I've wondered about this as well, but I'm doubtful as to what they can really show. For one, everyone who has given testimony about such experiences... is alive. Were they "really" dead? Do we understand the limits of the human body for heart and brain stoppages? If it weren't unethical, could we do something akin to Flatliners and find out, repeatably, what one experiences when "dead"?
Also, can NDEs make any "predictions" about what kind of afterlife might exist? I've certainly heard Christians use these as evidence of an afterlife. I've even read a book where I'm assuming the point was to make a case for having met Jesus while dead.
In any case, make the belief pay rent: should Christians see anything different than Muslims, Mormons, or Scientologists? Will culture affect the nationality of the "great crowd of witnesses" seen (is heaven coincidentally populated by a sea of your own ethnicity)? Things like this. If predictions cannot be made... why not resort to a default that we simply don't understand the brain in conditions of either no activity, activity below our levels of detection, oxygen starvation, or the like?
I'm far more interested in cases where people supposedly saw a basketball on the roof or witnessed a car crash blocks away, but I haven't found anything tangible on these other than usage in debate by people like Gary Habermas. These kinds of experiences are at least open to falsifiability.
Also, while not an NDE... James Randi had an Out of Body Experience which is extremely interesting to listen to him recall,
Out-of-body experiences are very interesting to me as well. The first response seems to be to ignore them or to assume that they are lying. My response is to cautiously accept that they might be telling the truth, but to wait until we can find out more about what is going on. This could possibly be by using evidence gathered from careful experiments, possibly by using arguments from thought experiments.
I was on Reddit today, and I came across (this link)[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/eyiat/for_those_of_you_who_have_died_and_been/]. One of the things I've seen on this site that's bothered me is the exclusion of personal experiences in deciding what a person should or should not believe. I know that less wrong is mostly atheist, and I wanted to hear less wrong's reaction to descriptions of experiences like these.
For example, my dad was in the hospital 5 or 6 years ago when a truck came across an icy road and hit him head-on. His most vivid memory from this is a dream he had when he was in the hospital. He was in a pool of water with my mom, and they were both naked (they were underwater, but didn't need to breathe). He remembers that at the end of this pool, there was a bright light that he wanted to head towards. He began to swim that way...and here, I don't remember what happened, but he was unable to reach the light for some reason.
Such stories seem to be common for people who come close to death, and for a community based around rationality which seems to consider the likelihood of life after death as slim, I just wondered what your reactions are. My reaction is that such experiences are explainable in terms of neural activity, but that doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility that these are descriptions of experiences of an afterlife. I'm not convinced by them, but I do consider it to be possible.