Terror Management Theory, Psychology, and Survival evidence

Long winded thread title yet again, but I was wondering if anybody is familiar with TMT (Terror Management Theory) in psychology? It's been quite the topic of debate and although it's had a lot of criticisms that I believe are well founded, it's still an interesting topic and does relate to survival of consciousness, spirituality and so forth.

When brought into the topics I'm talking about, it almost seems like a vaguer, different version of "Super PSI". Or at least it used in the similar role. Rather then just explain away afterlife evidence, it's aimed at explaining religion, spirituality, belief in paranormal/anomalous phenomenon, etc as our minds just working to reduce our anxiety over death. This doesn't hold as anymore a explanation for it all as Super PSI does in that regard, and both have similar gapping holes in trying to explain survival evidence. 

Love to hear what some more "proponents" say, as the skeptics have said quite a lot about this. For example, anybody who goes envoking the "dying brain" theory for explaining NDEs might as well be quoting TMT

How does TMT go about explaining veridical observations during NDEs, or veridical reincarnation accounts? What mechanism does it invoke for transmission of information in these scenarios?

How does TMT go about explaining veridical observations during NDEs, or veridical reincarnation accounts? What mechanism does it invoke for transmission of information in these scenarios?

Good point, Typoz. I might add, add in all the cases of different survival evidence that include children unaware of death or anything like that. Which there is a lotta cases in literature, and who knows how many others that have gone unreported yet? The fact people with no grasp of death or annihilation have indentical experiences to the people who do speaks volumes. 

I guess you could say spontaneous ADCs and shared NDE experiences that happen when the person has no clue the person was dying, experiences that happened in non dangerous circumstances, etc also defy it

There is the rather unfortunate fact that someone - I'm not sure who - coined the expression "Fear-Death Experience". In the English language the terms 'near' and 'fear' rhyme rather nicely, and it must have been a satisfyingly neat and tidy counterpart to the existing "Near-Death Experience. I've certainly heard Pim Van Lommel use it, but I don't think he was the originator. It describes how someone on the verge of some potentially life-threatening occurrence may abruptly find themselves outside the body, and observing events from that position, they may even have other components, such as a life-review and visiting some other type of reality, or meeting or feeling the presence of some other being, and so on. And then perhaps the outcome is that the person is unharmed, there is no physical damage to the body (or maybe some non life-threatening injury such as a few broken bones, or none at all).

I think a case could be made that a better term for these might be "Expectation-Death Experience". It is the expectation of something which triggers the experience, but it need not be fear. For example if we take the view that people experience multiple incarnations and live many lives, rather than fear it might just be a sense of "Oh, here we go again", a sense of a familiarity with leaving the body, an almost mundane experience if it has occurred many, many times before, that may not evoke fear at all. Hence my dissatisfaction with the potentially misleading term, whose only merits are that it is brief and it rhymes.

Long winded thread title yet again, but I was wondering if anybody is familiar with TMT (Terror Management Theory) in psychology? It's been quite the topic of debate and although it's had a lot of criticisms that I believe are well founded, it's still an interesting topic and does relate to survival of consciousness, spirituality and so forth.

When brought into the topics I'm talking about, it almost seems like a vaguer, different version of "Super PSI". Or at least it used in the similar role. Rather then just explain away afterlife evidence, it's aimed at explaining religion, spirituality, belief in paranormal/anomalous phenomenon, etc as our minds just working to reduce our anxiety over death. This doesn't hold as anymore a explanation for it all as Super PSI does in that regard, and both have similar gapping holes in trying to explain survival evidence. 

Love to hear what some more "proponents" say, as the skeptics have said quite a lot about this. For example, anybody who goes envoking the "dying brain" theory for explaining NDEs might as well be quoting TMT

Wiki:

"In social psychology, terror management theory (TMT) proposes a basic psychological conflict that results from having a self preservation instinct, whilst realizing that death is inevitable and to some extent unpredictable. This conflict produces terror, and the terror is then managed by embracing cultural values, or symbolic systems that act to provide life with enduring meaning and value. .........The simplest examples of cultural values that manage the terror of death are those that purport to offer literal immortality (e.g. belief in afterlife, religion)."

This is just the prevalent mainstream materialist dismissal of all evidence of the paranormal including afterlife evidence, rationalized into psychological terms. They automatically assume that all such beliefs and evidence are illusory in some way, caused by underlying fear-induced fantasies, misinterpretations, hallucinations, frauds, or whatever else the materialist's imagination can come up with. In this fixed scientistic mindset, all beliefs and evidence of the paranormal have absolutely got to have a psychological (or abnormal psychological) origin. 

It's almost amusing that the underlying psychology of the scientistic zealots that produce such theories is as much fuelled by fear (that their world-view might be false), as they assume is the psychology of the "naive believers" they attempt to analyze. There is nothing new here - this has been part of the scientific mainstream view for more than a century. 

How does TMT account for terminal lucidity? It's absolutely illogical that a brain that is damaged enough that people literally die of starvation would randomly produce these out "of terror".

It's almost amusing that the underlying psychology of the scientistic zealots that produce such theories is as much fuelled by fear (that their world-view might be false), as they assume is the psychology of the "naive believers" they attempt to analyze. There is nothing new here - this has been part of the scientific mainstream view for more than a century. 

There is a sense of symmetry here. My late father used to say. "who judges others, judges himself". In this instance, those asserting the importance of terror are openly confessing their own innermost fears.