PROOF OF HEAVEN???

A week ago I posted on The Myth of an Afterlife.   Like most, I once believed in Heaven and a future life of comfort and security.  I'm uncertain about exactly when, but not much longer after finding out that there was no real Santa Claus, my view on this subject began to shift.

Every Sunday I try to focus on some facet of religion.  Today, the subject of my analysis will be neurosurgeon Eben Alexander.  I've reported on him numerous times.  Here is one quote:

What about all those near death experiences, where reasonable people return with very similar stories?  That bright light, such peace and the beauty of the afterlife?   You can read  Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven:  A Neurosurgeon's Journey in the Afterlife.  Here is a five-minute You Tube summary.  My take?  They sincerely had something similar to a dream.  Many store in the brain this ideal vision.  Some say the light is embedded at birth.

Read this very long and comprehensive article about Dr. Alexander in the Harvard Crimson.  It is fair, but  perhaps overly complimentary.  But these alumni publications are notorious for this attitude.  His adoptive father got his medical degree from Harvard and Eben himself taught there for more than a decade.

Christian publications sell $1.2 billion annually, around 10% of the total market.  His first book on his re-awakening experience has sold more than 2 million copies.  Since then he has written two more.

Eben Alexander's public relations show a credible and stable neurosurgeon with a happy family life.  The reality is just the opposite.  According to Bernard Patten (neuroscientist at Rice University and Baylor) in his critique of Proof of Heaven:

• Alexander admits he didn't feel loved, initially resenting the fact that his sixteen-year old mother abandoned him.
• He spent months alone in an orphanage crib.

Further, in 2013 after the book was published, Luke Dittrich, contributing editor at Esquire, wrote a critical article:

• Was adopted by a successful doctor, but was sent to a New Hampshire boarding school for his high school years.  Mind you, this was Phillips Exeter Academy, which got him into Duke.
• At the time of his medical trauma, he was fending off various malpractice suits for $3 million, where he altered medical records to cover his errors.
• While Alexander writes that he spent a week in coma from bacterial meningitis, what really happened was that the medical doctor watching over him purposefully induced the coma, weaning him off anesthetics, where he he was conscious, but delirious.  Michael Shermer of Scientific American explained that Alexander's "evidence is proof of hallucination, not heaven."
• Said Dittrick, facts in the book were altered for dramatic effect.  For example, there was absolutely no way for him to see a rainbow when he awoke.
• In 2009 Alexander was reprimanded by the Virginia Board of Medicine for two spinal operations he performed in 2007.  Remember, this visit to heaven occurred in 2008.
• The Atlantic and Wired also had damning expose's.
• He has a net worth of $5 million.

So why did PoL sell so well?  Back to Patten:

The reason this kind of rubbish gets published is that it sells.  And it sells because people want to read about heaven in the hope that heaven really exists and that they some day (but not quite yet) might get there.

Here is a simple list of only 36.

On this rainy Sunday in Honolulu, I'm pleased to report that President Donald Trump is scheduled to leave DC on Air Force One for Florida the morning of Joe Biden's inauguration.  The Donald departs with a 29% approval rating, the lowest of his presidency.  As he got almost half of the votes on November 3, this means 58% of Republicans still support him.  That is the number that scares Republicans in office.  They can't afford to alienate his base.  Oh, that TIME cover is an appropriate joke, you won't get it in your mail if you subscribe.

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