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Luckily for atheists, they have nothing to fear about the afterlife, although there’ve been cases of atheist NDErs who’ve returned to tell of chilling experiences upon their resuscitation. Some, upon their return, have even taken up the cross, their reports were so disturbing. If foxholes can’t make a believer of God out of some people, perhaps shivery postmortem OBEs can.
In recent years, there’s been a handful of movies released that have portrayed NDEs to be celestial and glorious. Anyone who has researched this topic, as I have, knows that not all NDEs are pleasant. Perhaps not even half are even warm and fuzzy. It’s well-known that most of us dream both nice dreams as well as nightmarish ones. Why should NDEs be any different?
There seems to be a definite suppression of information within the field of afterlife study. Some researchers are unbiased enough to report cases of both heavenly and hellish near-death experiences, as well as everything in-between, whereas there are those who seemingly, via a filtering process of info, want to portray the phenomenon in a favorable light, only.
In one most unsettling NDE anecdote I came across, the experiencer reported seeing Gray Aliens of all beings, snatching away the souls of the recently departed. (Note, not demons, but ETs. Now there’s a new one.)
Who really knows for certain what awaits one upon their crossing over the Great Divide? There’s been accounts of positive NDEs that have turned into negative ones, and vice versa.
There’s certainly a bit of a helpless feeling to it all. We entered this world, many believe, without our agreeing to it, and such ones feel so it is with the next one.
Although I’m of the opinion that possibly half of all NDEs are likely negative (it is thought that negative ones often go unreported due to shame or embarrassment on the part of the experiencer or the aforementioned sifting of reports), I disagree with the fundamentalist Christian perspective that believes these to be glimpses of perdition.
These same Christian fundamentalists also say that positive NDEs, too, are the result of the Devil’s doing (i.e. Lucifer, who transforms himself into an angel of light in order to deceive the masses). I always found this to be a flawed theological concept: the idea that an intrinsically dark entity who’s been banished forevermore from the Light still possesses the means to change itself into a Light Being for the purposes of trickery.
Then there are those who fear what the afterlife may bring, in the way of inconveniences or disappointments totally unrelated to the religiously conceived hereafter of reward and punishment. For solitary types, for example, what if the afterlife turns out to be one where there’s hardly any alone time? Such an immortal disembodied state would truly be unbearable for the creative types among humanity. Imagine drawing one’s last breath and then awakening to a crowded environment resembling a never-ending train terminal, where a sea of incorporeal bodies are jammed together and are continually bumping elbows. Perhaps this scenario sounds most agreeable to gregarious types, but to lonerish and wallflower personalities this would likely seem to them as being utter pandemonium.
What I find most fascinating is the painting, “The Ascent Into The Empyrean” by Hieronymus Bosch. It was painted circa 1500, and depicts the prototypical NDE tunnel with some angelic beings or spirit creatures contained within it. What I want to know is how this painter knew about “the Tunnel” when the medical instruments and machines that allow for people nowadays to be revived were not in existence back at his time.
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