I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that Alex Malarkey’s story was all made up. And yet, that’s the news this week. Here is the NPR lead:
“Nearly five years after it hit best-seller lists, a book that purported to be a 6-year-old boy’s story of visiting angels and heaven after being injured in a bad car crash is being pulled from shelves. The young man at the center of The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, Alex Malarkey, said this week that the story was all made up.”
Alex, now a teen, was not only injured in that crash but was left quadriplegic. The book was co-authored by Alex and his father. Since then, parents Kevin and Beth Malarkey have separated; the children live with their mother.
The Washington Post notes that the Alex Malarkey account–like the Colton Burpo story in Heaven is for Real, which was published four months to the day later in 2010—became part of a popular genre of “heavenly tourism” controversial among orthodox Christians. That has certainly been the case with Beth Malarkey, a devout evangelical Christian who has spoken out against the book featuring her son because it is not biblically accurate. Alex is totally dependent on his mother as his caretaker. She reports that he has received no proceeds from the book, though it is impossible to tell whether she considers that a virtue because the money is tainted or a complaint about absence of support for a catastrophically disabled son. She says he has tried to set the record straight, that he knows the book is biblically in error.
This past week, Alex’s open letter to Christian bookstores occasioned the news story. He said:
“I did not die. I did not go to Heaven. I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible.* People have profited from lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible.…Those who market these materials must be called to repent and hold the Bible as enough.”
* He was six at the time of his NDE.
Surely I cannot be the only reader who sees backstory lying thick on the ground in this situation! And yet the media seems either blind or oblivious, reporting his change of story as a clear case of “truth-telling at last.” Full disclosure: I have not read the book, but admit that the quotes I have seen do not sound authentically like the voice of a young boy. Yet I have heard so many children’s NDE accounts that I believe there was something there, back in the beginning, which drew Alex to tell his father about…what?.
It was almost exactly one year ago (January 30, 2014) that I wrote about Colton Burpo’s NDE as described in Heaven is for Real. He was three at the time of his NDE, and in the seven years between then and the publication of the book, his eager conservative-pastor-dad kept questioning him and adding more and more details to his first simple story. As I said then about Colton:
He said angels sang to him, and he sat on Jesus’ lap .
But… by the time the sincere but hardly impartial father stopped asking questions, and the boy stopped adding details in response to those questions, seven years had passed and … the relative simplicity of the few original details had grown as the boy grew, into an elaborated account of Christian exclusivity and holy warfare that puts Revelation imagery into the hands of human warriors resembling Marvel comic book heroes.
What is a child with an NDE to do? Can we get parents out of the picture and listen to the kids?
The absence of understanding pours in from all sides. There is the Grace to You website, where Phil Johnson back in 2012 posted “The Burpo-Malarkey Doctrine.” (Beth Malarkey recommends the article and linked to it on her blog.) Johnson mentions a half-dozen dozen or so well-known NDE autobiographies and inveighs:
No true evangelical ought to be tempted to give such tales any credence whatsoever, no matter how popular they become. One major, obvious problem is that these books don’t even agree with one another. They give contradictory descriptions of heaven and thus cannot possibly have any cumulative long-term effect other than the sowing of confusion and doubt.…But the larger issue is one no authentic believer should miss: the whole premise behind every one of these books is contrary to everything Scripture teaches about heaven. (Emphasis in original.)
The article goes on to quote from an upcoming book, that NDEs “are either figments of the human imagination (dreams, hallucinations, false memories, fantasies, and in the worst cases, deliberate lies), or else they are products of demonic deception.”
Unfortunately, the Progressive Christian perspective, though more informative, has been no more helpful to the young experiencers. In the online Religious Dispatches, Ithaca College Associate Professor Rachel Wagner has written a comprehensive piece looking at the resistance the public and religious press showed at the early suggestion there might be questions about The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven. (Despite my caveats, I recommend reading her article.)
The successful marketing of such books reveals our craving for reassurances about what lies beyond death, but it can also raise problems for scripturally strict readers of the Bible like Alex’s mother, Beth Malarkey…
This modern-day controversy seems to spark some of the same tensions that inflamed the early church, with a markedly twenty-first century marketing spin. The early church fathers were disdainful of those …who claimed they could have spiritual inspiration through experience alone, and in so doing, supplement scripture. If we look at the earliest years of the Christian tradition, we can find both Jewish and Christian extra-canonical accountings of trips to heaven – and yet most of these traditions didn’t make it into received canon.
