Cannot see how NDEs are so easily dismissed by many scientists or skeptics

[HaShev]

Mistaken in their conclusions like you Turz are mistaken in your claims of proof when it's not evidence.
If the Doctors thought this was evidence then why do they try so hard to keep people from the other side?
"D'OH!"
Christianity straddles the fence on this issue, on one hand teaching Egyptian underworld myths, but then also borrowing the opposite Judaic ideology of ressurection back into life.
Pick a side of the fence and stop sitting on those sharp spikes.

 

[shimon]

I find it interesting that near death experiences are pushed ...it is actually a form of control so that people will be satisfied and placated in this life...authorities dont even need drugs to control the masses this way...if one reads ezekiel 13 esp verses 20 and onward we are shown that it is used so the wicked will not turn from their ways because they feel they will have another chance in some form to bad people dont get it...it is the shell game all over again and the dung beetle rolling his dung along the ground promising a new life after he emerges from the dung....yuch.......

 

[HaShev]

Christians need to recognize resemblances like the Islamic use of paradise promises and study them like a mirror reflection of their own practices.
Kings (kingdoms) get the unsuspected pawns to go out and fight for them using promises of reward in death and valor in order to get them to do the dirty work they would never risk to do and a fictional place they are in no rush to go to.

 

[turzovka]

Christians need to recognize resemblances like the Islamic use of paradise promises and study them like a mirror reflection of their own practices.
Kings (kingdoms) get the unsuspected pawns to go out and fight for them using promises of reward in death and valor in order to get them to do the dirty work they would never risk to do and a fictional place they are in no rush to go to.

It seems to me a lot of your messages fall into these philosophical ruminations which are too esoteric or ambiguous to have any practical usefulness.

I ask you how a “dying brain” can rise above its own self and watch things going on in the O.R. room and even adjoining room. We know this because there are many accounts where the medical staff report that is what the resuscitated patient told them when they remarkably came back from the beyond. Note to you: medical staff are not prone to lying about something like this or being mistaken as to what they observed.

And you come back telling me how Islam or kingdoms view paradise or look at death. (???) What remains is something inexplicable in the natural. What remains is what I suggested in the first place, i.e. that God gives us glimpses of the supernatural or of life after death. And I cannot see how science or others can explain this away by saying “a dying brain caused them to rise above themselves and be fully conscious.”

 

[HaShev]

Once again it's not a dead brain when it's alive recolecting what it thought it saw. A dead person can't tell you what the processer thought it saw un time stamped, only the once again alive one can.
Furthermore if brain dead=not alive then why is it murder to abort that which has yet to have it's first brain wave?
Christianity wants it both ways on this argument=fence sitter.

 

[irosie91]

Once again it's not a dead brain when it's alive recolecting what it thought it saw. A dead person can't tell you what the processer thought it saw un time stamped, only the once again alive one can.
Furthermore if brain dead=not alive then why is it murder to abort that which has yet to have it's first brain wave?
Christianity wants it both ways on this argument=fence sitter.

you confuse me, shev-----what is it that you imagine did not have its first brain wave? -------let me help you------the fetal brain -----has BRAIN WAVES. Brain dead brains have no brain waves-----but fetus----BRAIN WAVES One of the criteria for brain death is ----no brain waves

 

[HaShev]

I was asked by an order of priests to mediate this debate and in coming up with the perfect compromise they agreed that if death is determined at the end of thought or even brain waves then life does not begin until first memory at worse first brain wave.
Do your research, it's at least 2-4 months before the fetus developes neurons and signal it's first brainwave if I remember correctly. First memory even longer.
That is the compromise they should feel safe and secure in agreement as it's better to compromise in rational logical truth that shortens the cut off period then be stuck not compromising and end up with longer abortion period allowances. THE most difficult debate is not so difficult for a rationalist problem solver, that's why they entrusted me with my advice and mediation.
In the 9xx BC Biblical era Solomon was that wise Mediator, but in our day we have no Temple & the imposter temple has no answers (everything is a mystery), therefore build the real Temple if you wish to "restore" wise mediation and council like in the days of Solomon, the kind even the RCC themselves are turning to for advice.

