Experiences of the wrong heaven or hell

July 22, 2012 12:11 PM

Do you know of (or have you had) a vision of heaven or hell that doesn't conform to that person's (or your) religion?

In this month's Fortean Times there is an article about people who have 'seen' the afterlife, be that heaven or hell. But all the descriptions fit what you would expect. The son of a priest sees the traditional Christian heaven and so on.

I am looking for stories of people who are say, Christian end up meeting Muhammad. Or similar.

posted by Nufkin to religion & philosophy (13 answers total)

Would Swedenborg count? His visions, as recounted in Heaven and Hell, are hardly canonically Christian representations of the hereafter, and as a practising scientist his relationship to church dogma was at issue anyway. At any rate, whatever happened to him in 1744/5 when his visions began meant that the last three decades of life spent as a visionary and mystic was sharply at odds with just about everything that had gone before.
posted by hydatius at 12:56 PM on July 22, 2012

i was reminded of this: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/304/heretics
posted by FreelanceBureaucrat at 1:30 PM on July 22, 2012

I have never really thought of it as being a representation of heaven but I distinctly remember a dream where I was in an idyllic environment and felt very happy. I guess the problem you will have with finding data points is that if someone has a dream where they were in an environment which is very pleasant but it does not fit with their cultural perceptions of how heaven is defined then we are unlikely to define it as heaven. Additionally, most Christians (or Buddhists or whatever) will have only a very limited idea of how other relgiions define their paradises or hells so the chance of getting a dream is limited and even if they had one then they might not be able to label it as such.
posted by biffa at 1:39 PM on July 22, 2012

Hmmm. I was raised in a conservative Lutheran sect, and, while swimming when I was about 14, had a "vision of hell." Rather than being all fiery lakes, and devils with pitchforks, and the like (which my sect did not particularly dwell on, but were pretty much the currency of of hell for me as a child), I experienced a moment of vast desolate emptiness devoid of any light or points of reference and full of a boundless solitary misery. It was only a split-second, but it was very unnerving. No idea where it came from at all or why my brain chose that moment to throw it up, but, now that I think of it, it was kind of like the afterlife imagined by the Mesopotamians.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:06 PM on July 22, 2012

There was a sci-fi fantasy series like this once. I forget the premise, but it more or less takes place in hell. There's a scene where someone is arguing with the devil who calls over Luther for a ruling on the argument. I'm probably conflating a couple of books.
posted by cjorgensen at 3:25 PM on July 22, 2012

My mom tells of a near-death experience which looked like a cocktail party of her deceased relatives. My daughter had a very high fever and came out of it with a vision of Woody Allen showing her around heaven. (We were raised Catholic).
posted by CathyG at 3:56 PM on July 22, 2012

This might not be what you're looking for, but in the wildly popular Heaven is for Real, although the young boy's story follows traditional ideas of his church's heaven, some of the details he includes contradict some slightly more obscure historical details.
posted by redsparkler at 4:45 PM on July 22, 2012

Keep in mind that the classic woo-woo "white light at the end of the tunnel and I saw my grandpa and St. Peter" is not actually canonical for the Christian version of the afterlife.

Catholics believe in purgatory, which I don't think is supposed to involve euphoria and a happy reunion with dead relatives.

A lot of Protestant denominations believe in the resurrection of the dead, in other words after you die it's like being asleep, and then at some unspecified future time you will be revived in order to be judged by Christ. This is where all that rapture and end times stuff comes from; not all Protestants believe in anything that ridiculous, but many believe that there will be an End Of The World, when Christ will return to judge the living and the dead. Heaven commences thereafter. Yes, even the nice polite denominations like Anglicans and Methodists believe this.

The thing is, most Christians who aren't ultra-religious don't know much about that, and don't really care. The whole "white light" thing is a cultural idea, not a religious one.

None of this, of course, is to say that therefore the woo-woo near death experience stuff is true. Just that it's interesting that it tends to jibe with a secular idea about the afterlife rather than any particular religious one.
posted by Sara C. at 4:52 PM on July 22, 2012 [1 favorite]

I was in a serious vehicle accident and I distinctly recall a tremendous expanse of space, millions of stars around me at a distance, complete quietness, and a strong feeling that although I was totally alone, I wasn't on my own.
posted by Kruger5 at 5:33 PM on July 22, 2012

Also: Edgar Caycee grew up conservative Christian and at some point began experiencing a whole lot of psychic stuff. Lots has been written about his life and experiences, which very much did not jibe with what he was taught growing up. However, that is not specifically about visions of heaven or hell.
posted by Michele in California at 6:18 PM on July 22, 2012

There was a sci-fi fantasy series like this once. I forget the premise, but it more or less takes place in hell.

Heroes in Hell?
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 7:20 AM on July 23, 2012

I have read some studies suggesting that Near Death Experiences usually fall in line with the person's cultural/religious beliefs about the afterlife. I have never heard of someone saying that their experience deviated from their beliefs, even if the experience was a negative (hellish) one. Granted, a near-death-experience is not the same as a total-death experience, and unfortunately, no one can tell us about it once they've gone there, because they don't come back...

On another part of this spectrum, my fiancee is a psychic who frequently hears from/talks to dead people, and we talk about this stuff almost every day. He tells me about his many, many experiences with the spirit world, and how he has learned about the afterlife from the many spirits who have told him about it directly.

The one thing he can't tell me about is Paradise/Heaven, etc, because once the spirit chooses to go there, they don't come back. The only spirits that interact with psychic mediums are the ones that choose to stay in-between. He also tells me that life is like a flash in a pan, and death is a concept that is likely too big for our human brains to comprehend; time and space are irrelevant to spirits on the other side.
Maybe this was kinda-sorta an answer you were looking for?
posted by erasorhed at 3:08 PM on July 23, 2012

the there's a room just like this in heavan idea is quasi-popular, but I'm not sure if the concept came from real near-death experiences or not.
posted by windykites at 7:32 PM on September 2, 2012