Argumentative Essay On Afterlife

Most people go about their lives thinking about what could or will happen when we die and leave this world you are living in. Do we go into a place where everything is like we always wanted it to be, like a dream life? Do we relive our worst nightmare for the rest of eternity? Maybe there is a heaven and we go to pearly gates to live on as an angel, or maybe there is just plain, dark nothingness. There are researchers, scientist, and book writers who made claims and did studies to support and deny an afterlife. Psychologist Emily Williams Kelly and author Paolo Coelho believe the existence of an afterlife through studies on near-death experiences, and Paolo Coelho simply wrote about it. Then there are scientists, such as Andrew Newberg and
Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg explains, “When people die, two parts of the brain that usually work in opposition to each other act cooperatively. The sympathetic nervous system—a web of nerves and neurons that run through the spinal cord and spread to virtually every organ in the body—is responsible for arousal or excitement. It gets you ready for action. The parasympathetic system, with which the sympathetic system is entwined, calms you down and rejuvenates you. In life, the turning on of one system promotes the shutting down of the other. The sympathetic nervous system kicks in when a car cuts you off on the highway; the parasympathetic system is in charge as you’re falling asleep. But in the brains of people having mystical experiences, and perhaps in death, both systems are fully “on,” giving a person a sensation both of slowing down, being “out of the body,” and of seeing things vividly, including memories of important people and past events. It is possible, Newberg asserts—though not at all certain—that visions of heaven are merely chemical and neurological events that occur during death.” What Newberg is saying is that these two systems work one at a time, but when something traumatic happens they both work at the same time, triggering the out of body experience. Another neuroscientist, Sam Harris, also believes that is no such thing as an afterlife. He states, “No one’s cerebral cortex shuts down entirely during coma… Additionally, the doctor (neurosurgeon, Eben Alexander) showed no understanding of the kinds of neurotransmitters that can be released by the brain during trauma, including one called DMT, which produces hallucinations.” He is saying that whoever “has gone to heaven” really wasn’t dead. To really see what life there is after death, they have to actually be