 

[irosie91]

I was asked by an order of priests to mediate this debate and in coming up with the perfect compromise they agreed that if death is determined at the end of thought or even brain waves then life does not begin until first memory at worse first brain wave.
Do your research, it's at least 2-4 months before the fetus developes neurons and signal it's first brainwave if I remember correctly. First memory even longer.
That is the compromise they should feel safe and secure in agreement as it's better to compromise in rational logical truth that shortens the cut off period then be stuck not compromising and end up with longer abortion period allowances. THE most difficult debate is not so difficult for a rationalist problem solver, that's why they entrusted me with my advice and mediation.
In the 9xx BC Biblical era Solomon was that wise Mediator, but in our day we have no Temple & the imposter temple has no answers (everything is a mystery), therefore build the real Temple if you wish to "restore" wise mediation and council like in the days of Solomon, the kind even the RCC themselves are turning to for advice.

do my research, SHEV?-----you got NOIVE------I and my ---little lab assistant put the electrodes on my pregnant belly when I was in my fifth month and ----recorded the brain waves of my little genius. Of course I already knew that the little cute fetus had
brain waves------we were playing. King Solomon is hubby's fave------he is constantly quoting ------SHEEEESH PS ----little genius in utero---did exhibit the expected brain waves in amplitude and frequency------uhm----there is a specific term for the HIGH AMPLITUDE things that he emanated-----but I forgot the term----and am too lazy to search. Sadly I lost the tracing. For a very strict diagnosis of brain death-----there should be an EEG recording------FLAT LINE. To be honest---it is barely needed----no brain stem function is enough. PS---the genius fetus passed age 30 long ago.

*****THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN*******

ain chadash tachat ha shemesh------even idiots like Penelope are not
NEW-----they have been "under the sun" for thousands of years----
ask solomon

 

[amrchaos]

Once again it's not a dead brain when it's alive recolecting what it thought it saw. A dead person can't tell you what the processer thought it saw un time stamped, only the once again alive one can.
Furthermore if brain dead=not alive then why is it murder to abort that which has yet to have it's first brain wave?
Christianity wants it both ways on this argument=fence sitter.

you confuse me, shev-----what is it that you imagine did not have its first brain wave? -------let me help you------the fetal brain -----has BRAIN WAVES. Brain dead brains have no brain waves-----but fetus----BRAIN WAVES One of the criteria for brain death is ----no brain waves

Or the NDE brain is not dead.

This is the point you need to take to understand Hashev. It is possible for the brain to be alive, but not scientifically alive. That is, as the brain is still shutting down when the doctors proclaim it is dead by his instruments.

There is also another possibility that nondecomposed brains can lightly record due to a changing EM field. Although very unlikely, it could help explain not only NDE, but wierdness in dreams and slightly altered memories.

Come to think about it, one could make up numerous theories, many testable, about NDE brains. So there is no need to assume what is exactly true but to tentatively wait until some theory is verified.

In other words, best to assume "I don't know" and find out over time.

 

[irosie91]

Once again it's not a dead brain when it's alive recolecting what it thought it saw. A dead person can't tell you what the processer thought it saw un time stamped, only the once again alive one can.
Furthermore if brain dead=not alive then why is it murder to abort that which has yet to have it's first brain wave?
Christianity wants it both ways on this argument=fence sitter.

you confuse me, shev-----what is it that you imagine did not have its first brain wave? -------let me help you------the fetal brain -----has BRAIN WAVES. Brain dead brains have no brain waves-----but fetus----BRAIN WAVES One of the criteria for brain death is ----no brain waves

Or the NDE brain is not dead.

This is the point you need to take to understand Hashev. It is possible for the brain to be alive, but not scientifically alive. That is, as the brain is still shutting down when the doctors proclaim it is dead by his instruments.

There is also another possibility that nondecomposed brains can lightly record due to a changing EM field. Although very unlikely, it could help explain not only NDE, but wierdness in dreams and slightly altered memories.