In the early centuries of Christianity we can also find a powerful experiential tradition in the Gnostics, who didn’t claim to visit heaven, but who did claim that their own spiritual insights could outweigh the opinion of institutional authorities and scripture.
Today, we have a pop-version of the same debates. Alex and Beth see new inspiration as dangerous. As Alex puts it, “I want the whole world to know that the Bible is sufficient. Those who market these materials must be called to repent and hold the Bible as enough.”
Todd Burpo and Kevin Malarkey, on the other hand, would have us allow new otherworldly visions to guide us—and would have us buy their heavenly storytelling as a means of expressing our extra-biblical convictions.
You see what is missing in all these commentaries? Two little boys, now young men in their teens.
Perhaps Kevin Malarkey has elaborated his son’s experience well beyond what Alex now considers truthful. Perhaps Todd Burpo’s theological naivete is a bit forced. The question remains: what of the genuine kernels of NDE remaining in the boys’ memories? What can they believe about themselves and that now-distant experience, and what (and whom) can they trust to talk about it?
Conversations about theology swirl, conversations about marketing hype are all over the place, conversations about the historicity of visionary experience may be welcomed. But two boys have been left without support, without assurances, with simply nothing but their own devices and available vocabulary to sort out an experience that can send adults into shock and even PTSD. They have been given notoriety but no insight, no way of understanding their experience except at the crudest literal level, no way of sorting out what it means about themselves that they are considered the objects of demonic deception or angelic praise. Their stories get attention, but the children do not.
There must be a better way to do this.
http://religiondispatches.org/why-are-we-not-surprised/?
I don’t believe Alex Malarkey’s story was made up either–embellished, with adult assistance, perhaps, but not a wholesale fabrication. Poor kid. So much has been taken away from him, and now, it seems, his own sublime encounter with God as well.
You are so right, Nan: Alex’s recent statement has to be awash in backstory. Someone is telling him his story can’t be true. “If it’s not in the Bible, it’s not true,” said my So. Baptist pastor with reference to NDE stories in a sermon last year. i think something like that is being said to Alex. For the fundamentalist, the Bible is another god. I know: I’ve lived in the Baptist ghetto my entire life.
Jan, it would have been so easy for me to ask, ‘Why don’t you go somewhere else’…but then I moved to a small Southern town. Now I drive 45 miles to a church in the nearest city. I hope you’ve discovered writers like Marcus Borg and Brian McLaren! Oh, and Nadia Bolz-Weber.
Well said!
Welcome – to the desert – of the real.
I love The Matrix as an explanation regarding what is going on concerning “beliefs,” and the main difference is that we are not lying in a pod somewhere “plugged in to a computer” and fed mental images. No, we are wide awake – and this “feeding of images” has been going on for 10,000 years.
What needs to be understood is that WE are the real problem – not “them.” Phase one of the Religious Elite mental take over (in round numbers) was back about 8000 BC, AND IT TOOK THE COMMON PEOPLE ABOUT 1000 YEARS TO WAKE UP. But when they finally did … look out.
Phase two began again about 4000 BC, was never stopped, and we are STILL in the middle of it today. It kicked into high gear C 3300 BC because of a known about astronomical-event that I’m not going to go into here.
The problem with archeological information is that it is never combined with psychological explanations. When “one person” stands before the people, calls himself a “god” and the people believe it – THAT is narcissism. Add to this HOW the new nation treats the people (NO empathy) and sociopathy can be added to the mix.
The “Matrix” is the forced doctrine they provide, which they know is a lie, but, the common people have no clue what is going on. Nation after nation did this in history … and, here we are today STILL doing nothing about it.
NDEs are NDEs – what does the total data picture say? Conclusions should be based on the overall picture obtained, and we go on from there. Can Christians say it’s wrong? When you ask a Christian what happens when the die, they all say they are going to Heaven. Really? According to Paul in 1 Thes 4:
14 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again (see Romans 10:9) even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus. (Sleep = dead.)
15 For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep.
16 For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. (Uh-oh.)
17 Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord.
So basically, the “dead are still dead” and will remain “dead” until Christ comes back. There is more information that states this “return” (along with the destruction event it was connected to – the “Day of the Lord”) should have happened 2000 years ago, but I’m not going to go there now – you can look it up yourselves.
