An alternative to atheist thought

[Succubus]

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.

Testimonies are just that, testimonies/anecdotes no matter how much of it there is it amounts to nothing. The plural of anecdote is not data. Thousands of people, are you sure of this figure? Whenever these yarns crop up they tend to be the same old stories that have been picked apart for years, indeed do a search of this forum and you'll find plenty, all of which have been dismissed for various reasons. They cannot be replicated, we have no idea what protocols were used, there is no possible mechanism and finally the people who promote this nonsense usually have an agenda, ie, religious claptrap.

[Whateverist]

OP, while you claim not to be religious you certainly share the same delusional thoughts/thought patterns with the religious. 

Do you understand that your delusions only appear significant and meaningful to you? 

You state "I believe my concept is rooted in facts.". A fact should be readily apparent, demonstrable and agreed upon by all people, or at least a majority. Based on the posts so far it does not appear that you've supported that your view(s) are factual. Can you supply me with objective facts to support your view(s)? How about we take them one at a time for discussion sake.

I wonder if his reason for 'believing his concept is rooted in facts' has more to do with the facts or more to do with his druthers?

[Cyberman]

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.

No, that's a shifting of the burden of proof. The question is, how do you explain them? And what is the relevance to your point?

[JackRussell]

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.

No, that's a shifting of the burden of proof. The question is, how do you explain them? And what is the relevance to your point?

They were close to death and an oxygen starved brain cycling impurities due to a weakened system gave them strange experiences. I have had Lithium poisoning 3 times, similar experience.

[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.

[Cyberman]

Yes, I've also had hallucinations brought on by medication and overtiredness. I've also experienced shock due to blood loss, which interestingly induced no hallucinations of any kind.

The thing is, though, nobody is required to offer up alternative explanations for any event under discussion, regardless of whether any such exists. One time this guy started telling me about some shit to do with angels or something, and wanted me to explain it away. I told him why I don't play those games.

[Astonished]

You say there's nothing wrong in the 'normal' sense but when you demonstrate that you have such a fundamental misunderstanding of facts that my 7-year-old self would be embarrassed to witness, that gives us reason to doubt. Do you not understand the difference between an assertion and actual evidence of that assertion?

You're also playing with definitions, a trademark of the religious. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...please, just stop insulting our intelligence, kid.

I'm sorry. I assure you, no offense was ever meant by anything I said.

I said "normal standards" to avoid specifying that I am OK emotionally, financially, in family relationships, health-wise, etc; but not OK by the standards I postulated in my writings.

I'm not sure what you mean with your question, but I think I can tell the difference between an assertion and it's evidence. I rely on the evidence and advise everyone to do the same. The assertions I make are my best attempt (I know they are lacking, but that's the best I can do for now) to describe the reality I perceive (my interpretation of the evidence that  I experience). I don't want to convince anybody of anything. I just hope people will start seeing things for what they are, and will make their own deliberate decisions regarding what to do with their reality.

You neglected to mention psychologically, and that's where the primary issue that you're causing to be suspect lies. This woo-crap you're spouting, religiously based or not, is evidence of a tremendously unhealthy mind. I was not exaggerating that my preadolescent self would think you were crazy or stupid based on what you're claiming here. Since you're claiming you're not religious (and I'll uncharacteristically take you at your word here) then I can't also assume that some form of indoctrination is what made you this way (although it's possible it did, and you escaped whatever form it took and just latched onto something else because of all the damage it did to your psyche) so whether you've just got some defect making you predisposed to believe in utter nonsense or you've been trained like a seal, it's very, very clear that something is not right upstairs.

Your denial of reality notwithstanding, it comes across as enormously condescending when you intransigently claim you've got the right answer and offer spurious 'reasons' for why that is so. You are pretty far behind on your apologies for this disrespect and seem to have only superficial remorse without actually understanding the nature of what you're saying that is so irritating and insulting.

You should really stop, demolish this whole inane hypothesis, go back to the beginning, and try to build it back up. When you realize you fail to do so, you'll be ready to sit at the adults' table. Until then, go stand in the corner while the seven-year-olds tell you you're too little to play with them.

[BlindedWantsToSee]

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.

No, that's a shifting of the burden of proof. The question is, how do you explain them? And what is the relevance to your point?

I have done research on the subject, and the evidence I have seen convinced me that indeed our awareness survives the death of our bodies, meaning the body is completely dead for several minutes before it is revived, but the person is self aware and perceives his/her surroundings while his/her body was dead (had no pulse and no brain activity). Then they were resuscitated, and they gave account of what they did, saw, and heard while their bodies were dead. There are many many documented cases of this phenomena. It seems legit enough to me.

To me this means that we are all very likely to have to make decisions after our bodies die. I think we will do better for ourselves if we are prepared to make those decisions when the time comes to make them. That's the relevance.

But, you know, even if we don't exist at all after our bodies die, we do exist now. I mean we have feelings, thoughts, wants, hopes, concepts, ideas, dreams, etc. Whether these things I just listed are material or non-material is irrelevant. The fact is we experience them. I am offering an alternative explanation of why our experiences, and those of all other people/life on the planet, are the way they are. I posted my interpretation of everything I've learned in my life, taken as a whole unit or system. The uni-verse is one whole thing...

[Cyberman]

What research was this? What evidence? Fine if it convinced you, but you need to do more than just say it if you want to use it to support your position.

[JackRussell]

Words good, but evidence baby!!!

WTF is non-material?

Our consciousness is an emergent property of a physical brain. Electro chemical activity. Post mortem nada.

Makes me happy coz I can enjoy being a decent human being and not worry about the unsaved portion of my skepticism.

Death is an earlier form of the heat death of the universe.

Entropy baby, no bullshit required.

Have fun and try to be decent.