Feh, I have seen reports of skeptics having same experiences and they continue being skeptics, before you reply, take into acount that I got that info from a Christian documentary on NDE’s.
Read the book ‘the afterlife experiments’. It was pretty interesting. It was about a psychologist who wanted to study the possibility of an afterlife so he did several experiments with mediums and found their replies were well beyond those found by chance alone. And he even attempted to control for factors usually considered possible explanations for these things like reading signals in the face or voice.
And the teachings of a lot of people more enlightened than you or I, including those not of my faith.
[/quote]
Anecdotal evidence of what? NDE’s? I’m pretty sure no one’s actually come back from the dead. Anecdotal evidence is not empirical evidence. Neither are religious teachings.
You’ve been around here long enough to know that Pascal’s Wager is a fallacy.
Cite?
I’ve never met an atheist who felt this way. Atheist != sociopath.
Yes, I have heard those reports also, in fact, I have such an experience on my site. I am not more likely to believe something because it is Christian than not. I am not Christian, nor do I belong to a religion of any kind. What causes me to believe or not is in the reading of the experience, I have read many humdreds of them, I know what to look for, what is probable, and what is not probable. If you have a cite I would be glad to read it and give my opinion.
I read your links and found them interesting. I believe they are closer to understanding consciousness than most. I see consciousness as an energy field, that energy field controls the brain, not the other way around.
I have noticed more research is being done on mediums, or channels as the spiritual people call them. Yes, some of them can be very accurate.
It is good that serious research is now being done in the area of spirituality.
Not good enough, someone else needs to confirm the research, and based on what happened previously on the past century, the great results do not pan out on further research.
One thing to take into account: new research regarding consciousness, dismisses any quantum mumbo-jumbo:
One more important thing to notice, is that out of the 344 patients resucitated, only 12% reported a deep NDE; so until further research, I have to go for a more prosaic explanation, rather than jumping to this as poof of life after death.
Not quite sure what this is in reference to. For most of the last couple of millennia western Europe has been predominantly Christian, and the vast majority of Europeans strongly believed in an afterlife and personal survival after death. (That many Christians nonetheless mourn and weep at the prospect of death is admittedly somewhat puzzling; I suppose there’s still that prospect of eternal damnation to worry about, and of course Christians always have at least paid lip service to–or attempted to convince themselves of–the whole “he’s gone to a better place” idea.)
If you’re referring to pre-Christian Greek and Roman cultures, it’s true they believed in a rather mournful afterlife, but they still believed in some sort of personal survival after death; it’s just that, at least in early pagan times, the afterlife basically sucked–not endless torture in the fires of hell, just an eternity of moping around with not much to do and no way to do it anyhow (which view is also echoed in the oldest passages of the Old Testament).
It’s only relatively recently that western Europeans have become mainly secularized and markedly less religious than Americans are, and the modern godless heathen post-20th Century Europeans certainly didn’t invent the custom of getting all weepy at funerals.
I’m of the “we’re sentient meat” philosophy and that one day we’ll be spoiled meat. That said, it’s not as depressing a viewpoint as many people make it sound. To an atheist, life is more precious rather than less as this world is all they’re is.
I used to believe in reincarnation but that was a more romantic phase. Now I think that to have to go through everything from potty training to Alzheimer’s twice would just be a form of torture.
It’s hardly an original thought, but I think “what happens when we die” more than anything else explains why cavemen painted walls and medieval Frenchmen built cathedrals the size of mountains and today people crash planes into skyscrapers and send their welfare checks to rouged televangelists. Most people just can’t deal with it, and there are things about it that suck, but there’s also a lot to recommend the viewpoint.
