Apparently Alex Malarkey didn’t come back from heaven. He came back to reality.
The bestselling book, The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, co-authored with his father, Kevin, a so-called therapist, was a fraud. Alex has now written a letter to Christian booksellers admitting he lied about his experience to get attention.
The question I have is, how could anyone have not known this from the beginning? Honestly, books like this, and others like it (Heaven Is Real; Proof of Heaven), just don’t ring true, not least because anything written about heaven has to be phony. Nobody has been there or ever will be there because heaven is not a place.
Let’s get that straight. Heaven is not a place. It is a metaphor for a mystery, for our conviction that life is not limited to the here and now. So wherever people who have near death experiences “go,” it is not a place called heaven.
Think about it. If God exists, then by definition God cannot be in a “place.” God just is. “Place” is how we earthlings think because we are confined to time and space. Eternity is the opposite.
The Book of Revelation in the Bible speaks of streets of gold, pearly gates, and mansions in the sky because that is all the author could conceive of given the limitations of living in this world.
So if someone tells you they just got back from heaven and wants to tell you all about it, you can bet it’s made up, an illusion, or perhaps even a delusion. But for sure it is not true, it is not real.
For me it is sad that so many people get caught up in this kind of profit making charade. They obviously need proof of something they are supposed to take on faith. But publishers and movie producers know a good thing when they see it so they grab hold of these stories and run with them.
I wish Alex Malarky’s decision to tell the truth would make religious people wake up to the Elmer Gantry’s of the world who are ready to take advantage of their sincere desire to believe in life after death.
I wish his recantation would help religious people understand that faith is the opposite of certainty, and that anyone who suggests he can prove heaven exists or is real is not a friend to faith, but its nemesis.
But I doubt it will. No, 18th century philosopher David Hume was probably more right than wrong when he argued that reason is the slave of the passions.
Which means, among other things, that we believe what we want to believe, whether it is true or not.
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