Books about experience of heaven

[jerryxplu]

I am very skeptical of people writing books of like near death experience and they either went to heaven or hell or whatever. It can be a grown man/woman or some children that claimed these events.

I am just wondering what you guys especially Christians think of such books. I remember recent one of such book was the "Boy who came back from Heaven" now saying he didn't die nor did he went to heaven. So I guess it is safe to say that it was all a bunch of lies.

I am fine with people having faith in their religion be it christian, muslim, hindu etc. but when someone claims of supernatural events I am always skeptical of it. extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Obviously people love this idea which is why books like the boy who came back from heaven or heaven is for real can be so popular best sellers.

So what do you guys feel/think when you come across such books?

[Antiont]

We are simple by born and that is heaven but we are be ensample by doing our activities against our nature.

[nobspeople]

I am very skeptical of people writing books of like near death experience and they either went to heaven or hell or whatever. It can be a grown man/woman or some children that claimed these events.

I am just wondering what you guys especially Christians think of such books. I remember recent one of such book was the "Boy who came back from Heaven" now saying he didn't die nor did he went to heaven. So I guess it is safe to say that it was all a bunch of lies.

I am fine with people having faith in their religion be it christian, muslim, hindu etc. but when someone claims of supernatural events I am always skeptical of it. extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Obviously people love this idea which is why books like the boy who came back from heaven or heaven is for real can be so popular best sellers.

So what do you guys feel/think when you come across such books?

Generally speaking, one can write something about anything - doesn't make it true. At best, such books can be seen as inspirational by some, entertaining or flat out lies by others. If a book is of a subject one doesn't like, don't purchase or read it.
To the topic of OBEs, NDEs and the like - there may be something to it. There are those instances that change the lives of the experiencers, doctors, surgeons and the like, simply because there's no way they can see that their experience can't be real. Real or not, there are fabulously interesting stories!

[Rose2020]

I make a point of reading books like this because I am curious. I keep an open mind and decide for myself.
Not all things can be proved or evidence provided. I ask myself why would a person write such a book, often risking their reputation or opening themselves to ridicule unless it is the truth?
Often such writers lead a transformed life, having changed from atheist to Christian.

[Tcg]

I ask myself why would a person write such a book, often risking their reputation or opening themselves to ridicule unless it is the truth?

Perhaps for the notoriety and cash involved with doing so. It seems that some crave the idea of knowing what happens after death (which these stories don't actually document given that a NDE isn't a DE) and will crave anything that claims to answer the unknowable.


Tcg

[William]

I make a point of reading books like this because I am curious. I keep an open mind and decide for myself.
Not all things can be proved or evidence provided. I ask myself why would a person write such a book, often risking their reputation or opening themselves to ridicule unless it is the truth?
Often such writers lead a transformed life, having changed from atheist to Christian.

This is true. Even given that there is also a market for such book subjects, and assuming there would have to be some unscrupulous folk who pretend to have had such experiences in order to gain income through dishonesty, one cannot conclude that all such stories are untrue.

[Difflugia]

Not all things can be proved or evidence provided. I ask myself why would a person write such a book, often risking their reputation or opening themselves to ridicule unless it is the truth?

Whether the experiences have been correctly interepreted is a different question, but I'm guessing that at least some of the authors are being honest about their own point of view or understanding about what's happening.

The ones that bother me are the ones that include the participation of children. Whether it rises to something that should be illegal or not, not only can children can easily be manipulated into believing things that are objectively false, but the publicity involved can be damaging. Their parents should be protecting them from that sort of thing rather than subjecting them to it. If an adult want to explore the possibility that their anoxia event was Jesus, then you be you. Don't do that to your kids, though.

A related and interesting book that I recommend whenever I get the chance is Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens by Susan A. Clancy [publisher's website]. As one of my favorite nonfiction books, I've read it multiple times and still find it fascinating. The Internet Archive's lending library has multiple copies.

[William]

[Replying to Difflugia in post #26]



From the link;

Ms. CLANCY: I think that it is because coming to believe you're abducted by aliens provides you, of course, with an explanation for psychological distress or problems you might have had. But even more than that, believing that you've been abducted by aliens provides many of these subjects with a meaning for their entire life. And I think that part of the alien abduction experience has been de-emphasized by abduction researchers in the past, like Bud Hopkins, who tend to focus on the more traumatogenic aspects of the experience. I mean, it is true; it's nightmarish, it's horrible, they're scary, they come in the night, they hurt you. I mean, why would you want to think--why would you want to believe that happened to you if you didn't have to?
But at the end of my research study, we asked very single subject: `If you could do it all over again, would you choose not to have been abducted?' And I never had a single subject say, `I wish it didn't happen to me.' They all said the same thing, that science does not explain everything in the world, that there is a higher power out there and that `I was chosen.'

BRAND: Well, it sounds very religious to me.

Ms. CLANCY: Yes. But you know what? I am so tired of controversial topics that I think I just want to stay away entirely from the topic of religion. All I would like to say is that in the same way that people find meaning in their religious beliefs and experiences, these people find meaning in their alien abduction beliefs and their alien abduction experiences.

[William]

Combining the two [religion and aliens] one can read in such pre-television stories similar testimony. Instead of aliens, one has gods/angels/demons/religious mythological icons...
Such experiences cannot all be put down to pre-imaged influences and it best be recognized that the imagery may come from the experience rather than the other way around...

Ms. CLANCY: The modal subject I spoke with typically had a number of sleep experiences that they thought were strange. For example, maybe they've had an episode of sleep paralysis. Yeah, it's essentially common. You wake up in the middle of the night, you can't move. It's a very scary experience. It lasts for about a minute; many people have it. And for the alien abductees I spoke with, some of them had that episode and they woke up and they thought, `Oh, my God. What was that?' And then later on in their lives, they read something or saw something on TV and they said, `You know, what happened to me that night is a lot like what happened to Bud Hopkins' subjects or what I saw on "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."' Bud Hopkins is an abduction researcher who's written a number of books about the stories that his subjects remember under hypnosis.

[Difflugia]

Such experiences cannot all be put down to pre-imaged influences and it best be recognized that the imagery may come from the experience rather than the other way around...

Why not? Your only argument here seems to be your intuition that all of the subjects being wrong about what they experienced is less likely than at least one supernatural event. Is it? Dr. Clancy picked alien abduction because we can be reasonably certain that there are no aliens visiting Earth. The calculus doesn't really change much by suggesting that the supernatural agent was actually a demon or a god.

I've brought up Santa Claus before and I'm about to again because the comparison is so apt. Many, many children receive gifts on Christmas that they believe are from Santa Claus. Obviously, some of these gifts are from their parents, but all of them? With all of the millions of events reported around the world, can we really be reasonable is suggesting a natural explanation in every single case? With so many verified instances of children receiving Christmas gifts, isn't is most likely that at least some of them are from the real Santa Claus?

[William]

Such experiences cannot all be put down to pre-imaged influences

[Replying to Difflugia in post #29]

Why not?

Because, combining the two [religion and aliens] one can read in such pre-television stories, similar testimony.

Instead of "aliens", one has gods/angels/demons/religious mythological icons...

The Santa Clause analogy isn't useful in this regard as we are only speaking about gifts left behind - which can be explained - we are not talking about folk experiencing and engaging with Santa. We are not even talking about a warm fuzzy joyous thing...

From my own experiences and subsequent study, I lean toward Jung relating such experienced imagery to what he referred to as the Archetypes...

[PSYCHOANALYSIS
(in Jungian theory) a primitive mental image inherited from the earliest human ancestors, and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious.]