“Ever wonder what heaven’s actually like?” Fox News journalists have the answer, from the mouth of Crystal McVea, whose heart briefly stopped while she was undergoing treatment for an inflamed pancreas. McVea claims she ascended to heaven, where she felt like she “had 500 senses” and smelled God. She is selling an e-book titled “Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again” describing the experience:
The question is, to where did her consciousness migrate during that time? Biblical heaven? A flying saucer? The black lodge from Twin Peaks? The BBC reports that she does not recall:
A 63-year-old woman who was expected to die after her heart stopped for 45 minutes is recovering well. Carol Brothers, from Easterton near Devizes, collapsed outside her home from a heart attack, last month.
Mrs. Brothers was returning home from a shopping trip with her daughter when she collapsed, said her husband David: “She was flat out on the floor, just changing colour – a horrible colour and basically I panicked.”
Paramedics managed to restart her heart after 45 minutes and she was airlifted to hospital. Mrs. Brothers is now recovering at home but says she has no memory of her ordeal.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m super conflicted about the rise of popular atheism over the last ten years or so. Let’s get that out of the way right off the bat. I truly respect the way people like Richard Dawkins (and the late Christopher Hitchens) challenge the influence of the world’s dominant religions publically. I love Bill Maher and found his movie Religulous quite amusing for the most part. This critical dialogue is incredibly important because I got news for you, religion is still the great fundamental bamboozle driving the war on drugs and terror. I think organized religion can be just as nuts as these guys do. I guess I just also see that it can also be incredibly and most boringly normal. A lot of good things come out of it as well, a sense of community, drug rehabilitation, charity work, etc.
Truth be told, the majority of people I’ve known or hung out with for most of my life have basically considered themselves atheists. It’s become almost a badge of pride for so many teenagers and young people, but I got news for you, it isn’t anything new or subversive…
Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander wrote an account of his near-death experience that pissed off a lot of skeptics. It sort of annoyed me too, but not as much as the skeptical annoyance annoyed me. The conflict between NDE believers and skeptics points to bigger problems in science and culture.
“In the materialistic demand to somehow untangle ourselves from the world completely in order to understand it, we’re asked to borrow a popular theological narrative. First, researchers are meant to believe there’s a way to create an experiment and not intervene or interact with it, and that they’re meant to do everything they can to preserve this principle. Then, they should believe that thoughts, feelings, and impressions have nothing to do with the reality they’ve set up inside the experiment and that there are laws (controls, etc.) that they’ve also created that actually prohibit them from interfering with whatever takes place inside the experiment world. This is remarkably similar to the deist or TV-addicted version of God — an old man on a distant cloud with a billion billion TVs. He set the show in motion so he could watch, pretending things happen independent of him.… Read the rest
Harvard-educated neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander woke up one morning with a bad case of E. Coli eating his brain. Before he could say “alakazam,” his neocortex had shut down completely, while his incorporeal body was whisked away on butterfly wings into the depths of the Infinite Beyond. He saw visions, was given messages, and upon returning to consciousness, wrote down his story, which he summarized for Newsweek.
Upon reading this account, blogging biologist and professional party-pooper PZ Myers basically accuses Dr. Alexander of being retarded. Relishing in his contempt for any Swedenborgian realities that may lie beyond atoms and the void, Myers wipes his ass with Newsweek on his famous science blog Pharyngula:
I’ve got to wonder who is responsible for this nonsense, and how it gets past the staff at Newsweek. Every once in a while, they’ve just got to put up a garish cover story touting the reality of Christian doctrine, and invariably, the whole story is garbage.
Picture: Jesse Krauß (PD)
Proof of an afterlife, or simply that we really have no idea how the mind works? Via the Daily Beast, Dr. Eben Alexander recounts his trip to a higher plane of existence whilst his brain was shut down in a coma:
As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.
In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.
All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex.
Picture: Sussex County Sheriffs Dept. (PD)
ABC News is reporting that Delaware pediatrician Melvin Morse, a researcher into near-death experiences and the author of numerous books including Closer to the Light, Transformed by the Light, Parting Visions and Where God Lives, has been accused of having waterboarded his own 11 year-old daughter over the course of two years:
Dr. Melvin Morse, 58, and his wife Pauline, 40, were arrested Tuesday, a day after their daughter told a child advocate that her father had “waterboarded” her four times between May 2009 and May 2011 while her mother watched and did nothing to stop the abuse, Cpl. Gary Fournier told ABC News.
Morse, who has appeared on Larry King Live and Oprah, is especially interested in the near-death experiences of children. Via his official biography:
In 1982, while a Fellow for the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Morse was working in a clinic in Pocatello, Idaho.
Looking down at one’s own body as the soul floats upwards…a feeling of immense calm as one moves towards the light…such reports by those who have come perilously close to death are often cited as proof of an afterlife or spiritual realm. However psychiatrist Dr. Karl Jansen explains that these near-death experiences are identical to a ketamine trip:
The near-death experience (NDE) is a phenomenon of considerable importance to medicine, neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry, philosophy and religon. Unfortunately, some scientists have been deterred from conducting research upon the NDE by claims that NDE’s are evidence for life after death, and sensationalist media reports which impart the air of a pseudoscience to NDE studies.
All features of a classic NDE can be reproduced by the intravenous administration of 50-100 mg of ketamine…including travel through a dark tunnel into light, the conviction that one is dead, ‘telepathic communion with God’, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences and mystical states…becoming a disembodied mind or soul, dying and going to another world.
Some shocking results are revealed when science tries to explain near-death experiences (NDEs) and other out of body experiences (OBEs), writes Mario Beauregard, author of Brain Wars, at Salon:
…Tales of otherworldly experiences have been part of human cultures seemingly forever, but NDEs as such first came to broad public attention in 1975 by way of American psychiatrist and philosopher Raymond Moody’s popular book Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon–Survival of Bodily Death. He presented more than 100 case studies of people who experienced vivid mental experiences close to death or during “clinical death” and were subsequently revived to tell the tale. Their experiences were remarkably similar, and Moody coined the term NDE to refer to this phenomenon. The book was popular and controversial, and scientific investigation of NDEs began soon after its publication with the founding, in 1978, of the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS)—the first organization in the world devoted to the scientific study of NDEs and their relationship to mind and consciousness.
