (Latin for "ahead of time", thrown in to make me look like a college student) that there can't possibly be any such thing as a soul, so they must

refute it by any means necessary, even if they have to cheat. This is not science. This can in no way be possibly be described as science. Yet it is passing for science more and more. I am considering James Randi, Paul Edwards, and the CSICOP organization (Committee for the Scientific Investigation [haha] of Claims Of the Paranormal) to be such fundamentalist mater-ialists. So I don't get sued for slander, I point out that this is only my opinion.

I can't really accuse Paul Edwards of cheating, although in some respects, he may be. Ian Stevenson has studied thousands of cases, and Edwards brings up maybe 5 to 10 of Stevenson's weaker cases in order to demonstrate that Stevenson's methods are inadequate. There should be some Latin word phrase like post hoc ergo propter hoc for the logical fallacy of "throwing the baby out with the bath water," [exhumas la bebe con la agua de la ba�a- well, that's Spanish] which fundamentalist materialists seem to do all the time. Because 10 data sets are dubious, I will throw out the entire life's work of a man. Again, I don't have Edwards' book in front of me, so I can't really treat him fairly.

If I remember correctly, he did raise some good points about flaws in Stevenson's method-ology, some of which Stevenson acknowledges. There are many problems involved in getting information from a young child, which may require the interviewer to ask the "scientifically invalidating" leading question. Under the la bebe fallacy, a "scientist" will say "Aha! Leading question! Throw out the entire data set!"

There is one case Edwards brings up that led me to strongly doubt Stevenson. I can't remem-ber the name of the man who claimed to have past life memories, but if you have the book or have read it, you may remeber which case I mean. I think Edwards did a good job of refuting this one case (I'd have to read it again to be sure- you see how my own biases are conveniently trying to help me forget?), but Stevenson consistenly defended the case, concluding that the man may have remembered a past life, but then embellished it with ideas of his own. If Stevenson can't admit that he may have been wrong, this seriously damages his creditability.

A full expolaration would have to cover more than just Stevenson and Edwards, and I would need to study Stevenson and his critics more in depth. Well, a full exploration would require me to gather evidence myself, or at least watch as others do. Has done this in .(link to review) I think that disreputable case of Stevenson's involved hypnosis, which is probably one reason why Stevenson doesn't usually use data gathered through hypnosis. I have a tendency to do the la bebe fallacy myself when it comes to hypnosis. However, if we want to refute my "displacement possession" theory and show that everyone reincarnates, we may have to rely on hypnosis. If we can match up the memories to records of an actual person, such evidence would be hard to refute, assuming the hypnotist is honest, doesn't have a plie of biographies lying around, and somehow steers the patient into one of these already found lives.

The most famous attempt at this is the Bridey Murphy case, which of course "everybody knows" is false. I haven't studied this in depth enough to make up my mind one way or the other. There's a book by Decausse (sp?) Called (I think) The Belief in Life after Death where he comes to the conclusion that the Bridey Murphy case was genuine. Edwards of course disagrees. It's very interesting to compare the two books and watch how each author leaves out data that the other uses to back up his side. If you gave all the data to an unbiased author, I wonder what he would decide?

There's a fairly pointless book I have by Joe Fisher called "The Case for Reincarnation" which includes cases from the Bannerjees, who use hypnotism in their research. (To be continued...)

[more: The Dalai Lama. Spacey stuff: Rosicrucians, Theosophy, Cayce, Scientology. Edwards incomplete: tries to refute soul: astral projection, mind-brain dependency, (ignores seances, I think) NDE's ]

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