It really can't be written off this easily because there is a lot more going on there than seeing a white light and going through a tunnel(which the majority of people don't even report actually). People witness their own surgery from above. They see conversations their loved ones are having with doctors in a room their body isn't even in. The deeper you dig into this phenomena the more events you see happen that have no medical or scientific explanation as we know it. These are subjective experiences that each person has and they differ from person to person even if just in minor details. Most of these people when told it was just a hallucination claim that it felt more real than life on Earth.

It's easy to write things off once science has explained them but science has never explained the NDE. It has hypothesized about what may cause them but none of this is proven fact.

Also when you start to get into the details and similarities of a NDE, what you find is details of experiences like a Life Review where these people relive aspects of their life and are able to see their life from different perspectives(from the perspective of the people they hurt or helped in life)

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/research24.html


The deeper you dig in the message each of these people receive in their NDE is that the most important thing in life is Love. This is nearly unanimous that you would receive this message in your NDE.



Then on top of all of this, the deeper and deeper you dig in you find more stories of people with terminal cancer(for example), on their death bed, doctors giving them a matter of hours to live....they have a NDE, are told or choose to go back into their body and upon doing so have a miraculous recovery or as science/medicine like to call it....Spontaneous Remission.


No matter what conclusion you come to if you dig deep enough I think you will find it hard to simply write these experiences off as "oxygen deprivation that is common to dying". I'm not suggesting we have a way to currently explain them or that that would even be easy. What I'm saying is these experiences require much further research and should not be written off easily due to the profound effect they have on the experiencer. On top of all that research you can start looking into the aftereffects of such an experience and see that most all of these people have had their lives positively affected by this experience and now are more loving human beings....again in such a profound way that it warrants further study.

Saw this linked on the drudge report yesterday: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...fic-study.html

rather deceptive title. The article documents the rather interesting phenomenon of mental experiences after one's heart has stopped, but it is only 'life after death' by adopting this technical medical definition of death and doesn't point to some larger "afterlife"

I don't see any reliable criteria for differentiating the theory of intelligent design from the theory of the flying spaghetti monster.

I don't see how one could even argue that "silly" is a reliable criteria for their comparison since the theory of intelligent design can be considered equally "silly" to some as the theory of the flying spaghetti monster is to others. Its far too arbitrary and so is any criteria apart from falsifiability.

Further research is warranted, welcome, and I predict will be immensely interesting.

I bolded the first full sentence of your last paragraph and, IMO, you need to reconsider the second part of your statement, or at least think about it in a different manner than what your current approach seems to consist of.

Also, you should revisit the very title of this thread.

Scientifically I can agree with you. Philosophically and practically speaking though it is still very important imo. This is a common struggle I would argue all of humanity shares but at least the majority of humanity shares which is to evolve to states of being that include more love, happiness, and joy. Nearly all NDErs bring back life lessons that put them directly on this path and once on it, it becomes nearly impossible to knock them off. This to me shows NDEs bring about profound realizations and life lessons that also need not be ignored, however disinterested in these specific things science may be.