Residual Christianity and a 1973 Ford Bronco

I haven't written about it much yet, but in 2017 I got divorced.

"'For I hate divorce,' says the Lord, the God of Israel" (Malachi 2:16). Yeah. Me, too. Nobody's like, "You know what's rad? Gettin' divorced."

My (ex)wife and I separated for about six months in 2015, we got back together at the end of that same year, and then we separated for keeps in late 2016. When we separated for keeps, I got to live the dream of every full grown adult by moving back in with my mom.

It only took me a day to move all my stuff over, and the last thing I brought to my mom's was my 1973 Ford Bronco. It has a fuel injected 5-liter engine from a 1987 Mustang, a five-and-a-half inch lift kit, 20 inch rims, 37 inch tires, and a fully articulated James Duff suspension. I have no clue what half of that stuff is, but what I do know is that never in my life have I felt more comfortable with the size of my penis.



It was late August. The sun had gone down. Perfect conditions for driving the Bronco with the top off. It created one of those weird times in life where you experience something very pleasant and something extremely shitty at the same time. Like having sex after eating Taco Bell.

But when I got to my mom's house, the Bronco wouldn't turn off. Not like the Bronco just kept sputtering forever after I turned the key. I turned the key and absolutely nothing happened.

And it turns out, I have no plan B for turning off a car. Well, I had a couple shitty plan Bs. For instance, I turned the key back to the on position and then to the off position again, as if the Bronco was distracted and hadn't noticed I tried to turn it off the first time. It also occurred to me that I could just let it idle until it burned through an entire tank of gas, right? Eat a dick, Al Gore.1

I knew those plans were crap, but I had my phone, and Google knows everything, so I Googled what to do when your car won't turn off. Google said I needed to disconnect the plenary cable from the alternator. So it turns out the one thing Google doesn't know is that I don't know what an alternator is. I mean, I think I could pick an alternator out of a lineup, but I for sure don't know what a plenary cable is2, and also maybe I couldn't pick an alternator out of a lineup.

So I've got my head under the hood, and I'm staring at the engine like a Mormon staring at a Keurig, when the engine starts overheating. So now I didn't just need to figure out how to turn the Bronco off, I had to do it before it burst into flames.

Luckily I have a friend, Joe, who knows everything about everything mechanical. He goes to bed early because he's a good person, and it was about 9:30 now, so I knew I was pushing the envelope for his bedtime, but it was an emergency.

I got Joe on the phone and he says, "Disconnect the center cable from the distributor cap." So it turns out the one thing Joe doesn't know about mechanical stuff is that I don't know what a distributor cap is. But he describes it, and I find it, and I start reaching for it when he says, "Wait! You'll want to put on some gloves first because you can get an electrical shock from doing that." By this time, the Bronco is massively overheating. I say something to Joe along the lines of, "Great! Thanks! I've got to run get gloves out of my mom's garage before this thing blows up. If I don't text you in a few minutes, I died."

I run to the garage. I find some too-small lady gloves. I'm pretty much OJ Simpson at this point with a Bronco and gloves that don't fit. I run back to the Bronco, and yank out the center cable from the distributor cap, I don't get electrocuted, and the Bronco turns off.

And then I sat on my mom's porch for the next 30 minutes while a plume of steam came out of the engine compartment, I was pretty sure my sweet ride was ruined, and my penis felt small.

My prized possession was destroyed the same night that I called it quits on my marriage. It created one of those very familiar times in life where you experience something extremely shitty and something else that's also extremely shitty at the exact same time. Like eating Arby's right after eating Taco Bell.

And I also experienced this weird superstitious reflex. I couldn't help feeling that the Bronco went crazy on the same day that I separated from my wife because God was displeased with me and my decisions. I didn't believe in God anymore, but that feeling just rolled in on me.

A similar thing happened to me during my first quarter of college at the University of Washington. I was a super devout evangelical Christian at the time, and there was this one night where I got super horny, like blackout horny. Despite my devotion to the Lord, I had fornicated with a woman when I was sixteen, and in my blackout horniness I decided she was the person I was going to fuck that night.

