The Contorted Reasoning of Biblical Literalists

I used to be a Biblical literalist. That is, I believed that everything in the Bible meant exactly what the words would mean to a twentieth-century reader. And I belonged to a church (the Church of Christ) that was fundamentally and absolutely based on this assertion. There are numerous branches of the Church of Christ; this branch was one that insisted that instrumental music could not be used in worship (a rule not found in the Bible) and that only a single cup could be used for the whole congregation during communion.

Various New Testament passages describe “a new heaven and a new earth” which will be established after the apocalyptic return of Jesus (the “second coming”). The wording leaves very little room for literal misunderstanding. I was excited about this, because I was a nature-lover, and this passage meant that God’s heavenly eternity would include the beautiful (and sinless) trees and birds that I loved so well.

I was a meek high school student. Shortly after I joined the Church of Christ, I was giving Sunday night sermons, and an occasional guest sermon. In one of these sermons, I preached about the new heaven and the new earth. One of the men listening to my sermon was our local evangelist, Bro. Bob Sanders. He said nothing to me about the sermon, but the next week he got up at the pulpit and denounced me as a sinful misleader of souls. My crime: I had defended the idea that God would create a new earth after the Apocalypse. Please note that I was given no warning of this. At that young age, I was deeply wounded by this public denunciation.

You may wonder, as I wondered, how I could get in trouble for preaching something that was straight out of the Bible. Here was Bro. Bob’s line of reasoning:

• Heaven is where God dwells. God dwells within Scripture. Therefore the New Heaven is the New Testament.
• Earth is where man dwells. Man will dwell in heaven. Therefore the New Earth is heaven.

I am telling you about this because it is an illustration of how “Biblical literalism” is not; it is a contorted and twisted mode of thought that the “literalist” uses as a weapon against others, even helpless young high school kids. It took me years to realize that Biblical literalism is not honesty or truth; it is a perverted way of thinking that fundamentalists use as a weapon even against meek and harmless people.

I am still waiting to discover any literalist-fundamentalist who is truly honest and who is not vicious. How can I take fundamentalism, and the creationists who defend it, seriously? Jesus said, “By their fruits you shall know them.” I suppose fundamentalists have some twisted reasoning to show that hurting people is actually a way of showing love to them.

Critical Examination of the Near Death Experience, Part Five

In previous entries, I have written about the Near Death Experience. I have explained that it is no mere delusion, but it is subjective, taking place within the brains of the people who experience it. It is not, as some claim, an actual glimpse into heaven.

One conclusion is obvious from it, however. If the Near Death Experience is a glimpse into heaven, it is one that entirely contradicts the beliefs of fundamentalists and conservative Christians. Not everyone who has a Near Death Experience reports rocketing toward the light, or diving through the tunnel, or seeing departed family members, or having a life review. But one thing they all report is experiencing intense, unconditional love, usually in the form of a Being of Love, who accepts them without judgment. If they are encountering God, then God is love.

The people who have this experience may be Christians, or may not. They may not have even had previous religious beliefs. It doesn’t matter. They are swept into a universalistic salvation, to the brink of an afterlife from which they only reluctantly return to this vale of tears.

God, wouldn’t that be great? Of course, at first, we may resist this thought quite strongly. Shouldn’t people like Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic, and Mao Zedong go to hell? But consider the fact that, if Adolf Hitler slipped through the tunnel and emerged into the light, he would not be Adolf Hitler anymore. Adolf Hitler is dead. Completely. If “he” is in heaven, then “he” isn’t “he” anymore. Of course, I would like to give dictators a taste of the torture that they gave to others. But if I were flying up toward the light, I would be having too good of a time to worry about that. Literally, why would I give a damn if a person who had been bad but has been transformed is there also? Oh, and pass the Guinness. (I am writing this on St. Patrick’s Day, although it will be posted later.)

