Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

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Distressing NDEs as Scary Rites of Passage, #2

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This post continues the slightly amplified transcription of my presentation at the 2015 IANDS conference in San Antonio. If you missed the previous post, you might want to read that first and then come pick up here with Part #2.

Comparative valuations

The purpose of traditional initiation rituals was understood not only as being the source of  a “basic change in existential condition,” as Mircea Eliade claimed, but as an entry point to maturity and competence. The rite of passage would be a formal challenge, a test of the newcomer’s fitness for an advanced social role. In spiritual terms, it was expected that the ordeal might give access to altered states of consciousness that could provide a glimpse of other realms, a bit of secret wisdom. In some cultures, obtaining such a vision was (and sometimes is) an essential aspect of the trial. [Read more…] about Distressing NDEs as Scary Rites of Passage, #2

Can quantum physics prove an afterlife?

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In 2001, a cover story in U.S. News & World Report described how an underprivileged preteen in Massachusetts “caught the attention of Harvard Medical School researchers when he showed up on the university steps having successfully altered the genetics of chickens in his basement…His mentors described him as a ‘genius,’ a ‘renegade thinker,’ even likening him to Einstein.”

Jump a few years, and Robert Lanza would have a University of Pennsylvania M.D. and be a member of the team that cloned the world’s first early stage human embryos with an eye to generating embryonic stem cells. Where do you go from there? 
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New perspective on heaven and hell

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For any readers who are evangelical Christians, or progressive Christians, or recovering Christians, or even if you’re not Christian at all but are interested in people’s finding new ways of thinking about the subject of hell, here’s a great opportunity.

New Testament scholar and P.OST blogger Andrew Perriman has collected a series of his thoughtful posts into book form, Hell and Heaven in Narrative Perspective, which is now available for well under $4 on Kindle. (No Nook yet, though he’s looking into it; but Kindle can be read on any computer.) Definitely worth a look. Heck, at this price, just buy it and read at your leisure.

The only thing I am proselytizing for is openness to new ideas! See Perriman’s quote below.

Perriman says:

Being a collection of blog posts the book is academically lightweight, far from comprehensive, and suffers from many of the characteristic vices of the medium. Maybe that’s all to the good. In any case, I think it puts forward a pretty coherent case for reading the texts as interpretations of historical outcomes rather than as data for general theories about a personal afterlife.