I didn't have her phone number. I didn't know her address. I didn't know if she was home. I didn't know if she would want to have sex with me. I was pretty sure I knew the apartment complex where she lived, and I was pretty sure I knew the kind of car she owned. So my airtight plan was to go to that apartment complex and drive around until I found her car, and then based on the location of her car in the parking lot, guess which apartment was hers. That's not a good plan. That’s a blackout horny plan.

And honest to God, I decided to act on that plan. So I went out to my 1979 Chevy pickup, hopped in, and turned the key to fire up my fornication wagon. But that's as far as my airtight blackout horny sex plan got because the truck wouldn't start. It was dead. Like faith without works.

I quickly discovered that I had left the lights on. That shouldn't have been a problem because my truck was a stick and I was the master of compression starts. Unfortunately a compression start wasn't going to happen either because I parked facing uphill, and someone had parked right behind me.

Immediately my blackout horniness disappeared, and I realized that I had been full-on cock blocked by my Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Through his divine foreknowledge, God knew that my plan was for sure going to work unless he did something, so he inspired me to accidentally leave my lights on, and he prompted a Ford Taurus to park behind me.

He stopped me from sinning by killing my car. Otherwise I was absolutely getting laid. Never mind he hadn't done anything to shut my shit down when I slept with her a couple years ago. The Lord cock blocks in mysterious ways.

So my personal religious experience up to that point was that God speaks most clearly through the internal combustion engine. I have no idea how he communicated to ancient Israelites or present day Amish.

Now back to my Bronco problems in 2016. Even though I no longer believed in God, I couldn't stop reflexively interpreting the coincidence of my Bronco going crazy on that particular night as some kind of message from the Lord.

But then while I watched the live action radiator shit show coming from under my hood, I realized, "Wait a second. I have a comedy gig coming up in about a week that pays really good — more than enough to fix the Bronco. Also, when I got the Bronco I kept my very reliable Honda Civic because I knew the Bronco would take a shit on me with a fair amount of regularity, so I still have a way to get around."

So while I was waiting for the Bronco to un-overheat, it dawned of me that (A) I don’t even believe in God, so this is just a coincidence and (B) even if I’m wrong and God does exist, all he did to convince me to not get divorced was he inconvenienced me for about a half hour.

And as soon as I realized that I immediately turned into Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump during the hurricane going, “Is that all you got you son of a bitch! It’s time for a showdown! You and me! I’m right here! Come and get me!” And I sacrificed a goat to Beelzebub and Googled divorce lawyers.

1I actually have a very guilty enviro-conscience for owning the Bronco, let alone if I idled it through an entire tank of gas. And I don’t want Al Gore to eat a dick because I'm pretty sure he's a vegan.
2There’s no such thing as a plenary cable.

How much bullshit do we create in order to look like we're good people?

I was pulling out of a parking lot, turning left. This guy stops his car in the street to let me out. Nice thing to do, right? He’s being helpful, right? Nope. The dude’s an asshole.

To be fair, I’ve been succumbing to road rage rather frequently recently. I almost got into a fight with a guy in a shopping mall parking lot because he was parking his pickup a little too aggressively for my liking.

So maybe take what I’m going to say with a grain of salt.

But this asshole who was “letting me in” had no one in front of him for several car lengths — way more than enough space for both of us — and there was no one coming behind him. He basically just saw me turning left out of a parking lot and stopped dead in the middle of the road to be nice.

And it seems nice, right? Wrong, because that’s not how things normally work. I thought maybe he was letting me in, but I wasn’t sure because it didn’t make any goddamn sense. In Normal Driving World, he would’ve driven past and I would have pulled out right behind him. Super easy. No problem. Instead this too-kind fucker stops cold mid-street.

