An alternative to atheist thought

[Angrboda]

I agree with you about New Age crap, but I think you are making a mistake. How do you explain the testimonies of thousands of people that have had life after death experiences? These people where completely brain dead for brief periods of times, but they were conscious and had experiences outside of their bodies.

What you have is a theory about the cause of NDEs, namely that they are explained by people having experiences outside of their bodies. In support of your theory you claim that thousands have had NDEs. This may be true, but the one does not lead exclusively to the other. You've ruled out other explanations based on the propoganda of pro-survivalist advocates. The number of veridical NDEs in which the OBE of the person can be corroborated by others is so small that you can count them on one hand. Examination of the details of those handful of cases generally reveals more than is usually represented. Just as such veridical NDEs lend support to the theory that this handful of cases truly represents people having out of body experiences, there are also cases where the OBE was clearly hallucinatory. So the evidence for your "theory" is equivocal. I suggest you read the article quoted below. What you assert as "facts" are more properly labeled "conjectures." Since your conclusions follow from such "facts", then your conclusions are dubious at best.

(5) Melvin Morse reports an NDE where a young girl sees her teacher by her body during an OBE when her teacher is not actually there. This case also has other hallucinatory features, such as encountering doctors in an ostensibly transcendental realm:

[O]ne child.... could see her own body as doctors wearing green masks tried to start an IV. Then she saw her living teacher and classmates at her bedside, comforting her and singing to her (her teacher did not visit her in the hospital). Finally, three tall beings dressed in white that she identified as doctors asked her to push a button on a box at her bedside, telling her that if she pressed the green button she could go with them, but she would never see her family again. She pressed the red button and regained consciousness (Morse 68-69).

(6) Using open-ended questions, Morse also found a case where a child that was clinically dead reported that while she was 'above her body' looking down, "her mother's nose appeared flattened and distorted 'like a pig monster'" (Morse 67).

(7) The Fenwicks recount an NDE where the NDEr 'observed' a procedure that never took place during the heart bypass operation she underwent at the time:

[S]he left her body and watched her heart lying beside her body, bumping away with what looked like ribbons coming from it to hands. In fact, this is not what happens in a heart bypass operation, as the heart is left within the chest and is never taken outside the body (Fenwick and Fenwick 193).

The Fenwicks try to explain away this major discrepancy by pointing out that ribbons are indeed tied to arteries during an operation of this sort and by attributing the false perception to misidentification. However, it is difficult to see how a person truly out-of-body with vivid perceptual capabilities could confuse arteries (ribboned or not) with a beating heart lying next to her outside of her body. In the remainder of her experience this NDEr reported 'traveling' to a place that looked like an enormous silver 'airplane hangar' with tiny figures off in the distance, miles away.

(8) Other NDErs have reported seeing friends out-of-body with them who are, in reality, still alive and normally conscious. The Evergreen Study also recorded a clearly hallucinatory near-death experience after a major car accident:

Well, then I remember, not physical bodies but like holding hands, the two of us, up above the trees. It was a cloudy day, a little bit of clouds. And thinking here we go, we're going off into eternity... and then bingo, I snapped my eyes open and I looked over and he was staring at me [ellipsis original] (Lindley, Bryan, and Conley 110).

The authors of the study go on to write: "In this incident a woman had lost consciousness but her male companion had not. In the experience, she perceived the two of them in an out-of-body state, yet her friend never blacked out" (110).

https://infidels.org/library/modern/keit...crepancies

It's a simple fact, either NDEs are all real, or they're all hallucinatory. You don't get to say that some are real, while some are not. They are all the same type of event. They're either ALL real, or they're ALL false. You don't get to pick and choose and say that while a few are clearly hallucinatory, these others over here are clearly real. Since there are documented NDEs that are clearly hallucinatory, the only logical conclusion is that they are all hallucinatory. What you touted as evidence is actually nothing of the sort. Just a bunch of hallucinatory experiences.