This brings us precisely to the point about why fundamentalists reject the Near Death Experience. They simply cannot accept the idea of universalism. What kind of God would just invite every bum off of the street to come to a wedding feast? Oh, wait. I guess that would be Jesus, wouldn’t it, who told a parable that made exactly that point. Fundamentalists simply cannot accept that God is love and that Jesus forgives whomever he chooses, even if they would not permit Jesus to do so.

Near Death Experiences upset fundamentalists for the same reason that Catholics were upset about Protestantism during the Reformation—you mean, anybody can just walk into Heaven without permission from a priest who was certified by the pope? And today, fundamentalists insist that you cannot go to heaven unless you have your theology all figured out, you join a church, you tithe, and you give your allegiance to a smooth-tongued preacher. Fundamentalists have no choice but to claim that the Near Death Experience is a delusion produced by Satan. Fundamentalists are some of the most grim people I have ever met—they look forward to seeing everyone from every other viewpoint thrown into the Lake of Fire—and they are offended by the thought that God might forgive someone who has a different theological opinion.

To me, it would be a great relief to know that I do not have to have my theology all figured out to go to heaven. Of course, I am afraid that the Near Death Experience is a completely subjective thing that happens when we die.

Critical Examination of the Near Death Experience, Part Four. How could Near Death Experiences Have Evolved?

As I established in previous blog entries, the Near Death Experience (NDE) is no mere delusion. But neither is it a glimpse into Heaven. It is entirely subjective, occurring within the brain of the person experiencing it. It is a highly structured, detailed, and intense subjective experience. It is something that the brain does in extremis, that is, when imminently threatened with death.

This immediately raises the question of how the capacity for humans to have such a highly structured set of brain experiences could have evolved. Natural selection cannot, after all, favor something that occurs just before death, since the person who experiences them cannot leave offspring.

I wish to suggest that the Near Death Experience evolved because it offered a fitness advantage to people who experienced them and then returned to life. Consider what would have happened back in cave man days. A warrior was killed. Then he came back to life! And he had such things to report! Such visions! Clearly, he had some special contact with the gods. He would be rewarded with high social status and all of the additional mating opportunities that this would afford. Something similar could have happened to any shaman, male or female, who might have gone a little bit too far with the Salvia divinorum or the mushrooms.

Someone who had mere delusions from a brush with death would not be nearly as credible as one who had specific and credible visions such as those associated with the Near Death Experience—credible enough that people still believe them, and books about them are best sellers even in an age of science.

It has been noted that people from many different cultures have similar near death experiences. While it is possible that this is because they have all seen Oprah, it could also be because the brain-based capacity for experiencing a near-death experience had already evolved before the common ancestral populations of all modern races left Africa about 100,000 years ago, before modern races had differentiated.

I have, therefore, offered in this series of blog entries first a medical then an evolutionary explanation for the Near Death Experience. It is neither mere delusion, as skeptics often claim, nor is it a glimpse into heaven.

See my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, recently published by Prometheus Books.

Critical Examination of the Near Death Experience, Part Three

This is the second essay in a series that examines evidence presented by Jeffrey Long and Paul Perry which, they claim, prove that the Near Death Experience (NDE) is an actual vision of the afterlife. In the previous essays, I explain that, while the NDE may contain information that the subject has picked up from his or her environment in some way not yet understood, the NDE itself is a subjective experience.

The authors make the claim that victims or patients that experience NDEs could not have been having a subjective brain experience, because these people were in fact brain-dead at the time that they had the experiences; that is, they were EEG (electroencephalogram) flat-liners. As they write on page 46, “It is medically inexplicable to have a highly organized and lucid experience while unconscious or clinically dead.” Now, if the people who had NDEs were brain dead at the time, then there is no other explanation than that given by the authors: that the people’s spirits had in fact left their bodies and begun their trip to heaven. This is because nerve cells produce electrical and magnetic fields. If the nerve cells were operating at all, delusionally or otherwise, they would have produced some trace on the EEG. Moreover, the authors are very inconsistent on this point. An entire chapter, chapter 4, is about visions that people have had during anesthesia. People are not brain dead during anesthesia. So is NDE something that happens when the spirit leaves the body, or isn’t it? Did my spirit leave my body when I was last under anesthesia?

