Yeah, that's what all doctors are, patronising jerks. No compassionate type among them, except for those who study NDE and come to survivalist conclusion, is that it?
Can't you manage to a bit less prickly - you know perfectly well that that is not a paraphrase of what Kamarling wrote! I really hoped that as a doctor you would make a useful contribution here. I mean, there must be something about this site that pulls you - I would never spend time on a Christian site - or indeed a Flat Earth site, and neither would you I imagine.
What I guess I am asking is what is your take on the issue of NDE's?
It's simply not possible to have an argument here, let alone win is, is it? All I did was to demonstrate the fallacy of Long's research, showing that asking more questions about the same experience does not necessarily lead to better and more conclusive results. Believe it or not, there are lots of doctors and scientists who ask questions in regards to spirituality.
Well I think most of us feel you are missing the point. Dr. Long's research provides us with a statistical breakdown of what people report in their NDE's. The rest is interpretation, but the raw statistics are valuable I think. We can all decide how to interpret the results - and I for one haven't rushed out to buy a Bible - but the raw data stands for itself - at least in a Western context. I too would like to see the cultural variation of NDE's given more prominence. If you know someone who has done research on a reasonable large group of NDE's (18 doesn't seem to cut it!) why not present it?
That's what I think of God. Along the lines of Hinduism and Buddhism. Everything is the manifestation of God, from every one of us (including Hitler) to the dirtiest toilet on the Planet. The only thing is that we lost the ability to see it, mostly due to our gift of thinking abstract thoughts that allow us to create false values and fantasise about how things should work. In this respect I think animals are much closer to God than humans: not thinking about it, just experiencing. Idealistic sort of thought, but I think you get my point.
Leaving God out of this, I think my personal tentative opinion - backed up by reports from NDE's - is that there is some sort of non-physical plane of existence which outshines what we have here on earth. Perhaps the physical plane is some sort of trial, or a bit like doing something in a simulator - and when you come out of it, the whole thing drops away - rather like finishing a computer game. You can imagine the conversation afterwards, "Harry you son of a bitch, you killed most of my family and then burned me in a pit! I'll try and get even with you next time we play, but come on, we need a beer!"
Of course this is something we have debated many times.
Why then is God love and not the rest of it - hate, envy, anger etc.? I think that the primal sin is classifying things as good and evil, and it is the source of all suffering. If we admit that God is everything we have to agree that the worst crimes of humanity are also the work of God. That's why I personally think that all emotions are human, and God is way above that.
Maybe for the reason I explained above.
SD - you manage to do something that is pretty hard - you get me defending religious ideas - or at least getting perilously close! Can't you understand, you are enumerating the reasons why most of us don't classify ourselves as religious!
The point for me is that consciousness itself seems very hard to explain physically, and NDE's, OBE's, Death Bed visions, ESP, precognition, etc seem to me to be the data that doesn't fit - rather like blurry fringes from a 2-slit experiment were the data that didn't fit around 1900.
David