Boy Who “Came Back From Heaven” Takes it All Back

Apparently, the boy who went to heaven…..really only went to Cleveland.

And to the hospital. (in Cleveland)

No matter how much you may love Ohio, I can tell you from personal experience, it’s NOT what I’m hoping Heaven is going to look like 🙂

This is sort of a sad story on a number of fronts, but it appears like one of the best selling books that featured a small child who told a tale of angels and the afterlife after a horrific accident, was really a fabrication. It also appears like the family is a bit divided in a number of ways…and that there is a lot of tension and division between the child’s mother, and the father. (who wrote the book, and appears to have kept most of the money)

It also appears like the child (who is no longer a small child but definitely in need of medical support) remains deeply religious and for me, that adds a bit of a wrinkle to the otherwise straightforward retraction of the story.

I’ve never been a fan of deeply “religious” NDE’s, or ones that have very overt religious symbolism embedded in the experience, simply because I believe it adds a layer of wish fufillment and cultural conditioning to the experience. (Hindu’s rarely see Jesus, and Christians don’t see Krisha, Jews don’t see Mohammed, Buddhists don’t see Moses and tribal religions in underdeveloped nations see NO Judeo-Christian gods at all)

So stories like this one – retractions of very religious and mainstream NDE stories that have been turned into books and movies and bestsellers, are really NOT all that surprising to me, as I tend to look at them more skeptically, or with a bit less interest than the transformative ones that transcend religion or the prior beliefs)

That said, a lot of people in the Christian community are re-thinking their belief in NDE’s after this news……and it saddens me to see that for sure.

Check out the full article at the link following the short excerpt below.

Earlier this week, Malarkey acknowledged in an open letter that he was lying, saying that he had been seeking attention. He also regretted that “people had profited from lies.”

“I did not die. I did not go to Heaven,” he wrote. “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 Boy Who Came Back From Heaven” was first published in 2010 and told of a 2004 auto accident which left Malarkey in a coma. According to the book, co-written by Alex’s father, Kevin Malarkey, he had visions of angels and of meeting Jesus. In 2014, Tyndale reissued “The Boy,” which on the cover includes the billing “A True Story.”

The facts of “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven” have long been disputed in the Christian community, which has challenged reports of divine visions in Malarkey’s book and other best-sellers such as Todd Burpo’s “Heaven is for Real.”

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2015/01/16/boy-who-claimed-had-been-to-heaven-retracts-story-best-selling-book-is-pulled/