So if, by this “stuffed into your head” Matrix created doctrine, the dead are still dead, then there is no one in “heaven” – but yet NDE data states there is. All we’d need is conclusive NDE data that this is happening, and we make a stand according to the total data picture from all sides.
Getting back to the original post here – did the boy lie? What does ALL the interconnecting data say? I have never read the book, but I just find it odd – that if this event DIDN’T happen, that it would come up at all.
Begin at the beginning, continue on until you reach the end: then stop. (Alice in Wonderland.)
You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it. (The Matrix)
Nan, my husband works for an agency of the Southern Baptist Concention, and he literally would be fired if we even attended a progressive church. There are a few good Baptist churches here in the Atlanta area, but they’ve been kicked out and are thus off limits for us. However I do slip out to Quaker meetings occasionally, and I certainly do study those great authors you mentioned (mourning the death of Marcus Borg, by the way–his books were there when I needed them).
Jan, gotcha. That explains everything! I guess just hope for some with rounder edges, and keep reading. And coming here! I’m going to send you an email.
From my side of the fence, I can say that I’ve been “lucky” not to have been so brainwashed by the adults around me while growing up. I’ve been treated to many different religions & denominations. And I can imagine the sheer variety of “interpretations” I would’ve been given by them had I told people about my dNDE.
In this sense, I guess walking alone on my path was a good thing. I’ve had time to process it all, and developed my own understanding of what happened to me at age 7/8. I found my own “salvation”.
And now as an adult, whenever someone tries to use deceit to trick me into their religious views, it comes off as an annoying, pathetic attempt.
I’m surprised that Malarkey & Burpo haven’t been able to resist the “indoctrinization” by now.
But I know that as teens, they are in a phase of their development and processing that they will face challenges to their mental belief systems. At some point (hopefully), they’ll come to a truthful “Aha!” moment and then stick with it.
BTW Jim, I shuddered when you mentioned the “desert of the real”, for I had walked & crawled through a desert in my dNDE!
Hellboy said:
I had walked & crawled through a desert in my dNDE!
…………
Did you post the experience? If not, I’d like to hear about it.
I only tell my stories to select few in this world. Even then I have layers of what I reveal. The general public is kept unaware of my NDE(s), which are only known by my spiritual friends and NEB. And within my NDE, there are extra personal things that I keep only between me and God.
So basically, telling my NDE story online is outta the question.
I must say to Dave Woods, that I’ve tried to perfect the art of explaining my dNDE in words that give a clearer, more accurate idea of what it was like. But Dave just came up with yet another breakthrough in that!
It does sound like Alex Malarkey could well have been manipulated into retracting his story. (Someone a little more brusque than I am might even say that he’s likely been manipulated into telling a holy lie, i.e. one considered pleasing to God because it can have the effect of steering a person away from one or more things regarded as wrong and towards fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible – the lie in this case being of course that the story was just invented by him.) Maybe many miss the signs that he retracted it to get his highly dogmatic mother off his back (thus making being cared for by her somewhat easier) because their eagerness to believe that he made it up means they have no interest in seeing them.
It’s easy to see that it’s best to keep the experience to yourself. It’s far better, that if your spirituality and insight have evolved and increased, to keep it’s dissemination on a one on one basis. very…. carefully.
Another thing is that words can’t really describe the experience, so your rendition of it will mean something different to each person you tell it to. Being ignorant of their conditioning can be a big mistake.
If you have evolved from your experience, you’ve become a teacher. A good teacher is fully aware of the emotional and conceptual state of their student on a moment to moment basis at all times.
Transmission of knowledge has to get through a constantly shifting,changing, opening and closing window of opportunity. In other words, you have to pick your shot, and have respect for the inner conceptions of others, being sure of what it is, what ever it is. sometimes just a word at the right time can make a big difference.
What does get through has to be processed and assimilated by THEIR conception, not yours. Learning and evolving within is a highly individual, personal process. How many times have you heard, “I wish I had known then what I know now.”
I am a teacher. Perhaps that’s a common thing for those who’ve had Void dNDE’s, wouldn’t you say?
But your dialectic on teaching, while true, is limited. I’ve been at a point where I use teaching methods that goes beyond the student’s shifting emotional state. I actually create the mood and the understanding in them, so that I don’t have to be limited to the “right timing”.
