Dinesh D'Souza promised me an afterlife, and all I got were the same old cheap lies

[n2doc]

(From Pharyngula)
I am so disappointed. The little evangelical goober has a new book that promises to provide evidence of life after death — it's right in the title, Life After Death: The Evidence — but he doesn't seem to have, you know, actually provided any evidence. Newsweek has a summary of his arguments:

The "evidence," of necessity, is indirect: D'Souza doesn't claim to have communicated with anyone who has died, and he doesn't expect to. Instead, he looks to the human heart, and finds therein a universal moral code underlying acts of self-sacrifice and charity that appear to run counter to the Darwinian imperative to outcompete thy neighbor. This is a time-honored argument for the existence of a God who created human beings in his image and imbued them with a moral sense, as well as the free will to follow, or ignore, it. Berlinski uses the argument in his book, and Collins credits it with turning him from atheism to evangelical Christianity. (D'Souza acknowledges that the prominent atheist Richard Dawkins has offered an evolutionary explanation for human goodness, but he doesn't buy it.) In a Jesuitical display that does credit to his reputation as "an Indian William F. Buckley Jr.," D'Souza turns to his advantage one of the atheists' favorite arguments, God's apparent tolerance for human suffering. Precisely because evil so often goes unpunished in this world, he asserts, the moral code must reflect another reality, in which souls are judged, punished, or rewarded after death. "The postulate of an afterlife enables us to make sense of this life," he writes. It worked for Dante, didn't it?

The universal moral code argument is so tired. No, we don't need a magic man in the sky to implant puppet strings in our brains to make us do good, and as the reviewer mentions, we have perfectly reasonable natural explanations that fit the phenomenon just fine. But even beyond that, an external-sourced moral code wouldn't say anything about an afterlife. If I built a robot and included in its circuitry some code that inclined it to avoid colliding with cats, that does not imply that it is therefore eternal and will outlast any later encounters with a sledgehammer and a scrapheap.

more:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/dinesh_dsouza_promised_me_an_a.php

[MrScorpio]

1. Life after death is merely the karma that you leave behind

When you're gone, you're gone, but your deeds, whether for good or bad, can live on and on and on.

[Taverner]

2. This is about as laughable as Comfort's Magic Banana

[PlanetBev]

3. I read somewhere that this right wing nut is a friend of Ann Coulter

Talking about piling up bad karma...