Over my dead body there is an ideal utopia: Comments on Kellehear's paper

Abstract

Allan Kellehear's near-death experiencers (NDErs) report per ceiving a utopia beyond death. I examine the logical implications and philo sophical possibilities of such a realm, and come to three conclusions. First, the realms described by NDErs, if taken at face value, are far from utopian, rather resembling travelers' romances with exotic lands. Second, any truly utopian postmortem society is so far removed from our present world as to be morally irrelevant to our own. And third, only an ideational postmortem utopia, of the sort exemplified by Pure Land Buddhist theology, can avoid both the non-uto pian nature of NDErs' descriptions and the irrelevance of postmortem utopias.Allan Kellehear is becoming recognized as a highly creative and enterprising young sociologist who tackles topics beyond the province of old-guard sociology. His articles on near-death experiences (NDEs) in China

Evolution and the relationship between brain and mind states.

“…Within this view, models that contradict physical reality (see Lund hal, 1993aLund hal, , 1993b, make an appeal to forms of bioenergy so subtle we cannot even measure them (Ring and Rosing, 1990), insert loose words such as telepathy (Becker, 1991), or mention visionary encoun ters happening only "inside the head" must be discarded. We must also remember that the appeal to "other dimensions" is classical in pseudoscientific writings: it is the spatial equivalent of "unknown forces" or "unknown energies" (Becker, 1990;Gliksman and Kelle hear, 1990;Walker, Serdahely, and Bechtel, 1991).…”