What do atheists think of near-death experience stories of people going to Heaven or Hell.?
More like a near-death dream or hallucination. You hallucinate when your brain isn’t getting oxygen and if you happen to be unconscious the “dream” would be more intense. EVERYONE knows the story of what heaven and hell are supposed to be like and that you go to one when you die. Your subconscious simply puts it all together during the hallucination. I’ve experienced a mild form of this when I was VERY sick. Medical instruments can’t measure everything. There is still “spark” somewhere in the seemingly lifeless body. As for nonreligious people seeing heaven, like I said, the subconscious knows the stories and builds the dream around it. Consciously, the person is atheist, but the subconscious believes everything it sees and hears.
I agree with what newplasticsmell is saying. When people talk about what they perceive as NDE’s, they often mistake one phenomena for another. This is why so many people think that it’s all about hallucinations only. This is a reflection of cultural conditioning and belief, no different than the cultural conditioning and belief that led people to believe that the Earth was flat many years ago. The visions of heaven and hell, seeing what you expect, and all that… yes, the brain is shutting down and hallucinating like mad. An atheist will probable go through his/her own swirling merry-go-round version of heaven and hell when the brain is shutting down also. The existence of awareness beyond the body is another issue entirely that many people would like to sweep under the rug because it does not conform to their belief systems. An analogy to this is the religious fanatic who refuses to believe in things like genetic evolution because the Bible says something different. Would China still
