Posted on 01/21/2013 6:58:21 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Proof of Heaven is the sort of book I almost never read, but I'm glad I made an exception. I don't really follow the whole Near Death Experience, is-there-or-isn't-there-an-afterlife debate. I've come to believe there is more to life than life, but I don’t think about it much. Life itself seems a pretty urgent business and I want to pay attention to it before it's gone. If there's nothing afterwards, I'll never know. If there is, I've got an excellent lawyer.
But a friend gave me the book for Christmas. I started it, and found it weirdly compelling. As you’ve probably heard, it’s Dr. Eben Alexander’s memoir of how he, a neurosurgeon, went into a coma and saw the next world. According to Alexander, who should know, he was so brain dead at the time it happened that it’s virtually impossible for this to have been any kind of a dream or hallucination. And as the experience went on for days, there is a lot of detail, including some stuff that struck me as convincing. Nothing he sees on the Other Side is particularly startling. It’s all in line with the instincts of the best sort of faith. We’re loved; we’re forgiven. Oh, and there are angels. I’ve never been so sure about angels, but apparently there they are. Dogs too. I’d be very disappointed if there were no dogs.
Now as one of my novel characters once remarked: There’s a reasonable explanation for everything and that’s the one some people choose to believe. One of the things I liked best about the book is that Alexander is honest enough to allow us into some of the darker places in his psychology. If you want to construct a psychological explanation for his Near Death Event you can. And he even gives several “scientific” explanations of greater or lesser plausibility — the best being that the whole experience was basically the dream he had when his brain was rebooting.
All the same, I found the book oddly believable. It’s not pious or treacly like so many books about faith experiences are. And even though the doc gets pretty new age and woo-woo by the time he’s finished, it wasn’t alienating if you kept an open mind. It stuck with me for several days after I finished it.
So while no one can offer you a guarantee, I would say this book constitutes a piece of circumstantial evidence for the defense of heaven. Which makes for an interesting read, even if you decide to dismiss it.
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Thought so too, about “he” could do no wrong. But maybe it just applies to the good Doctor, who seems to be a good soul. And are there not some, who lead exemplary lives, unlike us sinners? (I am referring to just grave sins, not pecuniary)
Well...not really. We know that the devil is capable of doing all sorts of things to deceive people and draw them away from the Gospel.
The apparition contradicted God’s word by telling him he could do no wrong. By his own admission, he was a Christian more in name than in belief. How do you make it to heaven without belief, being born again?
Knight Templar (I like your FR name, BTW), Romans 3:10 says, “As it is written, there is no one righteous, not even one.” We are all sinners, including those of us who have come to know Jesus Christ. The difference is, we’re forgiven.
Same chapter, verse 3:23....”all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We measure ourselves against the perfect, spotless, pure standard of God, and we fall miserably short.
I didn’t read the book, only watched him in interview
But the implication of the experience he described was that she (his spirit guide who turned out to be his birth sister he had never seen or met or even knew about) was telling him that where he was now with her (in “heaven”), there was no longer anything he could do wrong, and he had nothing to fear
I would not get too hung up on whether other people are “good enough” Christians to get to heaven- there are plenty of NDEs by ordinary people of many faiths and beliefs and no faiths or beliefs, who almost get to heaven and then are sent back in a loving way....and they have more faith when they come back than they did when they died
That’s the point; no one is good enough to get to Heaven. The only way you get there is through the saving blood of Jesus Christ.
Mediums and psychics believe in “spirit guides.” They have nothing to do with Christianity.
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