So I start wondering if something else is going on. You see, not only do I succumb to road rage all the time, I’m also aware that I’m a shit driver. And since I know I’m a shit driver, I’m not just going to pull out in front of this motherfucker. Maybe there were some baby ducks crossing the street that I didn’t see, and I’ve already ran over way too many baby duckies.1

So asshole helpful guy stops. I get confused. I check for baby duckies. At this point I’m 90 percent convinced he wants me to go, so I hesitantly start to pull out in front of him, but at that exact same instant I guess he gave up on me because he starts to hesitantly pull forward, too. Like synchronized car lurching. So we both stomp on our brakes, and he starts to wave me on to go in front of him.

Nope. Fuck that. I’m done. I do not take his wave. I refuse the wave, and I very deliberately point at him and then point down the road, and I keep doing it until he pulls his head out of his butt and drives down the damn road like he was supposed to in the first place. Take your impotent, pretentious driving courtesy and shove it up your ass.

And please don’t get confused. This isn’t a story about bad driving and road rage. It’s a story about bullshit righteousness.

As humans, we have the need to continually create and maintain a positive self image. We need to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror and say, “Hey, there’s that good person.” We also desperately want others to view us as good people, too. 

So by stopping in the middle of the street to let me turn left, Helpful Asshole hamfistedly forced a story of how nice a person he is. After all, he had the right of way. He didn’t have to stop, but he did anyway because he’s such a caring, thoughtful person. And from his perspective I was too stupid and mean to accept his generous sacrifice.

But if you’re selfishly determined to be helpful when nobody wants or needs your help, you’re just getting in the way. Sometimes the most help you can give is to just simply be normal and unremarkable. My day would have been better if Helpful Asshole just drove like a normal fucking person. I wouldn’t have gotten all pissy, and we both would have gotten where we were going faster than we actually did. 

He made my life less convenient and both our lives more frustrating with his short-sighted attempt at a good deed. And I contend that his motivation was not altruism, but it was an attempt (admittedly, it was probably subconscious) to make himself look good.

But it turns out I’m full of shit.

I know I need to calm the fuck down in general, and especially when I’m driving. I could make the world a better place if I did that. And the world would be a better place if I assumed the best motives in others. Helpful Asshole didn’t start his day by diagraming out a plan to make some stranger’s exit from a parking lot awkward, frustrating and inconvenient. He just reacted to the circumstances that he found himself in. He wanted to be helpful. Sure he failed hard, but — whatever his motives — he was trying to make the world a little better. 

So what really happened? I refused an act of kindness. That makes me a dick. But just like everyone else, I need to maintain my own positive self image, so I’ve gone through all these mental gymnastics to try to show that Helpful Asshole was a hypocrite or a secret narcissist or a shortsighted dumbshit, when what I’m really trying to do is make myself feel better because I was a dick.

God’s not around. He’s not going to make everything right and just and good and fair in the long run. In theory I want to be somebody who helps make the journey at least a little bit better for my fellow meat suit earth travelers, but in reality I was a dick and spent a bunch of energy trying to demonize someone who arguably was really doing something in an effort to make my journey a little bit better. 

So in the end I’m the hypocrite and the secret narcissist. But I can still feel good about myself because I didn’t murder any baby duckies.

1I’ve never run over any baby duckies. I hit a full grown crow once. Learn how to fly away from oncoming traffic, you fucking crow. Good riddance. Right, Darwin?

Lottery Winner

The cabinets were old, but they were his. All three coats of paint were visible if you looked in the valleys and seams of the woodwork. Somewhat random, completely organic, yet somehow intentional. 

Winning the lottery changed his life, but it wasn’t the money. It was his outlook. He continued to pursue, but he stopped chasing. He had a casual intensity, an intense freedom.

The object of his pursuit was irrelevant yet he never neglected to pursue.

His life became more purposeful. Purpose in the moment. No waft of nihilism, neither was there a waft of anxiousness. At every moment his purpose was clear yet fluid. One thing always mattered. It caught his attention, captured his focus.

Every task was life. 

