[I'm going to leave this comment like it is, but I'm adding this edit for clarification. After a second read-through, I do agree that the quote I posted proves that NDE's aren't compelling evidence in the sense that they aren't definite proof of God/the afterlife/whatever. But I don't think they proved that NDE's aren't valid evidence, which it seemed to me at first they tried to do, and I then realized that they hadn't. So take this comment with a grain of salt, and see what you can make of it]
DreadedAnomaly gave two good articles to read in his post below*, which could possibly explain OBE/NDEs as completely natural. These are pretty good articles, but they highlight a problem I have with the whole discussion: that the anti-afterlife side seems biased, too. For example, a quote from this article:
According to Dr. Jansen, ketamine can reproduce all the main features of the NDE, including travel through a dark tunnel into the light, the feeling that one is dead, communing with God, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, strange noises, etc. This does not prove that the NDE is nothing but a set of physical responses, nor does it prove that there is no life after death. It does, however, prove that an NDE is not compelling evidence for belief in either the existence of a separate consciousness or of an afterlife.
This (to me) certainly does not prove that NDE's are not compelling evidence, it proved that it was not necessarily compelling evidence. It suggested that NDE's were not compelling evidence and further argument might have convinced me, but it seemed a bit too soon to call it a "proof" to me. (and there was no further argument, because they thought they had proved it)
Things like this cause me to question whether there is anyone who has published unbiased arguments for or against God or the afterlife. Responses to this post don't seem to escape bias, and while we can account for bias, it's particularly difficult to do so for a topic where I'm questioning whether I'm biased myself.
*http://lesswrong.com/lw/3ok/is_there_anything_after_death/3bgr
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.