Thanks for the kind words: it's difficult to find good things in someone disagreeing with you, it shows great civilization.
I should have been more polite: I reacted badly to this passage: "Your absolute certainly reminds me of my family's absolute certainty that Jesus is coming back, and all those who don't believe in him will be cast into the lake of fire", partly because so many people I know have been hurt by those believers. But I could have done better!
When I was younger, I studied over decades the things you mention. Indeed, I was more open minded before I studied the field...
Let's start with near-death experiences. Unfortunately, quite a lot of them are extremely negative: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6173534/.
Also, even the positive ones don't necessarily involve universal love. My father had two positive near-death experiences which he described to me in great detail, and he felt no fear and even contentment, and saw a white light, he never described any sensation of love at all. This article is a great read, by someone who suffered an NDE herself and went on to study them.
I would attribute the past life memories to selection bias. There are twenty-five million children born each year in India alone. Almost all kids talk about imaginary lives; only the few whose statements match some aspects of their ancestors are reported, the rest aren't. You also can't forget unconscious prompting by parents. Given 25,000,000 kids each year, simply through random chance you're going to get a lot of amazing matches. If you had to wade through the 24,999,990 failed matches, I think you'd be a lot less convinced.
I know more than a bit about quantum mechanics: I'm a mathematician. When I was young, there were so many books trying to make a connection between quantum mechanics and various forms of spiritualism, and I read every one I could get.
But they were all the same: "Existence is weird, quantum mechanics is weird, so there must be a connection."
What about the double-slit experiment convinces one that life after death exists? I don't see it. It shows that everything gets more fuzzy as things get smaller, and below a certain size, particles look a lot like waves.
Susan Blackmore, who I mentioned above, had some paranormal experiences and then devoted her academic life to proving that the paranormal existed: except that she managed only to get negative results, and eventually did a famous meta study where she got scientists to rank famous paranormal experiments on the basis of their rigour, and mapped "rigourousness" vs "strength of results" and got a graph that showed that as experiments became more and more rigourous, the magnitude of their results tended toward zero!
You should read her popular account of this - she's a very sympathetic and open-minded person, but she's also a really solid scientist.
Thanks again for your politeness, and have a good day!
