IMEs are influenced by the surrounding culture

This argument is used in the debate Does God exist?.

This argument is a justification of IMEs are simple hallucinations.

Keywords: consciousness, death, immortality, survival, medicine, testimonies, occultism, soul, afterlife, neuroscience, hallucination, beliefs, deceased, metaphysics

Summary

Interestingly, some IMEs are influenced by the religious ideas of the experiencers: Natalie Saracco has a Catholic IME, while a Jewish teenager, Nathan, testifies to an IME that features Jewish religious conceptions. Hindu IMEs do not resemble Western IMEs. This clearly shows that IMEs portray the more or less conscious ideas of the experiencer, and not an objective reality.

Quotes

“A number of studies have highlighted differences of varying degrees between IME accounts from Western countries and those from other cultures. The example most frequently cited in the literature is that of India (Groth-Marnat, 1994; Pasricha, 2008; Pasricha & Stevenson, 1986). It appears that certain elements present in Western accounts, such as the vision of tunnels (31% of near-death experiences according to van Lommel et al. (2001)) or the review of life (13%), are very rarely present, if at all, in Indian accounts. [...] One example is the phenomenon of mistaken identity, in which a person is sent back to life because he or she is not the one expected by Yama, the god of death in Hindu and Buddhist religions. This phenomenon, very common in India, is also found in stories collected in Thailand by Murphy (2001), who concludes that there are differences between Thai and Western stories. Over and above religious figures, it appears that Thais report more negative affects than Westerners, often linked to a fear of hell (Murphy, 2001). Similarly, a study carried out in Germany revealed differences between the East and West of the country in terms of the emotions felt during an IME (Knoblauch, Schmied, & Schnettler, 2001). Individuals tend to report significantly more negative emotions in East Germany (60%) than in West Germany (29%) [4]
[4]χ 2 (1, N = 82) = 7.88, p < 0.01. [...] Stories from China (Zhi-ying & Jian-xun, 1992), Hawaii (Kellehear, 2001), Chile (Gomez-Jeria, 1993) and Tibet (Carr, 1993) also differ from Western accounts, supporting the hypothesis that local cultural beliefs influence IME. According to Augustine (2007), near-death experiences are influenced by people's expectations of death and life after death, which are often strongly linked to culture and religion in particular.
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Author not entered, “Near-death experience (NDE): a synthesis of the literature”, L'année psychologique magazine, 01/2017.

References

Justifications

Objections

IMEs have an underlying structure that is stable across cultures and environments

Parent debate