Near death experiences based on religon?

Please be nice, this is probally my first "real" post.

Maybe this has been spoken before or maybe not but is there any correlation between a persons religious beliefs or concepts of the after life and what they see during a near death experience? Reason I ask this is that I had a close friend who nearly died from a swimming accident and what he saw afterwards is the typical bright light, past ancestors and such. Hes not a super religous bible banger but he is a Christian. Now take my dad as the other hand. My father, who is Agnostic, had a heart attack and was clinically dead for approx. one minute. What he saw was nothing, blackness, darkenss. Nothing at all. Hearing other stories of this sort tend to make me believe that your beliefs and concepts of the after life shape your own afterlife experience.

Rather or not my theroy is true or false I do think its interesting to wonder about these sorts of things.

There was a time when I would say without a doubt there is some kind of afterlife. However, then I had my own NDE. And what I saw was completely unexpected. I'm not really quite sure what I expected to experience. Like all that was going through my nind was that I was going to die and I know this and there's nothing I can really do about it. I could tell you I saw my life flash before my eyes and stuff but that would only be half true. Truth is I my mind wasracing at about a gazillion thoughts per second, I couldn't keep up even if I had tried to. Slowly my senses began to numb out. I heard muffled sounds and my eyes just slowlykinda gave out. I tried touching anything I could to keep my self incontact with the physical world but I was losing strenght to move rapidly. After that all I remember is my friend calling 911 and then trying to keep me awake till the ambulance arrived. The last feeling I really remember is the feeling of you mind being seperate from you body, only that my mind felt (or knew) that it wasn't coming back.
Did I see anything? Not really,... not even in my minds eye. But then again I'm not religious. I used to be religious, but now I just study religions. Something tells me that maybe I sould go back to the church after that experience, and yet I never have.
The only thing I can tell you is that it was the most intense and incredible feeling in the world. I won't lie, I'm not affraid of much (or at least like to think that I'm not), but during that whole time I was more frightend than I thought a person could be.

im christian, but i really had no idea about christianity and Jesus christ when i had one of my many near death experiences, this is the only one i remember, the story is quite humorous actually, but please get beyond what happened... i was like 3-6 years old, and my older brother, who is 2 years older, told me to go into the dryer because it would be a fun ride. I believed him so i did, he started the dryer and i started flying around inside the dryer. I started screaming then finally i look at the back of the dryer and saw like a vent and i began to go through this vent and on the other side of the vent was this place where 2 men were standing, one had a white beard, and i asked if he was santa claus. He then said, yes, why i don't know probably so i could find out about religion with my own faith as opposed to it being told to me. Then he told me to turn around and go back, and so i did. My parents had stopped the dryer and i was fine.

I have a lot of astral travel since I was a child, in all my experiences I found nothing to be religious but rather enlightened.

I did in one occasion felt a present so overwhelmingly great that I am still trying to find worlds to describe it.

last year i did alot of research on near death experiences, and i have ultimately come to the conclusion that what you believe in shapes what you experience upon death. if you are a religious person, you will encounter religious figures that correspond to your belief system. if you are in a "negative" state of mind when you die, you will probally experience some sort of hell. if you dont believe in life after death, you will probally experience nothing at all. with all this in mind i have concluded that we shape our own personal reality through what we believe in. so what do i believe in? i believe that in death all my questions will be answered, i will be free from the matrix we are all trapped in, and i will embark on a new journey through the universe once i leave this world.