this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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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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[–] chosensilence@pawb.social 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

death is the cessation of all biological function. this process leads to a permanent and irreversible nonexistence.

[–] Zexks@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

So everycell or 1 cell or 500000 cells. What about the microbiome. How many spe iese of bacteria must remain or be gone. No what you have there is not a measurable metric on the human body.

[–] chosensilence@pawb.social 0 points 5 days ago (2 children)

we don’t know. i am not stating otherwise. something makes clinical death possible and it mimics death in a detectable sense. but the process of death reaches an irreversible point where total functionality ceases.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

You may also be fighting history. We have definitions of death, and have had them throughout all history. But now we understand death is a process, and we are sometimes able to Intervene, even when people have passed the milestones historically associated with irreversible death.

Or you’re fighting practicality. You can detect whether or not a heart is beating, even without technology, and that is usually part of the death process. But medical technology will continue to improve, leading to possible interventions later in the process. You have a moving target. How can you even tell when all cells are finally irreversiblydead? This logic leads to the silly extrapolation of not being dead until after you’re cremated

[–] chosensilence@pawb.social 2 points 5 days ago

i don’t know when they’re irreversibly dead lol. that’s the point. we don’t know how to guarantee death has occurred. this doesn’t mean it isn’t a moment in the process, it means we can’t detect when it happens. irreversible biological death has never been reversed, period.

[–] Zexks@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Its not a matter of knowing. Its a definition of metrics. Youre not stating metrics. Youre stating an unfounded opinion based on intuition. Who says its irriversable. Just becuse we dont know how doesnt mean something is impossible.

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

it is observed as irreversible. i don’t feel the need to hold off speaking in absolutes here.