Tuesday, November 4, 2025

Hellacious Near-Death Experiences

Not all reported near-death experiences are positive.  They can be quite hellacious.  Some I have read of involve the individual appearing to be suspended in/above a terrifying void against their will, in the physical clutches of malevolent entities, or being told by taunting observers that their earthly life was an illusion to toy with them.  Many sorts of things are logically possible, albeit unverifiable since their truth does not follow by logical necessity from anything that is demonstrably true, when it comes to near-death experiences and the afterlife.  Perhaps there is no afterlife for anyone and near-death experiences still occur as misleading mental constructs.  Perhaps only some people have an afterlife, or the afterlives for different people pertain to wildly different realms far beyond the stereotypical (and very unbiblical) ideas about heaven and hell.  Whether or not there is an afterlife, near-death experiences would not have to be anything more than private experiences while people are still biologically alive.

This post is not about presenting the differences between the real Biblical afterlives or intermediate state before the resurrection and the content of many near-death experiences.  It is also not about focusing on the insurmountable epistemological barriers to knowing if one's own or someone else's near-death experience is an illusion or actually allowed them to see an afterlife of one kind or another.  I want to emphasize here the logical possibility, since it does not contradict axioms and cannot be disproven, that many or all people who have near-death experiences are still biologically alive.  What would be the likely reason in this case as to why some people have hellacious experiences?  When there is terrible or fearful imagery, an individual might be having their perceptions filtered by personal fears about the afterlife, misconceptions about various religious philosophies they had unthinkingly accepted, or severe mental health struggles from before the experience.


In other words, the person would not be truly dead (including dead by Biblical standards, which is a state of unconsciousness [1]), but because of their very anxious or depressed mental condition, their final moments before resuscitation or a return to their sensory baseline are consumed by oppressive images.  If/when this is the case, a person would only be perceiving purely mental imagery or misperceiving external, material stimuli in a way that might make it seem to them like they have entered a miserable afterlife.  If they are a non-rationalist, they might assume that this is precisely what has happened, when there are all sorts of possibilities about the nature of their experience that do not contradict logical axioms and yet are unverifiable due to human limitations.  Still, if there is an afterlife of torment, either immediate or after a period of soul sleep, it thankfully cannot be both moralistic and eternal.  This is a horrendous category of afterlife that no one needs to fear because it is logically impossible.

An afterlife of righteous, punitive torment could not last forever, since any kind of of eternal torture could only be far worse than or extremely disproportionate to any moral wrongdoing in a person's life.  More than this, an afterlife of righteous, punitive torment could not start right whenever a person dies and stretch on for all people involved until the same finite ending point, as with the evangelical idea of torment in Sheol.  This would be disproportionate, but not in the same way as eternal torture: it would mean that the point on the historical timeline when a person dies dictates how long they suffer.  Both of these are irrational because of their contradictions, though one is far worse than the other.  No one has to fear in their moments before death, whether they are about to face eternal soul oblivion, temporary soul sleep, or an immediate afterlife, the prospect of facing eternal torture meted out by a "rational" and "righteous" entity.  This is utterly impossible!


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