The HBO special “Life Afterlife” was another story, however. Dr. Schwartz wrote: “HBO had made a beautiful, inspiring show. But the science was sandwiched in the middle and lost nearly all its impact. We had expected that the show would leave the audience feeling ‘Science can be brought to bear on these issues,’ and ‘Wow, those mediums were tested by science and actually were found to be doing what they claimed.’ Instead, the show was good entertainment but little more. We had thought HBO really cared about the science, but discovered what the producers most wanted was to see how many people were crying when the lights went up. After all, HBO didn’t really care about making a scientific statement.” In fact, HBO had given almost as much air time to skeptics, as they did Dr. Schwartz’s experiments. The producers apparently believed they were being “professional and fair” giving equal time to skeptics and therefore creating a “balanced” presentation. But in this case, it seems a “balanced” presentation is simply sinister. What is Creator’s perspective?

This result was quite predictable, given that it was people who created the film production showcasing the scientific studies, so this was done by skeptics more than believers. Many such individuals are willing to give a platform to the unconventional but, at the same time, their true inner beliefs will nag at them and they will want some kind of a fallback position as if to say, "You see, we don't truly believe in this but we're trying to do these people a favor, but also be fair to the real truth of things, that it is still in our minds, questionable." Such treatment is more the order of the day than not, and that is true across the board of such treatment of the paranormal as a broad category. It is reinforced again and again by the skeptical scientific community who will always revert to the mantra that "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence," which is, in effect, a way of saying, "We are not going to believe it no matter what you do." In all the rest of science, such matters are dealt with mathematically, to look at statistical probabilities, simply to avoid these kinds of perspectives that are often based on well-entrenched prejudice against an unconventional idea when the scientific dogma has reigned, perhaps for centuries, and is so ingrained in people's thinking it seems intolerable to even entertain the possibility the dogma could be wrong. Left to their own devices, human beings would rush to explore anything unconventional, given the merest evidence of its validity, to see if it can be ruled out convincingly or perhaps supported through further investigation, and not simply dismissed out of hand because an overwhelmingly convincing case could not be produced in a single investigation. That is too high a standard for many lines of inquiry in science where the experimental conditions are widely variable, difficult to control, and contain much random noise, and so can only be established through considerable repetition, and a body of work taken together as a kind of meta-analysis is needed to see the true trend that is unmistakable and validates that something unusual is occurring, at least sufficiently to be scientifically demonstrable, and therefore credible. But any one of those individual studies taken by itself would be lambasted by critics and the authors would never find acceptance in the arena of public opinion, even at the level of the scientific community, let alone a broader segment of the population. So this bias was in play in the consideration of the work of Dr. Schwartz, which was indeed worthy and unfortunately, in effect, masked by seeming "fair treatment" that was actually a prejudicial showcase that underrepresented its true value and importance in bringing forward an important truth about life itself and the immortal nature of consciousness.