I am now going to explain the line of reasoning due to which I believe that the near-death experiences should be explained by the most straightforward narrative, which says that those people indeed died and experienced the afterlife. The same reasoning applies for the spiritual experiences of the saints.

Years ago my wife and I were walking along a path and as we passed by a tree, it meowed at us. It was dark and we couldn’t see the cat on the tree, but although we couldn’t see it, it sounded like a young cat, and it wasn’t happy. Since it was too dark to do anything constructive about it, we went our way.

Now, if we didn’t believe in the existence of cats, or if we didn’t believe that cats can climb trees yet forget how to get down, we might have looked for another explanation; maybe someone placed an electronic device for reproducing sound on the tree. Maybe a man was on the tree, imitating a cat in order to fuck with us. Maybe it were little green men in flying saucers. Maybe.

We didn’t see direct evidence of cat on that tree, but we accepted the obvious explanation of the meowing tree, because we are informed and reasonable.

However, in the case of NDE experiences, some people would rather believe in the most idiotic, improbable and flawed explanations, just to avoid the obvious conclusion that if something meows at you from a tree in the dark, it must be a cat.