He continued to work. He allowed himself to become immersed in the importance of the pedestrian. A master craftsman of the cosmically unimportant which brought him joy. He had the honor of thick callouses from years of repetition, allowing him to be effortlessly excellent at the minutiae of his everyday.

At the wave of his attention, trouble took its proper place by shrinking. Not completely gone, but reduced to a toy.

His kids knew he loved them. He built that into his reality. He built that into their reality. 

Pain wasn’t crippling. Pain was part of the texture of his Joy. It was the bitterness of coffee and of Scotch.

He lived with time. He lived with spaciousness. 

All because he won the lottery. The check is laminated on his wall. The uncashed catalyst of his subtle yet undeniable greatness. 

Sausage Party, the Movie: Food Having Sex & Religious Tolerance

True confession: I dig Seth Rogan movies. And when I heard that Sausage Party ends with computer-animated food engaging in explicit sex acts, I thought, "How could this not be great?"

Turns out, the movie is pretty much entirely about religious belief versus non-religious belief. That and swearing. And computer-animated food engaging in explicit sex acts.

[Um ... spoiler alert? But if you really need a spoiler alert after reading the title and getting this far, you're pretty much a dumbass.]

Sausage Party is about food that lives in a grocery store. A system of beliefs is held (pretty much) unquestioningly by all the groceries, specifically the belief that wonderful joy and bliss await them once they are purchased and leave the store. But this commonly-held belief gets challenged when a bottle of honey mustard is purchased then returned. The mustard is pretty effed up -- has some PTSD-like problems from the horrible things he saw in the "great beyond," so much so that he commits suicide by jumping out of a shopping cart, creating a cleanup on aisle two.

Later in the movie a hotdog named Barry also returns from the great beyond, confirming all food's horrific fate and the falsehood of the store's beliefs.

The movie's main hotdog, Frank, finds a cookbook which proves to him that the humans will inevitably torture and consume any food that leaves the store. But when he confronts the rest of the groceries with this evidence, they are unable/unwilling to accept it.

Later Frank realizes that you can't just shit on other food's beliefs and expect them to listen to you. So he changes his message. "Look," he says, "I'm sorry. I wasn't respectful of your beliefs, and I acted like I had all the answers. But I don't. Nobody knows everything."

And I agree with that message. Nobody knows everything, and nobody should act like they have all the answers. Even though I'm pretty damn confident in my Agnatheism(™), I rely heavily on other people's thinking and research; I also lean heavily on some probabilistic ideas that make sense to me, but could be flawed; and the most persuasive argument that I've arrived at doesn't even refute God's existence, it just says that if God exists, he's either not good or doesn't send people to an eternity in hell.

But some of the other threads in the movie don't sit particularly well with me. For instance, we find out that the belief in a blissful great beyond was intentionally created by "the imperishables" because when the groceries believed in a twisted, gruesome future, their existence prior to being purchased sucked hard. So to establish order and generate hope, they came up with their "religion."

And I'm all for hope. I like the New Atheists, but I'm not down with their push to eliminate religious belief. I held religious beliefs for twenty years, and in a lot of ways my existence was better then (because of my hope in an afterlife) than it is now. It was unsustainable (for me) because of the intellectual difficulties inherent in religious belief, but apart from that, I recognize that my life was qualitatively better.

Where I disagree with Sausage Party is that religious belief is a lie foisted on believers by the founders and/or inner circles of religion. I believe that religion evolved organically, based heavily on our evolved instincts, the ones that still make us feel creepy at night in big, dark, empty buildings. But the idea of a group of malevolent (or benevolent) religious leaders creating and perpetrating a lie is way too conspiracy-theoryish for me.

Additionally, we don't have the luxury of anyone coming back from the dead (the "great beyond") to tell us what it's like. Well, we kinda do. We've got near-death experiences, but I've explored those in another post, and their stories don't really help.