I’m fully aware of differing perception, which is why I get my bNDE friends to use certain analogies so that others will have a better concept of their stories, transcending people’s differing perception. Whenever they tell their NDE stories at IANDS meetings, I can almost feel the misguidance of the audience. And afterwards, its clearly proven. While I understand what the NDE’r is saying, most audiences misinterpret what’s said, and come up with some farcical conclusions from hearing the NDE stories. That’s why I try to advise the speakers of what effect their words are having.
And yet, I just made yet a confusing, subjective statement myself, when I referred to how I crawled through a desert. Now in hindsight, I think people will picture some guy in rags literally crawling through a hot desert, thirsting for water. None of which I meant.
I saw the Heaven’s For Real movie. It was told that Colton identified what Jesus looked like from a painting done by a spiritually gifted young gal. And now in real life, its suggested that Colton really didn’t see the eye color(s) of Jesus?
I wouldn’t harp on their last names. Burpo is a convenient surname if you’re in the soda pop business. In that case, why would you wanna change a good thing??
“Malarkey” has a certain strong oomph to it.
It seems to me that these kids were hijacked from the “Git Go”. Colton’s father interpreted His son’s experience by his own established conditioning. Alex’s Parents did the same. How could they not, considering how thorough their indoctrination’s were.
I saw Colton on a talk show being quizzed by a talk show host. It was obvious that the host was skeptical, but trying to hide it. Colton said he’d seen God’s eyes. The Host immediately jumped on him asking what color they were. Colton looked like he was being put on the spot.
Alex’s mother lives up to her name. She’s full of malarkey. I must say the last names of these people are unfortunate. If I had a last name like Burpo or Malarkey…..I’d change it.
These kids were pushed into “Star” status by hopefully sincere but archaically orientated religious people, who made money by exploiting them, writing their books for them. They processed what the kids were relating through the filter of a static cast in stone “you’d better believe or else” religion.
The “you’d better believe” people are challenged, by anything that deviates from what’s been beaten into them. This is fear plain and simple, the religion of fear. Any one who hasn’t succumbed to their conditioning, is a threat. Their parents were beaten down, and they turned on their own children.
If the parents hadn’t profited from the books, making “Stars” out of their kids, It might have gone down easier. But as it is, the accepted religions that distorted and confined them, have disgraced their children. in a way that will follow them for the rest of their lives…….unbelievably sad. And Yet, we who know still believe the Kids.
For entertainment:
You all should see the movie “Legion”, about archangel Michael vs Gabriel. The message of the movie entertainingly makes the point that I’ve been trying to drill in religious people’s minds for years now. The Gabriel represents the fundamentalists while Michael represents those who truly “get it”.
But for nothing else, it has cool SFX.
Sounds like something I might actually go see!
Its on DVD. Starring Adrianne Palicki.
About the Burpo-Malarkey malarkey:
I keep it simple. I’ve seen manipulations like this all the time. You all should see what would happen if *I* were on the scene with the Burpo-Malarkey families, pointing out their illogics. It’d probably be like verbal ballet. Some of my friends say I have a certain effect on people where they actually THINK and then keep their on me.
The Alex Malarkey story bothers me on a couple of levels.
There are no heroes here, only victims. Perhaps Alex Malarkey is a hero in the tragic sense, but it doesn’t look like anyone can save him, at least not in this life, right now.
When I first saw the headline, I groaned. In this day and age, you can be sure that at least a few NDE story’s thrown around in the market-driven ‘heavenly tourism’ industry (that phrase is so spot-on!) are embellished, if not outright fabrications.
Every money-grabbing psychic/seer appealing to our popular culture has to throw at least one elaborately detailed and inspiring near death experience into their autobiography. It breathes indisputable spirit-cred into their resumé, and who can argue with them? At a certain level, J.Z. Knight’s claims sound no more fantastic than Eben Alexander’s Map of Heaven, so how does a casual reader know the difference?
It takes a lot of work, both intellectually and internally, but I fear most folks aren’t brave enough to make the effort. Yes, it takes nothing less than courage and internal fortitude to do the work needed for spiritual growth and discernment, especially for those affected by fundamentalist doctrine from childhood.
But regular followers of this blog know that, and all of us can clearly see what’s happening to Alex. I won’t launch into one of my anti-fundamentalism tirades, because frankly, I’m tired of b****ing. Folks either ‘get it’ or they don’t.
It’s obvious that popular media has overshadowed serious research and counseling. Jeffrey Long’s NDERF website comes to mind as Exhibit A – “Over 3700 (undocumented) NDE stories!” I guess it serves a purpose, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on the authenticity of every submission to it’s database.
