<Isn't the human body magnificent! What a wonderful way it has about making the most traumatic experience - the human's entry into an everlasting non-existence - a peaceful, soothing thing! >

Yes, quite so...but my point is, being very Darwinian here, there has to be a benefit to a mutation or it wouldn't have become part of the "magnificent machine." How does this benefit the race as well as the individual? And if it doesn't, and it's an attribute (gift?) purely for the individual, does our pure mechanistic view need rethinking? If AP isn't interested in this, anyone else whom might be, chime in. I tend to be a person who doesn't think we have any concrete type evidence of a "beyond" either, but was trying to get at a possible hint/inference by way of looking at this end experience itself. Not the subjective reports about it, but the "unnecessary" ease of it. Birth is certainly painful for women, so biology doesn't necessarily always treat the most essential passages compassionately. A universally painful horrible nightmare death illusion wouldn't be reported back to people anyway....nobody has really heard from the dead or it wouldn't take faith to be religious. So if right past the warm light is an instant of unspeakable terror, but nobody at that stage ever revives, we'll never hear about it. Supposing the light tunnel really is the last thing, however, doesn't it seem like a rather kind gesture from somewhere or at least a lucky break for us?

I can imagine a religious (even non-Christian) person saying "the spiritual realm finds no reason to further punish a mortal being after he's finished his life in its last seconds." But I can't come up with a reason that this smooth death trait would be a selective/procreative advantage under the usual scientific theories, which on most other matters I tend to endorse.