During a hockey game dangerously late in the spring, an Area man fell through the ice. His body remained submerged for nearly an hour as he floated under the surface. Eventually, his body was retrieved through a hole in the ice and non-miraculously revived through the purely materialistic process known as CPR. But what has truly captivated the hearts and minds of the nation is his experience while unconscience.
"As best as I can remember, the ice just suddenly broke under me. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground shivering."
Dinesh D'Souza was among the first to understand the full significant of these events. "While unconscious, he didn't experience anything! Most people don't understand just how the brain works, so let me try to explain it. When you almost die, all sort of secrets just pop out. And the greatest secret of all is what happens to us when we die.
"I have spent much of my life thinking through the implications of this truth. And now I finally know where it leads. This man's experience tells us that … it's just nothing. Nothing happens to us when we die. It's like falling asleep forever. While I find this conclusion to be deeply disappointing, my intellectual honesty compels me to embrace it."
Ray Comfort could not be reached for a full interview. When contacted by phone, he repeated over and over, "Domesticated! Domesticated! Bananas are domesticated!" Kirk Cameron mentioned that after Ray went on a rampage through a produce section, local grocery stores have banned him. He added, "I'm really worried about him right now."
Perhaps most enlightening of all, an Area nerd managed to spare time for an interview between raids. "Almost dying is like when a computer crashes and starts spewing long sequences of text. Those aren't random bytes. It could be registers, memory dumps, or really just about anything. These are secrets hiding deep in your box. They really mean something."
Others were less moved. William Lane Craig was quick to dismiss the inference. "What you have to remember is that if hell is real, and NDE are but a shadow of what is to come, then we should have expected the NDE of an atheist to be a small amount of heat. However, once all the facts have been carefully considered, we will remember how cold the lake was. What if the heat and the cold merely canceled out, and produced a feeling of nothingness? It should therefore be clear that the Logical Argument From Near Death Experiences is invalid. In order for the argument to succeed, the atheist must know with absolute certainty all of the possible temperatures of hell, and how a fraction of the experience would interact with a numbing cold."
J. P. Holding was merely irritated by the suggestion that this was in any way significant. "These atheists always claim to base their views on repeatable experimentation. If this Area Man wants us to believe his story, he should walk back to the lake and throw himself in, just to see if the experience repeats itself."
What has been overlooked until shockingly late in this article is the Area man's own thoughts on the commotion. "What the hell? People are making deep philosophical inferences from my malfunctioning brain? I'm all for people figuring out that religion isn't true, but this is just ridiculous. If religion is replaced by using my dreams as a basis for a beliefs, well, we're really just back to where we started."
