NOM

I am really into near death experiences, I have read many books and watched many videos concerning them . The one thing I noticed in all the different accounts/experiences is that God, Jesus or a supreme being never asks the person that has just died what religion were you on earth ? This really struck me as significant!!! The one thing that was common was a life review and how you treated others during your lifetime. So my takeaway from this is that your religion doesn't matter at all ( I still believe in basic Christianity) but what does matter is did you try and be a good and decent person and did you treat others with kindness and compassion? I think God is much more understanding of our individual circumstances than we realize. Things like the word of wisdom or did you partake of the sacrament with your right or left hand is just a bunch of man made bullshit that has no value !!! Thoughts?????...

I've always found NDE comforting because of the themes of love and unconditional peace people describe.

If you enjoy reading them, the psychoanalyst Jung had one that is also interesting and doesn't invoke God or Jesus but a higher energy.

A friend of mine is a nurse and she said she's seen some interesting things at death. In particular, that many people complain of heat or burning, rather than peace or seeing loved ones. The people who feel too warm while dying tend to be people who were really mean to hospital staff.. It sounds a little tropey but...

Mackman wrote: ↑

Sun May 16, 2021 8:56 am

( I still believe in basic Christianity) but what does matter is did you try and be a good and decent person and did you treat others with kindness and compassion? I think God is much more understanding of our individual circumstances than we realize. Things like the word of wisdom or did you partake of the sacrament with your right or left hand is just a bunch of man made.....

I think you are very close here.

I do think that God prefers that we avoid as many of the pitfalls of life as possible. No need to make a difficult journey even more troublesome. And they rob us of some of the sweeter experiences that life has to offer.

Also from another view, to immediately remove all of our difficulties would deprive us of the experiences that teach us the meaning of Eternal happiness.

The important thing is to look to God and live.

Palerider wrote: ↑

Sun May 16, 2021 9:48 am

The important thing is to look to God and live.

And just as importantly, don't fail to live because you're too worried about how God is judging you about things that don't matter.

Hagoth wrote: ↑

Sun May 16, 2021 10:43 am

Palerider wrote: ↑

Sun May 16, 2021 9:48 am

The important thing is to look to God and live.

And just as importantly, don't fail to live because you're too worried about how God is judging you about things that don't matter.

Doesn't that seem to be where the rub is for many people.....

Defining what matters to God and what doesn't.

I'm always surprised how they recognize god/jesus/angel. How would you know? How would they demonstrate it? What proof could there possibly be that an afterlife human could use to even hope to verify it?

Wounds in the hands/feet? How would you verify the source/age?

It's all so very much faith and a product of their expectations.

dogbite wrote: ↑

Sun May 16, 2021 12:20 pm

I'm always surprised how they recognize god/jesus/angel. How would you know? How would they demonstrate it? What proof could there possibly be that an afterlife human could use to even hope to verify it?

Wounds in the hands/feet? How would you verify the source/age?

It's all so very much faith and a product of their expectations.

This might be difficult to understand but a disembodied individual's ability to "comprehend" intelligence that is freely available in the afterlife is beyond our comprehension. Introductions and verifications would seem trivial compared to the experience at hand.

You're thinking like a mortal/human.

Like i said, it's very much faith. Because there isn't any evidence it is so.

dogbite wrote: ↑

Sun May 16, 2021 2:03 pm

Like i said, it's very much faith. Because there isn't any evidence it is so.

Perhaps not for you. But there might be plenty for those who have experienced such things.

Subjective experience is not evidence.

What I'd like to know:

Does a Christian ever meet Allah?

Does a Muslim ever meet Jesucristo? (I guess that would be a Spanish speaking Muslim, eh?)

Has anyone of any belief system ever met SATAN and returned to tell the tale? Good ol' Stan an integral part of many belief systems, hasn't a "bad" person ever had a NDE and met the evil one?

dogbite wrote: ↑

Sun May 16, 2021 5:41 pm

Subjective experience is not evidence.

Not evidence for you. Correct.

Its indsinguishable from a Mormon Testimony. If I accept one, there is no empirical basis for rejecting the other, or any other claim. Even though they make contradictory claims.

dogbite wrote: ↑

Sun May 16, 2021 5:41 pm

Subjective experience is not evidence.

That is true. These experiences are real to the experiencer, as in they really experienced it. The question is what "it" is.

I see a big difference between people who have a subjective experience and gain personal insight from it (e.g. my friend who claims to have met Jesus in a NDE) and someone who uses it as a platform to tell other people how they should live their lives, like making sacrifices for the experiencer's cause (e.g. Joseph Smith) or someone who leverages it into a money-making venture (e.g. Betty Eddy)

The personal experiencer has their own takeaway and it doesn't really matter what someone else thinks of it, or ultimately, whether or not it is objectively true. It's their experience. The followers of a "prophet" are required to make it real through a leap of faith and endless apologetics, even though it is no more empirically provable than the personal experience.

My friend's Jesus experience actually caused her to stop attending church regularly and gave her permission to release herself from her callings and related anxieties. Her life got much better as a result. Either Jesus or some part of her own brain told her what she needed to know. Her interpretation of what happened to her that day is certainly different than mine but, literal or not, it was a very positive thing for her and those around her.

dogbite wrote: ↑

Sun May 16, 2021 12:20 pm

I'm always surprised how they recognize god/jesus/angel. How would you know? How would they demonstrate it? What proof could there possibly be that an afterlife human could use to even hope to verify it?

