@Finn dAbuzz,
OmSigDAVID wrote:Finn dAbuzz wrote:Your life matters, as do the lives of friends and families.
At any given moment the lives of strangers may matter to you
and if even the most subtle of personal connections are made you are likely to care.
In general though? Not so much.
If life
matters, if people
CARE about it,
then
Y r there so few people who have enuf interest
to join the International Association of Near Death studies
to ascertain whether conscious life endures?? Very few people have joined it.
Finn dAbuzz wrote:"Life After Death" is not "Life" unless there are people walking
around who know they lived before and died.
My surgeon told me that I died 2wice during surgery.
I know that I lived b4 those deaths.
Finn dAbuzz wrote:I would love to know right now that my sense of identity - "I" will exist after I die, but this not to be,
and "Near Death" studies will not provide me with that information.
Tho I
don 't PERSONALLY remember being in a state of death,
I 've met others who
DO remember that,
and whose medical doctors support their assertions thereof.
My own experience with out-of-body experiences while awake
gives me credence in the experiences of others who left their human bodies.
Finn dAbuzz wrote: "Near Death" is not "Death." "Death" is when you don't come back,
I deem that definition to be born of emotion, arbitrary n not well reasoned.
Before I ever heard of any post death experiences,
I grew up with the notion (shared by everyone I ever knew at the time)
that death was no heartbeat n no respiration for a while.
I see no reason to change that idea.
No good comes from arbitrarily re-defining it that it must be permanent.
Finn dAbuzz wrote: and a "Near Death" experience may be nothing more than a hallucination
brought on by your brain being deprived of oxygen.
As I have already pointed out,
people have been disinherited for bad-mouthing decedents
in surgery, addressing family members out in the waiting room.
The decedents have seen n heard that, while in a state of death.
After returning to life, thay went to their estate lawyers
and
disinherited those who defamed them.
Finn dAbuzz wrote:Unfortunately, for me, I retain a tiny bit of my childhood conditioning by Pastor Steinke of the Grace Luthern Church in NY. One of the most joyful people I have ever met, but when he got behind the pulpit the fire and brimstone flew.
In a tiny corner of my brain remains an irrational fear of hell.
While it surfaces at only the rarest of times, I have a misgiving that
it will do so when I'm near death.
Think happy thawts.
If u don 't commit suicide n if u r not an atheist, then u will probably be OK,
if u don't run wild killing a lot of folks without a good reason, etc.
Finn dAbuzz wrote:99.9% of the time my thinking about death is that it's nothing to fear since either I will "wake up" in some representation of heaven or the lights will simply be switched of for all eternity. Either way there's nothing to fear...but that's my rational adult mind doing the thinking. 0.1% of the time the kid staring in terror at Pastor Steinke thundering on about damnation, comes to the fore and I tremble.
There is an account in the literature of a clergyman like that who died of a heart attack.
When he returned to life, he said (approximately):
"I was surprized that God was not interested in my theology."
He said that he moderated his threats to his congregation.
David
