Friday, June 20, 2025

Positive And Negative Near-Death Experiences

If Christianity turns out to not be true, then if there is an afterlife, eventual or immediate (the Bible's is not immediate at all but would be still experienced as if it immediately came about [1]), many other logically possible dimensions or lives might be waiting instead of a hell that kills sinners (2 Peter 2:6) and a heaven of eternal bliss.  If the majority of reported near-death experiences actually are reflective of real afterlives in our futures, then it would seem very likely that whatever afterlife exists would be positive.  Many alleged near-death experiences, for all the sensationalist stories of torment, are overwhelmingly positive or at a minimum not hellacious.

Whether people claim to have felt a sense of unity with God and the cosmos, to have been welcomed by dead family members, or to have tasted love and relaxation greater than what they had previously experienced, much of what is described by people who assert they glimpsed an afterlife is rather joyous or liberating.  Even if these accounts are accurate, it remains possible that some people, perhaps even a quiet majority, hold back their own accounts, real or alleged, because their experiences were not those of existential peace, supposed reunion with loved ones, or interaction with benevolent spiritual entities.  Some of them are far worse than the real Biblical hell would be if it is real or exceed the torments of even fictional hells.

Maybe they recall--since the events memories attest to are not verifiable though the memories exist within one's mind, so they might be recalling false memories--being attacked or belittled by hostile beings or feeling terror and confusion over bizarre surroundings.  If they do remember seeing or feeling things closer to the hells of (what is hopefully) fiction or worse, then they might not be eager to dwell on such things or subject themselves to potential mockery by other people.  Just as various traumatic experiences in this life, like sexual assault, might go intentionally unreported in an effort to minimize psychological pain, not everyone who remembers undergoing a distressing NDE would want to contemplate or share what is in their mind, although very little could be more philosophically important than what kind of afterlife/afterlives there is/are if one indeed exists.

The sheer isolation such a person might grapple with in expecting assumptions, dismissal, or outright malice from other people just for stating what according to them seemed to have happened could be devastating.  Depending on what a person hypothetically sees between death and resuscitation, they might have very gruesome imagery embedded in their consciousness, and yet people could remain silent in life about something far less terrible, such as something that merely embarrassed them.  It does not logically follow by necessity that there is an afterlife though there is an uncaused cause and though it is possible for consciousness or both the mind and body to live again after death (none of this contradicts axioms).

It also does not logically follow from people having varying near-death experiences that they are all or almost all in error.  An afterlife would not have to be the same or particularly similar for everyone.  As long as they do not contradict logical axioms like the objective necessity of one concept following or not following from another, many different afterlives could exist.  Overlap and disparity between various accounts of NDEs does not prove that they are false, and the numerous positive anecdotes do not necessitate that the afterlife would have to be positive.  There could be a great many distinctively negative NDEs that were either mentally blocked from memory afterward or that people remain silent about out of penetrating fear.  Thankfully, even this would not make it logically necessary that there is an afterlife of terror, but it is possible.

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