Ok, then ignore the conclusion and instead I'd ask 'how can there ever be evidence if god himself is withholding it from us?'

Also relevant I think is the argument that faith is a belief without a requirement for evidence and I'm guessing that even the theists that reject that god is deliberately withholding the evidence would agree that they must have faith and evidence would remove the need for faith and so again, there can never be evidence.

What kind of theist actually needs evidence, and if theists don't, what kind of evidence could ever convince an atheist? Maybe anything that we think is evidence of god, actually can't be.

What if God appeared to you in your room and encouraged you to believe in him? Would you completely reject this because you can't falsify it?

By only accepting empirical data that you are able to test as proof of God, you are basically rejecting the possibility of God, where God is a supernatural being.

By the same token, God could never communicate with you supernaturally because you would reject it as being supernatural and non-testable.

It seems that in the event that these things happen, the more logical thing to do would be to not simply dismiss them as evidence because it is supernatural, but to examine your beliefs about these things more closely.

What I think your conclusion (and those who insist on data) leads to is that there is no testable proof of God in the natural, not that there is no God.

I've had it. The content of such an experience was too real for me to ignore it or the experiences NDErs claim to have. Why is the content of the experience so similar and why do so many people take away from it that the only real important "things" in the world are love and compassion?

I agree with the "too real to ignore" perspective. I've had both spiritual experiences with the use of psychedelics and without them, and to ignore them would not be intellectually honest, IMO.

There is physical evidence out there:





Atheists just chose to ignore it....

So jesus reveals himself to the world by the means of grilled cheese on toast?

Because they are brought up as evidence, and that means knowledge plays. When you sit around claiming the brain has no activity 15 seconds after clinical death, I will correct you because you are wrong and perpetuating an error. The brain has no easily measurable activity 15-20 seconds after clinical death, because people lose consciousness. Unfortunately people misinterpret this, sometimes out of ignorance and sometimes willfully to mislead people as I suspect you have been the victim of.

It might be that you are just echoing someone else, but that is your problem and not mine.

Fair enough. I'm not a cardiologist or a doctor, I was just quoting what was in the video from a cardiologist.

Ultimately, neither of us actually know whether it's just an experience happening in the brain or it's consciousness leaving the body or if consciousness even has to technically leave the body bc no one knows what exactly consciousness is. This is and should be the most fascinating question of our times because we have lot's of evidence to lead us to believe that consciousness may continue after our body dies. We don't have proof but we have evidence that points that direction, luckily there are a few scientists out there that are trying to make radical new paradigm shifting discoveries and researching this.

This seems like an odd stance to take. Particularly since we know for a fact that the brain can make us see and hear things that aren't there.

If you see them and hear them, how do you know they aren't there? Do you realize, everything you see, hear, and sense is happening in the brain? If you sense something and experience it why would you automatically assume only some of it is real?

Because it's inconsistent with the rest of reality as I know it.

People who suffer from Cotard's syndrome may hold the belief they are dead. Are you saying there's a chance they might be correct?

Funny. And theists just say 'Pareidowut?'

Not just a few. I've seen estimates that there are about 50 000 articles published in neuroscience per year. Granted that these will be about a multitude of different subjects, and not all directly related to consciousness they are still about the mind. Other than that willingness to shift paradigms is healthy in itself, eagerness to shift paradigms is not.

Consciousness is a tricky subject because people's intuitive understanding of consciousness is often very far from what the evidence tells us. So these musings regarding the mind that people call spiritual, theological, philosophical often seem to be misguided or wrong. This can make some people frustrated or angry and they start perceiving researchers as people with an agenda to ruin or destroy their belief. Quickly terms like logic, empiricism, evidence or data become swearwords, the anti-thesis of being openminded, spiritual or seeking. I think this is very unfair. I'm certain the majority of neuroscientists are merely eager to explore the mind honestly.

That doesn't mean there is not bias in researchers and a resistance towards necessary paradigm shifts. It happens, the classic case when it comes to the mind sciences is the cognitive revolution.