I believe when IANDS was founded, one of its intentions was to fund research, but it looks like that idea flew out the window years ago. It currently does its best to be a clearing house for information, but lack of support appears to have caused it to put most of its focus on its annual conference.
Solid credible NDE research, counseling and information dispensation is desperately needed right now, but that takes leadership. As seen in governments around the world, that seems to be scarce at the moment.
The good news is that the information is out there, if we search for it.
Rabbit, you always nail it. Sigh. Yes,, I think people either ‘get it’ or they don’t, and most don’t. Was it C.S. Lewis or Gilbert K. Chesterton (or who?) who said something along the lines of Christianity really isn’t for the masses, because they don’t understand it–or any religion or spiritual practice. It’s like what we think of as “the Real Message” is right out in plain sight but is invisible to most people.
As for IANDS and research, academics tend to have a difficult time with experiencers (and vice versa). As long as the researchers had the place mostly for themselves, there was a coherence about their aims and motives; but then the experiencer population kept growing, with complaints about researchers being “voyeurs” and exploiting their findings for their own scholastic purposes (but that’s what researchers do!), and academics complaining about the airy-fairy thinking and absence of understanding of quantification among the NDErs, and eventually the researchers mostly went away, except for those who publish in the Journal.Really, they had to if they wanted to protect their professional credibility. Psychology itself has gone into a slump of late, along with most of the social sciences. Research has shifted to the neurosciences, very hard-edged and reductionist, even in the mind/brain area. Just look at the preponderance of studies exclusively involving cardiac arrest: the interest is in the clinical aspects of dying, not in the experience or the NDE. In other words, we’re in a whole different generation and mind-shift. Very uncomfortable to a lot of us.
I think Kevin Williams site does it’s best to steer around this. Granted, it’s sort of static, I can’t think of a better way to put it, and this is a poor attempt. However, because it’s solely his thing, he keeps it pretty much on point, and doesn’t try to “out nde” everybody else.
When dealing with public psychics or gurus, I simply look at their core values & message & ideology. If it rings universally TRUE, then I see them as legit. I can usually detect ego-driven BS instantly.
When dealing with religious folks who “don’t get it”, I have enlightened them by example. I have a situation in the town that I live in where I enlighten the young adult christians with my words of true love & why and so on. most of them take to it, with gleaming eyes like they’ve never heard of what I just told them but somehow know its true.
Then there’s the hardass christian young adults who constantly espouse hypocrisy. For them, I usually only succeed at enlightening them by some intense, emotional inspiring event. But that usually means I end up being the sacrificial lamb, which sucks.
Here’s another story you might like (to be entertained by…or just sigh):
http://news.yahoo.com/four-westerners-plead-guilty-over-nude-photos-malaysia-101537225.html
I’d just like to say a few words in defence of the nderf website. I think it’s useful to have a place where people can just tell their stories with no interpretation or “verification” and leave it up to us what we make of it. It’s just “raw data” if you like and we must use our own judgement. I suppose I’m just a bit fed up with being told what to think – I’ll make my own mind up.
Also it’s interesting re the Malarkey malarky – some people can’t accept the nde if it doesn’t conform to a religious orthodoxy, some can’t accept the nde if it seems to support religious figures. I guess we’re more the same than we are different.
Interestingly the Christian religion was opposed to the orthodoxy of its day. Plus ca change etc etc.
🙂
Dear Nan,
I’ve only just come across your piece on the Alex Malarkey ‘recantation’, but I’m very much in agreement with you and am amazed that so much of the press coverage seems to have taken his statement at face value (as well as completely failing to understand the theological agenda behind the folks who are driving the opposition to NDEs in general as a matter of principle). I don’t for a minute want to question his mother’s absolute devotion to her son and heroic long-term care of him, but I do question whether she has not been manipulated by the hardline Reformed Sola Scriptura constituency into disavowing Alex’s account, and persuading him to do so as well.
That there is more than meets the eye here should be obvious to anyone with their critical faculties functioning properly if they just read Alex M’s statement. The two key incoherences come right at the start
i) ‘I did not die’. How could he know that, being in a coma? That’s a medical question, not one that can be decided by a declaration on the part of an unconscious patient.
ii) ‘When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible’. That doesn’t make logical sense, as he presumably made the claims based on personal experience (why should having read the Bible make any difference to that? – if anything, it would seem to make his claims MORE credible since it would indicate that they were not just generated out of a pre-formed imagination).
