I like tea

“Do you ever think about the afterlife or do you just live for the here and now? After you die, are you hoping you’ll go to heaven, or are you afraid you may go to hell?”

This is Fox’s pathetic excuse for journalism? False dichotomies? I’d have been surprised that a news network was wasting its time on this BS if it were any other network.
Nadine

Umm…wow…I have three letters to describe my reaction to this:
wtf.
Alex

LOL, I love the end when he says “Does [hell] really exist? Next up we’ll be joined by a priest…” Hmm… I wonder what he thinks? I’m going to have to stick through the commercial break!
THz

“Up next we’ll be joined by a priest and he’ll give us those answers…”
Oh I can see where that’s going.

That whole thing was appropriately titled “beyond belief.”

How did he know he spent exactly 23 minutes there, did he have a stopwatch? And if was so horrendously painful, how was he able to give such a description, wouldn’t he have been in too much pain to think clearly? It sounds more like a nightmare that was fed by childhood tales told by twisted priests about a place he musn’t go.
Kyle

I have to say: Seriously?
mike

A terrifying experience, including feeling like you can’t move, after falling asleep? After 10 years of telling this ridiculous story, has no one suggested sleep paralysis to this poor guy?

BTW, I like how it’s always “what if those atheists and agnostics are wrong?”, as they say in the intro, never “what if those Christians are wrong?”
Deena

“…he says that on November 23 1998 he fell asleep and had a terrifying vision…”

He experienced:
– sensations of falling
– unbearable heat
– sulfurous odors
– difficulty breathing

Oh, I can totally empathise….I had to go through this nearly every night until my hubby stopped eating cheese. Maybe I should write a book too?
Darwin’s Dagger

Any 23 minutes I spend watching Sean Hannity is 23 minutes I spend in hell.
James

There’s no calvary coming to rescue you in Hell? So why are you back?
Brian

Sleep paralysis, definitely – it’s a textbook case.

I love how he says, “you wouldn’t want your worst enemy to go there”… but apparently a loving god doesn’t mind sending you to such a place at all. Even a whacked-out fundamentalist has more compassion than god.
Kevin Morgan

Faux news, only the best in infotainment!
Perchance to Dream

I agree with you guys, it fits the elements of a sleep paralysis episode, mixed with a high degree of lucidity. I used to have SP happen a lot when I was lucid dreaming. I’d usually wake up in bed unable to move, my body vibrating, sometimes with auditory hallucinations. It was usually just a dream copy of my room and I could eventually get out of bed and explore my dream world. Sometimes I’d become aware in the middle of a dream and feel so weak and hardly be able to move – I knew instantly that I was just experiencing the sensations of sleep paralysis. Lots of floating and flying too, which is exhilarating. The experiences can be very vivid. But most importantly, I knew that everything wasn’t real.

Now I don’t know if he’s lying or not, but if you’re unaware of these unusual states of consciousness and you have a bad episode, I have no doubt it’d scare the crap out of you. Look up the “old hag” syndrome for example.

Too bad for him. He was deceived by his own mind! And I feel sorry for children who have to listen to stories like that. Stories like that being told at church did a lot of psychological damage to me as a kid.
Karen

Did you know: Hell has fire. And there are deformed, twisted creatures there.

No way he could have made that up.

Yeah, interesting that hell turns out to be just like the most lurid depictions of it over the centuries, huh?

Kind of like how people who have encounters with aliens always describe them as looking just like the 1950s comic-book versions.
Doris Tracey

Padre’ Pio was giving confession in the Catholic church in Italy and a man said to Padre’ Pio, I do not believe in Hell and Padre’ Pio said, “You will when you get there.”
Jeff

Too bad he didn’t have a video camera (or any kind of camera) with him…

Too bad he didn’t bring back a souvenir.

I bet you a little piece of Hell would fetch a pretty penny on eBay. that along with a little piece of Heaven 😉
Richard Wade

Clever marketing decision. Who would pay $12.99 for a book called “23 Minutes On My Sofa” about sleep paralysis?
Kathryn

What frightens me is that the book is given 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon, with about 165 reviews (no small number).
Alex

I once had a dream in which I won a lottery. Guess what? When I woke up, no lottery!

We definitely need some bleach in the gene pool, because this is the most ludicrous piece of journalism/news/whatever-the-fuck-you-call-it that I’ve ever seen. More and more it seems that Americans have more in common with Muslim fundamentalists (I dreamt of paradise, therefore paradise is real) than with anyone who can even plausibly pretend to be rational.

Sheesh!
Lysander

A man supposedly spent 23 minutes in hell. He lived to tell about it.

We all have horror stories about trips to the DMV… He’s damn lucky if he was in and out in 23 minutes.
Ordinary Girl

Breaking bones? You have to be kidding me. Isn’t the soul supposed to be supernatural, not natural?
Justanotheratheist

When I was younger, I thought I was being abducted by aliens. No joke. I would wake up frozen, unable to move or breathe, and seeing aliens walking around my bedroom. Parts of what I was dreaming would be visible when I woke up. As a kid, this terrified me. Especially that sensation of being unable to move or breathe.

Now, not knowing about SP as a kid, I can totally see how that would scare the shit out of someone. I still have SP and night terrors on occassion, and even as a rational adult, they still scare me. I’m also an insomniac, but I digress. This guy doesn’t need a priest, he needs a shrink and some Ambien.
Jen

Did you know: Hell has fire. And there are deformed, twisted creatures there.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons it sucks to be disabled or ugly: here we are, in the twenty-first century, still assigning these charactistics as signs of moral failure rather than genes and/or accidents.

And of course this guy is going to sell books. He may outsell The Secret.
malcolm

I’m puzzled. Are you not supposed to be dead in hell? I mean, not breathing and everything…

Pardon my ignorance, but isn’t his description a bit inconsistent with the ‘die and go to hell’- theory when he says:
‘It was so unbearably hot, far beyond the ability to sustain life. I wonder how [one] can be alive in this heat. […] and this is how you breathe in hell…’

Perhaps he just fell asleep in sauna?

Anyway, what really makes me worry is that a grown man is allowed to tell stories like this on a major TV channel in year 2008. And not ridiculed afterwards. That’s depressing.
Jeff

malcolm said,
Anyway, what really makes me worry is that a grown man is allowed to tell stories like this on a major TV channel in year 2008. And not ridiculed afterwards. That’s depressing.

Agreed. Its our responsibility to ridicule this when others won’t.
Undecided

In a post above, someone made a reference to : “What if the agnostics/atheists are wrong? No one ever says what if the Christians are wrong.”

I think the point really is that non-believers are the ones with something to lose. If a Christian man is wrong, well then he will suffer no different a fate than that of a non-believer. But if the Christian man is right, it is the Atheists who are in trouble.

Just something to keep in mind…

The reason why no one asks, “What if the Christians are wrong,” is because it is only the Atheists who are betting their lives, souls, eternal existence, or whatever you would like to call it.

Just thought I would play devil’s advocate for a minute.
CS

Agreed. Its our responsibility to ridicule this when others won’t.

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

– C.S. Lewis.
Ordinary Girl

The reason why no one asks, “What if the Christians are wrong,” is because it is only the Atheists who are betting their lives, souls, eternal existence, or whatever you would like to call it.

Undecided, that is simply Pascal’s wager. What you forget to ask is what if Christians are wrong and Muslims are right. Aren’t Christians then betting their “soul” too?

It’s not possible to follow all religions simultaneously. Every human plots his own course into the unknown whether Christian, Atheist, Muslim, Hindu, or any other religion or creed.

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