Come to think about it, one could make up numerous theories, many testable, about NDE brains. So there is no need to assume what is exactly true but to tentatively wait until some theory is verified.

In other words, best to assume "I don't know" and find out over time.

the NDE experience does not happen to BRAIN DEAD BRAINS----it happens in cases of near death with brain still functioning however marginally----ANOXIC BRAINS ---- -

 

[turzovka]

Once again it's not a dead brain when it's alive recolecting what it thought it saw. A dead person can't tell you what the processer thought it saw un time stamped, only the once again alive one can.
Furthermore if brain dead=not alive then why is it murder to abort that which has yet to have it's first brain wave?
Christianity wants it both ways on this argument=fence sitter.

Here is a quote from the following article by neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander whose personal account in 2012 garnered world wide attention. This is what I am talking about. It goes far beyond your theories where you cannot get past a brain and nothing more in the reality of life and death, body and spirit. Read on then, if so interested.

"Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself. But I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all: truth."

http://www.newsweek.com/proof-heaven-doctors-experience-afterlife-65327

Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife

By Dr. Eben Alexander 10/8/12 at 1:00 AM

As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon. I followed my father’s path and became an academic neurosurgeon, teaching at Harvard Medical School and other universities. I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.

The brain is an astonishingly sophisticated but extremely delicate mechanism. Reduce the amount of oxygen it receives by the smallest amount and it will react. It was no big surprise that people who had undergone severe trauma would return from their experiences with strange stories. But that didn’t mean they had journeyed anywhere real.

Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.

In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.

I know how pronouncements like mine sound to skeptics, so I will tell my story with the logic and language of the scientist I am.

Very early one morning four years ago, I awoke with an extremely intense headache. Within hours, my entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down. Doctors at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, a hospital where I myself worked as a neurosurgeon, determined that I had somehow contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that mostly attacks newborns. E. coli bacteria had penetrated my cerebrospinal fluid and were eating my brain.

When I entered the emergency room that morning, my chances of survival in anything beyond a vegetative state were already low. They soon sank to near nonexistent. For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive, my higher-order brain functions totally offline.

Then, on the morning of my seventh day in the hospital, as my doctors weighed whether to discontinue treatment, my eyes popped open.

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

But that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.

I’m not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.

All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.

It took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but—more importantly—the things that happened during that time. Toward the beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky.

Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them.

Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.

A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had to make this noise—that if the joy didn’t come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you wet.

Seeing and hearing were not separate in this place where I now was. I could hear the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang. It seemed that you could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming a part of it—without joining with it in some mysterious way. Again, from my present perspective, I would suggest that you couldn’t look at anything in that world at all, for the word “at” itself implies a separation that did not exist there. Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else, like the rich and intermingled designs on a Persian carpet ... or a butterfly’s wing.

It gets stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming back up around us again. It was a river of life and color, moving through the air. The woman’s outfit was simple, like a peasant’s, but its colors—powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach—had the same overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that everything else had. She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for five seconds, would make your whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened in it so far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these, beyond all the different compartments of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being much bigger than all of them.

Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.

The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.

“We will show you many things here,” the woman said, again, without actually using these words but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. “But eventually, you will go back.”

To this, I had only one question.

Back where?

A warm wind blew through, like the kind that spring up on the most perfect summer days, tossing the leaves of the trees and flowing past like heavenly water. A divine breeze. It changed everything, shifting the world around me into an even higher octave, a higher vibration.

Although I still had little language function, at least as we think of it on earth, I began wordlessly putting questions to this wind, and to the divine being that I sensed at work behind or within it.

Where is this place?

Who am I?

Why am I here?

Each time I silently put one of these questions out, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these blasts was that they didn’t simply silence my questions by overwhelming them. They answered them, but in a way that bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought like we experience on earth. It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate—hotter than fire and wetter than water—and as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.