After that, the rest of the declaration is simply a stern theological injunction against anything that does not conform to the hardline Reformed doctrine of Sola Scriptura (in which most of the Christian world has never believed in any case).
Another problem with all of this is that while Alex M’s recantation might carry some weight were it the only element of the book, it isn’t. There is the small matter of the accident itself and the veridical perceptions accompanying his supposed out-of-body experience. Here we’re in the realm of objective evidence, not just subjective testimony, yet none of the press reports are talking about this side of the story, presumably because they haven’t read much NDE literature and aren’t familiar with the research methodology involved.
There are of course many purely spurious NDE accounts out there, as well as others in which an authentic core experience has been subsequently embellished for various reasons (it may well be that Alex’s comes into the second category). It also has to be said that the relationship between experience, subjective imagination, memory and the symbolic is an immensely complex question. But these things having been said, I still think that Alex Malarkey’s recantation begs more questions than it answers. If you take the history of mystical experiences (I’m thinking particularly of well-documented cases involving Marian apparitions in the Catholic tradition, which is an area where I’ve done extensive research professionally), there are several cases of children who under duress from adults retracted their stories, only to go back to their original account sometimes decades later. So I don’t necessarily think we’ve seen the last of all this…
Well, heaven bless you for your contribution to my day (and I suspect that of a good many other readers here)! Wonderfully apt, observant, and i believe right on the mark. It is so painful to see people locked into an ironclad ideology which not only does not fit but which is contorting their life. And extremely interesting to hear your observation about recanting children (is that recanting retracted children?) many years later. Yes, it will be fascinating to watch this over time. Peter, thank you so much for these astute observations!
In terms of the NDERF, and doctoring submissions, they did it to me once. I had a vivid ADC (After Death Communication) from my Father. He came to me in a dream, and it effected me deeply. In fact it woke me up. He visited me in full technicolor. I know it was him.
I sent it into Jody. When it came out on the site, she had cut it to shreds, to the point where to me, it didn’t even make sense. I Emailed my anger in terms of what had been done, and she changed it back to the original. This shows that they’re not above, tampering with evidence.
Thanks, Dave. Sorry to hear that.
Pertaining to me, it’s no big deal. Sorry about that for me, is irrelevant. My point is they’re not above tampering with peoples experiences. This being said, I don’t think it’s a rampant procedure with them either. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot from the site.
When somebody becomes an NDE star. All of the skeptics and fossilized religious people are going to attack their credibility. also, it seems to me that there’s a competition between those who research as well. This is a standard fault of the Earthly human condition.
can I suggest a new topic? what is the purpose of life?
Toma, I’ll have to think about whether that even feels do-able! Will report.
From a Fundamentalist’s perspective, Alex Malarkey is telling the truth when he declares that he had never read the Bible, prior to being coached.
Extremist’s of every stripe (Christian, Muslim, reductionist materialist and all of ’em) believe that if one reads their holy book(s) and fails to arrive at the same conclusions the extremist did, then the reader hasn’t actually READ the book.
Put another way, from the Fundamentalist Christian viewpoint, Bart Ehrman, Elaine Pagels and Karen Armstrong have never actually read the Bible. *sigh*
Sigh right along with you.
About this article, my husband first noticed the article on Alex’s recanting on Yahoo and brought it to my attention. As I researched this out, I noticed that the Malarkey’s were in a divorce and two, the book rights were solely in the father’s name. Beth claimed that she was receiving no funds from the sale. (taken from her blog which seems to have disappeared). Beth is also a avid John McArthur follower and he is very antigonistic to any type of spiritual experience happening today. He is a preacher from California and has been hard line for years. Most of who she has contact with when I reviewed her blog site, are individuals that have spoken out against NDEs. What is really sad is the lack of support for Alex himself. With the type of injuries he had (his skull was almost detached from his body) I would wager he probably did have spiritual experiences of some type which have been exploited by those who had their own hang ups and cant handle the thought that their belief system may be in error.
What I find interesting is how most Christians do not seem to understand the actual life of Christ. He raised many from the dead, did healings, had 500 people come back to life upon his death, came back in spirit form to the point he could interact with physical elements on this plane. (I have recently read an ADC account from a lady who was able to physically feel her deceased love one even though he was in spirit form so to me this is personal confirmation of Jesus appearance to others in this manner).
