Religion - a respectful discussion, for those interested

Apparently you didn't read the article, so I'll re-post it here:

"Proof of Heaven
A SCIENTIST’S CASE FOR THE AFTERLIFE

Near-death experiences, or NDEs, are controversial. Thousands of people have had them, but many in the scientific community have argued that they are impossible. Dr. Eben Alexander was one of those people.

A highly trained neurosurgeon who had operated on thousands of brains in the course of his career, Alexander knew that what people of faith call the “soul” is really a product of brain chemistry. NDEs, he would have been the first to explain, might feel real to the people having them, but in truth they are simply fantasies produced by brains under extreme stress.

Then came the day when Dr. Alexander’s own brain was attacked by an extremely rare illness. The part of the brain that controls thought and emotion—and in essence makes us human—shut down completely. For seven days Alexander lay in a hospital bed in a deep coma. Then, as his doctors weighed the possibility of stopping treatment, Alexander’s eyes popped open. He had come back.

Alexander’s recovery is by all accounts a medical miracle. But the real miracle of his story lies elsewhere. While his body lay in coma, Alexander journeyed beyond this world and encountered an angelic being who guided him into the deepest realms of super-physical existence. There he met, and spoke with, the Divine source of the universe itself.

This story sounds like the wild and wonderful imaginings of a skilled fantasy writer. But it is not fantasy. Before Alexander underwent his journey, he could not reconcile his knowledge of neuroscience with any belief in heaven, God, or the soul. That difficulty with belief created an empty space that no professional triumph could erase. Today he is a doctor who believes that true health can be achieved only when we realize that God and the soul are real and that death is not the end of personal existence but only a transition.

This story would be remarkable no matter who it happened to. That it happened to Dr. Alexander makes it revolutionary. No scientist or person of faith will be able to ignore it. Reading it will change your life."
http://www.ebenalexander.com/books/proof-of-heaven/

 

Here's the Newsweek article where I first discovered this amazing story, and the book that came from it:

"As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon. I followed my father’s path and became an academic neurosurgeon, teaching at Harvard Medical School and other universities. 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.

I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.

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.

I know how pronouncements like mine sound to skeptics, so I will tell my story with the logic and language of the scientist I am.

Very early one morning four years ago, I awoke with an extremely intense headache. Within hours, my entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down. Doctors at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, a hospital where I myself worked as a neurosurgeon, determined that I had somehow contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that mostly attacks newborns. E. coli bacteria had penetrated my cerebrospinal fluid and were eating my brain.

When I entered the emergency room that morning, my chances of survival in anything beyond a vegetative state were already low. They soon sank to near nonexistent. For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive, my higher-order brain functions totally offline.

Then, on the morning of my seventh day in the hospital, as my doctors weighed whether to discontinue treatment, my eyes popped open.

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

But that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.

I’m not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.

All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.

It took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but—more importantly—the things that happened during that time...."
http://www.newsweek.com/proof-heaven-doctors-experience-afterlife-65327

...read the rest of this compelling article to find out what he experienced while in this state of brain inactivity!

 

You really don't see the difference there???

 

There's good news....there's still time for people to come to understand the truth. There's no shame in being in a different place in the journey that is life. We all learn and grow at our own pace.

After all, nobody is a saint until death. We continue to learn, to develop our human potential, and to grow in holiness until death, and even after death we have the beautiful gift of purgatory to cleanse our souls of any residual "dirt and debris" of sin, and to purify ourselves for the joys of heaven. As Yogi Berra would say, "It aint over til its over".

God desires our love, and so He leaves us free, for true love cannot be coerced. From the beginning, God created us with that radical freedom to choose Him, or to choose ourselves instead. (which ultimately leaves us isolated and alone, apart from heaven, in our own self-created state of hell). Remember that even today, over 90% of the world's population believes in God, and is progressing slowly but surely on the "practice field" of earth to be ready one day for the championship celebration in heaven!

We must choose the higher good that our souls crave: union with God's pure love, union with each other in love - over personal material possessions, monetary wealth, fleeting physical pleasures, earthy "successes", fame, etc. In the next life, where we are much more fully alive, more fully human, and more authentically ourselves, only love and community (communion with one another in love) matters. And God tells us that there will be "a new heavens and a new earth", and that we will have all the joys of this world with none of the pain and suffering that stems from sin. It will be the true paradise that the Garden of Eden was intended to be, before the devil tricked Adam and Eve with lies, causing them to abuse their freedom, choosing the one thing God forbade because He knew it would be harmful to them, leading them to slip into sin, pain, suffering, and ultimately death. Jesus ("the new Adam") has saved us from this fate, and He paved the way to salvation (through His perfect obedience to the Father, even to the point of death on a cross)