Peterkin

True. OTOH, neither can you force me to leave. Are you at all aware that two posts you say are contradictory actually say the same thing?

I answered the specific items I quoted, and nothing else. The point was, in each case, self-evident. I'm not convinced this completely sincere. I mentioned a couple of factors that retard decomposition. To be more comprehensive: mummification, extreme cold, dehydration, saline or acidic environment, exclusion of oxygen and microorganisms. Not a great big mystery - and not relevant to whether the meat thus kept fresh was dead or alive when it went into the container. If someone were buried while still alive, they would not stay alive very long - 3-6 hours, depending on the size of the person and the coffin and how much they struggled. The state of tissue preservation is a function of the environment, not the animation of the corpse. I have* a pickled hog's head in a vacuum pack in my larder. It's been there for six months, before which it was shipped over from Poland. It's fresh and ready to eat whenever a Narn dignitary comes to dinner. But I'm confident that that pig was stone dead, even before the head was severed from the body. (* Of course i don't! That would be as gross as exhuming people. ) I don't agree that my responses have earned those quotation marks. I don't follow. My rational explanations were of the phenomena I explicitly addressed. If you need anything else explained, ask a specific, comprehensible question. If you want a thesis discussed, present it in clear, concise terms. If you just want to be annoyed and annoying, keep doing what you're doing.

There is your first problem. and that's our second. What, by you, is a 'proper' answer? Had we been interested enough to do all the original research, we would now be experts in undeadness, or whatever this subject is. Obviously, we were only interested enough to respond to you. Until you became tiresome. I never got so far as to figure out what you're wrong about, exactly. Please to show where I said this. I'm not mad keen on being grossly misrepresented.

Sop can I, should I become interested enough. So can you. Does that mean we're done here?

That's not why those procedures were carried out. They were meant to preserve the body for its passage to the 'next world'. They didn't set much store by the brain and didn't want that useless much rotting in the perfect skull. But they prized the heart and liver and preserved those, for the owner his post-life used thereof. Except in the case of zombies and vampires, of course, but that's superstitious practice in service of superstitious belief, while the Egyptian mummification is scientific practice in service of superstitious belief. The degree or absence of obvious decomposition has no effect whatever on the presence or absence of life. You can have putrefying postules all over your body and still be alive, or be a perfectly preserved prehistoric man https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/europe-bog-bodies-reveal-secrets-180962770/ and be dead as a doornail. You might vacuum-pack a body for safekeeping, or keep it in the deep freeze, the same way you keep any met fresh. Fresh and alive are not synonymous.

No, they're not. Decomposition starts as soon as tissue no longer receives nourishment. You just don't overtly notice it until the microorganisms get to work. There seem to be some gaps in your understanding of the subject, just as shown in your responses here. My refusal to read the thesis stands, on the grounds of personal taste. I prefer paragraphs, rational punctuation and comprehensible vocabulary. I dislike anything stated in all capitals, even when correctly spelled.

Yes, it is known to happen that someone, even a certified medical doctor, makes an incorrect determination of death. Human error is far less common than it was in the 19th and early 20th century, when cardio-pulmonary were the only criteria. We have more sophisticated instruments an can measure more subtle activity. Also, because these phenomena (semblance of death for various reasons) are now known and medical practitioners are alert to the possibility. (Unlike the movies, where any passer-by can say, "Too late; he's gone" and the victim is buried next morning, we're quite vigilant nowadays.) But it can still happen. And very rarely, even modern instruments fail to detect very faint signs of life in a patient who is comatose, hypothermic or extensively damaged, as in an explosion or fall from a great height. Such a patient would usually be monitored and checked again for life-signs over a period of time. I don't see your problem summarized in an accessible form.

Good! Then the subject has been well and truly covered and can be put to rest. In a mausoleum, if you want to keep visiting and taking its pulse.

There are three less invasive ways to be sure: Have all the up-to-date brain-monitoring devices and competent personnel to read them; keep the corpse under observation until rigor has come and passed (about 24 hours is customary before post-mortem examination commences) or keep it in a secure, but not airtight room until a satisfactory state of decomposition convinces you that it is, in fat, dead. Not really.

I rarely do otherwise. I have no idea. As previously stated, as I stated, I don't attempt to decipher solids walls of text. If you present your thesis succinctly, I will consider it. I suggested two ways to make sure.

That's right. If you were a rich and powerful ancient Egyptian, you could be quite certain this wouldn't happen, because your brain would have sucked out through a straw and discarded, while your heart and liver were lovingly preserved in separate sealed jars. Cremation accomplishes the same peace of mind more efficiently. At some point, we need to terminate surveillance of the dead, or we'd all end up living in one endless, limitless Stephen King novel.

Yes, in the same way. It's not a thing that is, but a process that happens. Concepts like colour and weight are non-physical attributes of physical entities (more correctly, products of an interaction between physical entities: a surface and light; a mass and gravity); what the entities do with these attributes is action or process, and how those actions manifest is in events and/or products. So, the brain exists inside a human being who exists and some of the activities that take place in the brain - the deconstruction, juxtaposition, comparison and reconstruction of input data - can be collectively described as imagination, which feeds processed ideas and images into a more focused brain function called creativity, which further refines those reconfigured ideas and images into a new product of invention.

