RE: Near death experience of Howard Storm
January 29, 2016 at 2:20 pm
(This post was last modified: January 29, 2016 at 2:21 pm by Whateverist.)
(January 29, 2016 at 10:34 am)Catholic_Lady Wrote: I do have a serious question for all of you.
Would you WANT this story to be real?
Would it make you happy if it were? Or would you still hate the idea of God and afterlife even after reading this story which paints God and the afterlife in such a positive light?
Would you rather it all be a farce, and that we all just die when we die and there is no loving God?
Good question but I don't think we attribute the same significance to what it would mean for the story to be real.
If I had the same experience I would think "cool, so this is the kind of experience which gives rise to religions". It wouldn't change in the slightest my understanding of cosmology or the cycle of life. But I could gather meaning from such an experience as I have in other settings. I think this guy makes the mistake of shoe horning an experience into an off the rack belief system, rather than grokking it directly on its own terms. He is also guilty of going literal when the unconscious mind is never that. You can't ride dragons if you try to cram them into little boxes. His experience was distorted and wasted.
I'm quite sure he really had an experience, so it was real as such. But the move to apply it directly and literally to the real world is always a mistake. These things have an as-if quality.