You know we are outraged and shocked by those persecutions of Christians by ISIS and other Islamic extremists.
But medical people have said (I don't know how they know) that the consciousness is only for less than a minute until the brain is starved of oxygen.
I don't really know what your point is in this OP.
But when ISIS beheads people, they do it slowly to create the greatest possible amount of pain.
Back in the 70s when an assassin murdered King Faisel of Saudi Arabia, they executed the assassin with an expert headsman who accomplished the beheading with three cuts, the first two being precise to create excruciating pain without numbing shock.
I say this because I have realised that most (if not all) of those Christians of my acquaintance that have gone to the Lord recently really suffered. This technologically advanced and medically caring society has put them all through years of deterioration and many hospital visits and changes of treatment, with pain only just being kept at bay by powerful drugs.
Then there is all the praying and false hopes and extensions and apparent remissions...
It is with sadness I remember a friend who was dragged off to palliative care for six months of chemical treatment to sink into coma and incoherence away from her beloved garden and house in France.
Another friend has resisted the idea that it has to be this way. (She has parents in their 80s). But doctors say that old people these days multiple present with ailments. This means the last years become medical fire-fighting. It sobered her up.
There certainly is room for Christians to discuss how we approach death. As one pastor has said, "Christians spend more time praying to keep people out of heaven than we spend praying to get them into heaven."
There is a kind of eerie song by Crystal Lewis, "Healing Oil," which is of an old woman nearing death, having lived a good life, but at the end is physically tired and in pain. She's thankful for the life the Lord has given her, but at this point she's ready for the next step, seeing Him face to face.
My mother suffered a head injury in an auto accident while out in Oklahoma City in 2001. She actually went to the hospital for observation apparently having suffered no injury, but during the night she had several brain hemorrhages and was unresponsive the next morning.
They put her on life support as I and a couple of her sisters got to the city. They advised us that she was essentially brain dead ("Her frontal lobes will be reduced to nothing but scar tissue" the neurosurgeon stated). But Oklahoma law and the family wouldn't allow her to be removed from life support at that point.
Two weeks later, with no frontal lobe activity, we did remove her from life support. By that time, her brain had recovered just enough to maintain body functions, but nothing more. She did seem to have vague "awake" and "asleep" states, and she had autonomous reactions to acute physical stimuli (stick her arm with a pin and that arm would flinch), but nothing more.
And that was her state for the next eight years. One of my aunts and her husband moved into her home to care for her.
My youngest aunt always maintained that my mother was conscious that entire time. The aunt who cared for her and I did not. I did not want to think that my vibrant, outgoing, mother was conscious and trapped in an immobile body.
Quick story: When I was stationed in Honolulu in the 70s, my mother came to visit. We were wandering a shopping center and she spied television actor Khigh Dhiegh, who played the villain Wo Fat on "Hawaii Five-O" at the time.
She walked right up to him and began conversation. She kept talking (and I was checking my watch) until Mr Dhiegh graciously invited us to lunch. That's the kind of woman she was. That she was trapped conscious in an immobile, mute body...nope, I didn't want to think about that.
As a Christian, what I did not know and could not know was: Where was her spirit?
The apostle Paul had written, "..
.to live is Christ, to die is gain." But that alive/dead binary concept supposes that while alive one is able to purse the Commission, to live for Christ, at the very least, to be able to pray.
But if there isn't even that....
Her body eventually died, essentially, of old age. It just began shutting down.
If the situation were different, knowing what I know now, with the diagnosis being "her frontal lobes are just scar tissue," I'd have had her taken off life support sooner rather than later. We may have the science to keep a body functioning, but there is no God in that. If He intends to work a miracle, He'll work a miracle...and all the better without
extreme medical interventions to take the credit.
And if not...
to die is gain.