I do, however, like the existential message in Sausage Party. We can't be certain of what happens after we die, but we can be certain that right now we exist, so we better get busy living (or get busy dying). Eventually, that becomes the consensus of the groceries: to live life fully right fucking now.

Just last night I had a friend challenge me on that. I had an opportunity -- one that will still be available in the future -- but I chose not to seize it; I postponed the experience, saying, "Now's not the right time." To which he immediately and confidently replied, "Now's always the right time."

I'm an accountant. As such, I'm not predisposed to wholeheartedly embrace things like "Now's always the right time." But I'm also a human. I have no guarantee of anything beyond my finite earth existence. So even if I can't wholeheartedly embrace "Now's always the right time," the only proper way to live is to force myself to lean that direction.

Everybody is Scared Sh*tless of Death (CPE: Continuing Personal Existentialism)

I'm reading the book Existential Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom. My marriage counselor recommended it. Sounded like a fun beach read, so I got it, and it's a little weird how much I'm digging it.

A main theme in the book is that everyone suffers from death anxiety. Extreme death anxiety. And although it's extreme for everybody, for some people it's EXTREME. Since none of us can handle the idea of our finite existence, we all develop defense mechanisms that perpetuate a state of denial.

We're all in denial of our inevitable death.

I'm a CPA. My job requires me to have professional skepticism, and since I read a lot of this book at work, I wasn't totally buying what Irvin was putting down. This happens to me a lot. I'll read a book that makes broad, general claims about the human condition, and I will (A) believe the claims are correct, but (B) believe that I'm an exception. So I was in denial about my denial.

I've never shied away from contemplating my own death, and when I do contemplate it, I usually don't feel the fear. The process of dying sounds horrible because I don't like shark bites, but the ultimate result of death is non-existence. I didn't exist before I was born, and I got through that pretty good. Matter of fact, I think I handled it like a champ.

But the more I've read the book, the more Yalom's either convinced me or brainwashed me that he's right. Even though I don't feel the fear of my own death very often, I'm now convinced that deep down I'm totally fucking terrified of it. And as I reexamine my actions and attitudes toward existence and death, I see that they belie the fact that I'm constantly shitting my existential pants.

Why? Because I know with 100 percent certainty that I'm going to die. Or as Irvin says, "Death itches all the time."

I lift weights. I've been doing it for fifteen years, five days a week. I rarely skip a workout, and when I do it bugs me big time. I've tried to figure out where my drive comes from. I'm an accountant, so I don't have any practical need for physical strength. It wasn't to impress my now-estranged wife. She always said she was good with how I looked, and I believed her. Was I trying to impress other women? If I was, it wasn't a conscious motivation. Was I trying to impress men? Maybe. Dudes comment on my physique a lot more than women do.

A couple years ago, I devoured the book The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. In it he said, "People in all cultures worry about social status (often more than they realize)," and that we all have "a thirst for social approval." So I started to think that my commitment to lifting weights came from my very human drive for social status, and I still think there's a lot to that.

But now that I've read Existential Psychotherapy, I'm totally convinced that lifting weights (and exercising in general) is part of my defense mechanism against the crushing reality of my ultimate death. As long as I'm getting stronger or at least maintaining a higher-than-average level of physical fitness, then I'm not dying. A faint and less-than-rational thread of my inner dialog is that weaker people, less fit people, are the people who die, but not me.

I don't seem able to escape this fitness delusion even though it's obviously bullshit. First off, I'm not that fit, and I eat like shit. Second, I know I'm going to die regardless of my fitness level. Also it's pretty clear that this defense mechanism won't last. Eventually I'm going to age to the point where I can't keep lifting or running or riding the exerbike or mall walking or doing whatever water aerobics does. This particular source of denial has an expiration date.

But the fitness delusion also reveals my primary defensive strategy: If I'm making progress, I'm holding death at bay; to stop growing is to start dying.

Now I understand why I've always had a high need for achievement. Every time I achieve something, I prove to myself that I'm not dying. Achievement is growth. Stagnancy is death. When I'm not pursuing a goal, I feel like a zombie, like I'm just waiting for death.