I continued moving forward and found myself entering an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting. Pitch-black as it was, it was also brimming over with light: a light that seemed to come from a brilliant orb that I now sensed near me. The orb was a kind of “interpreter” between me and this vast presence surrounding me. It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and the universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb, and the orb (which I sensed was somehow connected with, or even identical to, the woman on the butterfly wing) was guiding me through it.

Later, when I was back, I found a quotation by the 17th-century Christian poet Henry Vaughan that came close to describing this magical place, this vast, inky-black core that was the home of the Divine itself.

“There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness ...”

That was it exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.

I know full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this sounds. Had someone—even a doctor—told me a story like this in the old days, I would have been quite certain that they were under the spell of some delusion. But what happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any event in my life. That includes my wedding day and the birth of my two sons.

What happened to me demands explanation.

Modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided. Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference, physics tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation.

Before my experience these ideas were abstractions. Today they are realities. Not only is the universe defined by unity, it is also—I now know—defined by love. The universe as I experienced it in my coma is—I have come to see with both shock and joy—the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.

I’ve spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in our country. I know that many of my peers hold—as I myself did—to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of emotion, much less the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us. But that belief, that theory, now lies broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can be, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.

I don’t expect this to be an easy task, for the reasons I described above. When the castle of an old scientific theory begins to show fault lines, no one wants to pay attention at first. The old castle simply took too much work to build in the first place, and if it falls, an entirely new one will have to be constructed in its place.

I learned this firsthand after I was well enough to get back out into the world and talk to others—people, that is, other than my long-suffering wife, Holley, and our two sons—about what had happened to me. The looks of polite disbelief, especially among my medical friends, soon made me realize what a task I would have getting people to understand the enormity of what I had seen and experienced that week while my brain was down.

One of the few places I didn’t have trouble getting my story across was a place I’d seen fairly little of before my experience: church. The first time I entered a church after my coma, I saw everything with fresh eyes. The colors of the stained-glass windows recalled the luminous beauty of the landscapes I’d seen in the world above. The deep bass notes of the organ reminded me of how thoughts and emotions in that world are like waves that move through you. And, most important, a painting of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked the message that lay at the very heart of my journey: that we are loved and accepted unconditionally by a God even more grand and unfathomably glorious than the one I’d learned of as a child in Sunday school.

Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself.

But I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all: truth.


= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander, M.D. To be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Copyright (c) 2012 by Eben Alexander III, M.D.

This new picture of reality will take a long time to put together. It won’t be finished in my time, or even, I suspect, my sons’ either. In fact, reality is too vast, too complex, and too irreducibly mysterious for a full picture of it ever to be absolutely complete. But in essence, it will show the universe as evolving, multi-dimensional, and known down to its every last atom by a God who cares for us even more deeply and fiercely than any parent ever loved their child.

I’m still a doctor, and still a man of science every bit as much as I was before I had my experience. But on a deep level I’m very different from the person I was before, because I’ve caught a glimpse of this emerging picture of reality. And you can believe me when I tell you that it will be worth every bit of the work it will take us, and those who come after us, to get it right.

 

[The Irish Ram]

There was the case of a woman blind from birth. Then they found a tumor deep in her brain. They needed to stop her brain activity completely during surgery. With no brain activity, she watched the whole operation. And was able to tell the surgeon what the tools he used looked like, the song he was singing during the operation, and amazingly, she knew what color scrubs he was wearing. She knew the color blue even though she had never seen color before.

It happened to me when I was a child, in the ambulance. I was unconscious the whole way, but at one point the nurse said my heart had stopped. And I thought, "if I heard you say that I can't be dead." But I was looking at myself laying there when I thought it. And I was facing my mom who was considering stepping right out the ambulance, because she thought I had died. I knew I had to get back in that body and move so mom wouldn't step out onto the highway at 90 miles an hour, and no sooner did I think it I was back in my body. I'll never forget how heavy clay is because my arm was so heavy I couldn't lift it. I tried to move my fingers and couldn't, so I moaned.
When I told my dad about it, he turned white, because I was out before the ambulance arrived and didn't regain consciousness until I had been in the ER for some time, which meant there was no way of me knowing that the person that had the stethoscope on my heart was the nurse that lived across the street from my grandmother's and ran over when she saw the ambulance arrive.

