printWith apologies in advance to all non-human primates. In the quest for the lowest common denominator, mainstream American publishers will publish the musings of a monkey, or worse: a small boy. Colton Burpo, barely out of short pants, is the “author” of a best seller, “Heaven is for Real.” ALLEGEDLY, this “four-year old son of a small town Nebraska pastor, during emergency surgery, slips from consciousness and enters heaven. He survives and begins talking about being able to look down and see the doctor operating and his dad praying in the waiting room. The family didn’t know what to believe but soon the evidence was clear.'” Yeah, I kid you not.
The only scientific variable worth noting in this equation is the fact of a father with a vested interest in the belief system. (Hypothesis: Boys whose fathers believe are more likely to develop after-life ideation than boys whose parents don’t believe. Examine whether the difference between the groups is statistically significant.)
The same awe accorded to the Nobel Savage and to the natural world is accorded in American culture to The Child, who is seen as possessing uncanny prescience; a primordial, pristine, un-spoilt wisdom.
Heaven help us! Errant adults elevate infants as philosopher kings.
I love the free market, as was said here, but faith in the free market need not require a nearly equal faith in popular culture. Why does it follow that a product produced and exchanged in the process of making a living must inspire faith? More often than not, the marketplace doesn’t adjudicate the quality of art, pop culture, or literature. The market does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences enacted by consumers.
Aguilera (Christina) sells more than Ashkenazy (Vladimir) ever did. Britney and Burpo outdo Borodin. For some, this will be faith inspiring, for others deeply distressing.
Seriously, that America’s adults are reading this tripe (and bopping in front of a TV screen using Microsoft Kinect) goes a long way to explain a hell of a lot.
UPDATED: Guys, you’re missing the point: the problem here is not the issue of faith in the afterlife; it’s the publishing of this tyke. A nation that looks to kids for spiritual, intellectual, and moral guidance is a nation without any idea of ordered liberty, which demands a certain hierarchy in terms of age, intelligence, experience, knowledge, etc. It’s something the Japanese know about. Adults should not be reading books written by kids.
Archeology magazines had difficulty selling a subscription, Biblical Archeology did very well. Stick in the Holy Land with a Bible reference and it’s deliverable. National Geographic had the rest of the world but when they wanted a bonus- Ancient travel in the land of Abraham. Christian fiction is growing where other areas are decreasing. I think modern readers are looking for something they can believe in because the rest of the world sucks. Sometimes, I don’t blame them.
I think I saw the headline of this story on CNN.com. Immediately filtered it out as a scam.
Not sure if the boy believes his tall tales or if the parents are peddling this crap and the kid is just a pawn. Either way, it’s embarrassing that something so transparent is viewed as newsworthy.
Maybe if fewer journalists were reporting on this crap, we’d have more of them questioning the illegal wars, the out-of-control spending, or the Fed’s vast criminality. I guy can dream, can’t he?
That it will not contribute to modern American culture in the dialectical sense is a given; however, there is something therapeutic about acquiring a Kinect (and for that matter, an Android-based smartphone) for the sole purpose of hacking it for use with a desktop PC.
Warranties be damned: Not all diversions need to serve a rational purpose.
I agree with you Ilana. I saw this story a couple of weeks ago and it sounded ridiculous. Face it, we live in a frivolous society that just wants to be fed and entertained. Very childish. With the PC thugs lurking around every corner, the citizenry has been conditioned to not think too critically. While our country is going into the toilet, too many people are more interested in voting in American Idol than a presidential election. I’ve heard the term “bread and circus society” used before. That is US.
It was only a matter of time before our sagacious juveniles, long a staple of movies and books, turned into juvenile kitsch. I recall losing all hope when a Library of Congress book study found ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ the second most influential book readers had ever experienced. The worst of it: a 1999 Library Journal poll chose ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ as best novel of the century.
Sorry for the misunderstanding Ilana, my comment about the four year old child was not about the afterlife. Your article only touched the edge of the problem and in my comment, I tried to point out that it went deeper. The kid’s ‘afterlife story’ like all the stories of the afterlife published before it, misses the true reason of religion anyway. Churches are loaded with stuff like this. The Bible gives these people lots of cute things to push and they take advantage of it. Isaiah has numerous references to ‘and a child shall lead them’ the lion and ‘the lamb will lie down beside each other’, child preachers were popular years ago. This kid is nothing new in Christianity. Women and feminine men have been promoting this kind of stuff in the church for years. That is only one of the reasons why men are leaving the church in droves. Christian men don’t read this stuff; but, there is a ready market on the other side of the aisle.