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First, I forget all of the specific details, and the person telling these stories didn't provide any source material.
So, here's the stories as I remember them. There's this six-year-old boy who has yet been taught of Christanity, or any biblical story. He suffers a trauma that eventually leads doctors to pronounce him dead. Though he eventually regains functional ability despite this being pronounced dead. The boy then describes Heaven with great detail.The second story involves a teenage girl whose parents were not Christian, and had no contact with Christanity. After waking up one day, for no known reason she paints what is described as an exceptionally beautiful rendering of Heaven that is parallel to the boy's description of which she had no knowledge of. To add to the remarkable nature of the girl's painting she did not show any great interest or ability for art before this.
I'll just ask one thing,(My PS3 doesn't like me making long posts) did these children really have no concept of Heaven at all?
I have a hard time imagining that a 6 year old has NEVER been exposed to the concept unless s/he's been living in an isolated bubble. I have a 6 year old, and though we aren't religious at all, she hears plenty about it from her friends at school (and the occasional visiting aunt)
1. While I am not a firm believer in reincarnation--I've had a "terrifying and exciting" experience of my own--I feel that it cannot be entirely dismissed. The experiences both children had could well have been from the "open" window of a past life that had yet completely closed.
2. The brain is a fascinating organ, and we have come but a short ways to understand it.
While I underwent POW training--meaning to experience what it is like to be a POW and to gain a measure of understanding of confinement and torture--I stood for x number of hours in a 4x4x6' box with a bag over my head.
The reason I mention this is for two observations.
a. Everyone I knew in my life came into the box, and we all had some very interesting conversations. Some deep, some funny, some a bit sober.
Added to that, a number of "guests" were people I didn't know, but the hallucinations quickly faded after the training, and I do not remember much about the conversations--only that the whole experience was both weird and deeply thought-provoking.
b. Almost everyone of us shared a common hallucination. And this is where it gets really weird. We all conceived of a shelf in the box. A couple of us tried to place our water and food containers on this shelf. With disastrous results, not to mention. I was tempted to do the very same thing, until I heard one hapless trainee get hauled out of his box and punished.
The amazing thing about that hallucination was that almost all of us imagined this shelf in the same "place" within our box prisons. I mean, the variation of placement would have been mere inches, not feet, not on another wall, etc.
3. The concept of heaven, of course, originally meant the stars above the Earth and quite possibly the other planets as well. It was a human desire to escape the confinement of the Earth and to be with the gods who roamed freely among those stars.
The idea of an afterlife takes a convergent turn. Before the advent of organized Christianity, most religious thought placed the afterlife underneath the surface of the Earth. Except for the South American inhabitants (might be other cultures similar in thinking that I am not aware), the gods lived above the Earth.
We have the Elysian Fields mythology that has transcended into the Christian mainstream of heaven: very Earthlike but perfect.
It seems to me, therefore, that while the human brain is capable of conceiving many things, it is still basic. For example, it looks at natural patterns in the world with the prime objective of seeing faces. Thus, we see faces in the most simple of things: food, trees, flowers, clouds.
It would be a wild imagination, I think, for a person experiencing NDE to conceive of anything other than the material concepts of this material plane when describing or even relating to an afterlife. I mean, I have yet read or heard a person describing the afterlife as "strings" or orbs or blobs or even as wild and exotic "alien" creatures from other worlds.
Rj7237, to me, these stories are similar to, "My cousin told me that someone in her family knows a woman who woke up one day after being in a coma, and she could speak 12 languages she had never been taught or heard."
First, I forget all of the specific details, and the person telling these stories didn't provide any source material.
So, here's the stories as I remember them. There's this six-year-old boy who has yet been taught of Christanity, or any biblical story. He suffers a trauma that eventually leads doctors to pronounce him dead. Though he eventually regains functional ability despite this being pronounced dead. The boy then describes Heaven with great detail.The second story involves a teenage girl whose parents were not Christian, and had no contact with Christanity. After waking up one day, for no known reason she paints what is described as an exceptionally beautiful rendering of Heaven that is parallel to the boy's description of which she had no knowledge of. To add to the remarkable nature of the girl's painting she did not show any great interest or ability for art before this.
I'll just ask one thing,(My PS3 doesn't like me making long posts) did these children really have no concept of Heaven at all?
The correct way to approach such extraordinary claims is firstly to very them then to try to find out the explanation.
Before the story is verified as anything other than a story or at least grossly overdone story there is no point in trying to make any sense of it.
Children have a better intuitive understanding than many adults. When Steve Jobs presented the first Apple computer, who do you think figured out how to use it first, Andy Warhol or a child who was about 6? The 6 year old did. As an adult, I try to imagine heaven and hell within the scriptures depiction, but children kind of just know what it is.
Karl, it sounds to me like a classic urban legend. Our imagination of heaven and hell is strictly made, for most people, of stories or myths we hear from religous writings. Fact is, if it did exist, we could never know.
First, I forget all of the specific details, and the person telling these stories didn't provide any source material.
Who says Erich von Daniken isn't alive and well? That was one of his hallmark phrasings. He never remembered specific details, but in the next paragraph he was off and running with his wild speculations.
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