I can prove the existance of God. Right now.

no they don't.
...
in some undeveloped countries santeria priestesses will whip up a batch of fugu, the poison of which causes people to go into a coma. they're breathing is arrested, and they're heartbeat is so faint it's hard to detect without specialized equipment.
after a couple of days the victim emerges in a stupor, brain dead, and suggestible.
hence the term zombie.

now, those people believe that the person died and resurected later. that's not proof of an after life (even a really shitty one), it's just proof that sometimes people don't entirely understand something, so they affix it to whatever belief system (or any point of reference really) that helps them understand it better.

your near death experiences don't prove anything other than the flexibility of the human brain under stress.

at least anymore than my sleep proves i'm a viking...

 

Personally, I believe this account...

However, I am going to have to side with relaxxx on this one... the credibility, AT FIRST GLANCE does seem biased.

Non-believers would have to investigate deeper to verify it's true validity, and I mean come on. Who are we kidding as if they would take the time

 

Let me rephrase the question. If evolution is a process, operating by natural selection, and mutations are selected according to their value in adapting to the environment, how does consciousness help us to survive or adapt? What can we do better than a highly intelligent being which is capable of performing the same calculating functions, like a computer or other artificial intelligence, but is not really "conscious", i.e., self-aware? I gather from your earlier posts that you believe that a proto-consciousness in primitive form exists or coexists as energy in the atoms and molecules that make up our universe, and that it becomes the complex, self-aware phenomenon we know of as our consciousness as our brains develop by Darwinian evolution.

Is consciousness just some sort of fortuitous epiphenomenon or by-product of intelligence? Do computers or other Artificial Intelligence have consciousness, and if so, what does it do for them? If not, what does ours do for us? And if the answer is "nothing special", how could it evolve (because natural selection requires that the adaptations selected contribute to the organism's effective adaptation in some way)?

Without consciousness, we would not be aware of the "great, big wonderful world we live in", nor would we be aware of our own existence, but we might be able to carry out impressive functions similar to those of computers or androids, and pass our DNA on by sexual reproduction. That would be enough for Darwin and Dawkins, but people who think that awareness of themselves and the universe is an impressive aspect of existence might be dissatisfied. Some evloutionists suggest that self-awareness might help an organism to try harder in the competitive struggle, although I don't see why this should be so. Others suggest that it might be helpful in integrating our thoughts, although they're vague about what that even means. Atheist Sam Harris is at least aware of the problem, although his answer seems to be "We don't know", and may never know because we're so close to the problem--i.e., the most immediately accessible part of ourselves.

 

Actually Yeal, not thousands has had them, millions have. 5% of the worlds population has had one. If my math is right, thats about 300,000,000 people. Relaxxx, just read some man, every single NDE has changed the persons life. There real. If they were dreams, then shouldnt some NDE's NOT be about God, feeling love and peace, and being in heaven? There all the same man, its not a lie. If you read several of them, theyll recognize the similarities and have no choice but to believe.

 

Tell me this, mr genious relaxxx..if NDE's are fake, then how come patients that under go surgery and die see themselves floating above their body(like all NDE's) and have reported EXACTLY what went on when they were totally unconscious? THERE REAL. GOD LOVES YOU.

 

OMG Listen up to what I said! I'm talking about in hospitals, where OUR TECHNOLOGY, not africas or whatever, registers a person as absolutely DEAD. When a person is ABSOLUTELY DEAD, and they report having a conscious experiance while in DEATH, that is an afterlife. You really can't argue with that.

We've established that NDE's are real. Ok.
We've established that they occur while people are absolutely dead. Need I say more?

If someone is dead, and their consciousness lives on, then the answer is pretty much given. If you want more proof than the one story I posted, DO SOME RESEARCH OF YOUR OWN BEFORE POSTING AGAIN! I found sooo many pages on google of documented evidence of people being absolutely dead. If I found one, you can find another, and maybe you'll break the egotistical barricade in your head and READ IT and prove yourself wrong (really hard to do=\)

Even if there is an afterlife for sure, how does this prove he existance of God? LOL This thread is so off topic but lets just go with it, we've argued like every universal question out there lol.

 

Of course they're real! But it has NOT been established that they occur while people are absolutely dead. That's why they're called near death experiences.

People don't come back to talk about "absolute" death lol


Yeal and smokindude and whoever else, do the disembodied consciousnesses of the absolute dead just float around like farts for a while and then piss off into space or what?

 

Their senses are picking up information in the emergency room and incorporation that into their dream. They are dreaming so they are disconnected from their sense of reality. Haven’t you ever fallen asleep with the TV on and had a dream that incorporated what you heard on the TV? I’ve done it a couple times.

