Charles Murray

And I actually give it in the book.

I won't bother to do that here.

But I had not examined the empirical reality and evidence for any of the elements of my catechism.

That's just what the people whose tribe I wanted to join believed.

Well, you have to understand that I am no more free from internal contradictions than anybody else.

So whereas I was a wholehearted materialist in the sense of believing that consciousness exists exclusively in the brain, when the brain stops

You stop.

There's nothing after that.

Okay, so if you'd asked me for a period of 20 or 30 years, I would have said, well, of course that's true.

How else is consciousness going to exist except through the brain?

But all at that same time, I'd always been interested in paranormal phenomena.

been interested in paranormal phenomena since i was a teenager and i read considerably on it and i didn't discard it on the contrary i i believed long before i became this eccentric christian that i've become long before then i was accepted the reality of esp and you think it would have crossed my mind at that point you know

If you accept the reality of ESP, it's really hard to reconcile that with materialist position on the brain.

And then I also read early on of the NDE literature, near-death experience literature.

I read the original Life After Life that, is it Moody wrote in 75?

And I didn't stop to think, if NDEs are real...

That sort of has a religious implication, doesn't it?

So it was a case of not resisting that evidence.

I thought it was very persuasive.

It was a case of recognizing the degree to which it was consistent with a lot of religious explanations that I had not taken seriously.