You say being pronounced clinically dead doesn't really mean much these days. So what does it mean? There are two levels of being dead?
People are routinely made to be "clinically dead" during operations, and they don't even get a death certificate from it.
As for 2 levels, I'm not sure.
I would say a more appropriate definition is needed, especially if you want to view humanity as a machine like a computer.
With a computer we can happily turn it off and then turn it back on later. At what point would it be considered "dead"?
That would be when it can't start any more. But in some cases, even that can be repaired.
But the important point is that no one has been able to report an experience while they are dead. They can only report it while they are alive, and that raises the question of if they were really dead and if brain function had really ceased, and if that experience occurred while they were dead, or their brain just filled in the gaps.
with possible exception to Jesus.
Lets leave fantasy out of this.
If you want to include Jesus, you may as well include Harry Potter.
What if clinical death is just another way of saying first stage dying? What if consciousness disengaging from the physical body occurs during clinical death, but like clinical death, is reversible? That would mean once the person enters biological death, that disengagement is permanent.
You can speculate about a lot of things. But all that speculation does is call into question the evidence.
What if it isn't?
What if the consciousness doesn't disengage from the body at all until permanent death, at which point it ceases to exist?
How do you know these reports of experiences and consciousness outside the body while clinically dead, suffer from severe reporting bias?
Because unless you are conducting a study to actually discover them, you will naturally have reporting bias.
The less likely an occurrence, the more likely you are to suffer from reporting bias.
Which makes the better story, that someone was clinically dead on the operating table, but was revived without further complication and reported no out of body or near death experience; vs someone died on the operating table, left their body and observed the operation being performed on them.
If you are going based upon anecdotal accounts or reports in the news, there will almost always be reporting bias as they will pick the stories that they think are newsworthy of interesting or that will get them views.
The default is that there is reporting bias or selection bias. And when making a scientific study, you need to consider how you avoid that.
You're being lazy, Jack.
I would say what is being lazy is claiming that there are these reports and examples, without providing any.
So where are these reports/studies/examples?
How did they deal with reporting bias or selection bias?
in the literature I was referring to, if you can find any.
The issue is finding the literature you are referring to.
As for religion, instead of focussing on the differences, look for the common threads.
The differences are what demonstrate that they cannot all be true, that at least a large portion is invention and raises significant doubts about any being true.
The common threads are likely things which are obvious (for example, all involve humans, and humans exist), and things which people were craving at the time, or which were needed for the religion to work.
For example, most will have some kind of afterlife, because people feared death. This helps tie into the control, especially with religions like Christianity where obeying the evil tyrant gives you a "better" afterlife. But look at the afterlives you get. They are vastly different. Some have reincarnation. Some have a heaven and hell (or a heaven and annihilation), some just have swimming around in a pool.
Most will refer to a higher power or being, because why would you just obey some random, long dead person? By appealing to a higher being who allegedly created you or Earth, or even just one vastly more powerful than you, it provides an attempt at a reason to obey.
The "prophet" it isn't just saying "Hey I think you should do this." Instead it is saying "This god created you and is telling you to do this."
This also gives them an excuse for how they obtained this divine "knowledge" (including "knowledge" of the afterlife) and why you should obey/trust them, such as being hand picked by this higher power.
And of course they will claim it helps you live a better life. How many followers do you think they would get if they said it tells you how to live your life worse?
Look at all the people claiming Earth is flat, that 9/11 was an inside job, that the moon landings were fake, that free energy is real, and so on. How many of them share claims of a conspiracy that the government is trying to stop the truth from getting out? How many of them share claims that people have been killed by the government to stop that "truth" from getting out?
Does that mean we should believe there are actually conspiracies and the government is out hunting "normal" people, killing these people to stop the truth getting out?