But the authors have no direct proof that the subjects were brain dead while having their NDEs. The authors have relied upon stories submitted to their online website. Although I agree with the authors that the contributors were seldom if ever actually lying, we simply do not have medical corroboration for the claim that they had NDE during actual clinical death. It is possible that the victims were brain dead for a while, but they may have experienced their NDE either just before or just after their brain-dead period, at a time when they might have been capable of perceiving the things that they later reported.

I would also like to point out that, as I mentioned in the first essay, Persinger’s God Helmet and the drug ketamine produce some of the same mental images as those that appear in NDEs. Of course, NDEs are much clearer and more detailed than those that emerge from God Helmet and ketamine experiences. But this is not surprising, since the God Helmet and ketamine may only partially stimulate whatever brain circuits may be involved in the NDE.

The authors are correct in asserting that an NDE is no ordinary mental experience. They invite you to try closing your eyes and then describing the experiences around you. You cannot do it, even if you are alert, so you could not do so when you are in or in a coma. This is a good point. But the brain, when it experiences an NDE brain, is in extremis, which is a condition you cannot simulate. The mind might become hyper-aware as its last gasp before dying. Warriors sometimes enter an altered mental state when they are in the middle of a battle, one in which time seems to slow down and in which they do crazy things that actually work. The Viking word for such a warrior was “berserker.” It is an altered mental state that occurs under extreme conditions. Maybe the NDE is such a state also.

I would like to offer a possible explanation for the Near Death Experience. This hypothesis is not proven but will explain the phenomena outlined in Long and Perry’s book and in these blog entries.

* First, the patients experienced dreams or received sensations from around them just before clinical death. These sensations were time-distorted, with the result that they seemed to occur throughout the period of death.
* Second, when the patients entered clinical death, electrical imbalances were maintained in the brain, even though there were no impulses traveling along the neurons.
* Third, when the patients were revived, they remembered the things that happened in their brains just before the period of death, which were preserved in the electrical imbalances. This hypothesis would explain how the patients could experience NDEs without actually processing any new experience while they were clinically dead (with flatlined EEGs).

You are particularly encouraged to make comments on this hypothesis.

One important question remains. The NDE is a detailed mental experience that cannot be simply a delusion. It therefore must have evolved. I will approach this question in the next entry.

Critical Examination of the Near Death Experience, Part Two

This is the second essay in a series that examines evidence presented by Jeffrey Long and Paul Perry which, they claim, prove that the Near Death Experience (NDE) is an actual vision of the afterlife. In the previous essay, I interpreted the evidence to indicate that people who experience NDEs are in fact perceiving something, but not the afterlife; they are perceiving, in some way not yet understood, their immediate environment. But there are several reasons to believe that the NDE is a subjective experience inside of the brain. This does not mean that it is a mere delusion or dream. It is clearly a unique kind of experience.

But it is probably subjective. Here are some reasons.

First, not everyone has the same visions. This is hardly surprising for a subjective experience, but cannot be true of someone actually looking into the afterlife, unless, that is, each of us has our own private heaven waiting for us. The authors say that nearly all people who have an NDE report intense joy. Only about one-third report the tunnel, and two-thirds report the bright light. Fewer than one in four reports the stereotypical life-review (see previous essay). And I suspect that there may be even more diversity of experience than the authors report. Long and Perry say that NDEs are blissful experiences, but I remember reading somewhere that a small but significant percentage of people have what they think is an encounter with Hell. The authors, moreover, report a woman who heard, in her NDE, the universe saying Allah ho akbar! Really? Is the afterlife a Muslim one? Obviously, if there is an afterlife, it was experienced as such—and experienced subjectively—by this Muslim woman. Finally, most NDE reports include an altered sense of time. This is a trick that our brains play on us all the time, for example in dreams that seem to last for a long time but which had to occur during a brief minute or so of rapid eye movement.

