Question: Are Near Death Experiences anecdotal?Answer: Yes. And so is most everything. You will see in the dictionary listing below exactly what an anecdote is defined to be. If this is an argument for or against the authenticity of near death experiences, I fail to see it. Anecdote is defined as an incident or fact. I find the word "anecdote" being used to argue against the realness of NDEs, useless and not an argument at all.
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) (web1913)
Anecdote \An"ec*dote\, n. [F. anecdote, fr. Gr. ? not published; 'a priv. + ? given out, ? to give out, to publish; ? out + ? to give. See {Dose}, n.] 1. pl. Unpublished narratives. --Burke.
2. A particular or detached incident or fact of an interesting nature; a biographical incident or fragment; a single passage of private life.
From WordNet (r) 1.6 (wn)
anecdote n : short account of an incident (especially a biographical one)From the moment we are born, until the moment we die, personal experience is all we have to measure and understand the world about us. People who say "personal experience is not reliable" should try doing without it. We trust our experiences to feed us, shelter us, and keep us safe. To say that personal experiences can't be relied upon is not thinking clearly. In fact, those same scientists who say personal experiences are unreliable use their personal experiences every day of their lives and depend upon them in the same manner every other human does.
If some scientist says "your experience is anecdotal and therefor not acceptable as evidence". Reply with: "what you said about my experience is anecdotal and therefor not acceptable as evidence of anything either."
