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Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world

Near-death experiences and "coming back" from death, a rant (pawb.social)

submitted 1 week ago by chosensilence@pawb.social to c/atheism@lemmy.world

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

this is something that really bothers me. i'm wondering if others have the same annoyance:

whenever i hear about people who supposedly died and came back and reported seeing and experiencing an afterlife, all i can think about is how death is irreversible. quite literally nobody has ever died and then resurrected. reanimation hasn't been observed a single time throughout all of human history. what happened instead is they were actively dying and their brain was reacting to shutting down. "of course," you say reading this. but so many people accept the premise that this is remotely possible by not rejecting it immediately and that is the most frustrating part about all of this.

it confirms and demonstrates to me that humans are resistant to being fundamentally challenged even in the face of absolute certainty. most things in the universe are not absolutely known, but death is the rare, and perhaps only, exception. death is permanent in its natural occurrence. there is no 99.9% of the time, there aren't any other ways to be dead (literal death), every single living thing will die. period. ...unless humans figure something out.

so yeah it bugs me when people even entertain the idea that there's something worth discussing or listening to regarding claims of "coming back from death." like there are skeptics and people who are willing to listen to these assertions. ...why? there is, literally, no chance they are describing an existence after death. death can't be reversed. when a person appears clinically dead and then regains consciousness, guess what, they weren't dead regardless of medical technology saying they were lol. we just aren't able to detect the smallest indications of life.

/rant

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[–] CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Death isn’t an abstract concept or religious rite, it’s a very real legal state that a human can be in, with a formal definition is something that has been minutely debated through centuries of medicine, law, and legislation. It has very real effects on humans, like who is allowed to make legal decisions on behalf of the human in question, or where that human’s body is allowed to be. To me, it seems you have decided that you have a new standard for death you would like to propose that better aligns with your religious beliefs, but I think it would be impractical to reorganize hospitals, law offices, courts, case law, medical research and so on because it advances your point that death is final.

And candidly, I think it is much more challenging to a theistic worldview to argue that raising people from the dead isn’t miraculous because it coming back from the dead happens quite often, than it is to argue that it isn’t miraculous because it doesn’t ever happen. The Fatimah Sun miracle doesn’t matter, because that’s what everyone experiences when they stare at the sun too long; you just shouldn’t do it because it’s super bad for you.

Being an atheist means choosing your beliefs as a logical extension of reality as we observe it, rather than choosing a set of beliefs and reinterpreting reality to match our beliefs. The science says people die and come back to life. We should update our beliefs to match that.

[–] chosensilence@pawb.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

what the actual hell are you talking about lol

you are comparing the legal and medical definition of death to the actual biological experience of death. i know a formal definition is challenging to establish, do you know why?????? because we can't 100% guarantee death has occurred when we've determined it has happened. the physical cessation of all function is not reversible nor has it ever been documented to be such, and the Lazarus effect does not establish or even suggest that. the study you are citing uses phrasings like "after death" and "upon death" because it's clinically relevant. they were clinically dead, not biologically. science is unable to guarantee death has occurred when physical cessation is observed.