Thank you lekatt.
I visited the web site and I’ll look forward to the book. (late March)
If I had a lamb I would have it bleat all through the night while the above is sleeping.
The point of the matter is, though, we only have one documented case of a person who died, stayed dead for long enough for all bodily functions to cease, and then returned to life.
I… don’t think his experiences are typical, though, and the reports of it were written down a minimum of sixty years later.
Near Death Experiences are interesting, even if the research is a bit lacking in structure, but the real problem with them is that they are merely near death. Something entirely different may happen when one is completely deceased.
We need a nice, rigid, well documented, scientific experiment to answer this. Unfortunately, while most of human history has been focused on more efficient ways to produce the first half, the second half of the experiment can not yet be reliably reproduced.
No one knows. It is unknowable. Anyone who tells you different has “faith”, not knowledge. Or they have “hope”, but not knowledge. You can’t know.
Cite?
Lazarus!
Jesus?
Ask Doc Cathode. That’s how I know what happens, (to us), after we die.
I know E-Sabbath was referring to the NT. I was just facetiously trying to point out that religious literature hardly counts as reliable “documentation.” It’s not even fair to say that Jesus was the only resurrected person or God in a mythological context. Without making a judgement about the veracity if the gospels, I just want to say that they do not constitute reliable “proof” of anybody coming back from the dead. I’m not trying to denigrate the story, I’m just saying that it offers no objective, scientific data as to the question of whether we can know anything about a surviving consciousness after biological death.
I know, I was being funny, or trying to.
Oh, sorry. :o
To be fair E-sabbath only made the claim that the event was documented. AFAIK, that just means that a document exists about it.
But also to be fair there are more than just one documented case. Even the NT includes two instances as vanilla pointed out.
Man, if Houdini couldn’t make it back, I doubt anyone can!
Extrapolation.
An interesting sidestep to the unanswerable question in the OP is
If something of us is left ‘alive’ after death, what does that something know?
It seems to me that the something (let’s call it a soul for convinience) would not contain memories of the life that we had. My reasoning is that it is becoming pretty clear that the physical brain has the capacity and structures necessary for remembering the event of our life. Now such structures would be unnecessary if the soul was itself capable of remembering, so I would conjecture that the soul itself does not have memory.
No when we consider how much of our ‘selves’ we associate with our relationship with our memories, this has the disturbing effect of showing that our souls are not synonymous with our ‘selves’. The soul would be hard to link with the life that begot it. It would also make reincarnation and the Jesus statement that who is mrried to whom does not matter in heaven, easier to understand. Without memories the soul would not drag skills from one reincarnation to another, nor would marriage remain an issue in heaven. If the soul exists, I think it contains only motives are decision making abilities. Hense a reincarnation may achieve similar things in different incarnations, and a soul in Heaven could be judged (good goals/motives, non-selfish decision making), and coul exist forever without ‘dieing of bordom’ because without memory time is not a discernable thing.
As you may have guessed I could go on and on …
But I’ll leave my ideas at that for now, Cheers, Bippy.
The way I see it is, one day I’ll be proven right and be happy or I’ll be wrong and I won’t care.
I was attempting gentle humor, Diogenes. I was thinking mostly of the ‘three days’ part, as many resurrections occur nigh-instantly after death, in mythology. Or, actually, sometimes years later… The point I was making was, well, we can kill people real good, but they don’t come back. NDEs are, well, near, but not completely dead-dead.
http://www.prebirth.com/prebirth/index.html
All things are possible, skeptics should not limit their knowledge so much. They could learn so much more about the world they live in.
Love
Leroy
HAHAHAHAHAAAAAA.
Hello, Lekatt? This is the pot. You’re black.
Don’t tell us about learning until you’re ready to open your own mind a few millimeters.
I’ve already learned what you believe. I just don’t accept it. Big difference.
Oh, by the way, there’s a difference between saying “all things are possible,” which may be true, and “all things that we believe in actually happen,” which is definitely not true, and which seems to be a good description of your philosophy, based on your posts.
Why can’t we all get along? Everyone has an opinion and is free to express it, thing is when all is said and done, only one group will be able to say, “nay, nay, nay, nay-nay” and have anyone around to hear it!