I blog to feel not dead. That's why I always want to blog more than I do. Sometimes I think I don't want to die until I've gotten all my ideas down on paper. More likely, as long as I have more ideas to get down on paper, I feel like I'm not going to die. More denial.

And now I'm  questioning how much my denial tactics have caused the failure of my marriage. Irvin Yalom says, "For some ... commitment carries with it the connotation of finality, and many individuals cannot settle into a permanent relationship because it would mean 'this is it,' no more possibilities, no more glorious dreams of continued ascendancy." To me marriage feels static, like a destination that you can't leave, like a place where growth is misaligned with consistency; therefore, it impedes my denial of death. It prevents me from scratching my death itch.

It's far too simple to think this is the only factor contributing to the breakdown of my marriage, but it's also obvious that I can't fully engage in a permanent relationship until I figure out how it can be an engine for my personal growth despite it's inherent finality.

As an Agnostic, I Really Miss Not Having a Bible

I converted to Christianity in eighth grade. In ninth grade, my youth pastor, a great guy named Len Kageler, told us we should read through the Bible, cover to cover, once a year. So I started doing that.

In the twenty years that I was a Christian I probably read the entire Bible front to back a dozen times. And that doesn't even include Bible studies or sermons or other ways I'd expose myself to the scriptures.

I wasn't supposed to have any pride, so I tried to not make a big deal about how much I read the Bible. But the space I created for myself in my various Christian circles -- my Christian identity -- my "success" as a follower of Jesus -- was based largely on my familiarity with the Bible.

And now that I'm an agnostic (a doubting atheist) I find myself missing having a Bible.

The truth of the Bible was a postulate, a given; it was axiomatic. I approached it presupposing its truth, and I spent thousands of hours of mental P90X figuring out what it meant and how to apply it to my life. My goal wasn't to figure out whether or not it was true. My goal was to figure out what God was like and what life was like and what reality was really like.

Now, as an agnostic, whenever I read philosophy or religion, it seems I'm judging its veracity and little else. Even if I've determined that a particular book is believable, it's reflexive to determine the limitations, the scope, of the ideas presented. Dawkins' book The God Delusion is great (and by the way he outs himself as an agnostic in that book), but it doesn't help me with my marriage or my job, and it definitely doesn't clarify my purpose in life.

The Bible was an all-purpose text. It was a complete manual for human life. If any aspect of existence wasn't covered explicitly, I  just had to dig deeper to find principles that shed light on the problem. The answers were in there if I sought them with enough tenacity.

It was a wellspring of wisdom and encouragement. God loved me and had a wonderful plan for my life; the Bible is where he expressed his love and revealed his plan. It was a dependable source of hope and inspiration.

As an agnostic, there's no omnipotent force that is working in the best interest of all mankind, I can't know what reality is really like, there is no ultimate hope, and there's no book that I can spend a lifetime reading and re-reading to find inspiration and new messages of love and redemption.

I'm not complaining. (I'm kind of complaining.) I'm just feeling sentimental.

If there's a book that has consistently helped you at the art of living, it'd be cool if you'd share it in the comments.

It's Agnosticism, Not Brain Surgery: Should I Believe a Neurosurgeon's Near-Death Experience?

I tend to believe people. If somebody tells me they had a near-death experience, then I believe they had a near-death experience. I don't have too much professional (or even semi-pro) skepticism when it comes to personal experiences.

But the conclusions people make based on their personal experiences, those make me skeptical like a Sports Authority employee selling a treadmill to Chris Christie. I wrote a post about how personal experiences don't bring us any closer to the truth about God and ultimate reality. Near-death experiences are no exception.

A friend encouraged me to read Dr. Eben Alexander's book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife. It's a doctor's first-hand account of his own near-death experience while he was in a coma for seven days.

