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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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[–] Hoimo@ani.social 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, but see, you're just arguing definitions again. If it's irreversible by definition, then of course it's impossible to get back from it. But for all we know (and can detect), it's possible to be in a state that is indistinguishable from "true death" (at least for a moment) and return to a state of life. So you can't say with absolute certainty that those people weren't truly dead, you can only argue after the fact based on your definition of "true death".

And the same with "afterlife": if they weren't "truly dead" they couldn't be in the afterlife when it's defined as "the place you're in when you're truly dead", but the afterlife would be completely unfalsifiable by that definition anyway, so who cares. They were in some state indistinguishable from death and still experienced something, call it what you want.

Again, I'm not saying NDEs prove the existence of heaven or whatever, but they are experiences people have when they're super-duper close to death and that's interesting. Is it the desperate hallucinations of dying neurons? Still interesting. So when you ask "why listen to these people when they're clearly making shit up", I answer "you can also make shit up if you're clinically dead for a minute, I still want to hear it".

[–] chosensilence@pawb.social 1 points 5 days ago

it isn't irreversible by definition. i am stating it is irreversible. death is the cessation of all biological function and this has never been reversed in human history.

it's possible to be in a state that is indistinguishable from "true death"

yes, and that would be.. a state, not death. indistinguishable is describing our ability to detect a difference, not the mechanics being absolutely identical. they are still separate processes.

i'll give you that on "afterlife." i have a point to make but it might just be something that annoys me personally and not worth getting into lol.