Near death experiences: beyond belief?

I'm reading a book by a Christian author on what happens when we die. It is full of stories from folks who had those "near-death" or "post-death" (in other words, they were clinically dead) experiences. The man who wrote the volume sounds pretty conventional-there is nothing vaguely New Age about his exegesis. He is actually fairly reticent about his ideas, but offers them as his own. It is a bit harder for the faithful to dismiss him as a nut case-but as he says, not everything in his stories fits neatly into an orthodox Christian package.

At the same time, life after death experiences are a very controversial topic-both among scientists and among traditional Christians.

Scientists who don't belief in life after death keep trying to find chemical or biological explanations for the experiences-and it is possible that some day they will, in a way that convinces believers that they are just a vision of the dying brain. On the other hand, there is a lot of variety to the ones recounted by this writer.


I'm personally not sure what to make of this authors theology or beliefs. His thoughts and hermenuetic makes me a bit uncomfortable, in part because I can't dismiss him as a New Ager with whom I have no doctrine in common. Not that dying is a topic most of us enjoy pondering. But it's not bad to ask (again) what I believe-and why.

Home

Pulling out of my street to go down to the Lake, I notice the lady across the street (the wealthy one, with the big ol' house) is standing by the fence, watching her horse. The donkey (Sian admits now it is one, instead of a miniature pony) runs across the pasture. It's a fabulous night, cool, a little windy, a great night for the summer solstice.

I crank up a Chris Daughtry song, which just happens to be "Home"...I'm going home, to the place where I belong, where your love has always been enough for me."

I walk, and then I run, past the fishermen and women, watching the boats on the lake, reveling in the beauty. I knew as soon as I ran down the road to the Marsh Creek Lake that I belonged. I wonder why it took me so long to find the place that reaches out to me in memory even when I am miles away-my spirits lifting when the Wallace sign shows up right before the bridge.

Coming home, I almost run down a man and a woman walking in the dusk down Fairview. Idiots, I think to myself. Then I recall the first time I came through Glenmoore on Creek Road.

Down the empty road a woman and her children walked, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I want to live here, I thought-so close to suburbia and so far.

Go for it, I say silently to the couple as they walk out of the darkness of the trees. Have fun. Just be glad I saw you this time!

I've never gone through immigration, but I'm seeking amnesty.

I'm not an immigrant. My grandparents and great grandparents were, but that's going back about a hundred or more years. Yet when I happen to see golf on television, I wonder if there was a class (GSL) that I was supposed to take when I left NYC for the 'burbs.

I happened to be at the gym when the US Open was on, and I might as well have been watching France play Italy in World Cup Soccer for all that I understood.

He's going for the third putt, says one announcer to another. They lament how bad the "rough" is on a particular hole. Tiger's plus 6 at 18, they tell us. I know that means he's six over par at hole 18, but I have almost no idea what par is. All I know is that, unlike the real world, to have six of something in golf is worse than having minus 6.

The only part I really understand is when the little white ball drops into the hole.

I have friends who adore the 'sport' of golf. They become vice presidents of banks and COO's so that they can spend half of their work weeks out there on the golf course socializing...I mean, getting to know potential business partners. I even have a friend whose husband sells photographs of golf courses that are so lovely I wouldn't mind having one in the kitchen or dining room. But somehow the language of golf has evaded me for years, posing an invisible but powerful barrier to intimacy with the sport.

Perhaps that's not such a bad thing-if I don't understand the fundamentals, I won't know what it is I'm missing.

After Sian had an improper website pop up on the computer in our family room yesterday, I installed parental controls.

We were worried that somehow "Club Penguin" be banned in Glenmoore. What happened, of course, is that it was very difficult for anyone to get online. Sian forgot her password. Colin did not have a password. The computer wanted me to add an administrator. Who else is there in this house? The cat?

While I was inside I left the hose in my flower garden. The kids quickly took it to another part of the garden and the so called "mud hole." I can't remember what that was like when we bought the house, but now it is a refuge for all things muddy. Like my 12 year old daughter, dresssed in a tankini and six layers of mud. Sometimes she looks like a young Leslie Caron, a lovely hatchling. Sometimes she looks like a seven year old, pushing the hose under a pile of wet dirt, and waiting, with Colin and Tyler, to see the water push up the dirt and seep through the ground.

Come and see, Colin suggested as I pushed the lawn mower up and down in the humid air. So I did, enjoying the sight of children behaving like they have for centuries--dirty and wet and loving every filthy minute.

