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AN American sceptic-turned-believer has become one of the most outspoken advocates for belief in an afterlife.
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LEE STROBEL terms near-death
experiences a “very well-
researched area.”
(Photo: Lindy Hopper Phoenix on Flickr) |
Lee Strobel, the former award-winning legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, is a New York Times best-selling author of over 40 books. They have sold eighteen million copies worldwide and been translated into 40 languages.
Recently he told CBN news platform Faithwire why he is so convinced that humans survive death.
“It started several years ago when I almost died,” said Lee. “My wife found me unconscious on the bedroom floor.
“She called an ambulance. I woke up in the emergency room. The doctor looked down at me and said, ‘You’re one step away from a coma, two steps away from dying’.”
Lee lost consciousness, lingering between life and death “until the doctors were able to save me.”
Afterwards, he became intensely interested in exploring what follows after passing on.
“I was a Christian at the time this happened,” said Lee. “I was a pastor, so I believe what the Bible teaches about the afterlife. But I’ve also got a sceptical gear.”
The journalist read and heard compelling stories from near-death experiences during which people were clinically dead, but were very aware of events taking place around them.
Lee realised that “their consciousness, their mind, their spirit and their soul continues to exist and see things and experience things that are impossible if, indeed, they weren’t having an authentic out-of-body experience.
“I was a sceptic about near-death experiences until I found out we have 900 scholarly articles that have been written and published in scientific and medical journals over the last 40 years,” describing it as a “very well-researched area.”
In his book The Case for Heaven: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for Life After Death, Lee documented many individual, deeply moving accounts of near-death experiences.
One involved a woman named Maria who was clinically dead after a heart attack, but later recalled being “conscious the whole time.”
Maria reported “My spirit separated from my body. I watched from the ceiling of the hospital the resuscitation efforts on my physical body and then my spirit floated up through the floors of the hospital and out of the building.”
When Maria was revived, she told hospital workers she had seen a man’s blue tennis shoe on the third-storey ledge of the building’s roof and described it in great detail.
Lee explained that bemused staff “went up to the roof and found it exactly as she had said.”
He was especially swayed by a study involving people who were blind from birth and went through near-death experiences.
The individuals, who had never seen more than shadows, said they were able to watch resuscitation efforts, met with “dead” loved ones and more. Returning to their physical bodies, the new gift of sight had gone.
In another book on the topic, Oxford-educated philosopher Chris Carter describes his studies into the evidence for survival.
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Blind individuals, who had never seen more than
shadows, said they were able to watch the efforts
to resuscitate them.
(Photo: NARA & DVIDS Public Domain Archive) |
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In The Case for the Afterlife, released by Llewellyn Publications in March, he draws on “science, philosophy and legal reasoning” to conclude that death marks the beginning of a journey which involves reincarnation as well as a heaven that is made up of different “planes” of existence.
His research included “compelling case studies of near-death experiences, deathbed visions, apparitions, children who remember previous lives and communications from the deceased.”
Chris examined spirit messages from poet and classicist Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research.
Two decades after his passing in 1901, Myers gave mediums detailed descriptions of his experiences on the Other Side.
He had learned of a seven-level journey the soul undergoes after death, moving from Earth to increasingly spiritual realms.
Frederic explained that after Earth, the six other planes included Hades or an intermediate state, the third plane of illusion, then Eido where beauty and colours are indescribable.
Fifth comes The Plane of Flame, where one lives a life “that seems to burn like a flame.” Next is the unifying Plane of Light and finally, when one is ready, the Out-Younder awaits.
Frederic had not reached that level, but said the soul “who enters that Seventh state passes into the Beyond and becomes one with God.
“This merging with the Idea, with the Great Source of spirit, does not imply annihilation. You still exist as an individual.
“You are as a wave in the sea; and you have at last entered into Reality and cast from you all the illusions of appearances.”
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