Ex-atheist describes near-death experience

Standard-Times ^ | 1/31/2004 | LINDA ANDRADE RODRIGUES

[aruanan]

The story is bogus. We know there is no supernatural, because it does not show up on instruments. So it's not there. He was on drugs, and hallucinated.

It showed up on the human instrument. Love, honor, mercy, courage, honesty, and self-sacrifice don't show up on instruments designed to measure force or quantity, but they're still perceptible, their measure is taken by experience, and they lie behind the greatest and most forceful events in history.

[plain talk]

bump for later read

[jwalsh07]

By how credulous it makes an ordinary person?

Is the credulousscope akin to the old fashioned logic analyzer?

[EggsAckley]

(( ? ))

[Fiddlstix]

Bump

[gcruse]

Off topic completely, but when I was in radio school in the Navy, I saw a Flash Gordon serial episode in the base theater. Flash was communicating on what they called a skilliascope. It output morse code at maybe one character very two seconds.

Of course, Flash read the message while it came in at the speed of normal speech, producing probably 20 words in 10 seconds.

The audience of ditty-catchers laughed in unison.

[Vinnie]

Eternity means a looong time. Not being a risk taker, I think I'll play it safe.

But that's just me. If you know better, go for it.

[Ichneumon]

Having a tale like that would sure be a great way to have a career giving speeches and interviews and selling books (only $16.95, operators are standing by) and so on, especially if the story was really detailed and dramatic and you could work up some stage emotion when you tell the story.

Good thing that Howard Storm is the real McCoy, since it wouldn't be hard for a huckster to invent a tale tale in order to milk people hungry for faith affirmations, eh?

[adam_az]

"I have had oxygen deprivation and I never had any visions. Is there any study that shows at what levels of oxygen deprivation one might "see" things? Any data on those who have been strangled, put in a sleeper hold or drowned?"

Actually, quite a bit. I only googled for one, but I'm sure a smart guy like you can find more. That's assuming you are more interested in a scientific answer than trolling people who don't have your religious beleifs.

When mountain climbing, hypoxia causes hallucinations, for example.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/everest/exposure/hackett.html

"I could share some of my own experiences with this kind of hypoxia on Everest. One time, when I was sleeping in my tent and ran out of oxygen during the night at about 25,000 feet, I had this most vivid hallucination that John West, our expedition leader, had come up to the camp with a full bottle of oxygen, with no regulator on it. He had put it inside the tent and just opened it and filled the whole tent with oxygen. I was very grateful for him. I felt better right away. And the next morning, I was trying to figure out where the bottle was and how he had gotten up there in the middle of the night."

"It dawned on me that obviously this was a hallucination and I knew I wasn't dreaming because it was so incredibly vivid."


Conclusion: John West is really god! duh.

[adam_az]

"It showed up on the human instrument. Love, honor, mercy, courage, honesty, and self-sacrifice don't show up on instruments designed to measure force or quantity, but they're still perceptible, their measure is taken by experience, and they lie behind the greatest and most forceful events in history."

They are also SUBJECTIVE AND FICKLE...

Not exactly qualities you probably had in mind for your diety of choice, eh?

[missyme]

Obviously your very comfortable living in death (A blank state) for how many years? oh eternity....

[missyme]

So how do you vision your death for eternity...?

[Ichneumon]

That's not gravity being measured. That is the effect of what we call gravity on a particular mass, registering the amount of mutual attraction using units that we came up with many years ago. It doesn't show "gravity".

And just how is that different from any other measuring device? Show me a meter that *directly* measures electric current, for example, instead of the current's effect on something which is then used to cause an indication on the meter.

[NordP]

If this story helps even just ONE person - I don't care if it's true, factual, funny to some, good, bad, or anything inbetween...it is worth hearing.

[jwalsh07]

:-}

[ThinkDifferent]

Obviously your very comfortable living in death (A blank state) for how many years? oh eternity....

Appeal to consequences.

[adam_az]

""The Afterlife Experiments" by Gary Schwartz is a decent book to read inasmuch as it's the first to examine the issue of consciousness after death in under strict scientific protocols."

a must read

"A Critique of Schwartz et al.'s After-Death Communication Studies"

http://www.csicop.org/si/2001-11/mediums.html

Schwartz, Russek, Nelson, and Barentsen (2001) recently reported two studies in which mediums appeared to be able to produce accurate information about the deceased under conditions that the authors believed "eliminate the factors of fraud, error, and statistical coincidence." Their studies were widely reported in the media as scientific proof of life after death (e.g., Matthews 2001; Chapman 2001). This paper describes some of the methodological problems associated with the Schwartz et al. studies and outlines how these problems can be overcome in future research.

(excepted, link above for full article)

[Ichneumon]

Obviously your very comfortable living in death (A blank state) for how many years? oh eternity....

"Obviously your [sic] very comfortable" making wild (and incorrect) guesses about the condition of my life based on extremely scant evidence.

[adam_az]

"So how do you vision your death for eternity...?"

I generally don't think it's worth speculating about, to be honest, though I suspect death for eternity is very, very uneventful, not counting the process of decay and so on.