I have always been thankful for that experience, because I know exactly what it is like to be absent from the body. When our terrestrial suit wears out, we simply step right out of it. Brain is different than mind. Brain is terrestrial. Your mind is part of your soul. It never dies.

Take note of where you are standing. Now close your eyes, and take a step to the left. That is what it feels like to die. You remain you, with or without the clay part.

 

[HaShev]

You guys are living in groundhog day here, how many times do I have to repeat.
You still have a processor when waking up which recollects and tells the story, (you also would have one in the time to come ressurection back into life) but the problem is, as that story passes down the line it changes (like that experiment game you did as a kid the end story changes as it gets passed along and added to).
Therefore you assume you are told real events real truth which is almost always corrupted. Then there is the issue of selective recognition which Christians are famous for being fooled by.
Lastly you'd be giving these story tellers powers that of your mythical Jesus as equal to above your idol god.
If the returning from death is no big deal then you made a god out of a false prophet or you should be wearing a bed pan around your neck and hild services in the ER and give Jello during your communions.

 

[turzovka]

There was the case of a woman blind from birth. Then they found a tumor deep in her brain. They needed to stop her brain activity completely during surgery. With no brain activity, she watched the whole operation. And was able to tell the surgeon what the tools he used looked like, the song he was singing during the operation, and amazingly, she knew what color scrubs he was wearing. She knew the color blue even though she had never seen color before.

It happened to me when I was a child, in the ambulance. I was unconscious the whole way, but at one point the nurse said my heart had stopped. And I thought, "if I heard you say that I can't be dead." But I was looking at myself laying there when I thought it. And I was facing my mom who was considering stepping right out the ambulance, because she thought I had died. I knew I had to get back in that body and move so mom wouldn't step out onto the highway at 90 miles an hour, and no sooner did I think it I was back in my body. I'll never forget how heavy clay is because my arm was so heavy I couldn't lift it. I tried to move my fingers and couldn't, so I moaned.
When I told my dad about it, he turned white, because I was out before the ambulance arrived and didn't regain consciousness until I had been in the ER for some time, which meant there was no way of me knowing that the person that had the stethoscope on my heart was the nurse that lived across the street from my grandmother's and ran over when she saw the ambulance arrive.

I have always been thankful for that experience, because I know exactly what it is like to be absent from the body. When our terrestrial suit wears out, we simply step right out of it. Brain is different than mind. Brain is terrestrial. Your mind is part of your soul. It never dies.

Take note of where you are standing. Now close your eyes, and take a step to the left. That is what it feels like to die. You remain you, with or without the clay part.

That is a rather personal and moving account, I.R. Are you also telling us that you first started to see right after that surgery? If so, I am very happy for you and I give you credit for sharing.

My friend back when we were around 20, he was in a terrible car accident where two of his friends were killed as well as the woman in the other vehicle. He was in the backseat and was horribly injured but survived. Several months after the accident he disclosed to me how he vividly remembers running down the highway away from the scene of the accident and he recounts how he could see the ambulances and his own body in the vehicle being worked on. Next thing he could recall was waking up two days later in the hospital. This is a spiritual matter, imo, no question about it.

 

[The Irish Ram]

tur, no, sorry. I meant a near death experience happened to me, not that it was similar to the woman's story. Some one else here was badly injured, and thought of his mom, and went there to her home. He couldn't explain it, but he knew it happened. Spirits are not bound by dimensions. You think and you are there. Those that have gone on before us, can actually be sitting right next to us, and go undetected because our eyes are tethered to 3 dimensional beings.

We are spirit and eternal. We aren't tethered by time. Only the shell is. That's why you can have a pleasant memory of the past and feel as though it just happened yesterday. That I came that close to death scared my dad nearly to death, but I am so happy to have experienced a small glimpse of what the future holds.

