It was only mostly dead…
Oh my Oh my…this reminds me of my most favorite joke of all time…
A man is on the operating table and his surgery starts to go south.
He sees a bright light and travels towards it. At the end of the tunnel there is a big gated city on a cloud, gates manned by God,…robe, beard and all. The city is filled with pious clean-living people doing pious good works and admirable deeds.
And he says to God…lovely, but boring…do I have another choice???
And then he falls down down down for like forever until he reaches an underground cavern with a big rock door. This door is manned by the Devil, Satan, the Prince of Darkness.
Satan opens the door and the man walks into what appears to be a fabulous nightclub…drinks, dancing, music…a couple of gorgeous naked women approach him with drinks and he soon finds himself drinking martinis from their navels…
then everything fades to black and a voice says…come back…come back…it’s not your time…and the man is back on the operating table having pulled through by the skin of his teeth.
But the experience has affected him and he embraces a life of debauchery. After all, he has seen the truth and he knows the secret…he cheats people, steals, uses women, drinks to excess.
Then he dies for real
This time he goes down, down down right off the bat and he soon finds himself facing Satan in front ot that familar door.
And Satan opens the door and the man finds himself in HELL. Fiery lava pits, people in ragged clothes being whipped and tortured by demons, brimstone, the works.
He turns to the devil and says…what up with this?? Where are the naked ladies, where’s my martini???
And the devil says…drumroll…
** Then you were a prospect, now you’re a client.**
So what are you attempting to imply/insinuate?
Other than telling a good joke, the point was (I think) that the happy glowing “go toward the light” experience some people have undergone might be a trap laid by the enemy, to sucker us into thinking that the afterlife is glowing and happy.
People having that experience might tend toward complacency, thinking that they now are guaranteed entrance into heaven, whereas they are still failing to perceive the beams and timbers of sin in their own eyes. They might, for instance, stop going to church or making confession, figuring they’ve got it made.
I saw that on a Voyager episode actually; it turns out that those “go into the light” experiences are some kind of parasitic alien trying to lure victims in. “Sooner or later you will come into my matrix Captain…and you will nourish me for a long, long time.”
All we need to know about morality, we can learn from Star Trek.
(Only half joking!)
Mostly I just like the joke …it represents the idea that a NDE might not be representative of the real thing ( a DE, I guess )…mostly the joke is about sales and sales pitches, it was an off topic thing to post but the post I responded to reminded me so much of that joke I couldn’t resist
Cool by me! The chance to tell a good joke is a precious opportunity, not to be squandered. The chance to allude to Star Trek is also a good thing, well worth seizing upon.
Also, it opens up the idea that the NDE, like a good joke, depends an awful lot on the interpretation.
And the poor guy who sees heaven, then is pulled back down to earth to continue his previous life?
That’s a shaggy dog joke!
Seriously, I won’t even pretend to be as eloquent as most of ya’ll, but I do believe it’s impossible for us to have concrete evidence in either direction. For my own research, (because I love this topic) I have read a couple books on NDE, and find personal comfort in that there is a place for us after death.
I also believe, as was said earlier, that ppl do tend to see what they have believed and been taught in greeting en route to “heaven”, or whatever you call it. There was also a story I liked about a cardiologist who passed, and being an atheist, was greeted by 2 spheres of light he felt were 2 of his relatives. So that was a person with no preconceived notions who had a different but similar exp.
I would believe NDE to be a brain malfunction EXCEPT for the DIFFERENCES AND the similarities…know what I mean? It’s as if those make it more credible. If everybody had the same story, I would not believe it.
And, no, I do not believe in hell, there is enough of that on our Earth created by man. But that is another subject.
We have plenty of “concrete evidence” against an afterlife being possible, and evidence for NDEs being just hallucinations; people just desperately want to believe, so they ignore that evidence. Instead they just listen to cherry picked or outright made up stories and convince themselves they mean something.
Also, it could certainly be possible to have evidence in favor of life-after-death. If seances actually worked, or if ghosts actually helped solve crimes, or if people came back from NDEs with actual, testable information. Location of buried treasure, or simply location of buried human remains. The same for reincarnation; if someone came up with information that truly could not be known except by a dead person, that would be pretty convincing evidence.
I think I would find these NDE reports a little more believable if at least some of the people came back saying they just barely escaped hell.
Such as?