My column from the IJ

LancasterOnline.com

LANCASTER COUNTY, PA -
I had a revelation a few days ago.
Scratch that image — it's way too religious for a column about the contemporary scourge of institutional religion, Christopher Hitchens and his confraternity of anti-theists rail.
Let's just say I had an epiphany. Darn it — there are moments when the English language, with its huge debt to the Judeo-Christian tradition, just works against you.
I realized that, according to Hitchens and some very cultured scientists, I am essentially a troglodyte.
Many of the world's ills, he argues, can be laid at the door of "proud," "stupid" and possibly "arrogant" people like me — those who believe in God.
"Religion comes from the terrified infancy of our species. … (It) is innately coercive as well as innately incoherent. Because it's man-made, there's an infinite variety for them all, and these sects proceed to quarrel among themselves, religious warfare being one of the great retardances [sic] of civilization of the time we've been alive and very much to this day," said the author of "God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," in an interview broadcast on Boston public radio station WBUR.
The British-born Hitchens and his spiritual (oops, there I go again) compatriot, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, seem to be everywhere — fodder not only for their own skilled publicists, but for countless profiles, news shows and, inevitably, responses from theists irritated at being belabored as ignorant bigots.
If one were to judge by the attention garnered by learned and glib critics like Hitchens, one would think the tally in the current game of "gotcha" being waged against conventional belief is "Atheists 6-Theists 0."
One example: In this week's edition of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list, Hitchens' book is third, admittedly behind the equally exasperated Al Gore's tome on the Bush administration, "The Assault on Reason," but five spots ahead of Pope Benedict XVI's book, "Jesus of Nazareth."
If the sometimes-testy Hitchens is a tough nut for the faithful to swallow, Dawkins has got to be even more of a royal pain.
The Oxford University Charles Symonyi professor of the public understanding of science, and perhaps the world's most photogenic atheist, Dawkins has continued not only to defend evolution as a fact, but also to argue evolution by natural selection is a satisfactory and evidence-based explanation for the world the way it is, while the idea of God is not.
When asked a few years ago in an interview in the online magazine Salon why humans continue to insist on believing in God, Dawkins responded: "One suggestion is that the child mind, is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. … Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it."
Dawkins and Hitchens aren't alone — they have friends just as mad as they are.
So what do you do if you are a theist in the cross hairs of highly articulate atheists?
One suggestion: Put on the thinking cap they don't think you have and consider whether they might have a point.
I can't help but wonder if part of the answer to why anti-theists are getting so much attention now is the Bush administration's stubborn rejection of any scientific discoveries that did not jibe with its conservative world view.
The president's sometimes unholy alliances of convenience with the most polarizing elements of the religious right, his attempt to stifle dissent on scientific matters in government agencies, and his almost gleeful anti-intellectualism has fueled an inevitable backlash.
Although this imbalance has recently provoked a healthy reaction among Christian conservative intellectuals, it also has annoyed moderate members of the scientific community who believe in evidence-based science (as in the generally recognized facts around climate change).
In addition, people of faith in this still largely Christian country remain easy marks because, to put it bluntly, they are often sloppy and sometimes ignorant about the faith fundamentals.
In a recent New Yorker article on Hitchens and his ilk titled "Atheists with Attitude," reviewer Anthony Gottlieb gives examples of idiosyncrasies in belief among Americans alternately amusing and scary.
Gottlieb refers to a 2001 survey in which more than half of American Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists and Presbyterians believed Jesus sinned — in direct contradiction to church tradition. Gottlieb also refers to a Barna Research Group survey that found most Christians don't know who preached the Sermon on the Mount.
There's more, but I don't want to embarrass anyone.
At the moment, the radical fringe of the anti-religious crowd can claim the edge in intellectual consistency.
Too bad, because a few anti-theist assumptions bear some intense scrutiny and charitable questions.
Why does an atheist like Dawkins believe "the broad direction of history is towards enlightenment," when there is so much evidence to the contrary? How does one explain our human tendency to seek a moral compass? Can one blithely dismiss the possibility that good and evil are realities, not merely constructs?
Faced with a withering barrage of criticism from this group of hot-blooded anti-theists, thoughtful people of faith have some choices to make.
We can barricade ourselves behind unexamined dogma and tribalism, or, openly and undefensively, we can seek to appreciate the anti-theist position.
Forced to ask ourselves some tough questions about what we believe, we will deepen and better appreciate our own faith.
After all, if they can evolve, why can't we?
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The Revolution of Species: Should Theists Take Atheists Seriously?

I think the answer is yes, when they are as brilliant as the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins-and as good-looking. If he's an example of natural selection, I'm going to give that evolution idea a second look.

What seems a little odd is how little sense of humor these gentlemen have. Perhaps, as in Christian and Jewish circles, there are inner sanctum in which anti-theists make fun of their own idiosyncrasies and creeds.

Although it gets irritating to be continually patronized as an ignorant bigot, perhaps we should turn the other cheek. We believers need to tend to our own flock.

I am particularly amused, and appalled, by the stats mentioned in the New Yorker by Anthony Gottlieb in his article on Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, that merry band of brothers.

It may be worrisome to atheists that 44 percent of Christians believe Jesus will return within 50 years. But it should be more worrisome to Christians that 1/5 of non-Christians in another poll also think Jesus will return.

Jesus who?

I came back from an overnight trip to NYC to see my dad just in time to catch the last inning and a half of GEYA baseball. Colin's team, the Tigers, played the Red Sox. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, the Red Sox were the better team-just underneath the first place Yankees. I'm not quite sure whether that was an accident, careful ranking pre-season...or the fix was in. Whatever the case, the Red Sox were, last night, better hitters and fielders. My Colin, who had not played last spring, has improved greatly. His two hits were very effectively fielded, though, and the Sox beat the Tigers...ouch, by a score of 10-4.

Across the street from Dad's house in Park Slope, the private school that has taken over one of the mansions on the Park is constructing a building where the playground had been for decades-the workmen have no shame about starting at 7:00 a.m. Sian managed to sleep through the racket. In this once genteel neighborhood of limestone and brownstone Victorians, the thin sheen of civilization fast disappears when it's time to jockey for a spot for the SUV or Mercedes sedan.

Survival of the fittest-it is the law of the jungle New Yorkers live by. There's something endearing about the insanity of the city, even in the swank Slope-but I was happy to return to the green ball fields, my frighteningly healthy squash plants-and the bliss of crickets in the spring grass.