 

[aris2chat]

Once again, even those dead for days have to recollect using the processor brain for it's total recall.=failed argument.
All you did was prove to everyone how coming back to life is a common occurance not worthy of making these people gods or venerating them.
Even a dog named Dosha rose from the dead, and unlike Jesus, Dosha fulfills the "Mandatory" prerequisite that his name must be in the MikDosh.

For your theory to have any credibility whatsoever, the first premise that must be true is that all these people are liars. Not just the one who experienced the NDE but all the doctors and other witnesses during and after the episode are supporting his or her claims with lies of their own. Illogical to the extreme.

What is the upside for a lifelong atheist all of a sudden being certain God exists? What is it about a 4 year old child picking out a grandfather he never knew out of a lineup, and telling his mother of the sister he met in heaven who died in his mother’s womb? How would he possibly concoct something so fantastic as that? And now the Christian parents would live this insane lie and not worry about their very souls in that state? How can patients (many of them) speak of items or people in adjacent rooms while they were virtually dead on a table? Everyone who testified to that miraculous account were in on the lie? And how does a dead brain allow a person to leave their body and look above the room and describe later all that occurred from that vantage point?

The list of inexplicable is endless. The documented cases are endless.

........not fully explicable yet. As knowledge grows, so we hope will our understanding of the unknown. Even the universe is finite, it just appears endless to those who do not know or understand it.

Except NDEs do not stand on their own. The preponderance of empirical evidence for God is legion. Miracles abound, supported by reason and historical evidence for the Savior. NDEs are just another way of God giving us a glimpse of heaven and the nether world. Most believers are convinced of God through many other ways that have nothing to do with this. It is the skeptic who keeps trying to isolate every account and present his opposition, which all too often sounds implausible all on its own, nearly always. Including how they dismiss weeping statues because they can point to one or two hoaxes. Again, they have to attest everyone else is lying, or “mistaken” as another here suggests.

A pantheon of gods, fairies, dragons, unicorns, flying people, mermaids, demons, ghosts............
Why is a single god any more valid that anything else that was taken by early men as 'empirical' from their evidence?
To early man a dinosaur or elephant skull was proof of dragons or cyclopes, giant bones were proof of giant humans or titans.
Wasn't that long ago that a water line was proof of noah's flood globally.
Jesus to early christians was no god but just man.
There is no 'empirical' evidence of gods, let alone of single god. Tales, legions and myths. If there was empirical evidence all people around the world would believe the same exact thing. With so many christian denominations, they don't even believe the same things any more than differing muslims sect do.
How many christians have killed christians or muslims killed muslims over their differences?
You think you are right but to billions of other people and all the other denominations you might be seen as absolutely off your rocker.

We use the generic term of god as he but she, it or them might be equally as valid. God might also be just a necessary creation of our mind to help us cope with the as yet unknown.

 

[aris2chat]

you can want to believe in the easter bunny but that does not prove it is real

You apply your own limited understanding to events or fill in the blanks to thinks you can't explain or rationalize.

That is in no way proof of anything except your imagination.

We can transplant organs so death is not the absolute end of cells. You can cut the head off a snake, gut it and skin it but it will still keep moving for some time. Some creatures can be moving up to several hours after death or dismemberment. We loose a limb and can have phantom pains the rest of out lives. Even stone cold death might take hours or days for the last cells to give up, but that does not mean that the body or mind as a whole could survive or come back.
Keeping a body artificially alive does not mean the person is alive or ever can return. We can send impulses to a muscle and make it contract but that does not mean the body is alive.

 

[turzovka]

You guys are living in groundhog day here, how many times do I have to repeat.

You guys are living in groundhog day here, how many times do I have to repeat.You still have a processor when waking up which recollects and tells the story, (you also would have one in the time to come resurrection back into life) but the problem is, as that story passes down the line it changes (like that experiment game you did as a kid the end story changes as it gets passed along and added to). Therefore you assume you are told real events real truth which is almost always corrupted. <<< That sounds lame to me. Everyone is a liar, I get it... otherwise your theory cannot stand up.

Then there is the issue of selective recognition which Christians are famous for being fooled by. <<< Dr. Eben Alexander was not a believer for all intents and purposes, recall? His “god” was science.

