Messages from the Dead?

Do our loved ones say “good bye” on their way to the afterlife? In The Supernatural Worldview, I recounted instances in which C.S. Lewis experienced his deceased wife’s presence and then Bible scholar J.B. Phillips saw an apparition of C.S. Lewis on the day Lewis died. (see excerpt). Naturalists and some Christian apologists defer to the naturalistic explanation labeled ‘hallucinatory wishful psychosis’ by the atheist psychologist Sigmund Freud in 1917. It seems odd to me that apologists who purportedly hold a supernatural worldview default to the naturalistic explanation. Here is an excerpt from a recent article which discusses the growing body of evidence that these visitations are real events:

Quote :

 According to a study done in 2006, 84  per cent of the bereaved were in good mental health at the time. And only 5  per cent found the encounter negative or distressing; for the majority, it was profoundly comforting.

Visual perception of the presence seems to be the rarest. In another study, only about 5  per cent actually saw the dead person; about 15  per cent heard him or her; and the rest had partial impressions, such as feeling hands on their head or noticing a distinct presence in the room.

Unlike our conception of ghosts, these presences can physically react with the material world.

The writer Nancy Coggeshall, for instance, felt the presence of her partner twice while lying in bed, five months after he died in 2002. ‘I felt someone lying down beside me, and I felt the impact of [his] weight on the mattress. The second time, the pressure was so great, I rolled over and asked: “Who’s there?” ’ she told me.

Karen Simons, who works in advertising, recalled a similar experience in 1994, after her father, a farmer, died of a heart attack.

‘After Dad’s death, I began driving his big, old Ford Taurus,’ she told me. ‘It was comforting, in the way you hang on to people’s shirts. But that’s all it was. Until about six weeks after he died.

‘It was a very cold night in January. I’m driving on the highway and into the passenger seat comes Dad. I could feel him settle in. He had a very distinctive lean to the left, because of the way his back was.

‘Also, you know how you know the sound of people’s breathing? How you can tell whether it’s your son or your daughter in the room? It was Dad. He rode with me for about ten miles.

‘It was incredibly real and completely transforming. I was almost giddy. I was hoping he’d stay.’

From Messages from the Dead

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2632303/Messages-dead-The-drowned-son-returns-bedside-chats-The-astronaut-spoke-fathers-ghost-Impossible-This-spine-tingling-series-make-think-again.html

http://www.supernaturalworldview.com/2014/05/20/messages-from-the-dead/

Well, in my opinion it is not the dead departed but something wanting to make you think it is!