Author of the book What Happens When We Die?, Dr. Sam Parnia has conducted extensive research into the near death experience. Together with Dr. Pim van Lommel and Dr. Peter Fenwick, Parnia has studied patients who suffered from cardiac arrest and experienced clinical death in an attempt to scientifically obtain data about and study NDEs. Dr. Parnia said, "If you look through science what's amazing is the things that any group of scientists often believe has been completely black-and-white and completely correct -- if you look 50 years later, most if not all of them have been changed. And I think with this subject [the near death experience] as well, in the future we will find actually mind may be a separate scientific entity and can continue functioning after the end of life when the brain stops working. That will have huge implications for all of mankind, there's no doubt about it. It will revolutionize our old way of thinking and open up a whole new field of science that has as of yet been undiscovered." Speaking of "undiscovered" things that science cannot explain... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qX0zBUYLFs Vicki Noratuk was scared and confused. She could see the emergency room doctors working diligently to save their patient, badly injured in a car accident. She heard them say, "We can't bring her back" several times. She watched as the "crash cart" was brought in to try and save the body on the table. Vicki struggled to grasp what was happening. She couldn't believe what she was seeing. She couldn't believe she was seeing. Vicki explains, "I've … [Read more...]
Are NDE accounts all full of Malarkey?
Critics of my nonfiction work are well aware that I believe that some NDE accounts may hold key evidence which could settle for good the question of whether our consciousness ceases to exist the same moment our physical brain/body dies. That answer would seem to be "no." Corroborated veridical NDE perceptions, refers to new memories created by the individual in question while they were in a documented medical state of emergency which might be most accurately described as "somewhat" near death. To be honest, I'm not really interested in generic claims of an NDE or knowing every story behind every claim. In fact, there is only one aspect of any potential NDE claim that actually intrigues me at this point. I've seen and heard enough of them about heaven to believe in the possibility that heaven exists. I've also seen and heard enough NDEs that claimed to have occurred in hell to accept that possibility as well. The fact that NDEs can result in either heaven or hell suggests that the experience is not dismissible as a euphoric hallucination caused by chemical reactions in a dying brain. It doesn't really matter to me about the "degree of death" involved, meaning whether or not a medical professional had technically declared the individual in question to be dead at some point, assuming they recovered after recovery became unexpected. My foremost interest is knowing whether or not this person claims to have learned new information while incapacitated, and whether that evidence can be investigated and corroborated or debunked by an independent third party. If … [Read more...]
Heaven Is for Real
Some atheists seem to think that if they relentlessly attack theists and blame God for all the evil in the world, they will eventually succeed and completely eradicate all religious beliefs. Frankly, that will never happen. The goal is simply unattainable. As long as people inhabit the earth, at least some of them will believe in a supernatural God. Nevertheless, a rather persistent atheist acquaintance recently posted links to several news stories on Facebook about mothers who had allegedly murdered their own kids because they wanted the children to go to heaven. His argument apparently was that religious beliefs, not mental illness, motivated these women to commit such heinous crimes. Now were the situation reversed -- for example, if I insinuated that people who believe Darwinian theory explains their existence were all prone to become serial-killing atheist cannibals and used Jeffrey Dahmer as an example, I would be committing the same flawed, illogical "guilt by association" argument my acquaintance had attempted. And that would be just as juvenile, and wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right. Nor do two left turns, but three do. This acquaintance went so far to direct a question specifically to me, asking, "how many more have to die before someone says 'Stop!' This heaven stuff isn't real?" My reply was to say that I believe heaven is for real. However, I also know that I can't prove it any more than an evolutionary biologist can prove that I share a common ancestor with an oak tree. I won't claim to know heaven exists beyond all doubt, because … [Read more...]
