Near Death Experiences

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Near Death Experiences
OP - December 18, 2014, 06:45 PM

As a former Christian, I am used to hearing propaganda claims about people having Near Death Experiences and going to heaven and seeing Jesus and stuff. I have looked into this phenomenon further to find that in a lot of these cases, there is no religious imagery or religious figures in peoples experiences and, in fact, there experience is usually determined by their culture and religious beliefs at the time. Hindus have seen Yama, the God of the dead. Some people think that NDEs are a preview of the afterlife, but due to their contradicting nature that would be difficult to reconcile.

Some of the cases are interesting such as Pam Reynolds and another women who floated out of her body and found a shoe on the ledge of the hospital which was later verified. Some people seem to receive information that they could not have known otherwise such as that they had siblings that died before they were born. Anyway, they are an interesting phenomena and they are the strongest challenge (for me) to a purely materialistic, reductionist view of human consciousness.

As a lot of these people are absolutely convinced they talked to God and/or Jesus and claim they were given a message to share with humanity, these people's claims are essentially indistinguishable from "prophets" in the past. If Muhammad claimed to have a message from God, then how can you say that Howard Storm (a NDEer who claims that Jesus saved him from hell) isn't a valid prophet too? Could people who have claimed prophethood in the past be people who have had these experiences? Perhaps religion was born out these experiences rather just merely a fear of death and the unknown.

"I moreover believe that any religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system."
-Thomas Paine
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Near Death Experiences
Reply #1 - December 20, 2014, 02:54 AM

bump. Apparently people who aren't anywhere near death can have one of these experiences if they think they are going to die. I think near death experiences might be at the root of a lot religions rather than their having been made up from scratch

"I moreover believe that any religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system."
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Near Death Experiences
Reply #2 - December 20, 2014, 08:37 AM

From what I recall, they have reproduced "NDE's" by causing oxygen deprivation of the brain in patients. Similar observations to "NDE's" were reported such as "light at the end of tunnel", etc.

On the same note, other drugs such as Ketamine and Dimethyltryptamine have been noted to cause similar "near-death-experiences" including "communion with God".
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Reply #3 - December 20, 2014, 05:34 PM

I am aware of the attempted physiological explanations. In some cases it would seem a stretch to think that the experience could be merely explained as oxygen deprivation because of people having this experience when not deprived of oxygen at all and some have come back with knowledge they couldn't have had otherwise (such as knowledge of what was going on in other rooms while they were being resuscitated). However, I don't think they "prove" anything as the evidence is merely anecdotal.

But people come back feeling like they are prophets and having a message from god to share with the world. Perhaps the "prophets" in ancient times were merely people who had similar experiences.

"I moreover believe that any religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system."
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Reply #4 - December 20, 2014, 06:01 PM

Re having knowledge of what was going on in other rooms/their room at the time, that's no more weighty than a "forensic psychic" saying that they see the body in a field or near a river, or any other thing that we imagine that turns out to be kind of true.

You don't hear of all the times someone nearly dies where they hallucinate something happening to them or nearby that's not accurate, but of course you'll hear the few times that they were close to the truth, and there's many opportunities for that to happen given enough NDEs.

One time, I "predicted" a car crash just an hour before our van crashed and got totaled at an intersection with a bunch of my family members in it when I was like 12 or 13. If it was a moment of clarity where I saw the future, it was a pretty pathetic one to have, because no one was even hurt and it was just an annoyance, made probably more annoying when the first thing I said after we settled to a halt was, "I told you so!"

But given enough years of life with enough "bad feelings" or predictions or worries or anxieties or time to just imagine stuff happening, we are bound to be right at least a few times. Needless to say, I haven't been on the mark much since then, and there's no reason for me to imagine it was anything besides getting a "something bad is going to happen" feeling randomly that happened to coincide with an actual bad event soon after. I see NDEs where they see something about the future or the room next door as no different than this.
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Reply #5 - December 20, 2014, 06:38 PM

I bet you are right that NDEs that are less impressive where the person brings back false details probably don't get reported as much as the ones that bring back accurate information. I think the ones that are most interesting are ones that were done in medical situations when the person has an Out of Body experience and can describe certain details from when their EEG was reading no activity. Could have been a lucky guess, false reporting, or subtle brain activity that wasn't detected, but some of these cases seem hard to chock it up to any of these things. Pretty much all the people who have these experiences describe it as the most profound and real experience of their lives, which seems strange that certain people could have this kind of experience while essentially flatlined.

But as many of these people feel as if they met God, they would essentially be indistinguishable from prophets from the Bible and Quran who claim they have been in the presence of a god and were told to deliver a message. So instead of focusing on whether these experiences are hallucinations or not, I want to explore what role they could have played in forming the major religions that persist today.

"I moreover believe that any religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system."
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Reply #6 - December 20, 2014, 09:23 PM

Yeah, I get what you're saying, and no doubt some people who had spiritual experiences were experiencing hallucinations, whether from a NDE or sleep deprivation or mental illness or sleep paralysis, etc. As for who of historical importance might have one or more of these things to blame for influencing religion, I reckon that's lost to history. There's a lot of threads on this forum, I think, where users have discussed what they believe was going on in Mohammad's head at the time, and of course we can't agree.
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Reply #7 - March 05, 2015, 06:47 AM

Some articles from infidels on immortality and Near Death Experiences:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/immortality.html

http://infidels.org/library/modern/steven_conifer/mbd.html

http://infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/HNDEs.html

The one on NDEs is extremely long and exhaustive, but it really brings out the absurdity of the survivalists explanation for this phenomenon considering some of the stark differences particularly between accounts cross culturally. Also, it is striking that not one person who has claimed to have left their body has ever managed to see targets set up in high places in the room out of their normal line of sight. Until something like this is verified, there is absolutely no reason to believe anything paranormal is occurring.

On immortality, the idea is quickly becoming incoherent for me. Dualism, to me, seems clearly false and all other afterlife theories seem to suffer from a problem of identity in which even if some sort of entity went on beyond death, there would be little reason to identify that entity with you. But living forever sounds awful. I manage to stay reasonably content with my own current existence, but if I went on forever everything would eventually seem so dull and pointless(sometimes it does already).

"I moreover believe that any religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system."
-Thomas Paine
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