Atomic:

I see this "quest for knowledge" as one to find security, meaning, and a way to escape fears and sadness such as are associated with being at the mercy of nature, the deaths of loved-ones, and realizations regarding one's own mortality. There's no reason to assume this is somehow "inherent knowledge of a creator". Belief in things greater than ourselves are expedient; is expedience really a satisfactory reason to believe in something (apologies to Ovid for borrowing his crass sentiment)? To put this another way, humans don't seem prone to believing in deities that aren't somehow expedient. They either worship to appease, or they worship to obtain favors. Humanism and atheism are the only belief structures that believe in an explanation simply because it seems to be rational, even if no good can be obtained or bad can be avoided by holding those beliefs. Every other belief structure caters to human insecurity and egotism.

Oh, just wanted to add...death is an all-or-none proposition, and it's a one-way street. You're either dead, or you're alive. Near-death is still "quite alive". If your heart stops beating, but it is restarted, you were not dead, just suffering from perilously impaired-functionality. The actual measure of death is the complete and irreversible cessation of brain functionality. It seems that all that happened in this preacher's case is that the logical parts of his brain were damaged by his near-death delirium.

And will someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but by my understanding of Christian teachings (I was one, once), people are not judged and sent to their eternal rewards until the 2nd Coming of Christ, when the living and dead alike stand before the Lamb and have their names read from the Book of Life (or not, and they're sent to the Bad Place). Before that event, there is no judgement, the dead are just dead. Funny how a preacher-man would be ignorant of the very Scripture he preaches on, unless it was all just a testimonial ruse.

It's not that atheists or agnostics are any harder on the type of magical thinking that Christians indulge in, as opposed to Buddhist or Hindi or pagan magical thinking. It's more that Christians are extremely heavy-handed about their preaching and scare-tactic proselytizing, and unlike those other religions, they simply cannot handle the notion that someone doesn't indulge in EXACTLY the same magical thinking they do. Christians have even been prone in the past to torture and kill those who believe in something else.

And this is just another heavy-handed fundamentalist preach-piece. If I wanted to make a cool million, I'd dramatize a conversion testimony to validate Christian magical thinking and write a book too. Just as Christians tend to call folks who lose their faith "weak" and say "s/he wasn't a True Christian (tm) to begin with" when someone grows out of superstition, I have to say I'm extremely skeptical that this guy was EVER an atheist to begin with. The story is just too formulaic.