Lastly you'd be giving these story tellers powers that of your mythical Jesus as equal to above your idol god. If the returning from death is no big deal then you made a god out of a false prophet or you should be wearing a bed pan around your neck and hild services in the ER and give Jello during your communions. <<< Don’t be so desperate in your attempts to deny God His own will with some kind of gotcha game like “well if everyone can come back from the dead than Jesus rising is no big deal anymore.” God can do as he pleases. Your disturbance is not that God is letting others come back from the dead and therefore minimizing the importance of Jesus own resurrection --- your disturbance is that we are claiming God is providing signs and wonders for man to believe in which science or nature cannot explain. Empirical evidence troubles you.

I also am getting a little dismayed that all you seem to be able to rally around is that “you have to have a working brain to observe anything or be conscious of anything.” No, you don’t. Dr Alexander essentially proved that by demonstrating how consciousness is and can be separate from any brain activity whatsoever. Lying brain dead in coma where they were about to disconnect him, yet what he experienced he said was more real than anything that seemed real before for him. It also breathed God, love being the highest virtue was all he could clearly sense. Science consensus is that such a brain is totally incapable of creating such activity. The Russian doctor was dead in a morgue for three days, came to when being sliced open at the autopsy. He is saying it is of a spiritual realm. And that seems to really bother you. So this neurosurgeon is also a liar or fabricator of facts even though he is an expert in the field and just put his whole career on the line and he also has, no doubt, plenty of medical records and eye witness peers to back much of what he said and what took place. So many continuously, no matter what sign is presented, look for any explanation except the most obvious one, God.

 

[turzovka]

A pantheon of gods, fairies, dragons, unicorns, flying people, mermaids, demons, ghosts............
Why is a single god any more valid that anything else that was taken by early men as 'empirical' from their evidence?
To early man a dinosaur or elephant skull was proof of dragons or cyclopes, giant bones were proof of giant humans or titans.
Wasn't that long ago that a water line was proof of noah's flood globally.
Jesus to early christians was no god but just man.
There is no 'empirical' evidence of gods, let alone of single god. Tales, legions and myths. If there was empirical evidence all people around the world would believe the same exact thing. With so many christian denominations, they don't even believe the same things any more than differing muslims sect do.
How many christians have killed christians or muslims killed muslims over their differences?
You think you are right but to billions of other people and all the other denominations you might be seen as absolutely off your rocker.

We use the generic term of god as he but she, it or them might be equally as valid. God might also be just a necessary creation of our mind to help us cope with the as yet unknown.

Sorry, I do not have time for all of your challenges and questions here (later I hope), but may I change the subject?

Question: What is your main objective in being here? Entertainment? It appears to me (from the little I have read) that your objective is to look for ways to discredit anyone who dares offer up evidence for God. Does that not presume you have an end in mine and you are only focusing on those means that support your preference? That which cannot be explained you leave as unexplained, not as any evidence for the believer.

Why? Don’t you want to live forever? Are you so certain that there is no God or consequences that you are comfortable in taking the risk of offering God no thanks or praise or any of your time? Even if one cannot be sure of the truth, I would hope most would still attempt to communicate with the one who, for many reasons, still stands a very good chance of being real.

 

[aris2chat]

A pantheon of gods, fairies, dragons, unicorns, flying people, mermaids, demons, ghosts............
Why is a single god any more valid that anything else that was taken by early men as 'empirical' from their evidence?
To early man a dinosaur or elephant skull was proof of dragons or cyclopes, giant bones were proof of giant humans or titans.
Wasn't that long ago that a water line was proof of noah's flood globally.
Jesus to early christians was no god but just man.
There is no 'empirical' evidence of gods, let alone of single god. Tales, legions and myths. If there was empirical evidence all people around the world would believe the same exact thing. With so many christian denominations, they don't even believe the same things any more than differing muslims sect do.
How many christians have killed christians or muslims killed muslims over their differences?
You think you are right but to billions of other people and all the other denominations you might be seen as absolutely off your rocker.

