New Movie Investigates Near-Death Experiences

I heard a lot of people really liked the first two episodes of surviving death but then started disliking the other ones because it apparantly got too iffy

Without checking the content I recall being turned-off by one of the episodes, neutral on a couple and quite impressed by the others.

I tend to make connections between unrelated areas, so bear with me on this. Just recently I was reading something about the difficulties sometimes encountered with trying to do a high-quality sound broadcast in some locations. Someone was describing a building in a village where there were lengthy cables connecting the microphones at one end to the electronic equipment positioned at some distance. There was an unacceptable hum (from 50Hz/60Hz mains electricity, as well as possible break-through of powerful radio transmissions) appearing in the audio signal. Eventually they discovered some of the old wiring was corroded and they didn't have a proper earth/ground connection.

The solution, they hammered a long copper rod into the ground and used that as a good earth connection. Problem solved.

This is how I sometimes see God or religion. If someone in a location many miles away encountered a problem with hum in the audio signal, they might decide to run a very long cable to the known good earthing-rod which had been put in place by the first team. But that would be the wrong answer. Each location needs its own localised connection to ground.

That's how I see trying to connect with some ancient religion in a different time and place. It is only going to add all the hum and noise in the lengthy cable. It's why NDEs are an ideal solution. Each one acts as a fresh, localised earth-connection, giving clarity once more.

I also see NDEs as a democratisation of belief, it bypasses all the hierarchies of priestly organisations and brings a direct message to an individual person.

I might go further but this could disturb some people, I think many religious ideas may have started from an NDE, which is where the commonality arises which some may interpret between their own personal beliefs from tradition and some modern-day NDE. But it is interpreted in an inappropriate way: rather than valuing and treasuring present-day experiences in their own right, as carrying a direct and clear message, they are perhaps sometimes used only to prop-up an older and less clear historical NDE-based belief.

I might go further but this could disturb some people, I think many religious ideas may have started from an NDE, which is where the commonality arises which some may interpret between their own personal beliefs from tradition and some modern-day NDE. But it is interpreted in an inappropriate way: rather than valuing and treasuring present-day experiences in their own right, as carrying a direct and clear message, they are perhaps sometimes used only to prop-up an older and less clear historical NDE-based belief.

I'm still working on completing Shushan's books but this does seem to be the case, along with CORTs and possibly mediumship.

Part of the challenge though is it isn't completely clear to me NDEs clarify matters though they might at least move the conversation along...admittedly I suspect the immediate afterlife one goes to after this life is itself not a place of total clarity. Some NDEs and even In Between Lives for CORTs support particular religions/values over others, whereas others might present us with (sometimes wildly) different locales. Then there are the mediumship accounts which at times present afterlives that are perhaps too much like this one, with at least one account I recall mentioning something about having to get a job...

But I do think even amidst that confusion one takes away the power of any kind of priestly caste - whether for a traditional religion or the materialist dogma - to control people's lives...to say nothing of politicians, academia, etc.

I'm still working on completing Shushan's books but this does seem to be the case, along with CORTs and possibly mediumship.

Part of the challenge though is it isn't completely clear to me NDEs clarify matters though they might at least move the conversation along...admittedly I suspect the immediate afterlife one goes to after this life is itself not a place of total clarity. Some NDEs and even In Between Lives for CORTs support particular religions/values over others, whereas others might present us with (sometimes wildly) different locales. Then there are the mediumship accounts which at times present afterlives that are perhaps too much like this one, with at least one account I recall mentioning something about having to get a job...

But I do think even amidst that confusion one takes away the power of any kind of priestly caste - whether for a traditional religion or the materialist dogma - to control people's lives...to say nothing of politicians, academia, etc.

While I appreciate and agree with you on the difficulties of having a range of very different and varied information, it is the directness, with no intermediaries which causes me to use the word clarity. While there is a curiosity about a supposed afterlife, one thing we must not lose sight of is living here, today.

Though I've not had an NDE I did seek some sort of direct understanding of my own life, why do I exist here in this world and how I should live. If a person like myself rejects or questions mainstream or conventional ideas about daily life, it does lead to a difficulty, a lack of any foundation. It appeared to me that only some sort of direct contact could answer my questions. I think sometimes those individuals having an NDE receive some of this kind of understanding. But it is an ongoing process, not a moment of change and happily ever after. One of the repeated aspects across different NDEs is that a person returns to this life knowing they have some sort of purpose or role to fulfil - yet at the same time they often do not know what it is. Which is to say, a person is not told what to do, only that what they do matters.

To Kam's point about hijacking content to suit a particular faith tradition: the irony is that it defeats their own evangelical purposes.  The faithful don't need to be convinced.  The doubting Thomas's would react much better to an agnostic telling of something as stunning as NDE's.  Might even lead them to Christianity, who knows?

I haven't seen this film yet but I have had a look at the various trailers etc and one hour long, 'four expert' discussion. Without reading back through the comments, I also don't like the evangelical, in your face glitter and hype. It puts me right off what probably is just as evidential as anything else.

I enjoyed seeing Michael Sabom again, though. He has become a religious Christian, there's no doubt about that and because of it, he will never be taken seriously again by academic researchers, which is a shame. He wasn't a religious person when he started his research, he was just a typical mainly secular type (although I think he joined a methodist church early on, but that would have been what you did over there, a social thing)

I also noticed he's still got the old tapes of his study. What I would give to listen to those (I've read them in his book of course which still is to me remarkably persuasive). 

I would urge any sceptic to buy that book (study). If you read those six cases with detailed veridical perceptions, you realise that ordinary explanations, as he said, just don't 'wash out'.