Ian, I don't think LH was trying to shut down the dialogue. But he was raising a point about many discussions that have occurred in this forum when spiritual issues come up. In those discussions it is not unusual to see material certainty being used as a standard to reject or invalidate extra-material perceptions. "I'm a realist", "prove it scientifically", "no objective evidence" and similar assertions are brought to bear.

This is all well and good except that such claims are being borrowed from a different universe of discourse grounded in meat-bound physical experience. It would seem to me to be obvious that reports of non-physical perceptions are not going to be measurable or frame-able by the purely material standards of physical science, even if they can be rendered consistent with some intellectual standards of scientific thinking. The two are very different. The latter has to do with how oneimposes standards of consistency, reasonable coherence, and methods of evaluation on a set of data. The former involves means of testig the phsyical universe to reveal its workings.

There is a whole ocean of data about spiritual stuff in the human library, ranging from propositions that are testable in some ways to extreme assertions about entities and their divine families and mythic adventures. Some of it is reasonable and consistent, and some of it is as inexpllicable as daytime television.

Anyway, I would suggest you might meander through some of the earlier htreads on related topics and revisit some of these arguments from the past before you come down too heavily on the "meat measures matter most" school of thought in such discussions. It is possible that there really ar emore thigns under heaven and earth than in all of natural philosophy, even if the field is also cluttered with nightmares and weirdos.

A