On the other hand, where NDEs may not quite fit so well with this website is that those who have come back from one usually report having a direct experience with a massively greater higher consciousness that some call "g-o-d" -- it's just not the "g-o-d" of any religion! There are occasional exceptions who talk about meeting Jeebus in the afterlife but most of them are probably delusional or attention-seekers contaminating the pool of genuine witnesses. That's really too bad, because it leaves religion in the driver's seat when the reality of NDEs, if they could be scientifically validated, they have the potential to destroy most organized religions forever. Which I think most of us would welcome as a good thing. I hope to write more on the topic of NDEs later.

Religion satisfies a need in people to feel a part of a greater whole, but it's a poor type of satisfaction derived from swallowing falsehoods. Being a Recovering Catholic that is crystal clear in retrospect, but remembering my childhood exposure to it I recall a kind of fog of conflict where I felt like I was trying my best to believe and do the right things the way my parents and culture laid them out for me, but at the same time I was very confused about much of it and often felt like certain things were being held back from me. And some things were held back, like all the emphasis on 'the Virgin' when I was just a little who didn't even know what a virgin was <g> and nobody would ever explain it! Not the catechism nuns, not my parents, not the priests in their sermons, nada. The most important thing they all held back from me however that took even longer to figure out than what exactly a virgin was and wasn't, was their DOUBT. Religionists all have it, because faith and doubt are opposite sides of the same coin and you cannot have one without the other even if only one side is face up all the time. There's no hiding from that inner awareness that is always trying to make sense of things, to weave what it thinks it knows together in a harmonious tapestry of understanding where there are no glaring conflicts, because this is how our brains are constructed to learn about the world and adapt to it. It's an automatic, one might even say autonomic process of our brain's functioning to construct a worldview this way as we mature out of infancy becoming better and better all the time at understanding and dealing with the world we find ourselves in.

Or at least that's the way the process is supposed to work.

Religion throws a monkey wrench of falsity into it that prevents a valid worldview from forming and vastly hinders social maturation, resulting in poor understanding and poor interactions with the world. We see the most extreme cases of this manifested by religious groups which seek to impose their childlike worldviews onto their neighbors, their county, and the whole world if they can. Radical Islamists dream of their versions of religion being forced upon everyone in the same way evangelicals dream of control-freaking everyone too. In their delusions, none of them could possibly have a poorer understanding of the world they live in. And today we are faced with the prospect of nuclear war because of them.

If Trump and North Korea don't get us nuked, maybe Pakistan and India will. Or Iran and Israel. Who knows what Russia might do with the psychopath Putin scheming and plotting with the psychopath Trump. Religion has twisted and deformed all these cultures to the extent we may even suffer an extinction event; recently I heard on PBS I think it was that just 1% of the world's arsenal of nuclear weapons blowing up would plunge us all into a nuclear winter that could last for decades. I think that might depend on whether they were mostly air bursts or ground bursts, but there's no sense quibbling because there's nothing saying a global thermonuclear war would be limited to just 1% of the available nukes being used.

The point is, religion for the most part is a filthy horrible thing and that is a central theme of this website, so it's a pleasure to associate with like-minded people. Just think, if there were enough of us to be able to apply a sufficient of force (e.g. economic or political) somehow upon just the right leverage point, maybe we could prevent the religion-inspired nuclear train wreck that almost seems inevitable, from happening...