{"id":115111,"date":"2026-03-02T16:17:45","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T23:17:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=115111"},"modified":"2026-03-02T16:17:45","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T23:17:45","slug":"difficult-to-explain-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2026\/03\/difficult-to-explain-away.html","title":{"rendered":"Difficult to explain away"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"sdkfjoasfioapoaihyiasioaiowee87fafhgaufhas\"<\/a>
John Donovan Wilson as Brigham Young, on the set of Six Days in August <\/em>(2024). \u00a0Still photograph by James G. Jordan, of Redbrick Filmworks.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019m pleased to announce that Episode 6 of our Becoming Brigham<\/em>\u00a0 series is now up online as \u201cYoung Brigham Young,\u201d Part One<\/a>:<\/p>\n

We tend to think of Brigham Young as the stern-faced old man from the few existing photos. But what was he like during his formative years? Our hosts explore this question, and Camrey interviews Susan Easton Black to get the historian\u2019s perspective on the young Brigham.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And, of course, Episode 6 and all of the five preceding<\/em> installments of the series are available at becomingbrigham.com<\/a>. \u00a0Please watch, enjoy, subscribe, and share.<\/p>\n

\"Utrecht\"<\/a>
At the Universiteit Utrecht, where Pim van Lommel received his medical degree.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I was busily occupied this morning (see below for part of the reason) and I\u2019ll be out and away from my computer for several hours this evening, so I think that, today, I\u2019ll content myself to some extent with sharing\u00a0some notes from my reading of Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience<\/em> (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), by the Dutch cardiologist and researcher Dr. Pim van Lommel:<\/p>\n

\n

When heart patients without an NDE were asked to describe their resuscitation, they always made one or more essential errors, unlike patients who had an NDE during their resuscitation and who were able to recall surprising details of this procedure. \u00a0(128)<\/p>\n

And it is even harder to find a materialist explanation for perceptions at a considerable distance from the hospital or for verified perceptions by visually handicapped or blind people. \u00a0(128)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s a reference in this next passage to an article published in\u00a0The Lancet<\/em>, which is\u00a0a weekly\u00a0peer-reviewed\u00a0general medical journal. \u00a0Founded in London in 1823, it now has additional offices in New York and Beijing and is generally ranked among the world\u2019s oldest, most prestigious, and best known general medical journals. \u00a0The article to which reference is made (and which I recommend) is Pim van\u00a0Lommel, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers, and Ingrid Elfferich, \u201cNear-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands,\u201d\u00a0The Lancet<\/em>\u00a0358, no. 9298 (December 15, 2001): 2039\u20132045.<\/p>\n

\n

Reports of out-of-body episodes can include verifiable facts that people could not have seen or heard with their normal senses and that doctors and nurses never mentioned afterward. \u00a0These reported perceptions usually take place from a position outside and above the body and sometimes even from outside the room where the body lies. \u00a0As mentioned, medical and nursing personnel were usually stunned by the level of detail patients knew about their resuscitation and almost always responded with surprise or disbelief. \u00a0The story of the dentures that were removed and stored during a resuscitation, which was published in\u00a0The Lancet<\/em>\u00a0and told earlier, is inexplicable to most scientists because the patient knew details about his resuscitation and the appearance and actions of the doctors and nurses in attendance despite entering the hospital in a coma and being transferred to the intensive care unit for respiration while still comatose.<\/p>\n

Out-of-body experiences are often difficult to corroborate if the NDEs took place many years ago. \u00a0Additional prospective research is needed to verify out-of-body experiences shortly after resuscitation. \u00a0But there are so many well-documented cases of people leaving their body, with a great many verifiable details, that it is virtually impossible to cast doubt upon them or to ascribe them to fantasy or imagination. \u00a0(128-129)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"In<\/a>
The Celestial Room of the Idaho Falls Temple.
Please note the heavenly reunions depicted in the mural on the wall.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And here are three passages that I marked while reading Brent L. Top, What\u2019s On the Other Side? What the Gospel Teaches Us about the Spirit World<\/em> (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2012):<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI have a father, brothers, children, and friends who have gone to the world of spirits. \u00a0They are only absent for a moment. \u00a0They are in the spirit, and we shall soon meet again. . . . \u00a0When we depart [from this life], we shall hail our mothers, fathers, friends, and all whom we love, who have fallen asleep in Jesus. . . . \u00a0It will be an eternity of felicity.\u201d \u00a0(Joseph Smith, cited on pages 42-43)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\n

We have more friends behind the vail than on this side, and they will hail us more joyfully than you were ever welcomed by your parents and friends in this world; and you will rejoice more when you meet them than you ever rejoiced to see a friend in this life. \u00a0(Brigham Young, cited on page 43)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\n

What is more desirable than that we should meet with our fathers and our mothers, with our brethren and our sisters, with our wives and our children, with our beloved associates and kindred in the spirit world, knowing each other, identifying each other . . . by the associations that familiarize each to the other in mortal life? \u00a0What do you want better than that? \u00a0What is there for any religion superior to that? \u00a0I know of nothing. \u00a0(Joseph F. Smith, cited on page 43)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whenever you\u2019re feeling down, think about such things.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"An<\/a>
The Palace of Westminster (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As is my (perhaps unfortunate) habit, I spent a few minutes today reading at an online site where the dominating spirit seems to be one of anti-religious mockery, contempt, and derision, where a perpetually-cultivated sneer appears to have taken on the character of a permanent rictus. \u00a0And I couldn\u2019t help but think of a passage from the Anglo-French writer, historian, and parliamentarian Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953):<\/p>\n

The Barbarian hopes \u2014 and that is the mark of him \u2014 that he can have his cake and eat it too. \u00a0He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers. . . . \u00a0In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.<\/p>\n

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.<\/p>\n

\"NIH<\/a>
One of the goals of this most recent blood test is to determine whether I have any actual human DNA or whether, instead, my genome is entirely reptilian. \u00a0(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/blockquote>\n

I want to get out in front of a potential conspiracy theory: \u00a0In preparation for a routine physical examination that\u2019s scheduled for the next few days, I gave a blood sample this morning at a nearby medical laboratory. \u00a0All of the blood that I gave was my own. \u00a0I generated it; it came from my arm. \u00a0I offer this clarification in order to forestall any claim over at the Peterson Obsession Board that I used somebody else\u2019s blood for the test, that it came from a na\u00efve and duped donor to the Interpreter Foundation.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 I\u2019m pleased to announce that Episode 6 of our Becoming Brigham\u00a0 series is now up online as \u201cYoung Brigham Young,\u201d Part One: We tend to think of Brigham Young as the stern-faced old man from the few existing photos. But what was he like during his formative years? 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