Question About 'post-Mortem' Experiences

[Wandering_Cookie]

Hi there! First let me say I am so happy I found this site, I will be posting my story when I'm at an actual computer and not my phone soon. I am in the very early stages of renouncing my faith.

 

I was raised, unfortunately, by an evangelist in the Faith Movement, aka the Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie Movement. I remember as a young child I would ask my mom how we know heaven is real, and her reply would launch a story about preachers who were sinners before and were denounced dead during a medical procedure. During this time, they would supposedly see hell and beg for another chance and were then sent back. There were also stories of people supposedly seeing heaven and coming back to tell the tale.

 

My question is, are there any non hallucination induced accounts of coming back from the medically announced dead?

 

I'm also embarrassed that I was so excited to tell my friends about these ridiculous works of fiction. xD

[Guest Valk0010]

That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.- David Hume

 

I honestly don't know much about NDE's but I approach any I hear from that quote's prospective.

http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Miracles_in_history

[Eugene39]

The closest thing I have found to it is a book named "90 minutes in Heaven" by Don Piper. He was involved in a horrible car/truck accident and was thought to be dead, and wasn't extricated from the vehicle until after a preacher who happened upon the accident "prayed him back to life". I have also read the book "23 minutes in Hell" by Bill Wiese. NDE's are something that has everyone scratching their head a little, I suppose, but IMO, Bill Wiese's book could plausibly be just a very bad nightmare since it happened while sleeping.

[R. S. Martin]

I believe there is a natural explanation for near death experiences (NDEs) but it is not yet fully understood. I found an article for Scientific Evidence for Survival of Consciousness after Death. The problem is that the article does not at all read like a scientific article, and it provides nothing in the line of a scientific research report. It might name a scientist and a comment made by him. That does not make it "scientific evidence."

 

For anyone interested, that article is taken from a very large index on a website Near-Death Experiences and the Afterlife. Someone has obviously collected a lot of material and I know scientists have looked at NDEs. So far as I know, the evidence is inconclusive, meaning no definite conclusion has yet been possible based on the evidence.

[GhostOfPerdition]

My understanding of NDEs is that when the body is near death the brain is flooded with a chemical known as DMT. This induces incredibly vivid lucid dreams which would account for death-bed religious experiences and NDEs if I am properly informed. I've been told that DMT is responsible for normal night-time dreaming as well, which would seem to make sense.

 

I will admit that this is all hearsay; I am not a scientist nor have I study in any relevant field. Still I think it is probably close enough to reality. NDEs are most likely a physiological phenomenon and, I'm sure, are in no way supernatural.

[florduh]

NDEs have been studied for decades with no supernatural conclusions to date. The idea never dies, however. At least something has eternal life.

[Thurisaz]

Not to forget the simple and (to the proponents of such claims) inconvenient fact:

 

If you came back... you weren't really dead.

(Yeah the ironic parallel... "if you left the cult you never really were a cultist!!!!1111!!!oneoneoneone!!!! )

 

If memory serves, the definition of "biological" (final, irreversible) death is braindeath, in contrast to "clinical death" which means the heart has stopped. People who suffered the latter can be brought back if something's done soon enough. They were not really dead, though - just dying.

 

The obvious problem is, of course, that a dead brain will never reveal any information ever again

[Overcame Faith]

Not to forget the simple and (to the proponents of such claims) inconvenient fact:

 

If you came back... you weren't really dead.

 

Very well stated. That's right, these are not experiences of people who have actually died and come back to life. The people who had these experiences were never dead so their brains still functioned. And it is the functioning of the brain that accounts for the experiences.

[nirvana]

Hey welcome to the forum, I'm new too

[Wandering_Cookie]

Hmm, that makes sense. This all makes me think of "Jacob's Ladder". Fantastic movie, by the way.

 

Hey welcome to the forum, I'm new too

 

Hi there!

[SirPhoenix]

The accounts of NDE's varry. Most report seeing the light, feeling loved, etc. Some report seeing the god they worship. Some report seeing hell. I do believe that these people believe that they have experienced these things. Whatever it was, it was real to them. That leaves us with two possibilites. 1. It was an artifact of the death experience and was a vivid hallucination that drew on elements of their personal beliefs. or 2. They really did see something of an existance beyond this one.

 

In the first case, it is nothing more than a yet undiscovered function of the human brain. While the human brain is amazing, it is far from supernatural.

 

No one can really say anything about the second case. We can only speculate. My personal guess would be that if something lies beyond, that it is also highly influenced by whatever beliefs that a person held while alive, at least at first. If conciousness does persist, perhaps the transition from one form to another is somewhat disconcerting, similar to a person blind his whole life having sight restored (medically of course). A transferred conciousness would likely have trouble processing the new input, and therefore might percieve things through the filter of what it once knew.

 

It is only my personal spectulation, but I think that if there is a concious existance after physical death, that there is a scientific explanation. It just happens to be an explantion that we have not yet discovered or perhaps we haven't yet evolved to the point where we can comprehend it.