Lazarus syndrome has been well documented since the 1980's, and a number of cases were reported long before that. In fact, in the 19th century, there was such widespread fear of being buried alive tht people had bell-ropes installed in their coffin, just in case. However, this is a cardiac condition: the heart resumes beating after a period of unresponsiveness. These days, death is not pronounced on the basis or heart and lung activity alone, but on brain-wave activity. Once the brain stops, it doesn't start again. That doesn't rule out the possibility of incorrect pronouncements of death, which is why people are not buried immediately - indeed, even the autopsy is not begun immediately - they arrive at the morgue. Medical personnel tend to keep trying to preserve life as long as there is sign of life to preserve. I don't agree that it's a good idea to bury people and dig them up again. Cremation is more definitive.

?

I would guess, in the same sense as the images on our computer screen: as an interpretation of captured visual images that has been deconstructed to form a data stream and then reconstructed as pixels. So the ,mind's eye' doesn't actually exist (as a physical entity); rather, it 'happens': it's a metaphor for a process that takes place within a neural network.

Well, no wonder I couldn't get a handhold!

I'm thinking more like one of the minions snuck it past the supervisor for a giggle. The formatter and printer snickered, kept quiet and passed it on through the process. Or even, some smartass in the print department switched off the image.

How certain are you of its inadvertence?

This is incorrect. I decline further climb on that wall of text.

Many people suffer from mental illness. In the US, about 83 million people. That would make about 40,000,000 religious mad-men and -women However, only a minority of the mental illness fits the description of the madman in the parable, but they are usually bipolar, rather than PTSD or OCD patients. You said the H word. I'm gone.

What does it mean to "believe in" religion? We know the institutions that represent particular religions exist, and that organizations exist, and they they collect real tithes and services from real parishioners. It doesn't make atheists particularly happy, since we also know that these institutions wield oppressive political power. Do we believe that belonging to a religious organizations makes a great many people feel secure and validated? Well, I can't speak for any other atheists (since we're not organized and have no shared belief system) but I believe that. I also believe that it gives some people the moral authority to abrogate other people's autonomy. Do I believe that of believing in the specific content of a specific religious doctrine - certainly not as a general principle, no. I think some religions make many of their faithful miserable, angry, frightened or ridden with guilt and self-loathing. Do some religious beliefs make some people happy? Very probably, but I don't see it demonstrated that religious belief is their only pathway to such happiness.

None of the parts are the foundation. And you, like Beecee, keep dragging in your subjective moral judgment. People take both rational and irrational actions for reasons that seem wrong to other people. The morality doesn't affect the rationality, or vice versa. Personally, I would rather lie to a child than watch it suffer - and don't much care who condemns that attitude. Most adults lie to children all the time, for all kinds of reasons, about all kinds of subjects, and if I judge them at all, I do it case by case, not wholesale. But that's just my casual relationship with with truth - subjective.

You are forgetting the ones that have lasted for longer than 2000 years or do I sense a bit of favoritism? I didn't mention any particular religions, nor shown favour to any (in this instance). The time-spans I mentioned in comparison to the longevity of skyscrapers seemed to me sufficiently inclusive. This is no entirely true, though it also misses the point. Humans have rational and irrational ideas. Humans have rational and irrational fears. Humans have rational and irrational responses to the environment and to events in their lives. When irrational fears and desires create a crisis addressing that crisis is rational, even if addressing it means inventing an irrational response. A man's wife died recently. She used to read bedtime stories to their small child and he misses her, doesn't understand about death or why she abandoned him. Child can't go to sleep without the mother reading him stories, and he's starting to imagine bizarre things due to sleep deprivation. The father, not exactly in the grandest emotional condition himself, is worried. He has explained about how people don't want to die, but they do, and that it's forever; they can't come back. Child says father is wrong, because he's seen his mother. (this is a common occurrence ) No, the father explains, he was just dreaming (except he can't go to sleep, so he knows this is lie) or 'just' imagining things - as if imagination were a trivial thing! But the child is not convinced. And he can't sleep until his mother reads him a story. So, the father says: "Well, Mommy can't come back anymore, but she can see you from heaven. If you close your eyes and try to sleep, she'll be able to read you a dream. That's even better than a story!" Child allows himself to be tucked up and closes his eyes. And every night, until he's a big lout of 8 of 9, he goes to sleep confident that his absent mother will read him a dream and he feels less bereft. And even when he's grown, sometimes, in very stressful situations, he might go to bed, close his eyes and think, "Mom, can you read me the solution to this problem?" Was the father wrong to say that? In the sense that the statement was incorrect, yes. Did he believe it himself? Who knows - he probably wanted to, or at least wished it was true. Did he intend to brainwash the child? No, he intended to comfort his child. Whether it was the right or wrong thing to do,it was a rational thing to do - and it worked. (It's not his fault that it worked so incredibly well, and works so universally, that far more ruthlessly ambitious men than himself were able to parlay it into hegemonies of immense wealth and power -- all of them quite rationally based on semi-rational human psychology.) The foundation of a cult has been laid. What's irrational about an individual or elite group using whatever tools and methods are available to give themselves an advantage over others? Given competition for resources, mates, status etc., of course. Hierarchy, the drive to be top dog, top of the food chain, certainly predates H. sapiens by some 60 million years, and so does the pack impulse to take direction from a leader. If that's irrational, it's also unshakable.

I think we have different points of view. I don't see religion - the concept or the institutions or the practice - from inside any particular belief system, but as an anthropological phenomenon. I don't see mythology as pernicious lies, but as the stories people tell about their origins, group identity and world-view. I don't think of religion as starting from a bronze-age dogma, but as an organic product of human imagination, curiosity and awe. I do draw a distinction - quite a sharp one - between ancient, primitive beliefs and modern religious institutions. So I don't think we're talking about the same thing, and doubt if we can.

Which is what some people in every age did. Actually, all people, both.