We use the generic term of god as he but she, it or them might be equally as valid. God might also be just a necessary creation of our mind to help us cope with the as yet unknown.

Sorry, I do not have time for all of your challenges and questions here (later I hope), but may I change the subject?

Question: What is your main objective in being here? Entertainment? It appears to me (from the little I have read) that your objective is to look for ways to discredit anyone who dares offer up evidence for God. Does that not presume you have an end in mine and you are only focusing on those means that support your preference? That which cannot be explained you leave as unexplained, not as any evidence for the believer.

Why? Don’t you want to live forever? Are you so certain that there is no God or consequences that you are comfortable in taking the risk of offering God no thanks or praise or any of your time? Even if one cannot be sure of the truth, I would hope most would still attempt to communicate with the one who, for many reasons, still stands a very good chance of being real.

Objective? Other than watching hamster in a wheel?
I can't speak and I can go out for extended periods so yes, this is a form of learning and entertainment. It is a distractions. Maybe I am waiting for someone to be smart enough to actually prove something or find some compromise or way to accept others not like themselves.

My views are right for me. I admire people of faith as long as they don't try to convince me I am going to hell. I understand how faith can help some get though trouble in life as long as they don't suspend all logic in the process. I was raised around dozens of religions but found none more real than another. Discussing and arguing religion with true experts is interesting and educational but I don't have to hold to their beliefs.

I think because I can. I am not about to turn by brain off and follow the rest of the lemmings. If I were to believe it would be in something real not some fable.

Why are any of us here if not for our own amusement in some way. You thing you are going to convert others with your logic? You think if you save some soul that you will find your own place in some heaven? IF you can't argue your own beliefs, how can you convince others that you are right? People are not going to believe in your idea of god just because you say so, unless they are mentally defendant in some way. Because god said so is not a valid answer for religion.
There are logical reason for not stealing or killing. Simply telling others that it is god's will is not logical.

I've seen some of the best aspects in people that believe and I've seen the absolute worst. Doing something because some god said so is not a good enough reason. A god that needs to threaten with hell fire and damnation is a bully. People that need to use god as a threat to control others are as bad.

This is the only lie we should be concerned with, not some after life or next life. Hell is of our making here and now not something to anticipate because of some judgement of others. If you can't love and accept those who are different or even worst of mankind and you call yourself a man of god then I don't have reason to trust or believe you.

It should not be about converting but just accepting people who are the way they are. No judgement, no scorn, not hate, just accept. If there is a problem, help them but don't expect some miraculous change in them. If they are troubled, be a friend. Don't make them in your image, you just might be wrong. Consider that possibility before you tell others what to believe or what is right or wrong.

There might be a god, but logic tells me not to bank on it. There might be benefit in prayer but I will trust science. There might be a hell but if I love what I see as a logical and ethical life I'm not going to worry about something that may or may not happen after my death.

We have brains for a reason. We should not blindly refuse to use them because of a fairy tale. If after all examination you choose to believe, if you have proved to yourself beyond any shadow of a doubt at all then good for your. If you tell me that you are right and can't prove it to me, then I will not believe you. If you threaten me then you have already lost the argument. Twisting my arm to convert is not a real belief or conversation. A prisoner that converts to radical islam at the point of a sword or fear of suffer pain and death is not a true belief, just lip service. Brainwashing is not real belief. Dying for your faith is just a waste of a life. Living as an example of your faith, a faith of love and caring of other life, of all people is more worthy of life. Counting bodies or soul you save is not. Expecting a reward of heaven or rapture is not. Presuming a belief in some book or god makes you more deserving or better than others is not.

I've seen what an insistent faith in religion or god can do to the world. Not pretty. I can't believe they are going to any heaven or be near any god worthy of my time or consideration. I will trust my brain to guide me. I will trust what I can see, what I know. I will trust my experience. I will trust what I can prove, or that can be proved to me.

I'm here to watch the hamsters till they learn to think for themselves and escape the wheel or can prove to me that running the wheel is the only perfection there is to life in the universe.