I don't normally put much stock in NDEs about young children. No doubt some children have NDEs. And it wouldn't surprise me if some have a heaven-and-back episode during the interval when they are clinically dead, prior to resuscitation. But for various reasons, I don't think those accounts are reliable.
However, this might be an exception. In his recent Biola presentation on NDEs, J. P. Moreland mentioned the case of a boy who died, went to heaven, met his late brother, came back, and told his shocked parents. The mother had aborted that son. Not only is that a veridical detail, but it's not the sort of detail parents would invent if they were hawking a heaven-n-back book. Moreland gives a thumbnail sketch around the 25 min mark of this presentation:
Unfortunately, he doesn't cite the source, so it's not possible to follow up on his summary, to assess the specifics for credibility.
Just recently, I talked with a 25 year old young man, who had suffered severe injuries from a car accident, and had an NDE when he was 13. “I flatlined three times”. Very realistic account ... he had no idea where I was coming from, or my reason for asking. But he told me of seeing a recently deceased uncle who told him “you have to go back, it’s not your time”. He says he can remember this incident as if it were yesterday.
ReplyDeleteI wish Moreland cited the source too. The closest I could find was about a 13 year old boy named Trenton McKinley who claimed he experienced a NDE where he walked in a field holding Jesus's hand and also held his baby brother from his mother's miscarriage, not abortion.
ReplyDeleteMcKinley's story also raises questions about whether brain death is really death. Physicians had declared him brain dead, his mother had already agreed to donate several of his organs, and doctors were about to pull the plug, but McKinley regained consciousness.