If you keep looking around enough you will see lots of things are inconsistent with reality as you know it. You call those things, not real or crazy but maybe it's bc we are living in a somewhat objective, shared Virtual Reality but every experience is subjective therefore reality is actually subjective overall while many aspects of it appear to be completely objective. Some scientists are studying such paradigm shifting ideas, they should get more funding and credit imo.

Ok. But do you have an answer to the question?

Some elaboration:

To my knowledge there has only been one man who has had a pet scan while suffering from this delusion. His brain activity was compared to someone who was in a vegetative state or under anesthesia.

But he wasn't...

To answer this more directly: Of course I could be wrong about the nature of reality. I adhere to what it seems to be because that is what allows me to live. We all have to start with an assumption. Even theists. There is simply no other way to do it.

I do but we seem to share such drastically different views on reality my answers wouldn't suit you and I'd rather not get into the kind of debate it would cause. Let's just say the concepts of reincarnation and karma work quite well into the reality we see. There is lot's of evidence that points to this being the way reality works if you start to dig around in enough places.

So then you doubt the ability for the PET scan to accurately read/understand his brain activity.

What is your actual view of reality? It seems to be: we don't know anything to an absolute certainty, so literally everything is equally as likely as anything else.

Is it?

My mother had an NDE the year before I was born, some stuff she remembers fairly vividly or did we've not discussed it for a while but the experiences seem relatively common. When I considered myself a theist after some years of agnostic atheism it seemed important, strangely it seemed less important to my mother who never moved beyond an agnostic atheism.

My view of reality won't be valid to you, it won't fit your beliefs. If you want to know bad enough you could dig through a bunch of my posts and get an idea. They include reincarnation and karma which will inevitably start a debate on the "ethics of God and evil" in the world for anyone who disagrees.

Everyone searches for God in their own way and in their own time and on their own path. Some through science, others through religion, or probably a million other ways. The thing I came to realize years later about being an atheist is the funniest thing. Atheists are the biggest seekers of God out of anyone. Just ask any of them and they will all tell you....they've looked everywhere and they don't see him. The funnier part is when you find God and realize it was staring you in the face the whole time...you just named it the 10 billion different things you see in the universe and given each of them a different label or name whereas I just give it 1. If you had no memory you would constantly marvel at the things you see around you, it's only out of familiarity that you don't see how amazing it is that life exists.

I agree with this, in fact.

I'm not asking about things like Karma or reincarnation, more in a general sense. Let me ask it this way: How do you go about discerning truth from not-truth?

I tend to be a bit of a left brain thinker myself and trying to intellectually figure out what is the truth isn't about thinking intellectually, that will just confuse you more. Your brain is only made to compare and contrast things so we label everything and want to compare it to everything else and then assign judgements on it. This is really the only thing preventing us from realizing the truth.

Look around at life for everything that it is but without the labels. Don't think about it, just be totally present in the moment. I highly recommend reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle which discusses this in a ton of detail. After reading it, it slowly shifted my perspective and one day I had this incredible realization of oneness with everything that was in that moment that lasted for a few seconds only. That was enough to start my search for the truth.

As for how to discern it, you just know what is truth and what isn't deep inside you. The hard part isn't figuring it out, it's getting rid of the ego that keeps you from seeking the truth in the first place and discerning it when it stares you right in the face. You can have moments of realization of truth along the path but seeking the truth is a path, very few people get all the answers at once.

Thanks. But that's a bit more abstract than I intended. Maybe it's my fault for making the question so big.

Lets back up a bit. The cotard delusion example. How do you go about determining whether this patient is dead or not?

Something simple (at least for the omnipotent creator of everything): cure an amputee, i.e. grow back a missing limb. What, you say? Not possible? Where is your faith?

Of course, but the conclusion is not necessarily that these experiences are delusions. Without having had my personal experiences, I find it strange that others would critique my own conclusions, especially since I concede that me being deluded is a possibility, simply not the easiest explanation to me.

Given the persistence and conviction of my spiritual experiences, it would be dishonest for me to conclude that they are simple delusions, and ignore them as such.