Curious to know

[rexbeccarox]

Do you know what the N stands for, Rik?

I have seen smash repair shops turn a total wreck into a new car.
I stop wondering about life and death long time ago.
Now I know that everything is possible.

You didn't answer the question: do you know what the "N" stands for in "NDE"?

[emjay]

No, it wouldn't convince me of a god no matter who had had one. In my opinion it's just the hallucinations of a dying brain/some sort of lucid dream. In fact, again in my opinion, I think we're probably all going to have something like that happen to us when our time comes... the body shutting down depriving us of sensory input and driving experience inwards, and then the brain shutting down little by little, causing all sorts of weirdness.

[I Like Pumpkins]

I'd think they either had a hallucination or they were just trolling us.

[tjakey]

Many of the people I love most in this world are committed believers, including a Catholic Priest. Yet I remain skeptical to the point that “atheist” is as good a label for my world view as any. So, if someone I respected as an atheist had a NDE and converted to some kind of religious belief, I don't know that I would respect them any less. I would, in fact, be intrigued by their experience and interested in their interpretation of that experience. But it would remain their experience, not mine. Though none of the people I love have had a NDE they all claim real experiences with god. (I am the only one in the group who has ever been desperately close to being dead, and I don't have any recollection of the event at all.) Their experiences are also not my experiences.

That being said, I am an ex-christian fundamentalist; and have in my own history experiences of god. I interpret those experience differently now of course; but I don't pretend they never happened. They fit easily into the cosmos as I understand it, one without a god. A near death experience that changes someone's world view to one of faith fits into that cosmos as well.

[robvalue]

Well, it's a pretty clear "no". Sceptics aren't fond of the appeal to authority fallacy. No one has the authority to relay conclusions about undemonstrated phenomena, you see. But having a NDE doesn't imply anything magical happened at all.

Do you know what the N stands for, Rik?

I have seen smash repair shops turn a total wreck into a new car.
I stop wondering about life and death long time ago.
Now I know that everything is possible.

Wrong. That doesn't even start with N.

[Athene]

Incidentally, I had an NDE after I and several beachgoers got caught in a rip current, Rik. I lost consciousness and woke up being revived on a rescue raft. There was nothing that suggested an afterlife or a creator to me during my experience...and I was a theist at the time. Just a rapid, spontaneous recalling of early childhood events. Neurologists have theorized such "life flashes" to be the brain's best and last ditch attempt to "search" its memory for any data that could possibly prove useful towards survival; A way of downloading everything, in an effort to find anything. 

Even as a teenaged believer, I got that the bit of unusual brain activity I experienced was due to prolonged oxygen deprivation. At the time, I would have loved to have been able to tell people that there had been someone/something there or just beyond, but I couldn't.

Not without embellishing, or outright lying.

[KevinM1]

Do you know what the N stands for, Rik?

I have seen smash repair shops turn a total wreck into a new car.
I stop wondering about life and death long time ago.
Now I know that everything is possible.

Even you writing coherent paragraphs that aren't merely word salad and don't contain any emojis?

[Losty]

I have seen smash repair shops turn a total wreck into a new car.
I stop wondering about life and death long time ago.
Now I know that everything is possible.

Even you writing coherent paragraphs that aren't merely word salad and don't contain any emojis?

Ok don't get crazy now

[Angrboda]

NDEs are currently unexplained. A few more personal anecdotes wouldn't change that. I think you have a poor grasp of what constitutes evidence if you feel that the personal anecdote of a friend should change one's opinion on a matter of fact. A third of all NDEs do not involve near death experiences. In the AWARE study, out of something like 1500 cardiac arrests, only 100-150 survived to be interviewed. Of those, only 2-3 had awareness during their arrest. These are rare phenomena and not clearly understood yet. Drugs can induce powerful emotional experiences as well (ayahuasca, DMT) so it's not clear whether NDEs are a normal brain process or something else. What is known is that people appear to be able to have conscious experience in the absence of measurable brain activity. That's all. It doesn't prove that people are capable of having experiences in the absence of brain activity. There's a difference between measurable brain activity and a conclusion that there was no brain activity. Moreover, most NDEs weren't even monitored for brain activity, so the level of measurable brain activity in most NDEs is unknown.

NDEs are an interesting phenomena, but we simply don't know enough currently to offer them objective validity.

[madog]

If a friend of mine came back with an NDA I couldn't tell you anyway




NDA: Non-disclosure agreement