You seem to think there's a difference between beliefs and assumptions. That is, you say your reaction is to make no beliefs about things like the existence of God and the afterlife, but you also say that you assume there is a God. Can you clarify what you consider that difference to be?
If a patient happened to be hooked up to an MRI during what they later describe as an NDE, and the MRI recorded patterns characteristic of other events generally considered hallucinatory, would you consider that evidence supporting the explanation that NDEs are hallucinatory events? Would that significantly alter your beliefs about the existence of an afterlife?
If it proved possible to experimentally induce an NDE experience by manipulating a subject's brain in particular ways, would you consider that evidence supporting the explanation that NDEs are hallucinatory events? Would that significantly alter your beliefs about the existence of an afterlife?
Hmm, what I said was poorly worded. I may edit it. What I meant was that I considered the evidence to be sufficient for me to believe in God. Here's what I said:
I understand that my personal experiences with what I believe to have been God could be explained by neural anomalies, but until I have convincing reasons to believe that, or convincing reasons to believe there isn't a God outside my personal experiences, or convincing reasons to believe that my experiences are evidence of something else entirely, I'm going to assume that there is a God.
He...
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.