Such as the brain decaying into rotten meat when the body dies, and the mind having nothing to allow it to function. That’s the real biggie: for a soul to exist, in the terms of the conventional Abrahamic religions, it would have to operate without any material basis. There’s no evidence for this, and a good amount of science showing it won’t work. Where are the memories stored? What keeps them coherent? How does the soul perceive the world, without allowing the world to perceive it?
H.G. Wells “Invisible Man” could be detected by his retinas, which, in absorbing light, were themselves visible. How is the soul supposed to see, without being seen? What energy source permits it to process information?
It’s a fairy-tale. The ancient Egyptian mummies didn’t “live forever” and neither do we.
I think you’ll find that Abrahamic religions have something called Judgement day. On Judgment day God claims He will restore everyone’s bodies no matter how long they have decayed, even if they have gone to dust. In between our deaths and Judgement day we are pretty much in some sort of suspended animation. So it is incorrect to state that Abrahamic religions require the soul to exist(I’m assuming by “exist” you mean to be functional in some manner, forgive me if I am mistaken.). They lay dormant until reunited with their bodies.
There is also no consensus amongst or within Abrahamic religions as to what a soul is so I don’t see how you could make such a claim.
Aquinas is regarded as the greatest of Christian philosophers and probably one of the greatest theistic philosophers period. So far in this thread his reasoning for what a soul must be, has not been looked at: Thomas Aquinas (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Instead the debate seems more along the lines of if we have some sort of “ghost” inside us that controls our emotions etc, then when we die this “ghost” that we are calling a soul goes on to do various other crap and whether or not we can prove this to be true. Basically the question of whether we have a soul is being attacked at its weakest, most childish point rather than it’s strongest(which ihmo is to be found in Aquinas’ reasoning). Having said that I feel I should make it clear that I am no expert on Aquinas(though I do plan to be eventually).
As for NDE’s my personal belief is that some people get to see what they were expecting to see, basically I agree that they are probably mostly a type of dream. There are definitely some that raise questions on how easily we can dismiss them.
Well unless you know the person who experienced the NDE, no it’s not weird at all.. If she had come here and said that she had an NDE where she was told 10 years from now she was going to have a son, you would simply dismiss it as a dream or a lie and tell her to come back in 10 years. And lets be honest even if she came back in 10 years with her newborn baby boy her claim still wouldn’t be above accusations of coincidence or purposeful planning so I don’t see the aim of the question.
Cite?
Some do, some don’t. But in either case, dormant or active, the memories have to be maintained in some working structure. Once the body of a deceased person has decomposed sufficiently (or been cremated) there is no place for the memories to be stored.
There is a fairly significant consensus that the Day of Judgement involves the person being judged on the basis of his own memories of his life’s events.
If the person’s memories were gone, and a tabula rasa were created de novo, solely for the purpose of God’s own external memories to be presented as evidence, then this would seem capricious. And, too, no one that I’ve ever heard has presented this as a model for the Day of Judgement.
That’s pretty much how it’s presented in Christianity. The soul lies dormant…but it still functions to contain the person’s memories. The evidence against this is pretty substantial; bodies decay pretty thoroughly.
Well, yeah. That’s how reductio ad absurdum works. Why should I attack your fortified citadel, when you’ve left the back door wide open?
The claim being made is that our bodies will be fully restored, if our brain is fully restored to its exact same composition, our memories will also be.
I’ve never come across this. If I somehow erase a sin from my memory I will not be judged for it? I don’t think so. God claims to be all knowing, why would a being who knows everything we have done, in better detail than we could ever know ourselves rely on our memories? I tried googling your claim but couldn’t find anything supporting it.
Why would it be capricious? Also Abrahamic religions state pretty clearly that our deeds are kept in the books of life and death and we will be judged according to their contents(I doubt these are actual books however).
From what I’ve read of the Bible there is no mention of the soul containing our memory, again I have tried to google this claim but have come up with nothing. I’m sure there are Christians out there who believe this, but that doesn’t make it an actual property of the religion. Interesting side note, not all bodies decay like others, Incorruptibility - Wikipedia. According to my mother it happened to her uncle, and where she is from they don’t use coffins, you just get wrapped in a white cloth and straight in the dirt(no I don’t have a cite for this particular case :P).
That is a poor analogy, what you are doing is more like circling my fortified citadel and attacking another citadel that looks kinda like mine but is crumbling and manned by children.
I was referring to some of the cases mentioned in this thread.
I had a sense of deep inner peace.
And then this thread returned. :eek: