This is why I am never completely comfortable with the declaration, “There is no evidence for it.” Well, yeah, there is. What you experienced is evidence.
It isn’t very strong evidence, and, worse, it cannot be weighed or investigated or analyzed by anyone else. It’s subjective evidence…but it is evidence.
In a criminal trial, we permit subjective evidence. “I saw the man pull a knife.” In discussions of theology, we need to permit it also.
We just don’t need to lend it a great amount of weight, given that the accounts given by people tend to be contradictory. One guy has a personal revelation from Jesus, but another guy has a personal revelation from Krishna, and yet another guy has one from Balder. We shouldn’t simply dismiss these experiences. What we have to do is note them, perhaps categorize them, and file them away, to be re-examined if other evidence arises that they might be relevant to.
Have you ever read the book of Revelations? If we go by the bible as the blueprint of what happens in the afterlife, the lack of disembodied souls is to be expected because the dead rest until judgment day. People who believe the bible to be true shouldn’t believe in ghosts as well - spirits, not referring to God or the soul, are only mentioned 4 times in the entire bible: three times they sound like biblical descriptions of demons and once like astral projection because the “spirit” was that of a living person far away.
That degrades the word “evidence” to such a level that the term is meaningless. If everything is evidence then nothing is.
And we don’t allow “I had a vision that he drew a knife” in court in evidence anymore; that’s what was known as “spectral evidence” in the Salem Witch Trials, which you will note didn’t produce much of anything with a connection to fact. And that’s what allowing religious visions to qualify as evidence is equivalent to, not to “I saw a knife”.
You don’t prove definitions. And any definitions in a natural language are just vague approximations of reality, which does not have to fit inside a dictionary and does not need sharp distinctions. Viruses are not considered alive. One celled creatures are. But nature doesn’t care how we distinguish these things, does it?
Although one would think that the text in Revelation is clear, there are still many Christian denominations that hold a different interpretation, and which teach (for instance) that dear departed Grandmother is in Heaven right now (and no few which teach that Charles Darwin is in hell.)
The summoning of the ghost of the former king by the Witch of Endor is an interesting case: was the spirit summoned from its rest in its grave…or called back down from Heaven?
I largely agree with you, but one problem is that some people declare, most affirmatively, that “They saw God,” not that “They had a vision of God.” You and I don’t agree…but we don’t have any testing mechanism by which we can say for sure that it was only a vision, and not an “actual” revelation.
There is a convention in science that non-repeatable, non-verifiable evidence is relegated to a lower level of importance…but even in science, they don’t dismiss it utterly, or deny that it is evidence.
(In the past, not following this rule has led to errors. European scientists denied the existence of the Australian platypus for far too long, some even after having a specimen cadaver to examine.)
If someone sees God, or experiences heaven, or meets a ghost, it is evidence…but it’s fair to mark it with an asterisk as “unverified” or “anecdotal.” This is the only really honest way to deal with UFO or Bigfoot sightings. “Date/Time/Location, man X reports having seen… Man was alone and has no corroboration…”
If a person’s is brain dead then there would be no memories of anything, the brain holds the memories and with out it no one could remember being dead. No ,ore than any animal.
As for the possibility of a meta-empirical “soul-spirit-thing” fluttering away to some meta-empirical “eternal-awesomeness-land,” science shrugs, says “shit man how the fuck do you expect me to test that?” and hits the local pub. As we agreed earlier, that sort of afterlife isn’t really testable.
Of course, Catholics, some Anglicans, and I think an increasing number of other Protestants as well, also posit a kind of continued spiritual growth/purgation after death, which wouldn’t quite correspond to heaven or hell. Catholics call it purgatory, of course, Anglicans often shy away from the term because of its historical connotations, but quite a number of us believe in something that matches up fairly well with it. I’m not quite sure where the ‘souls of the dead are in a state of rest’ thing comes from, and given the number of Christians who have purported to encounter the souls of the dead (in heaven, purgatory, hell or elsewhere), I don’t think it’s at all supportable, in a Christian framework.
Your point about revelations, and platypuses, is of course well taken.
As to the OP, there isn’t even universal agreement as to what death IS, or exactly when it happens, and I would argue that you can’t argue about what happens after death until you have a common understanding of what constitutes death.
Its technically true, nobody knows what happens, so its not PC drivel. However, what the statement should continue is: “…therefore we cannot assume anything happens until someone finds out for sure, the default position is nothing happens”. That’s the less PC, piss-off-the-religionists version
My father and all my grandparents (as far as I know) are dead. I don’t remember the stars falling out of the sky. I think after you’re dead the world pretty much goes on.
Isn’t that just picking at the boundary of the set? I mean… Where does the ocean begin and the land end? The high-tide mark? The low-tide mark? Outlying reefs? Yet, ultimately, there is land and there is sea, and no one will get very far saying, “We can’t say there is such a thing as the sea if we don’t have an exact definition of where the land ends.”
So, yeah, we don’t know exactly when death occurs. How many cells can still be alive in the corpse? How many neurons still desperately doing their thing? How many red blood cells still carrying oxygen?
On the other hand, Abraham Lincoln (for example) is just plain dead. You can’t stretch the uncertainty far enough to embrace him. There really is such a thing as death, even if we don’t know whether it occurs after 1 second, or 10 seconds, or even eight minutes.
