Scottish philosopher David Hume once wrote if a person is claiming to see something miraculous, is it more likely that the laws of nature and the universe have been altered only for him and in his favor, or that he’s under a big misapprehension?
Now imagine hearing it from a child, who has no understanding of physics or neuroscience, and only reveals this occurrence over the course of several years to parents who have already taught him since infancy that miracles and the supernatural are real.
With Todd Burpo, author of “Heaven is for Real” arriving on campus soon, it’s a good opportunity to look skeptically at this volume and hold it up to the light of reason.
The book was written by Pastor Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent (who worked on another “nonfiction” book, Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue”). In fact, three-fourths of it aren’t even about his son’s experience, but Todd’s work as a pastor, faith, and church.
When Colton Burpo was four he went under anesthesia during an appendix operation, where he almost died (thus not having a “life after death” experience). During this time, Colton claims he went to Heaven and met Jesus, seeing the scars of Jesus’s palms where the nails were driven in. This is curious, since it implies that earthly wounds even on Christ himself are permanent in paradise, and also that the crucifixion nails were driven into the palm. Historians and medical researchers confirm that Roman crucifixion nails were driven into the wrist, not the palm, for the weight of the body would otherwise tear off the cross.
Physically, Jesus’s eyes “were just sort of a sea-blue and they seemed to sparkle.” Odd, since during that period vast contact with blue-eyed Germanic peoples in ancient Palestine is hard to find, if at all, and the eye color of Semites was, and still mainly is, brown. When Colton was asked to choose among numerous online images of Jesus, he chose Akiane Kramarik’s blue-eyed “Prince of Peace” portrait, which looks more like an Abercrombie and Fitch model than a Palestinian man 2,000 years ago.
Another of Colton’s claims is to have seen all the men of Heaven with swords, none for the women, of course (and surely no gays allowed I’m sure). Of course, he only mentioned this after seeing the battle scene in “The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe” some years after surgery, and after his mother said it was “too bad” he hadn’t seen that in Heaven. At any rate, this was God’s preparation for the battle between God and Satan.
The father writes that these must be what Colton really saw since he couldn’t have had such Biblical knowledge. But throughout the book the author says how the family would read Bible stories and scripture before bed, and being the son of a pastor it’s hard not to know about Biblical prophecy.
As for his never-born sister, it’s unlikely that over the years Colton didn’t know that his mother lost a baby, only then happening to remember seeing her in retrospect.
Then again, all of this and much more has come from the lad over several years. And if he is anything like other children who are prodded and encouraged by adults to say things that they think they might have seen from a very susceptible and young age, then the entire story becomes more dubious.
Even as a child I was taught about Heaven and how angels are supposed to look (Colton says the angels had wings, yet other claimers have reported no wings). Since believers will cling onto anything to try to block out the modern world and its wondrous, non-religious evidences of nature and the universe, the Burpo claims offer a tasty morsel of the suspension of reality.
I must be intellectually honest and admit that I don’t know what happens after death, but I’m pretty confident given the evidence of the ceasing brain activity that one’s consciousness ends. Some say that sounds depressing, but I like to think of it as Ayn Rand once put it, “It is not I who will die, it is the world that will end.”
Only when we conquer our fear of death will all of this mysticism end, including the multi-million dollar “life after death” machine that publishers can’t get enough of.
