Do Atheist’s Have Near Death Experiences?

If you’ve ever been interested in what happens when we die (I’m now talking to every person in the world, I think 🙂 you undoubtedly have asked yourself what happens to people who believe in nothing.

If you are skeptic, cynic, non believer or atheist, do you STILL have a spiritual experience at the moment of death, or are you required to believe in something in life, to experience something after death?

Of course, there are many people out there, primarily super religious people of one faith or another, who will insist that atheists have a different experience after death, simply due to what they believed (or more accurately did NOT believe) in life. I think that this is a pretty silly thing to believe of course, as if there IS an afterlife worth going to, it shouldn’t be based on what religion we practice (or don’t) If anything at all, it should be based on the type of person we are, or the consciousness we cultivate, and the way we lived in life.

Here it the thing though – atheists of ALL types have the very same types of Near Death Experiences as the rest of us. They have spiritually tranformative, calm, crystal clear and hyper real experiences that transform their world view and far more often than not, convince them that there is in fact, an afterlife or different dimension to human exisitence. (which again, doesn’t have to be flavored or colored by religion at all)

Here is a cool NDE as reported by a Jewish Atheist – someone who presumably felt culturally Jewish by birth – but a non believer in the supernatural or spiritual dimensinon – whose NDE earlier this month changed her mind in a very powerful, and profound way. Check it out at the full account, following the short excerpt below.

I don’t remember much after I woke up in the ICU but I never forgot this. I had a minor operation under general anesthesia. After they put the tube in my throat, my larynx started spasming and experiencing acute hypoxia. On arrival to the emergency room, I was incubated and manually ventilated with an oxygen saturation of 80 and with a blood pressure reading of 50 over 40. My heart stopped briefly.

This is when I experienced looking down at myself and watching myself being worked on. I felt very warm, happy, and safe. A deceased person that I was very close to was there with me. He looked at me in a loving way. I wanted to stay with him and didn’t want to leave him, but I was being sucked closer and closer back towards my body. Every time I tried to resist the pull, he looked very upset and told me not to resist. He kept smiling. That’s all I remember.

http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/laura_b_nde_8090.htm