Barry Duke is editor of The Freethinker: www.freethinker.co.uk

Barry,

Your magazine The Freethinker has been brilliant. As a fellow atheist I agree with every word that has been written apart from when you plug James Randi. He and his army are keeping the blasted priests in power. Look, the pseudo scientists have a pact with the Church never to make a scientific study of life after death. This pathetic nonsense dates from the 17th Century!

You know as well as I do that there is no room for a faith or any belief system when we have the scientific proof of something. Priests, mullahs, rabbis, "holy" men, ministers of religion, the whole grisly shooting-match disappears almost over night when the truth eventually hits the masses.

Ignorant people once worshipped the Sun until they found out what it was. All the time you are pushing James Randi you are also allied to the one-god religion of Spiritualism. They are fighting as hard as the Vatican to block the scientific proof that we all survive the death of our physical bodies. They are deliberately blocking the secular case for survival solely to keep the subject as a religious belief. They have a huge network of "churches" where they carry out "services", sing "hymns", say "prayers" and grovel before "ministers of religion".

You are on the wrong horse, for goodness sake jump. The religious lunatics have taken over the asylum. We are heading for a Third World War if the believers in supernatural absurdities are not quickly marginalised. All freethinkers must now join forces - those who say we survive death and those who say we don't. We can carry on our arguments after we have won our war against the great religious hoax on the human race. As you have covered so well in your magazine, these terrible forces of evil are targeting the minds of children, a heinous crime against humanity. This mental child abuse must now carry exactly the same penalty as the physical kind. Children are being taught to hate from birth as Prof. Richard Dawkins of Oxford University keeps pointing out.

Michael Roll

James Randi - His Amazing Role in the Great Psi Media Circus - an article by Sam Nicholls (1991)

No priest believes in what they are selling! - E-mail from Michael Roll to Dene Jones (August 13, 2002)

Linking Survival with Subatomic Physics - E-mail from Michael Roll to Prof. B D Josephson (December 11, 2002)

We can stop the Third World War, but only if we all fight very hard indeed - E-mail from Michael Roll to Jeff Rense (August 20, 2002)

Articles by Richard Dawkins

The Freethinker - The monthly secular magazine for those who have escaped from the clutches of priestcraft - as well as those wanting to ditch religion. The Freethinker Website offers a selection of articles and information about the National Secular Society.

The Horizon Research Foundation

If the continuation of consciousness and the mind at a time when the clinical criteria of death have been met and the brain has ceased functioning can be proven through large scale, reproducible scientific studies, then this will have huge implications for society.

It would indicate that the mind/consciousness may be a scientific entity, which is as of yet undiscovered, but which is not produced by the brain and is hence a separate entity from it.

Conceptually this may be rather similar to the discovery of electromagnetic phenomenon in the 19th century or Quantum processes which could not have been reduced down to the science of their time, however they do exist and were eventually discovered many years after they were first proposed.

Not only do we now know that they exist but we currently use them in our daily lives for example when we watch television, or use the microwave oven. It may be that in the same manner, we cannot reduce mind/consciousness down to chemical processes occurring in the brain.

If proven it would also mean that the age-old philosophical concept of the 'soul' may be the same as the more modern concepts of mind/consciousness and it is this that appears to remain after death.

AWARE Study

The AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study is the first launched by the Human Consciousness Project, a multidisciplinary collaboration of international scientists and physicians who have joined forces to study the relationship between mind and brain during clinical death, and is led by Dr. Sam Parnia, a world-renowned expert on the study of the human mind and consciousness during clinical death, together with Dr Peter Fenwick and Professors Stephen Holgate and Robert Peveler of the University of Southampton. The team will be working in collaboration with more than 25 major medical centers throughout Europe, Canada, and the United States.

What Happens When We Die? - An article by M.J. Stephey in Time (September 18, 2008)

A fellow at New York City's Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia is one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of death. Last week Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S. and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest.

New Research Confirms Life After Death - NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER (January, 2001)

“Science since the 17th century has kept, to the idea of an objective external world, arguing that matter is dead, but in the last few decades another view has developed that the material world is not dead and has a consciousness.”