Sites for atheists.

Sorry Greatnan. Still thinking about where to go with this.

No need to go anywhere - I just thought some people might like to have a look at them.

What about ths one

Neurosurgeon Dr Eben Alexander fell into a coma for seven days after contracting meningitis in 2008. He claims that during this time the part of his brain which controls human thought and emotion "shut down" and he experienced "something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death". Apparently in a place of fluffy pink and white clouds and "shimmering beings" he was met by – guess who – "a beautiful blue-eyed woman*". He had previously disregarded patients' accounts of out-of-body experiences on the grounds that the cortex alone generates consciousness. "But that belief, that theory, now lies broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it".

Right.

* Compare and contrast with 72 virgins, writing on one side of the page only.

My grandma had an out of body experience when she 'died' during a bout of pneumonia in the 1930s. She said she was in a beautiful garden. In the distance she could see a crowd of people many of whom she knew but had died. They were behind a small fence. They smiled and said 'Hello'. She came to a gate but a man said 'You can't come through the gate yet. It's not your time. Your children need you.' She turned to go when suddenly she felt a terrific pain in her back. Apparently as a last ditch attempt to save her a doctor had punched a hole through her back into her lung to drain it. She swore this was what she had felt and it had saved her life but after that she was never afraid of dying because she said she knew what it was like.

When decades later she was dying...she would say for the second time....I was sitting with her when she opened her eyes, looked at the bottom of the bed and asked, 'Jessie, what are you doing here?' (Jessie died during the war). She then made me move off the chair so that Jessie could sit down and they chatted for some time. Well my grandma chatted...I only heard one side of the conversation.

I don't know if Jessie was really there or not but she was real to my grandma. Grandma died a few days later.

I had an out of body experience on Saturday when the paramedic gave me entonox! Must have been the fact that it was shutting down bits of my brain temporarliy! - which happens when people die, only cancel the temporarily!!

It's a funny thing how people claiming to have had these NDEs, always describe whatever their particular religion has told them to expect...

Hallucination is the word I have been groping for.

People near death do sometimes have hallucinations. My uncle, the night before he died, described a swarm of flies buzzing on the ceiling of his bedroom. I can confirm that they were illusory.

Sites for an atheist person? Well, there's The Freethinker at freethinker.co.uk/ or The Friendly Atheist friendlyatheist.com/

For a mix of biology and atheism there's PZ Myers's Pharyngula*, freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/ - it gets rather salty there from time to time.

Oh, and Ophelia Benson blogs at Butterflies and Wheels - www.butterfliesandwheels.com/

* In developmental biology, the pharyngula, also known as the phylotypic stage, is a stage in embryonic development. So there... I wouldn't worry about it...

That should be www.butterfliesandwheels.org/

Why is there no MODIFY or EDIT key here???!?

I'm not actually sure how I managed to post this stuff about Dr Alexander and his proof of the afterlife here. That wasn't what I meant to do at all. Apologies.

No apologies needed, absent. I am not precious about the threads I start!

No I know that Greatnan but it was a bit daft.

Well, I liked it!