Wounds in the hands/feet? How would you verify the source/age?

It's all so very much faith and a product of their expectations.

I doubt these would be significant concerns for a person experiencing a NDE. If NDE have anything in common with powerful trips using entheogens such as psilocybin, Mescaline, DMT etc, and there is evidence that they do, then applying our normal reasoning, logic, and the laws of nature as we understand them would feel rather silly to someone who has had a profound, life changing experience.

I’ve never had a NDE. But I’ve had experiences on psychedelics that make my normal waking life and my regular ability to perceive and understand the world seem like a cheap feeble imitation in comparison. Experiences that make normal life feel like a cartoon animation while the other is like watching Planet Earth in 5k. In these states or “realms” you don’t need to see or hear to know. You know by some stronger deeper way that doesn’t map onto normal waking life.

Now those experiences were are all just taking place in my mind. But then again so is normal life.

From my reading of NDE, and the several close friends who have shared one with me, those who identify a being as Jesus or an angel are just trying to put words to what happened. No where have I heard anyone with a believable NDE say that the being told them he was Jesus, or identified him/herself in any way. So, when they try to explain who it was, they put in an identity. Sort of like they are trying to understand it themselves and the best they can do is to say “that person HAS to be Jesus.” So that is how they explain it to others. It could also be that they felt that the being they met just had to be Allah because nobody else would work to be that being. But the being never identified themselves as “Jesus” or anybody else. Most NDE don’t even try to put a name on the person, just a “being” or “being of light” or an intelligence of some kind.

In my personal experience, the “intelligence” doesn’t identify themselves in any way. Could be a guardian angel, or Jesus, or my subconscious or whatever. It just is.

Now, there are fakers who are trying to sell books or convert people to their religion. These people lack the humility of genuine NDE, and you don’t have to listen to them long before you start to feel that they are selling something. Parents of some of the kids who told of NDE come across this way. And some have even had their child grow up and claim that the parents were the ones who claimed it was Jesus or in some way disavow what the parents were claiming in order to sell books or make themselves sound important. And the NDE in most of the “selling something” cases just doesn’t fit the standard pattern in some ways.

The only times I have believed someone’s NDE when they claim to recognize people is when they knew the person in life, usually a close family member. They just quietly recognized the person without the person saying who they were/are. Even when they meet someone they don’t know, here again, the person doesn’t say, “I am your grandmother that you never met in life.” But the person with the NDE would later see a picture and that was the person in the NDE.

Even one friend who met her son who died as a baby. The young man didn’t say, “I am Tom who died as a baby.” He just said, “Mom, I want you to stop grieving for me. I am happy.” And she recognized him as her son all grown up, because he looked so much like her other children and mostly she just “knew.”

Lucidity and Alas are touching on my bigger point. What's going on in our heads is not a very reliable system of reality. We've all been tricked by our senses, Hearing and seeing things incorrectly. It's a highly lossy model running on weak inputs in a biological kludge of conscoiusness. We need independent external sources to help verify and establish facts.

I don't dispute they had an experience. It's the unfounded jump to meaning and meaning as deriving to real facts that I object to. That logic chain is beyond flawed.

dogbite wrote: ↑

Tue May 18, 2021 10:29 am

It's the unfounded jump to meaning and meaning as deriving to real facts that I object to. That logic chain is beyond flawed.

I agree with this dogbite!

Red Ryder wrote: ↑

Tue May 18, 2021 11:06 am

dogbite wrote: ↑

Tue May 18, 2021 10:29 am

It's the unfounded jump to meaning and meaning as deriving to real facts that I object to. That logic chain is beyond flawed.

I agree with this dogbite!

I agree with dogbite also as far as establishing external reality. But I also agree with Dumbledoor with Harry’s experience at the train station when Harry was temporary dead and Dumbledoor was dead. When Harry asks if it is real or all in his head and Dumbledoor says that it being all in his head doesn’t make it not real. That experience at the train station taught Harry some things that helped explain his life. You could say Dumbledoor explained the things, or that Harry’s subcounsious taught him, or whatever. What he learned was real and necessary. Something being all in your head doesn’t make it not real. When it comes down to it, every experience we have is all in our head. Everything we experience comes through our perception, so it is not real, but all in our head. This is why witnesses can give such unrelated descriptions of the same event. What happened to one person is all in their head and what happens to the other is all in their head. Everything we experience is all in our head, so why is the conversation with Dumbledoor, after he is dead, any different than the other conversations they had? Being all in his head doesn’t make it “not real” to Harry. It might be “not real to Hermiony, but to Harry, it was just as real as anything else.

alas wrote: ↑

Tue May 18, 2021 9:58 am

No where have I heard anyone with a believable NDE say that the being told them he was Jesus, or identified him/herself in any way.

That is an interesting point. My friend had no doubts that the person she met was Jesus. In fact, she says they sat together in a garden and had a long discussion with specific questions and answers. So whatever happened, the construct her mind created was THE Jesus as far as she was concerned. The other interesting thing that really surprised her was that there were winged baby cherubs flitting around.