Comment Re:Goes both ways... (Score 1) 645
I just wanted to respond to your post. I don't want to argue, and I really have no agenda: believe what you will. But let me ask a few questions: Do you believe that there is any afterlife at all? Or does our consciousness vanish into nothingness? Do you believe that you have a soul or a spirit? Is this human body you occupy just a vessel? A kind of avatar with a connection to somewhere else? Or is this just an elaborate biological mechanism that has somehow created for itself a sense of "you"-ness?
There is something I have noticed and wrestle with personally. I see evidence for an afterlife. I have been told too many stories and heard too many accounts of people with near-death experiences, and the strange thing about it is that they are pretty much consistent among those that have them at all. In other words, I don't hear that this person had an awakening to a 7th dimension where we eat colors and see sounds, and then this person over here has an experience where they awaken in a world of spaghetti. No, they all involve waking up, seeing themselves from out of their body, usually floating above the room and describing what others are doing in the room, there's usually a tunnel of some type, there is usually a feeling of engulfing surrounding love and belonging, bright light that seems to be God or some deity, and there is a sense of familiarity and welcomeness. They all seem to say that when this happens, it as if they are awakening from a dream: as if this life we are in was the dream and they are now awake and in the true life; it seems that clear to them.
Now, when I say I've been told stories, I mean to me personally. These have been people I knew, trusted, who I don't believe have an agenda, and in many cases these experiences defy or contradict what they know from the bible. This is over the course of 30 years, between people of different walks of life and whom have never met each other and certainly never corroborated their stories.
Well this bothers me a little bit. To be atheist, one would technically have to believe in no greater power, no afterlife. But yet, here sits this evidence staring me in the face.
What do you make of it? Your thoughts.