After recovering and recording his experiences, he began researching near-death experiences. "Though no two NDEs [near-death experiences] are exactly alike, I discovered early on that there is a very consistent list of typical features that they contain." But the fact that no two NDEs are the same is the beginning of the disproof of his proof of heaven.

If NDEs were proof of a particular belief system, then all NDEs would have to be very similar. If after we die we all go to McDonalds, then everybody who has an NDE better see a chubby guy with a half-tucked-in shirt and a name tag that says "Manager." If even one person has an NDE in which they are offered Doritos Locos Tacos, then the inductive, experience-based proof of McDonalds-after-death is invalid.

Even if everyone who had an NDE had the exact same experience, consistency of experience among the near-dead isn't enough to prove whether or not something (like heaven or McDonalds) is real. People who take the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca report a consistent list of hallucinations. They regularly see jaguars and snakes. But no one contends that the stoner confronted with the jaguar and/or snake has encountered an actual jaguar and/or snake. What it does seem to signify is that brains in a similar states (ayahuasca trips) report similar perceptions (snakes and jaguars).

In Chapter 24, Dr. Alexander's describes what he calls his post-coma "ICU psychosis." He went nutballs immediately following his coma and near-death experience. After waking up he saw Russian and Chinese emails in the air in his hospital room. "I became obsessed with an ugly background of 'Internet messages' that would show up whenever I closed my eyes, and that sometimes appeared on the ceiling when they were open." And for a stretch of time he was convinced that his wife and his physicians were trying to kill him.*

Due to qualitative reasons, Dr. Alexander believes that his waking delirium did not reflect reality, but he holds tightly to the truth, validity, and memory of his NDE - the NDE felt realer than the ICU psychosis. Everyone agrees that he was not experiencing reality when he was seeing Chinese internet messages on the ceiling, yet many are convinced that he truly experienced heaven as he flew through the air upon vast fluttering waves of butterflies next to "a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes."

I trust that Dr. Alexander's NDE did in fact feel realer than the ICU psychosis, but feelings of realness don't substantiate the truth of subjective, personal, inner experiences.

But even if I take Dr. Alexander's word for it, and believe he really went to heaven, that doesn't do much to alter my agnosticism (my "doubting atheism").

The heaven Dr. Alexander visited was a universalist picture of the afterlife: no hell, no judgment. The message Dr. Alexander received during his NDE and summarized multiple times in his book was, "You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong." The easiest theological interpretation of this is that everybody is loved, no one has anything to fear, and no one can do anything wrong. That's universalism, and I'm okay with universalism.

Listen. If God does exist and knows everything I've ever done, thought, said, and felt, and he still loves me deeply, dearly and forever, that would be awesome. I hope that's for real. I don't believe there's enough evidence to support it, but I hope it's for real.

Another interpretation Dr. Alexander's message of love and comfort is that it was intended specifically for him and not necessarily for the rest of us. Maybe if I had a near-death experience God would tell me, "You're tolerated and mediocre. You're afraid of dogs. You can't do anything right."

But this more exclusivist interpretation this still doesn't line up with most Christian traditions. Dr. Alexander had no reason to expect favorable treatment from God. He was not a committed Christian prior to his near-death experience. He was sort of raised Christian, he was married in an Episcopal church, and he attended church only on Christmas and Easter. Regardless, as he explains in his book, he had pretty much written off the idea of God's existence.

His experience could be explained by Calvinism: despite himself, he was chosen by God, predestined unto salvation. And I'm cool with Calvinism. If God has chosen some people for glory and others for hell, there's nothing I can do about it other than hope I'm one of lucky ones. Doesn't seem fair, but God doesn't necessarily need to be fair.

Assured salvation (once saved always saved) could also explain Dr. Alexander's NDE. Many Christians believe that once a person comes to Jesus in a true act of repentance, that person is guaranteed admittance into heaven and escape from hell. Maybe Dr. Alexander repented and came to Christ as a child, and was therefore permanently put on God's good list. I'm probably covered too if this is true. I followed Christ wholeheartedly for 20 years despite persistent doubts, so I should be good. Still seems unfair to atheists who weren't lucky enough to convert for awhile.

