You seem to be operating under the delusion your opinions are absolute truths.
When did I ever say that? I believe they are true, and that is my right, but I am not expecting anyone else to believe as I do.
This is not the case. When it comes to matters of spirituality everything is a subjective opinion. All we have is things that are made up. What we do is come up with a set of ideas that we accept as being true based on faith. These ideas cannot be proven one way or the other. Every religion is built on a set of axioms or assumptions that are considered to be true without any proof. It's not just religion but any belief system.
It is true that all beliefs are based upon faith, but that does not mean that religions are made up. I believe they are revealed by God, not made up by men. I don’t care if you or anyone else believes that, but it is my right to believe it.
The purpose of religion is the answer the four great existential questions:
1. Who am I?
2. Why am I here?
3. What does it all mean?
4. What is going to happen to me when I die?
In many ways these are unanswerable questions. But people invent religion because many people are uncomfortable with unanswerable questions. People want the comfort that comes from having concrete answers and absolute truth. This is why we make things up.
These questions are not unanswerable. They were answered by the Messengers of God.
The difference between you and me is you think your Messengers are telling you absolute truth. Where as I am choosing to have faith in my own beliefs.
That is true, so why can’t I believe what I believe and you can believe what you believe? Why try to change me? I am not trying to change you, I only state
what I believe.
My idea when we die we go into the light as been documented over thousands of years by people having near-death experiences. The people who have had near-death experiences all claim the experiences was not only positive but extremely positive.
You are wrong that these experiences are all positive. Most are positive because most people led a good life. Some people didn’t live a good life and they report bad NDE experiences. These people even tie their experiences to the way they had been living their lives and the bad NDE experience helped them to change and become better people before they really die.
People have described the experience as an exceedingly high level of fulfilling love. So I have taken this and incorporated into my chosen belief that when we die we go into the light and experience the infinite beauty of God's face as our last experience before we melt back into the soul of God.
This might happen when people leave their body and almost die, but those people were not fully dead.
So you are going to base all your beliefs about the afterlife on people who had NDEs and were not even fully dead. As I said before, you
want to believe that and that is why you have chosen to believe it. So if something else is true, you do not want to know about it.
What that boils down to is that you don’t want to know the truth if it contradicts what you want to believe. So if you died tomorrow you could die not knowing the truth. You close your mind to anything you don’t want to hear. That is a foolish way to live.
Distressing Near-Death Experiences: The Basics
The great majority of near-death experiences (NDEs) reported publicly over the past four decades have been described as pleasant, even glorious. Almost unnoticed in the euphoria about them has been the sobering fact that not all NDEs are so affirming. Some are deeply disturbing.
Few people are forthcoming about such an event; they hide; they disappear when asked for information; if inpatient, they are likely to withdraw; they are under great stress. What do their physicians need to know to deal with these experiences?
Varieties of Distressing Near-Death Experiences
We have documented three types of distressing NDE: inverse, void, and hellish.
1 The brief descriptions below illustrate the types. All examples are from the authors’ files unless otherwise indicated.
Inverse NDE
In some NDEs, features usually reported in other NDEs as pleasurable are perceived as hostile or threatening. A man thrown from his horse found himself floating at treetop height, watching emergency medical technicians working over a his body. “No! No! This isn’t right!” He screamed, “Put me back!” but they did not hear him. Next he was shooting through darkness toward a bright light, flashing past shadowy people who seemed to be deceased family members waiting. He was panic-stricken by the bizarre scenario and his inability to affect what was happening.
A woman in childbirth felt her spirit separate from her body and fly into space at tremendous speed, then saw a small ball of light rushing toward her: “It became bigger and bigger as it came toward me. I realized that we were on a collision course, and it terrified me. I saw the blinding white light come right to me and engulf me.”
A woman collapsed from hyperthermia and began re-experiencing her entire life: “I was filled with such sadness and experienced a great deal of depression.”
The Void NDE
An NDE of the “void” is an ontological encounter with a perceived vast emptiness, often a devastating scenario of aloneness, isolation, sometimes annihilation. A woman in childbirth found herself abruptly flying over the hospital and into deep, empty space. A group of circular entities informed her she never existed, that she had been allowed to imagine her life but it was a joke; she was not real. She argued with facts about her life and descriptions of Earth. “No,” they said, “none of that had ever been real; this is all there was.” She was left alone in space.
2, pp. 1–5
Another woman in childbirth felt herself floating on water, but at a certain point, “It was no longer a peaceful feeling; it had become pure hell. I had become a light out in the heavens, and I was screaming, but no sound was going forth. It was worse than any nightmare. I was spinning around, and I realized that this was eternity; this was what forever was going to be…. I felt the aloneness, the emptiness of space, the vastness of the universe, except for me, a mere ball of light, screaming.”
A woman who attempted suicide felt herself sucked into a void: “I was being drawn into this dark abyss, or tunnel, or void…. I was not aware of my body as I know it…. I was terrified. I felt terror. I had expected nothingness; I expected the big sleep; I expected oblivion; and I found now that I was going to another plane … and it frightened me. I wanted nothingness, but this force was pulling me somewhere I didn’t want to go, but I never got beyond the fog.”
A man who was attacked by a hitchhiker felt himself rise out of his body: “I suddenly was surrounded by total blackness, floating in nothing but black space, with no up, no down, left, or right…. What seemed like an eternity went by. I fully lived it in this misery. I was only allowed to think and reflect.”
Hellish NDE
Overtly hellish experiences may be the least common type of distressing NDE. A man in heart failure felt himself falling into the depths of the Earth. At the bottom was a set of high, rusty gates, which he perceived as the gates of hell. Panic-stricken, he managed to scramble back up to daylight.
A woman was being escorted through a frighteningly desolate landscape and saw a group of wandering spirits. They looked lost and in pain, but her guide indicated she was not allowed to help them.
An atheistic university professor with an intestinal rupture experienced being maliciously pinched, then torn apart by malevolent beings.
3
A woman who hemorrhaged from a ruptured Fallopian tube reported an NDE involving “horrific beings with gray gelatinous appendages grasping and clawing at me. The sounds of their guttural moaning and the indescribable stench still remain 41 years later. There was no benign Being of Light, no life video, nothing beautiful or pleasant.”
A woman who attempted suicide felt her body sliding downward in a cold, dark, watery environment: “When I reached the bottom, it resembled the entrance to a cave, with what looked like webs hanging…. I heard cries, wails, moans, and the gnashing of teeth. I saw these beings that resembled humans, with the shape of a head and body, but they were ugly and grotesque…. They were frightening and sounded like they were tormented, in agony.”
Summary
Like the better-publicized pleasurable NDEs, distressing near-death experiences are both fascinating and frustrating as altered states of consciousness. Because of the deeply rooted concept of hell in Western culture and its Christian association with eternal physical torment, they pose serious challenges to the individuals who must shape their lives around such a profoundly durable event, and to their families, friends, and physicians. In the absence of clear-cut clinical data and universal cultural views, physicians are advised that neutrality of opinion and careful listening are likely to constitute best professional practice for addressing these difficult near-death experiences.
Distressing Near-Death Experiences: The Basics