What is the atheist's response to NDEs? (born, Creator, soul)
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Are there any scientific articles that demonstrate conclusive evidence explaining how NDEs happen? I'd love to see how people experience NDEs from a Christian background and non-Christian background.
This isn't a scientific article per se, as it's from Newsweek(.com), but it's a description of a recent NYU study on the brain activity that occurs in patients who've suffered cardiac arrest (only ~10% of the 567 potential study subjects even survived their cardiac event, thus narrowing the sample size considerably), and the interpretation offered by the study's lead investigator is quite interesting:
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What makes anyone think that a NDE is any different than a normal dream? If a person has experienced some sort of trauma that is near-fatal aren't they more likely to have a dream related to that? Most likely the NDE is just another dream, the mind
producing the thoughts, images, and sensations that the person expects when dying.
What makes anyone think that a NDE is any different than a normal dream? If a person has experienced some sort of trauma that is near-fatal aren't they more likely to have a dream related to that? Most likely the NDE is just another dream, the mind
producing the thoughts, images, and sensations that the person expects when dying.
I've often felt that those who have "died" and claimed to have had a religious experience - it was merely the subconscious giving conscious thought that which the person expects to see upon death.
Therefore, if the person expects to see Jesus, that's what they see.
I've often asked people who have claimed to meet actual religious figures - how did you identify them as the person in question? How did you know it was Jesus, for instance. Because rest assured the real Jesus wouldn't look anything like the blond haired, blue-eyed, white-skinned Aryan we see in a lot of religious iconography.
More times than not, they couldn't give me a cogent answer. Not even, "I could just feel it!" They simply didn't have an answer. So there's no telling what people are really seeing - perhaps glimpses into other dimensions. Perhaps a person in this world having an NDE appears as a ghost in someone else's dimension and vice-versa? We can speculate until the provervial cows come home.
So there's no telling what people are really seeing - perhaps glimpses into other dimensions. Perhaps a person in this world having an NDE appears as a ghost in someone else's dimension and vice-versa? We can speculate until the provervial cows come home.
One thing's for sure, though, it's not the usual implied false non-choice, "this MUST be an accurate representation of the afterlife". As if that's the "only" possible explanation. There are in fact many equally good / more likely ones.
What makes anyone think that a NDE is any different than a normal dream? If a person has experienced some sort of trauma that is near-fatal aren't they more likely to have a dream related to that? Most likely the NDE is just another dream, the mind
producing the thoughts, images, and sensations that the person expects when dying.
I think that's a good point. I think we're all read about people who see Jesus in toast.
What makes anyone think that a NDE is any different than a normal dream? If a person has experienced some sort of trauma that is near-fatal aren't they more likely to have a dream related to that? Most likely the NDE is just another dream, the mind producing the thoughts, images, and sensations that the person expects when dying.
I agree. An NDE could also be just like any other hallucination, whether produced by drugs or a mental health problem.
What makes anyone think that a NDE is any different than a normal dream? If a person has experienced some sort of trauma that is near-fatal aren't they more likely to have a dream related to that? Most likely the NDE is just another dream, the mind
producing the thoughts, images, and sensations that the person expects when dying.
Kinda bizarre when you think about the OP's question. Why IS IT that the first reaction to an NDE is to attribute it to the supernatural? Instead of to something we all experience every night. Well, I do know why. Some people are just desperate to believe.
Obviously, I don't think dreams are supernatural either.
Kinda bizarre when you think about the OP's question. Why IS IT that the first reaction to an NDE is to attribute it to the supernatural?
Why do they not question what follows from their belief? If this spiritual body that leaves the skin and bone body can see and hear, why do we need eyes and ears? Or a brain? Why does it need a body at all? And if our thoughts is our spiritual body thinking, why does it start to forget when our body gets older? Why, when people get Alzheimer's, does that effect the thoughts of our alleged internal spiritual being?
Why do they not question what follows from their belief? If this spiritual body that leaves the skin and bone body can see and hear, why do we need eyes and ears? Or a brain? Why does it need a body at all? And if our thoughts is our spiritual body thinking, why does it start to forget when our body gets older? Why, when people get Alzheimer's, does that effect the thoughts of our alleged internal spiritual being?
The brain is a transceiver. It both produces Spirit (quanta) and receives guidance from it. It is the ONLY connection to this physical realm and it is a delayed playback. ANY alterations and dysfunction in the transceiver alter that CONTACT, NOT its source.
Why do they not question what follows from their belief? If this spiritual body that leaves the skin and bone body can see and hear, why do we need eyes and ears? Or a brain? Why does it need a body at all? And if our thoughts is our spiritual body thinking, why does it start to forget when our body gets older? Why, when people get Alzheimer's, does that effect the thoughts of our alleged internal spiritual being?
I think the answer is in the notion that the physical realm is problematic and somehow a locus of "evil" or "sin". In other words, these icky achy bodies that we have are a sort of punishment, part of living in a fallen world. The Christian hope is to be freed from what Paul lamented as "the body of this death" and the attendant struggle with its "sin nature". This liberation will come, depending on your exact dogma, in the form of a non-corporeal existence and/or a completely new and perfect physical body, free of "sin".
If you think in this way, then it's plausible to say that we simply "inhabit" physical bodies but don't particularly need them and in fact might be better off without their limitations and pitfalls.
Back here in actual reality, of course, we understand that we are embodied consciousnesses, that we are in large measure who and what we are because we have sensory apparatus in our bodies that interact with the world, hormones that mediate emotional responses to these interactions, and demonstrably without these inputs we would basically go insane in short order (read up on sensory deprivation chambers). We are not beings of pure thought that just happen to be housed in bodies; we are embodied beings that are inseparable from the physical. This is an intolerable concept to Christianity, so they work hard to deny its reality, and to characterize it as a horrible state of affairs, and to long for an imagined ideal existence freed from it.
I have often thought that Christianity, even when it's not being overtly ascetic, has a strong streak of asceticism in it that it can't break free of. It might not be common today to "mortify the flesh" through self-flagellation or wearing hair shirts, but there is still this notion that the body and its functions and drives are fundamentally gross, fattening and immoral, and little more than dangerous snares for those unwary of it and not focused on some future paradise where the body is finally and decisively "put off" (again, Paul's terminology).
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