Jesus interacted numerous times with people after death, went somewhere for three days (my personal view is he went to the astral realms for soul rescues) and offered to serve as an afterlife guide to the man who died beside him. Interestly, the term Jesus used to the thief dying next to him was the word “paradise”, which in their word usage of the day translates to “Park”. Park is the term the Monroe Institute uses to designate the most pleasant space in the afterlife realms before launching past earth planes.
I really think that if most church people would have a hard time if they actually walked with Jesus during his time on earth and shortly thereafter. They would probably stick the religious thinking of the day and would not believe the experiences.
***************************
The Robert Monroe Institute
This is an aside from the article, but I am curious, does anyone have any thoughts as to their void experience being the area of afterlife mentioned by Monroe OBE explorers labed as area 23. Here is a blog entry taken from the Bruce Meon forum, TMI trainer on this
http://afterlife-knowledge.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?num=1367796170
http://www.afterlife-knowledge.com/answers.html
Note: Their labels for the afterlife spaces are an effort to describe the regions that people who enroll in their program can use to identify parts of their experience.
Laurie, what a great comment! Poor Alex, indeed, however convinced his mother may be. Thanks so much. I will look at the Monroe blog links shortly and comment afterwards.
One more thought to the Marlarkey article: His supposed “recantation” sounded so very scripted, not like something a boy in his condition would craft. It reminded me of the type of statements that hostages are required to say in front of cameras. Not that his mother is being mean or the father, just that they are so held in place by their current belief systems that do not really prepare one at the core level on the actual experience of their spirit leaving their body. Traditional people have been taught going from here to there is like a light switch, I know I fell into that. Then my son died. There were many events. Many. My belief system had to be laid aside and a deeper search for truth was launched. I am still on the pathway of that search very much. I am trying to find a way for me personally to connect to that other state of existance. Sometimes I have been able to in some degree.
As far as the Monroe term “Park” and why I am drawn to it…not only did it compare with Jesus words but also to a experience. My sister had both her “in-laws” pass within 6 months of one another. When the mom passed, she kept asking who all the people were in her room, she wanted her husband to ask them to leave. When her husband passed six months later, the day of his leaving, his wife came back to him (in spirit) and told him he would be leaving with her to the Park.
A few months back I encountered a OBEr who was able to accurately describe events that happened (manner of death) to my deceased sister and brought in my son. She had applied some of the Robert Monroe thoughts. Her talk with me was like she was a go between between me and them. Afterwards I was extremely fatigued like a huge energy drain and more.
When I read of some of the people involved with the Robert Monroe institute and the things they were doing, it does give one a huge shift in your perception of reality.
There are so many things I could write, but it seems like whatever is going on past existence in a physical body….that is not as neat and tidy as some would believe. For that reason, I probably am even more driven to make meaningful contact with my deceased son. He was so truly good to others, his death has rocked me to the core. I do not even like looking at the earth plane now, it makes me like mad that it is some kind of illusion for preschoolers. Realize I have said a lot, but this is some of the things I am processing. Like an NDE, my experiences with my recently deceased son has forced me to rethink this reality and other “truths”.
Thank you Nan for looking into the Monroe Forum, actually maintained by Bruce Moen. Thoughts and insights are appreciated.
Clarification on my sister’s in-laws story about their passing: I meant before the mom passed when she saw the persons in her room, they were not seen by other people, just herself. I am assuming that it was those she loved in spirit form.
Also, here is a video on a program by the Monroe Institute by Skip Atwater. He is giving the results of OBE exploration of an afterlife area most conducive to humans. It is a 5 part series.
Nancy, I was listening to your interview on Christiana’s Psychic Cafe from November 17, 2013. You mention that in your former belief system you were a Protestant, and also a PK kid. Then came the NDE and a career at IANDS.
After your own personal experience and listening to many others over the years…how in your view would describe God/Source to be?
Thank you for your service to others.
Laurie, in my present belief system I’m still a Protestant, though by no means a doctrinal literalist. I’m still in church every Sunday for the same reason I believe that NDEs are important: because Something Is Going On, and it seems right to acknowledge that. A full answer to your question will take a longish blog post, which I’ve begun thinking through. It won’t be immediate, but it will be along soonish.
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
If you truly want to know just how bad the christian right is for a true search for spirituality. Read this book by Chris Hedges. His Father was a minister and he went to seminary school with the full intention of becoming a minister himself. He is fully aware of the value of true Christianity, and in depth illustrates where the Christian Right is going off the tracks.
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