 

Consciousness just didn't occur by random chance and it's not just a by product of intelligence, it's a necessary component of intelligence. Consciousness is required for advanced problem solving skills, sensory processing and social interaction.



Technology doesn't even come close to matching the complexity of the brain. All modern CPU’s are based on transistors which hold one bit (on or off ) the bits are processed through logic gates such as AND, OR, NOR. AND Gate: if bit A = 1 and bit B = 0 then bit Y = 0. Brain neurons are like a billion times more complex than that.

 

I've taken large amounts of DXM (NEVER AGAIN! ) and i've floated outside my body. I also inhabited the body of one of my co workers and thought/spoke in spanish (or at least what i think is spanish). I also often 'see' myself as i fall asleep.
My 'soul' didn't leave my body, i was just so fucked up that all my conventional points of reference disappereared.
Also, just because you are 'unconscious' doesn't mean that you don't interact and gather information from the world around you.
add into that the element of chance (people who incorrectly report events that occured while they are under are not as reported as people who do), and you get a lot of NDE's.

 

okay.
to start with, the line between living and dead isn't an absolute, and we draw and redraw it continually (see: terry shiavo, see: abortion, see: stem cells). Any of those three could be at the same time called alive and dead.
people in one culture can call someone dead (ie the zombies) while others, with accesss to better equipment (but still no where near perfect) call them alive.
so there goes your whole, 'absolutely dead'. (which, i define as, dead, gone, not waking up, not just in a comatose state for a couple of minutes).
if you do some reasearch, you'll find that no one who is 'absolutely dead' by my standards had a NDE, cause if they did they ain't tellin (Cause they're worm food).

and besides all that the plural of 'anecdote' is not data.
you could do some reasearch on google and find a thousand people who claim 100% to have seen Elvis, or who believe that rhino horn is an aphrodesiac. Neither or which is true.

and you've never established that an NDE is an after life, or even occurs during 'death', it could happen before and after the brain goes.

 

One person's account of an event cannot be regarded as evidence. People lie, people are confused, people say all kinds of shit. You cannot believe people's stories about this stuff. It's no wonder that people think all you believers are a bunch of gullible idiots when you keep relying on these kind of accounts to try to justify your beliefs. God can be understood through logic and through phenomena which are acknowledged by all. Many believers and atheists alike have an idea that god is something supernatural or fantastical and therefore demand unnatural signs, miracles or other weird stuff like NDEs to prove God exists. That's bullshit. God is real everyday life.

 

Can you back up that assertion with any evidence or sources?

 

lol no, he can't. He's done it with me before, next time he posts, he'll completely dodge the question. Either that, or he'll tell you to do research on your own. haha Its just the way he operates.

 

http://www.near-death.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience

^^That one's good, read more towards the bottom and it proves that NDE's are not a concoction of the brain^^

http://www.geocities.com/athanasiafoundation/nobrainactive.html

^^More evidence that they occur while brain dead^^

http://files.meetup.com/284333/Psi-NDE-Pam Reynolds case.doc

http://www.iands.org/research/impor..._lommel_m.d._continuity_of_consciousness.html


Mmkay that was just page 1 of google. Brain dead people who have NDE's happens all the time. That's what seperates an NDE from a dream, because it occurs while your DEAD! Stop denying the evidence.

 

don't be lazy. if you can't expain what relevance this evidence has, then why should i bother reading it for you? i also doubt that the "point" you are trying to make requires all that text.

i think its too easy to rely on NDE's. brain death probably involves being not fully conscious before/after the brain became inactive. then it would not necessarily mean the experience was from the moment the brain was inactive. it just doesn't seem logical to me that someone's brain could become active and the person conscious without being not fully conscious at some point. this is just my common sense. maybe it explains why those near death experiences are so short but i dont know how "dream time" scales with real world time so i can't say.

i'm pretty confident most people have experienced dreams so that makes near death experiences more vague.

what about the people that didn't have a NDE??

give it a rest

 

Is the op aware of bertrand Russel's teapot analogy:

 

You guys dont understand, the NDE is a miracle. I believe God makes the experiencer go back to earth to tell people about it, and how God is REAL. The details these stories have are amazing, and they all relate to eachother and experience the same things. Did you know, that the NDE's that dont have to do with God, experience themselves out of their body, at peace, feeling better than they ever have, words cant even desribe how Gods presence is and being in his unconditional love.

 

If anyone on here researches NDE's and people experiences like me, you would have no choice but to believe. Its clear evidence.

 

most people have already been introduced to religious ideas. i think alot of the "evidence" has already been contaminated.

"the human imagination is very powerful"