Doctor Claims He Has Evidence of the Afterlife

MSNBC ^ | 1/20/10 | Michael Inbar

[marshmallow]

In new book, he says that near-death accounts transcend cultures and ages

The near-death experience story is so common that it has become a bit of a cliché: A medical patient, hanging in a murky limbo between life and death, is drawn through a tunnel of bright light, meets their maker, and is told they must return to the land of living.

But that scenario played out letter-perfectly for Mary Jo Rapini. And her story is getting firm backing by a doctor who has studied some 1,300 near-death experiences. Medical doctor Jeffrey Long chronicles Rapini’s story, along with his own research, in a new book: “Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences.”

In the book, Long contends his study shows that accounts of near-death experiences play out remarkably similarly among the people who have had them, crossing age and cultural boundaries to such a degree that they can’t be chalked up simply to everyone having seen the same Hollywood movie.

Through a tunnel

Appearing with Dr. Long on TODAY Wednesday, Rapini related her near-death experience to Meredith Vieira. A clinical psychologist, Rapini had long worked with terminal cancer patients, and when they told her of their near-death experiences, she would often chalk their stories up as a reaction to their pain medication.

But in April 2003, she faced her own mortality. Rapini told Vieira she suffered an aneurysm while working out a gym and was rushed to the hospital. She was in an intensive care unit for three days when she took a turn for the worse.

“All of a sudden [doctors] were rushing around me and inserting things into me, and they called my husband,” she told Vieira.

“I looked up and I saw this light; it wasn’t a normal light, it was different. It was luminescent.

[Hootowl]

And how can you NOT understand that the English translators inserted the comma where they thought it should be? They also inserted quotation marks, colons, semi-colons, and so forth. Will you assert that those ARE found in koine Greek, or do you just have a problem with commas?

[woollyone]

so, the commas were inserted by interpreters who used their own opinion. good now we’re getting somewhere. So you said they were “mjssplaced”. Then comes the rub. According to whom? You? It is a matter of interpretation, not translation at all then. And THAT was my point.

[Hootowl]

What else have I been saying?

If you want to argue that a “perfect” translation of koine Greek would not include punctuation (or, for that matter, spaces between words or capitalization), you would technically be correct, although the result would be gibberish.

Translators also “interpret” (i.e., Merrian Webster: to explain in understandable terms) what they are translating so that it makes sense to second-language readers. That’s what makes something like Brian Hooker’s translation of Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” so eloquent in English. If Hooker had merely translated the French, word for word, the play would have been stilted and plodding in English. But Hooker used his poet’s ear and mastery of English to breath color and life into the translation, to interpret it, in other words.

And so my point was that the punctuation in the text was a decision by the translators/interpreters, based on what they thought was closest to the meaning of the passage. The comma could easily have been placed somewhere else and the sentence would still have made sense, even though the meaning would have changed.

[Reagan Man]

Interesting subject. Not to disparage those of us who believe in an afterlife, but humans have many things in common, including powerful imaginations.