“ "Science is only good for repeatable phenomena. And most of life, the most interesting parts, don’t repeat. So, science doesn’t recognize it. ” [Source: Television series, " Evil , Season 1, Pilot.]
Speaking of which, where’s Ani99?
Looks like not in the neighborhood since Oct ‘21.
There are plenty of records and academic studies about ‘near death experiences’ (NDE) where people being clinically dead describe what happened while they were dead. The question is how to interpret these records?
Was the person truly dead? Were the memories from the time she/he was clinically dead or from the moment when this person was dying or returned to life?
My own interpretation is that many of these experiences are caused by dying brains. I read that there is (often?) high brain activity just before and after death (seconds). This may cause some false memories.
Yet, there are cases where the person has been clinically dead for >10 minutes (no brain activity) and has described what happened during that time. The persons told that they were invisible observers outside the body, watching what the doctors and nurses were doing. It is difficult to explain these cases as false memories created by dying brains.
There are also cases which may be challenging to interpret within a narrow, ‘traditional’ christian framework but may tell about life after death.
I have been told that elderly and terminally sick patients often see dead relatives or friends within the last six months of their life, often close to death. They may talk with such a ‘visitor’ although nobody else sees the ‘visitor’. Seeing people that do not exist or other hallucinations is a side effect of some drugs. My mother saw how very realistic objects passed by her peripheral vision after a very minor stroke in the area of the brains that handle visual signals. It would be (too) easy to say that the ‘visitors’ close to death are just hallucinations. Yet, they seem to commonly appear before death although the person does not yet have problems in thinking, have not seen any hallucinations earlier and there is no changes in medication.
In some recorded cases, a small child have had memories of the life of another person died years before the child was born. The memories have been quite detailed and accurate but have usually faded as the person has aged. I watched an interview where one such person (already adult) described his feelings as strange, like there were two personalities within the same body. Difficult to interpret, could it be a dead personality getting to another body or some kind of ‘demon’ causing misleading memory transfers? I don’t know. Life is stranger than fiction.
Thanks for the transcripts. Although they are nice, I have to admit that I skipped most of it just because they were long. That is a problem in this kind of forums - few people have the time and interest to read long messages 
That’s not a problem for me; I don’t post to appeal to or to inform the masses.
Back to the topic …
Taking a break …
I can’t imagine how there could be objective evidence for life after death. I saw my father in the morgue drawer, he’d been there for several days, he looked stone cold dead with a particular autopsy signature visible, that could have been faked of course, a few days more and his horribly marred corpse, with the visible injuries that took two days to kill him, was incinerated. Apparently. I can think of scenarios that would be objective evidence for me, but that wouldn’t work for anyone else, any court. It could create a public mystery if he walked the earth again, if DNA samples were taken, but there would have to be sealed testimonies of things only I and my sister experienced, really deeply personal, unpleasant stuff. And no one could actually prove, if he walked the earth again, that he’d actually died, of course. Or the guy wasn’t a long lost son, or had been in suspended animation, or abducted by aliens and cruised around at 0.9c, or…
I arrived in Placerville, the day after my father’s death there, in the nursing home. I called the funeral home, the next day, and made arrangements for an inpromptu viewing, before his cremation. Later, I went to see my father’s corpse and say “Farewell”. Standing beside his body, covered up to his neck in the funeral home chapel, I viewed his mortal remains. And I heard his voice once more, as clear as my wife’s who is next me. He said: “I’m not there;” so I said: “Well then, what am I doing here?” And he answered: “I don’t know.” So I returned to my brother’s home without further ado.
On the other hand, I suppose a person would have to view the videos or read their transcripts in order to even begin to have a clue why I chose the title for this thread that I did.
I agree. As far as I know, this kind of cases have been studied and the results written in academic or medical journals or books. So there is more or less objective evidence of such cases.
If a person is very critical, these kind of reports do not turn their head. As someone said, they would not believe even if a dead person would come to them. I think that this kind of reaction tells more about the philosophy (/limited thinking) of the person than the unreliability of such reports.
It’s not about being critical. It’s about being real. Not deceiving yourself. Not making mere medical resuscitation anything more than it is. Life after life. There never has been and never will be objective evidence for life after death here below.
I agree wholeheartedly.
So, what is the limitation in thinking, you know the cognitive bias, in mere commonplace medical resuscitation not being objective evidence for life after death in the slightest, as nobody actually died.
Was Lazarus dead when Jesus called him from the grave? Or those who died but Jesus called them back to life before they were buried?
Some of the ‘NDE’ cases come close to the stories of Jesus calling people back to life. Lazarus was perhaps a longer time dead but the other cases were comparable to the modern stories of dead people coming back to life.
What the cases do not tell is what happens when someone has been dead for years. The dead-and-revived/resurrected (‘NDE’) cases tell about the first moments or hours after the death. Interesting but not the whole story.
We filter observations (data) through our personal way of interpreting things (basic assumptions or philosophy). When some observations do not match our previous thinking, we either have to deny the observations (‘they could not be dead’) or modify our interpretations. Sticking to the previous assumptions and philosophy no matter what the observations tell is limited thinking, IMHO.
Going through different cases has changed my thinking. Some cases have been such that I would have said ‘impossible’ if the documented evidence had not been convincing. Either some group managed to build up several cases of excellent forgery (conspiracy) or my previous thinking needed to chance. I concluded that I must modify my thinking because the data (documentation) did not fit my previous assumptions. That reflects a desire to seek the truth*, even if the truth is not exactly what I previously believed.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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