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

Abstract

Allan Kellehear's near-death experiencers (NDErs) report perceiving a utopia beyond death. I examine the logical implications and philosophical 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-utopian nature of NDErs' descriptions and the irrelevance of postmortem utopias.