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Bill Weise wrote a book called 23 Minutes In Hell. He claims to have passed out and spent 23 minutes in hell, then studied scripture for seven years and found over 300 scriputres that fit with (he said "verified) his experience. What do you think? Did he make it up? Did he have a dream or hallucination that fit scripture coincidentally? Was it real?

greywolf90

sounds like a dante wannabe. someone should tell him that an italian already beat him to it 700 years ago.

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"for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so."- Hamlet

Nora54

he had to have made it up. maybe the result of some crazy dream.

i heard of this book before. my roommate and i are both agnostic and this one girl (who's nice but VERY christian) got upset when we were joking when we said that hell would be a nice place to spend eternity, so she ran over to her dorm, grabbed this book, and brought it back to my dorm to show us both the horrors of hell.

i opened the book to a random page and found it to be full of incongruencies. for instance one part said that the author saw nothing but a thick black smoke obscuring his vision. in a few sentences he then went on to describe something far above his head. what happened to the smoke?

i just had to comment on this, it was such a coincidence.

marmalade

People have visionary experiences all of the time and they often are similar to previous visions. If this guy looked hard enough, he probably could have found many holy texts from other religions that would also have confirmed.

Jung explained these commonalities of experience as the result of archetypal patterns in the psyche. This doesn't discount metaphysical explanations, but they're not necessary.

tommi atkins

Hmm.
So he passed out and whilst unconcious, his dreams happened to fit what he already knew scripture taught on hell.
Then he spends seven whole years wrapping his studies round his dream.
Well OK. I might just save my money on this one.

AB517

Yeah, I saw this guy.
I do not believe him because it fits a religion exactly.
He may have been somewhere, but his brain took control.
A person that has experienced “hell” discription would be different.

For me, it is like when they speak of the bible as fact because Jesus came to them and told them so. This is the “physical brain” running the show.

Astreja

I think that he had a very intense dream, possibly with some of the features of lucid dreaming.

I'd be more inclined to believe his story if he had managed to bring back a small chunk of some element not found on Earth, or a similar physical artifact. As it is, it appears to be nothing more than imagination running wild.

Skepticologist

And I thought peyote was an indigenous Mexican phenomena. Seems it's more widespread that I imagined. Magic mushrooms as a chaser anyone?

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"I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of."

Clarence Darrow

onlooking eternal

I have heard about this book. I even saw it in Wal-Mart one time and leafed through it.

On another message forum that I go to on occasion, a young woman once posted a very long excerpt from this book in attempt to convert all the other forum members to Christianity. Nothing more than a clever scare tactic. Personally, I think that if the best argument you can come up with to convert someone to a religion, or any other position for that matter, is an elaborate horror story meant to "scare them straight," then you should probably sit back and reevaluate that religion or whatever position you are trying to promote.

Geshtinnanna

I've spent longer. Ever waited at the DMV?

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