why is it that i only hear about modern people dying on an operating table and seeing everything going on in the operating room or going through a tunnel and seeing dead relatives clothed in light? didn’t the romans float above thier bodies after dying in battle?
What, didn’t you see Gladiator?
I would think modern medical techniques for bringing people back from the brink of death, like defibrillators and CPR, will have made near death experiences (as opposed to “just before death experiencess”, which the rest of us tend not to hear about) more common. I would imagine that at least some people had them before modern times. (This assumes they aren’t a purely cultural phenonenon–how much the details of the experience might have varied in other times and places in accordance with different beliefs and expectations about death and life after death is an interesting question.) Any discussion about the causal relationship between NDE’s and widespread religious beliefs–i.e., which causes which, or if they both reflect some underlying objective reality–would probably be more suited for Great Debates. There has in fact already been at least one GD thread about NDE’s.