Near Death Experience (NDE)

(…am referring to those NDE's where the Consciousness is vastly expanded and…) I of course cant accept that its inherently true that the NDE's in question let the recipients KNOW anything as that is what I am supposed to be debating; But I will accept that by NDE you are referring only to the ones were people describe the experience like that. That cuts out simple NDE's like seeing yourself outside of your body looking down on yourself on the operating table. And I can see how one could generalize those as the NDE's that are just Lucid Dreams and the rest as true experiences of the next life. So with your clarification of NDE's definition I drop my biological argument about how the experiences may not be true; and I pick up a religious one. But I will get to that later; First the defense of my last arguments that I am not dropping before presenting the new one. 1)Concerning Annihilationism: (…Even the most materialistic atheists would tell you that matter and energy are everlasting….) Actually materialist are the only ones you should expect would tell you that matter could not have come from nothingness. Most theistic proponents agree that God created all out of nothing. That in the beginning there ‘was nothing' until it was created. But that's a whole other debate, and for now it distracts from this one. (…the soul becomes conscious and KNOWS of its own eternity and does not need…) To say that the soul is ETERNAL is a declaration about its duration of existence. That's not a fact you can just ‘feel'. And if this ‘experience' as a disembodied soul people have doesn't last ‘forever' but ended at some point, then it by definition was not an ‘eternal experience. It was a temporary one. On the logic that the soul could not exist without coming from somewhere and therefore cant go ‘nowhere', brings to mind a problem that occurs when you remember you are talking about a ‘soul' and not ‘matter' Matter may be in a permanent loop of recycling itself in 1 form or another but the soul HAD to have come from nowhere. The soul is not made of matter or energy but is simply pure information that defines who you are http://www.authorsden.com... . It's the data on the hard drive that is your brain. If that were ‘eternal' then it should have existed before you were born and you should have some knowledge of that time before then regardless of having a NDE if that's true. But the fact is that everyday of your current life is all that has forged and define who and what your soul is now. So the information that is your soul had to have come from nothing even if it is true that it will last forever. But by my opponents own logic because it came from nothing it could return to nothing. Now that may not be true, but it does introduce ‘doubt' making the fact of eternal life ‘shakable' 2)Concerning Physical Existences ‘Reflecting': (…– impossible and against all reason and logic – yet some otherwise intelligent…) Your talking about belief in cosmic evolution right? Again that's different debate. The fact of intelligent design holds no relevance in this debate; because physical existence has a blueprint does not mean that blueprint is from what will be our Eternal lives. It could be that Eternal life has a different set of blue prints, though from the same maker. And the maker made the eternal life's blueprints different on purpose because his purpose for Eternal life was very different from physical existences purpose. (…see and recognize their ‘dead' relatives and loved ones just as their material bodies looked like on the earthly plane of vibrations...) This fact actually would point to NDE's support of Annihilationism. Dose it not strike you as odd that the only people the NDE recipients see in the afterlife is their relatives? To prove an eternal life by NDE a recipient should see some people who have been dead longer than any of the relatives they ever knew in their earthly life. Abraham Lincoln for example. Why have none of the NDE recipients ever seen him if Lincoln is now existing as his Eternal self? Unless in the after life he has also passed away….hmmm? It of course dose not prove Annihilationism, but it cant rule it out can it? Anyway on to my new argument 3)The Sovereignty of the Experience: As a Methodist I completely accept that true experiences can happen to many people out there http://www.theopedia.com... ; but even though a person really experiences something that is more than biological, it does not mean this experience tells them anything true. In the early day's of America such false real experiences apparently happened for Joseph Smith, and in recent times they have happen for a man named Michel Cadry . http://www.amazon.com... http://www.theologyweb.com... Cadry's experience told him that the moon is God and Yuri Geller is the Anti-Christ. Even if the experience is not just biological there is still a danger of getting the wrong idea from it because of excess Enthusiasm as explained by John Wesley in this sermon when he gets to describing the second form of bad enthusiasm (18 ). http://new.gbgm-umc.org... "Though there is a real influence of the Spirit of God, there is also an imaginary one: and many there are who mistake the one for the other. Many suppose themselves to be under that influence, when they are not, when it is far from them. And many others suppose they are more under that influence than they really are." Experiences that tell you things that are false feel as real to the recipients as experiences that convey truth. That's why what your experience tells you needs to be balanced by the other Wesleyan points. The NDE by itself cannot make you unshakably certain without first seeing how it lines up in view of the other points. For sure it can probably make you feel a great deal more certain about Life being eternal, but not ‘Unshakably' so. There is room for at least a mustard seed of doubt (often all it takes) and if there is room for doubt then it's not ‘Unshakable' To summarize this round….. 1)because this is still possible (not inherently contradictory), NDE is not "Unshakable" proof…. 2)….It's not "Unshakable" proof…. 3)….It's not "Unshakable" proof…. I know I had other relevant specifics in my case; but that recurring theme is all I felt important to show in the summery, as it's the cardinal point I need to make to win this debate. If there is room for doubt to the recipients of NDE, then it's not ‘Unshakable' and the resolution is negated. Doubt isn't all that bad, most often it doesn't end up changing the beliefs, but lack of change does not mean pure absence of doubt. "Unshakable proof" does though.