Free Republic

The people who live and breathe politics often talk as if the upcoming election is the most important election of all time. As they see it, we are in an unprecedented historical moment and the choices we make today will determine the fate of the nation. I understand their perspective and a younger version of me occasionally slipped into that mindset. However, far from being unprecedented, the core challenge facing America today was described more than 2,000 years ago by an ancient Greek philosopher. Plato, a student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, imagined prisoners chained inside a dark cave,...

Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon doctor who claims to have experienced the afterlife during a seven-day coma, says the experience was like Plato’s world of ideals. In 2008, Dr. Eben Alexander went into a coma after catching an acute bacterial infection that had a severe neurological impact on his brain. For seven days, he lay unconscious. When he awoke, he described seeing a beautiful spiritual guide on a butterfly wing that took him through a wormhole. Sharing his story with the U.S. Sun, Dr. Alexander described a land of “beautiful very lush forests and meadow waterfalls into crystal blue pools, absolutely...

A short video presentation of Plato's (Socrates') Allegory of the cave.

Folks, I want to keep commenting on the article published in this month's Discover magazine by Jane Bosveld, titled Soul Search, which I began reviewing in One monk goes up over the rainbow. The article goes on to narrate a 1921 experiment perform by Duncan MacDougall, a physician, who claimed he was able to weigh a human soul. He accomplished this by measuring how much a person weighs before and immediately after death. After monitoring six deaths, he reported that people lost between 11 and 43 grams at death, which he attributed to the material weight of the soul. Others...