In my city there is a church that goes to street corners at public events and popular locales and yells and "preaches" at the passers by. I cringe every time I see them cuzz I know it'll take Christians 10 years to undo the damage these guys will do in 10 minutes. Likewise, I know the New Agers must cringe every time Shirley MacClaine grabs a mike. And I've got a feeling the atheists cringe with half the posts Longshot makes...
Exactly. These are fairly common during the NDE experience and quite often the experiencer can corroborate impossible details. I remember reading one story about a young girl who fell out of an intertube in the ocean. She experienced some of the classic symptoms of NDE and then left her body. She saw her brother's foot get cut - something that would have been impossible from where she was at and from someone nearly dead. When she was revived, she asked how her family how her brother's foot was doing...
I'm not trying to prove anyhign - I know I can't do that. My only goal is to make us all think. You guys try to do that with me and of course I try to do that with you. Let me ask you this question: NDErs are commonly in their near death state for 10 minutes or more. Medically their brain is flatlined. It's not "deprived of oxygen" - it's dead. I ask this question: how can we account that NDErs almost universally report that their brain is MORE active than in regular life. The experience is SO real and vivid and their thoughts so crystal clear that it is almost always a life-changing experience. I can't imagine a way to account for this medically...
i know this will be lost on you shoe because you need supernatural explanations to fill the void in your life but i'll give it to you anyway.. http://leda.lycaeum.org/Documents/The_Ketamine_Model_of_the_Near_Death_Experience.9264.shtml :-/
Adn by the way, I can tell you that all the atheists on planet earth could not convince my friend that her experience was not real. That's how vivid and these experiences are... And here's another question that I think the materialist crowd ignores: These experiences are incredibly visually complex! Some of the NDErs report seeing in 360 with incredible clarity. How could the brain possibly have evolved into a Surround Sound IMAX theatre? The complexity of this is simply too mind boggling for me to believe that it happened by chance mutations. But that's just a side note...
i tend to agree with you here, longshot. either you are dead or you are not. i find it interesting that certain psych delic substances produce the exact same effect. it makes perfect sense that one's brain would go into overdrive before it shuts off permanently. no human has ever returned from the permanent metabolic coma called death. best, surfer
No, this is an interesting point. The ketamine research shows that some of the NDE experience occurs within the brain. As I mentioned above, the tunnel, light, telepathic communication and with beings and life review can all be experienced by ketamine experiencers. But here's the problem that I see with the materialists explanation: 1. Ketamine does not produce the OOB experiences (as far as I know anyway) that can be independently verified. 2. The experience is often life changing but at not nearly the frequency as NDE. 3. Ketamine merely shuts off the receptors to accept outside input. This simply means that the brain probably thinks it is dying and begins to prepare and thus begins with the classic NDE steps. This, however, does not in any way show that a) it is not partially spiritual or b) that the OOB experiences of NDErs are not real.
You're right it's interesting, but again how does one account for the mental lucidity and the OOB experiences of many NDErs? Also, what do you mean by "no human has ever returned from the permanent metabolic coma called death."?