What do you think of stories about people dieing going to heaven and coming back to life?

Well today I was on amazon looking at the top 100 books and I found a book called Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back. Here is a snippet of what the book is about.

Heaven Is for Real is the true story of the four-year old son of a small town Nebraska pastor who during emergency surgery slips from consciousness and enters heaven. He survives and begins talking about being able to look down and see the doctor operating and his dad praying in the waiting room. The family didn't know what to believe but soon the evidence was clear.

Colton said he met his miscarried sister, whom no one had told him about, and his great grandfather who died 30 years before Colton was born, then shared impossible-to-know details about each. He describes the horse that only Jesus could ride, about how "reaaally big" God and his chair are, and how the Holy Spirit "shoots down power" from heaven to help us.

Told by the father, but often in Colton's own words, the disarmingly simple message is heaven is a real place, Jesus really loves children, and be ready, there is a coming last battle.

OK so this story is kind of the child version of 90 Minutes in Heaven, another bestseller. Now I really don't believe that this kid went to Heaven, but was in a hallucinogenic state during his operation or some other scientific reason. It seems like there were not many arguments against the child's experience on Amazon reviews and it was the #1 New York Times Bestseller ; maybe because he was a child or it seems so true. So my question is what do you think of these type of stories and how do you react to them?

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Permalink Reply by Timothy Gentle on March 20, 2011 at 10:56am

I'm all for setting signposts pointing to the 'story' side of this. If this happened and a child found out things that no-one ever said to him... wow. But I don't think this even happened. Maybe he was told to say it, (we all know there are people are sadistic enough to use a kid in that way) or he was told he said it before properly coming to or it never happened or something else all together. I seriously doubt the credibility of this story. Other stories of 'I went to heaven and saw a swan-chicken with cheesy feet' are 200% hallucinogenic.

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Permalink Reply by Doug Reardon on March 20, 2011 at 12:46pm

Bull hocky!

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Permalink Reply by Becca on March 20, 2011 at 1:13pm

I think these stories are lies or hallucinations due to chemicals and neuron firing that happens to people when the body thinks it dieing.

The drug ketamine can cause people to have out of body experiences. Some people have out of body experiences upon going to sleep... out of body experiences are not much of a mystery anymore.

Children hear all sorts of things they aren't supposed to be hearing. It is also possible that those parents talked about the miscarriage in front of the child when they thought he was too young to understand and remember --- adults make that mistake a lot.

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Permalink Reply by Wesley on March 20, 2011 at 1:42pm

christian near death experiences reflect christian ideology.... hindu near death experiences reflect hindu ideology..

http://www.near-death.com/hindu.html

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Permalink Reply by Bryan B on March 21, 2011 at 1:59pm

I was going to mention this. Cultural biases or is the afterlife also as divided as we are down here lol

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Permalink Reply by Alayna on March 20, 2011 at 10:47pm

I feel the fact that the boys' father is a pastor...in the Midwest, leaves a gaping hole in his "story"...I sounds like he's trying to "sell" heaven...and I believe in the afterlife...

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Permalink Reply by Alejandro M on March 21, 2011 at 1:12am

Option 1: there really is a Heaven and a God, who mysteriously chooses to reveal Itself, not to atheists, not to the Pope, but to a 4-year-old son of a Pastor (strange choice, innit?)

Option 2: the Pastor himself is a man of (very) few scruples and brainwashed the ideas of this book into his gullible toddler.

Mmm... tough choice.

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Permalink Reply by Albert Bakker on March 21, 2011 at 1:48am

Obe's are artificially inducible by stimulating the right superior temporal gyrus and then the part of it a little above and to the back of your right ear.

It is a part of the cortex that is extremely sensitive to oxygen depletion. (It is not necessary to maintain oxygenated fully to survive, other parts of the brain are more important to that end.)

Quoth: "It has been suggested that out-of-body experiences are the result of a transient failure to integrate the visual, tactile, proprioceptive, and vestibular information that converges at the temporoparietal junction, especially on the right side of the brain." New England Journal of Medicine

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Permalink Reply by Peter Metcalfe on March 21, 2011 at 4:07am

People from different faiths have similar experiences. If it happened to a Muslim he would probably see allah or muhammed. A Hindu would see someone else, a North American Indian something else again etc, etc. It all depends on what religion you were brainwashed into believing. It's just the mind playing tricks.

I suspect there is a lot of exageration in this book.

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Permalink Reply by Arcus on March 21, 2011 at 6:55am

I was born with a hernia and during the surgical removal I was clinically dead for a few minutes. Not quite sure exactly how long, but long enough for a nurse to have time informing my mom about the situation (and scaring her shitless).

Personal experience may not be the best evidence, but in this case it is good enough for me.