Mormonism could also explain the NDE. Mormonism is similar to universalism in that Mormons believe that everybody is going to one of three degrees of heaven (except apostates who go to outer darkness - a Mormon version of hell). Maybe Dr. Alexander was checking out the Terrestrial or Telestial level. I'm cool with Mormonism because if it's true I get to go to a pretty sweet place. Maybe not the best place, but still pretty fucking sweet.

Dr. Alexander's proof of heaven doesn't align easily with established religious thought (for example, Jesus was nowhere in his vision of heaven). As a result, many religious people, like this guy, reject his experience as false. Interpreting Dr. Alexander's NDE isn't an atheist vs. theist issue. It's more like Dr. Alexander's experience vs. any worldview that runs contrary to Dr. Alexander's experience.

Finally, what if Dr. Alexander is just full of shit? Like I said, I tend to believe people's personal experiences, but there's a chance that the dude is just plain lying.

Check out this interesting passage from Chapter 30:

I'd always believed that when you're under the burden of a potentially fatal illness, softening the truth is fine. To prevent a terminal patient from trying to grab on to a little fantasy to help them deal with the possibility of death is like withholding painkilling medication.

Maybe he's doing the same thing here. Every human being is under the burden of certain death. Could Dr. Alexander be purposely "softening the truth" and giving us a little fantasy to hold onto?

Another NDE author, the young Alex Malarkey who co-authored the book The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, recently made an official statement saying,

I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. 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 Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible.

Alex wrote this in an open letter after his book had already sold over a million copies. He was six years old when he was hit by a car and slipped into a coma, he was nine when the book was published, and he's now a teenager, paralyzed from the neck down. And he admits that his story was a lie.**

Look at NDE stories from a fraud triangle perspective. The fraud triangle suggests that three things need to be present for a normal person to commit fraud: opportunity, incentive, and rationalization.

The opportunity to lie about an NDE exists for anyone who almost died. No one can fact-check their statements. At best people could look for inconsistencies, and inconsistencies can be explained by saying that we are limited to human language to express things that are beyond our ability to communicate.

There's incentive to lie about having an NDE. The NDE book market is hot, and your book could be made into a feature film. Fame and fortune are available to people with near-death experiences; fame and fortune came to Dr. Alexander.

Lying about NDEs can be rationalized pretty easily, too. Dr. Alexander expressed a wonderful, even charitable, rationalization above. His lie could soften the bunt-force trauma of inevitable death.

I'm not saying that Dr. Alexander's story is a fraud. But I am saying that it could be.

One last thing. Dr. Alexander explains that his experience occurred while his noecortex was shut down. This is the closest he comes to proof. His reasoning goes something like this:

1. As a neurosurgeon, I am certain that my neocortex was completely shut down.
2. If consciousness comes from the physical processes of the neocortex, it would have been impossible for me to experience consciousness while my neocortex was shut down.
3. I did experience consciousness while my neocortex was shut down.
4. Therefore, consciousness emanates from somewhere other than the physical brain.
5. Therefore, we are not merely physical creatures.

This is a non-rigorous proof of mind-body dualism. If I were to accept it as proof, it would prove the existence of a spirit or soul. It doesn't prove that his experiences were real, and it does nothing to direct me to a specific belief system regarding God or the afterlife.

NDEs are extremely interesting. However, they aren't proof of heaven. But they don't disprove heaven, either. They're just fascinating experiences. Like seeing Russian email messages on the ceiling or hallucinating about jaguars and snakes.

*Immediately before coming out of his coma, his wife and his doctor were discussing pulling the plug on him. So although they were no longer considering killing him, his paranoia may have been the best substantiated of all his strange experiences.
**Upon closer inspection, it's hard to tell from his letter whether he's saying that he lied about his experience, or if he's saying that he now rejects his NDE because it doesn't fit comfortably with his current conception of Christianity.