Second, suppose that we do in fact have our own private heavens waiting for us. If this is the case, then the people in the NDE visions cannot be actual people. How can Granny actually be existing within MY private heaven? Doesn’t she have her own heaven to live in and experience? Why should my dead relatives be sitting around waiting for me to go rocketing up through the tunnel of light? One person reported having seen her grandmother back in the house in which she lived before her death (Chapter 4). How likely is it that her dead grandmother in heaven lived in a house exactly like the one she had on Earth?

The kind of subjectivity experienced during an NDE is probably not a mere cultural phenomenon. Some careless critics dismiss NDEs as the “Oprah effect,” in which people are very likely to report their NDE in terms that they have learned from watching Oprah’s frequent coverage of this phenomenon. This may sometimes occur. A person who experiences an NDE, one that consists of vague sensations, may subsequently interpret these sensations in terms of a life review, tunnel, loved ones, etc., based on what they have seen on television or read in books. The authors claim that since many of the components of an NDE are the same in people from many different cultures proves that it is not something upon which they have imposed their own interpretations. The problem with this claim is that many different cultures have seen western television. The authors point out, however, that NDEs reported from before 1975, when Raymond Moody wrote the first thorough book on the subject (Life after Life), are essentially the same as those reported in the post-Oprah era. But the fact that people who have NDEs are not merely repeating what they have heard on Oprah’s show does not prove that they are really seeing into the afterlife.

I believe the evidence demonstrates that the NDE is a subjective experience—a very unique one, and which may incorporate information from sensory modalities we do not yet understand. At the very least, if they are seeing into the afterlife, each person is seeing it in his or her own way. Still, there remain some unexplained questions, which I will address in upcoming essays.

Critical Examination of the Near Death Experience, Part One

A book by Jeffrey Long, M.D., with writer Paul Perry, entitled Evidence of the Afterlife, has been a bestseller. It is a book about Near Death Experiences, which many people, including the authors, claim to be evidence of life after death. I have read about Near Death Experiences for many years, and am very skeptical that they are manifestations of an afterlife, despite the fact that I would like to believe that they are. For some of you, it is important to know whether these experiences reveal the existence of an afterlife; for all of us, it is an interesting example of how to apply the scientific method to phenomena that involve the human brain.

This subject is, of course, relevant to evolution for two reasons. First, if they truly are glimpses into heaven, then science is a deficient way of understanding the human experience, even though it may be a perfectly adequate way of explaining atoms and cells and organisms. Second, if Near Death Experiences are not mere delusions, then evolution has to explain them somehow. It is also interesting from the viewpoint of the process of scientific thought: how can you examine such a subject, while avoiding bias?

A Near Death Experience (NDE) may occur when a victim or patient begins to die, or actually dies, usually under medical care, and then returns to life. When they return to consciousness, they may report that they have had an intense experience that they usually interpret as seeing into the afterlife, in which the souls of dead people still live. There are certain stereotypical experiences that are very common in NDEs, including the following:

· Bliss. Most NDE are blissful experiences.
· The Comforting Presence. The person experiences the presence of a powerful spiritual being who leads them through the NDE, and does not pass judgment on them.
· The Life Review. The person sees a movie-like rerun of the events of their lives.
· Out of Body Experience. The person reports seeing themselves lying unconscious or dead, and sees medical or other personnel attempting to revive them.
· The Tunnel. The person progresses through a tunnel toward a bright and welcoming light.

It is obvious that Long and Perry have a bias: their purpose is to convince you that the victims or patients are actually seeing or entering into a real afterlife; that is, the experiences are not merely occurring within their brains. It cannot be denied that, if this is true, it is one of the most significant facts in the world, and the authors’ enthusiasm would be justified. However, their enthusiasm leads them to make critical errors in interpretation and analysis, errors that may or may not be fatal to the belief that NDEs are visions of the afterlife.

