A hypothetical question for fellow atheists....?

Question

Imagine you had a really close call.

You heart croaks for a couples minutes and you have a 'near-death experience' with the tunnel and angels and God handing you a beer slaps you on the back and says "you see, I was real after all..heh heh heh".

CLEAR! *bzzzt*

You're back to life. You remember your experience.

Would you...?
a. run to your nearest church and become born-again
b. attribute it to some psycho/physiological condition
c. have 'faith' that it was just a dream or hallucination

I just find this situation interesting, since most Atheists say "God has never shown himself, so until he does, I don't believe".

But if he did, as in this situation, wouldn't you STILL not believe anyway??

Is seeing believing or is there more to it than that for you?

Why do people automatically use "Pascal's Wager" when they apparently don't even know what it is? Lay off the beer, it's killing your brain cells.

I'm a hardcore non-believer for Christ sake. Pascal can go to hell. lol :)

Answer 1

It depends on what kind of beer he was handing out..

If it was Bud then you'd have to chalk it up to a hallucination.. God would never drink crappy beer.

Answer 2

If I met the real God, I'd say, "Okay, I buy it now!" And then I'd be his best buddy forever and hang out if he wanted and since there probably wouldn't be much chance I could challenge him intellectually because he was way, way smarter than I, I'd opt for making him laugh instead and pose the simplest of stupid questions about incredible things I didn't know. And there'd always be the respect factor ......

But I'd NEVER go to church. What the heck for?

I f God is real and can hear me in a church then I can talk to Him anywhere - in my apartment, on the subway, on a downtown street, at the beach, in the park and even in Walmart. I don't need a church to go to or a guy who tells me he's closer to God than me just because he studied theology. And I don't need anyone to tell me what to do and I don't need any fairy tale book written by humans who tell me God told them what to write.

Church is just a way for all the God-talkers of the past ages to collect the people and tell them what to think. It's the way to get the money. It's the way to perpetuate the story so that people will keep coming.

It's not my way.

Answer 3

i'm agnostic, but i'll play along.

a. No. Churches are weird, period. Knowing God exists wouldn't make most of them any more appealing, and the ones that would be appealing already are (Unitarian Universalism for example).
b and c would both cross my mind. I think the longer time goes by, the less i would trust my memory, but this is common (especially dreams or when i'm drunk lol).

I firmly believe that most atheists are so for psychological reasons, or worse social ones. You're right, God could show himself in a dream or something and they could still easily (and correctly) deny it based on logic. The point of religion is to get beyond logic, since if it's real it has to.

Answer 4

I would assume that any such "vision" is actually a side effect of whatever drugs the doctors were pumping into me. By the way, I did nearly die twice. I almost bled to death on two separate instances, once when I was a teenager and got stabbed in the chest. The other time was when I got shot. Neither time resulted in white lights, angels, visions of god or dead loved ones, or anything else of a "supernatural" nature. I just passed out and woke up in the hospital hooked up to machines.

Answer 5

Chances are I would go with either b, or c. As most of my childhood i was conditioned to believe in god, angles and the pearly gates. As the bible say "when I was a child I thought and talked as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things," except for my comics and Star Wars figures...

I have never said personally if god shows himself I will believe. Now if Morgan Freeman comes to me and tells me to build and arc, I still wouldn't believe in god, but I have always wanted to build a boat.

Answer 6

I would think, and I always have thought, that when you hear these 'near death' stories from people, that their brain was 'misfiring'. If something is causing you to die, the body can do all sorts of things.

My Atheism isn't because I can't prove it. It's because of a lot of what the Bible preaches I cannot agree with, the threat of hell, that any loving God would send someone to hell to torture them for eternity, God is insecure so he asks a father to kill his child to prove his love, that this whole concept came from the mentality that is still in the Middle East today that we think is so bizarre and you can see it in the stories. It was just a way to keep people in line so long ago.

Answer 7

Pascal's Wager.

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Answer 8

Probably B). I remember reading/watching something about how when you're dying that white light thing is your brain shutting down - plus you'dprobably be high on drugs

If a god decided to wait to reveal itself until I had an NDE which I know can be easily dismissed he/she/it are a p!$$ poor god.

Answer 9

Seeing is believing provided the conditions can be trusted. I'm sure that people with sufficient alcohol have actually 'seen' pink elephants. That does not make them real. In your scenario, there are any number of variables and unknowns that would render the 'vision' questionable.

Answer 10

The mind is powerful and can not go against it's self. So if you think, 'this is an unbeliever,' than you will never make him believe, since opposites reject each other and never attract. Only when there is love does two opposites attract.

So basically what I'm saying is atheists don't exist.