Near-Death Experiences (Part Four)

What does or does not logically follow from a given idea is often incredibly easy to discover once a person has simply thought of the concept.  Nothing is self-evident besides the fundamental, inherent truth of logical axioms and that one exists as a conscious being (though this is only knowable through logic like all else, it is also self-evident because to deny or doubt it, one must rely on it), but it is not especially difficult to realize the logical necessity and absolute certainty of what must or must not be true if a specific thing is correct, even if someone is only discovering some of the relevant truths.  The real roadblock for people who look past assumptions, emotionalism, and laziness is that there are unavoidable epistemological limitations like the inability to know if what one is looking at is really there.

Multiple epistemological limitations prevent us from discovering which logically possible post-mortem state--oblivion of consciousness or any of the logically possible afterlives--is actually there.  There is the inability to know the future, there is the inability to know if most of one's sensory experiences connect with anything outside of one's immaterial mind at all, and there is the inability to glimpse to the other side, if there is one (and even if God or some other supernatural being showed this to oneself, limitations would prevent knowledge of whether this vision is more than a hallucination).  There is also the limitation of memory.  If I died and came back to life, whatever the means of death, I might or might not remember an experience in an afterlife.  If I do, the memories could be false, and if I do not, it would likewise not follow that there is not an afterlife.

For this reason, even if someone was to actually die, be revived, and remember no sort of near-death experience, it would of course not be true by necessity that there is no afterlife.  An afterlife might also await some people and not others, and this person could be one of those who will not receive a continuation of their consciousness in any form.  As unheard of as this is in most mainstream contemplation of the afterlife, it is logically possible.  There is also another possibility.  Like the Bible teaches, its theology very likely true even where its tenets could not possibly be false (for example, that there is an uncaused cause), it could also be the case that people die, enter a period of nonexistence or unconscious sleep of the soul, and then are resurrected at a future time.

Yes, no one is in heaven or hell right now according to the Bible, and Sheol, where it says we all go in the meantime, is not a dimension where we experience anything at all.  All of our very perception, Ecclesiastes (9:5-10), Job (3:11-19), Psalms (88:10-12) and other Biblical books say, ceases to exist until God resurrects our bodies.  The resurrection of the righteous is at the return of Jesus (John 14:1-3, Revelation 20:4-6, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18), and that of the wicked after Satan is thrown into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:10-15).  While people could still have misleading near-death experiences even if Christianity is true, as it probably is in light of hordes of historical evidences, those who have been medically revived might report they have experienced nothing when they died because they were not yet resurrected.  Inversely, those who have reported seeing something like the Biblical New Jerusalem could have spent moments perceiving what things would be like after their resurrection, though they were not in existence in all the time that passed before that.

In Sheol, where the righteous and wicked alike "sleep" in oblivion or unconsciousness, there is no joy, longing, anticipation, anger, sadness, hatred, or fear because there is no conscious awareness at all.  There is not even recognition of the only self-evident necessary truths that even Yahweh's existence hinges upon.  If Christianity is true, and once again, it very likely is, then the absence of near-death experiences for certain people who died and were revived could simply be because there is nothing that can be experienced when one is in the soul oblivion/sleep of Sheol.  Christianity is not true by logical necessity in itself because it could be or have been true that it is false wherever it is not logically necessary.  Either option is consistent with the truth of axioms.  However, it almost certainly is as far as evidence suggests, and it promises literal oblivion or sleep before resurrection to eternal life or annihilation of the soul (Daniel 12:2, John 3:16).