One piece of evidence that the authors are not being objective is that they do not consider or present credible alternative interpretations. Instead, they use straw men as their alternative hypotheses. For example, their logic seems to be that if an NDE is not a hallucination then it must be a vision of the afterlife. In fairness it must be added that some of their careless critics have created these straw men for them. But this is no more convincing than a Tea Partier claiming to be correct because a Communist is wrong. In these blog entries, I intend to develop an alternative interpretation.

The authors also reveal their bias by also entirely omitting any mention of the evidence that connects the elements of NDEs to stimulation of the right temporal lobe and by the drug ketamine. Stimulation of the right temporal lobe, either by a medical occurrence (stroke or epilepsy) or by experimental induction (Persinger’s famous God Helmet) produces some, though not all, of the characteristics of NDEs. It is clear that an NDE is not merely a delusion produced by epilepsy or brain chemicals, but it appears to be partly so, and the authors could at least have mentioned this evidence.

We must admit that NDEs are no mere delusions brought on by lack of oxygen (due to cessation of blood flow to the brain) or other trauma. NDEs differ significantly from delusions experienced by living people.

· They are vivid and clear. The emotionally-charged clarity of an NDE is usually strong enough to change the life of the person who experiences it.
· They are nonrandom. They contain some of the elements listed above, and usually very little else.
· They contain experiences that are difficult (the authors claim impossible) to explain in scientific terms.

The vividness and emotional power of NDEs also distinguish them from dreams. The authors claim that people dream about those whom they have recently encountered, while NDE include visions of people who are dead. The authors are incorrect about what they say about dreams; the very night before I read their book, I had dreamed of two people of whom I had not recently thought and to whom I had no particularly strong connection. But it is fair to note that NDEs contain visions of a nonrandom set of people: dead family members, even those that they did not know where dead.

Among the experiences that are difficult to explain are the following examples. One victim reported overhearing a conversation that occurred outside of the hospital room down the hall. Another reported that, while he was in a coma, someone had brought a candle and left it in a drawer; he was able to tell the nurse which drawer it was in. Another man knew which drawer his dentures had been placed in. A woman reported meeting a grandmother who had died before she was born, and she did not know who it was until, later, she saw a photograph of this grandmother. Perhaps the most interesting of all was the woman who reported seeing a shoe on a window ledge that she could not have seen from her room (page 73). It would seem impossible for a person in a coma to actually see and know things that occurred during the coma.

Nevertheless, there are alternative explanations, though not easy ones. These observations cannot be brushed off as mere delusions. How could someone know what was going on while they were in a coma? We know of no way this could happen. But it is possible that people experiencing an NDE do, in fact, have some kind of perception of what is going on around them, a modality of perception that is not merely seeing or hearing. A person in a coma cannot see which drawer a candle or a set of dentures is placed, but may sense it in some way we do not yet understand and which a coma does not inhibit. This opens up new possibilities for research; the ability of the human body to perceive stimuli, and transmit them to the brain, may be much greater than we had thought. But this does not prove that the victim was seeing into the afterlife. In fact, the best description of what might be happening was provided in the authors’ own words. In Chapter 8 they write, “It is a unique and remarkable state of consciousness.” And on page 201, they write, “…there is far more to consciousness and memory than can be explained solely by our physical brain. I find that incredibly exciting.” I think the authors are right about this and wrong about NDEs being visions into the afterlife.

Some of the other experiences can be explained by the ability of the brain to deceive itself. The woman who “saw” the grandmother who had died before she was born may in fact have seen a photograph of her years earlier, and had forgotten about it consciously. The woman who saw the shoe on the ledge may have seen it while being wheeled down the hall (the shoe was, after all, beside a window) and then forgotten it. The people who had visions of these things were not lying; they may have simply forgotten what they had seen at a previous time. We’ve all been there.

I conclude this first entry about Long and Perry’s book with this tentative conclusion: people who experience NDE are having a unique and vivid kind of mental experience, into which is incorporated things they have previously seen or that they have perceived during their comas in a manner not yet understood. There is no reason to conclude that they are seeing into the afterlife. In fact, as described in later entries, there are reasons to suspect that they are not.