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I have heard of the stories about when an atheist has a near death experience and they have a spiritual experience they convert to Christianity.
I have heard stories when Christians have the same experience it reinforces what they have been taught about scripture and they do not fear the death experience.
I had never heard of stories about when Muslims die, if they see Allah or some other spiritual leader within their faith until I saw the video below.
Please watch it with an open mind and give me your opinion concerning what it could possibly mean with regard to Islam.
ISIS, right? You mean - ENGLISH translation of DAES? So you want to build entire argument based on coincidental ( or not) translation, or the real name?
The word is an Arabic acronym of al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa ash-Sham – meaning the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams – but Daesh when spoken sounds similar to the Arabic words for "the sowers of discord" (Dahes) or "one who crushes underfoot" (Daes).
It's a common phenomenon, you are psychologically influenced by the culture around you or people that try to influence you (such as Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist missionaries). Read the Myth of Er when you get a chance. The word "myth" in Greek and/or Latin meant "story."
Outline: Er was a pagan soldier that wasn't that religious, after some fight he had a very long NDE where they thought he was dead but his body didn't waste away, then he came back to tell everyone that the gods had shown him how each psyche was an immortal spirit and reincarnation was how to reward and punish people who weren't gods.
I have come across various Muslims that have had NDEs but they aren't supposed to see Allah or Muhammad, so usually it is just Angels that witness about Allah to them or save them from drowning after they prayed to Allah, etc.
We have a Muslim here in the boards that converted from Christianity because he used to be a Christian missionary to Muslims lands somewhere and then he saw Christianity as a waste of a religion compared to Islam and then he turned into an alcoholic and his whole family was separated because of Christian denominationalism, then he prayed to Allah or something and the next morning he woke up with a full beard "miraculously" grown from having been completely shaven the night before and then he converted and Allah somehow made him have this feeling to go back to his family and tell them (or just see them, but he was scared cuz they might judge him since they were Christians) and it turned out his whole family had also converted to Islam already and it was such a miracle or whatever.
I have heard of the stories about when an atheist has a near death experience and they have a spiritual experience they convert to Christianity.
Indeed, and I have never quite understood why. It does not have to be an NDE either. I think it was Francis Collins who was out walking one day and saw a waterfall frozen in place. A beautiful sight for sure. But because the waterfall happened to be frozen in three streams, which put him in the mind of the trinity, he suddenly gave himself to Jesus. Which is..... at best..... a complete non-sequitur. One wonders what would have "clicked" in his brain had it been 2 4 or 5 streams not 3.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LuckyGem
I had never heard of stories about when Muslims die, if they see Allah or some other spiritual leader within their faith until I saw the video below.
Oh I would very fully and strongly expect they do. Just like I would expect NDE in India often has, among other things, images of creatures with many arms.
NDE tends to be had with, later parsed with, or both....... imagery that is culturally local to the person having it. Therefore people in Christian countries see white lights and Jesus, and people in other cultures see lots of beards or multiple arms. If you invented a successful religion that had a deity that was strongly mouse like, the NDEs of people in the culture permeated with that religion would likely be heavily cheese based.
This is not just limited to NDE either. When Stephen Spielberg had Hollywood success..... suddenly majorities of people hallucinating alien abduction were describing little grey people with big black bug eyes. Hallucination simply draws on cultural norms.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LuckyGem
Please watch it with an open mind and give me your opinion concerning what it could possibly mean with regard to Islam.
I think what it "means" is that people seeing what they expect to see, or what cultural norms influences them to see, throws fuel on the fire of skeptical inquiry into the meaning and relevance of ND experience. It is one piece of substantiation and knowledge in the claims that there is nothing spectacular going on with NDE and that it can all very neatly, with strong substantiation, be explained as the mundane operations of a brain under some form of distress.
Indeed, and I have never quite understood why. It does not have to be an NDE either. I think it was Francis Collins who was out walking one day and saw a waterfall frozen in place. A beautiful sight for sure. But because the waterfall happened to be frozen in three streams, which put him in the mind of the trinity, he suddenly gave himself to Jesus. Which is..... at best..... a complete non-sequitur. One wonders what would have "clicked" in his brain had it been 2 4 or 5 streams not 3. ...
Pardon the cut, but I am inclining to think that the subconscious brain buys into conversion before the conscious brain does, and I am struck by how often it is a rather trivial thing or some rather poor rationale that causes a conversion or deconversion.
If I may Take LI's name in vain, his conversion to Islam was just seeing a bit of Quran text. That by itself shouldn't convince anyone of anything, but I believe the conversion process had been going on for some time, and that was the Final Straw.
Similarly, Peter Hitchens converted (so he says) through seeing a painting of hellfire, but the long conversion process had (I suggest) been going on for some time.
Again the Atheist Blogger who converted to Catholicism through seeing Morality as an exitent entity is shouting a long period of forming the mental idea of an existing spiritual being.
And a I- pal of mine deconverted from Calvinism had (I would surmise) been building up doubts for a long time, but seeing a minister buying medicines instead of praying to be cured (yes, not a real deconverter in the usual way) snapped the bar and opened the floodgates of doubt.
At other times it can be a long process of research and repositioning of belief: Bible literalism to general acceptance, doubt of the story but belief in the god, and then doubts about a hands -on god and belief in a deistgod. Then possibly seeing that the evidence is rather against a god than for it and accepting the logical mandate of disbelief. Some do, some don't.
Pardon the cut, but I am inclining to think that the subconscious brain buys into conversion before the conscious brain does, and I am struck by how often it is a rather trivial thing or some rather poor rationale that causes a conversion or deconversion.
That is quite possible and is actually likely the premise behind a recent enough show by Derren Brown in which he conducted a religious conversion on a proclaimed atheists. Worth a watch if you have 50 minutes or so to kill on you tube sometime!!!!
Basically throughout his interaction with her he engaged in the vast substance of the conversion without any actual attempt to convert her. But then at the end of the process when he left her alone he "sparked" her conversion with a relatively mundane and trivial thing. The slight ringing of a bell as I recall, but I could be wrong. The video is here.
If time is short, Derren talks slow enough that you could probably watch the video in 1.25x or 1.5x speed without much loss of experience
But I think you are essentially correct. When someone has sudden conversions I find it very likely the vast majority of the foundation work for that conversation was laid down long before and was merely ignited spectacularly by some event.... a bell.... a frozen water fall.... an NDE...... or a particularly moving piece of text like your Quaran example............. or whatever.
Kurt Cameron (I think it was) talks of a long battle with drugs and depression and hatred for life before suddenly while sitting in his car he had a flash of light type conversion. Likely his need for a belief in a god was growing for a long long time however.
I think what it "means" is that people seeing what they expect to see, or what cultural norms influences them to see, throws fuel on the fire of skeptical inquiry into the meaning and relevance of ND experience. It is one piece of substantiation and knowledge in the claims that there is nothing spectacular going on with NDE and that it can all very neatly, with strong substantiation, be explained as the mundane operations of a brain under some form of distress.
I totally agree. It would be quite interesting to find someone, say from a lost tribe in the Amazon Rainforest, who has had a near-death experience, but has never heard of Christianity/Islam/Judaism and ask them what they saw.
Did they see/experience the God(s)/Spirits that they believe in (most likely) or did they see Jesus, Moses, Mohammad, etc. (most unlikely). I realize if they did see Jesus, Moses, Mohammad, etc. they would have no idea who they were, but maybe those beings (if they exist) would communicate to the person in their native language to explain to them who they were.
Remember, the brain is a powerful thing and that a near-death experience is still not dead, big difference.
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