I really don't like saying that God can't exist, there can't be an afterlife, etc., because we don't have evidence for which isn't the same thing as evidence against. My reaction is make no beliefs, not update my beliefs against.
It would be interesting for you to consider why you give the afterlife weight in light of "absence of evidence." By that, I mean that it might be helpful to consider where the "seed" got planted in the first place. Do things like NDEs and OBEs alone lead you to think that there is a possible afterlife, or was the idea/half-belief already present and NDEs/OBEs only make it slightly more likely or difficult to rule out entirely?
I only ask because I would presume that in many, many cases (Xenu, thetans, fairies, the Loch Ness monster, aliens, and many conspiracy theories) you absolutely do treat absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
Without a significant difference in the quantity or quality of evidence between these various cases, and without a reason to think that an NDE/OBE implies an immaterial self rather than simply an unexplained phenomenon... I suspect that the belief or concept of the afterlife hypothesis originated somewhere else and your current grounds for clinging to it (OBEs/NDEs needing to be explained and absence of evidence isn't...) aren't really real.
To say it one more way: you might be discussing this topic as if a certain set of evidence matters, when it really has nothing to do with why you deal delicately with the afterlife idea while harshly with the other unsupported hypotheses I listed above.
was the idea/half-belief already present and NDEs/OBEs only make it slightly more likely or difficult to rule out entirely?
That is almost certainly true. But it doesn't make the first part of your statement false.
Do things like NDEs and OBEs alone lead you to think that there is a possible afterlife[?]
I'm trying to objectively decide the answer to this question. It's difficult because of your other point.
...you might be discussing this topic as if a certain set of evidence matters, when it really has nothing to do with why you deal delicate
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.