Publisher Pulls Best-Seller About Made Up Journey to Heaven

The pious seemingly will fall for all kinds of snake oil.  A case in point?   "The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven: A Remarkable Account of Miracles, Angels, and Life Beyond This World"which was pulled by Tyndale House, a leading Christian publisher, after its subject, Alex Malarkey acknowledged in an open letter that he was lying about his supposed experience.  It turns out, the entire storyline was made up by Malarkey who "wanted attention" and seems to have been trying to please others, including Alex's father who co-authored the book.  Sadly, this is not the first book that has publicized supposed visit to Heaven and back.  The sheeple are all too willing to be fleeced it would seem.  CBS News has coverage.  Here are highlights:

A best-selling account of a 6-year-old boy's journey to heaven and back has been pulled after the boy retracted his story.

Spokesman Todd Starowitz of Tyndale House, a leading Christian publisher, confirmed Friday that Alex Malarkey's "The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven: A Remarkable Account of Miracles, Angels, and Life Beyond This World" was being withdrawn. Earlier this week, Malarkey acknowledged in an open letter that he was lying, saying that he had been seeking attention. He also regretted that "people had profited from lies."

"I did not die. I did not go to Heaven," he wrote.

"The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven" was first published in 2010 and told of a 2004 auto accident which left Malarkey in a coma. According to the book, co-written by Alex's father, Kevin Malarkey, he had visions of angels and of meeting Jesus. In 2014, Tyndale reissued "The Boy," which on the cover includes the billing "A True Story."

The facts of "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven" have long been disputed in the Christian community, which has challenged reports of divine visions in Malarkey's book and other best-sellers such as Todd Burpo's "Heaven is for Real." Last June, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution declaring "the sufficiency of biblical revelation over subjective experiential explanations to guide one's understanding of the truth about heaven and hell." One of the leading critics has been Malarkey's mother, Beth.  In April 2014, she wrote a blog posting saying that the book's success had been "both puzzling and painful to watch" and that she believed Alex had been exploited.

"I could talk about how much it has hurt my son tremendously and even make financial statements public that would prove that he has not received moneys from the book nor have a majority of his needs been funded by it," she wrote.

The same type of fairy tales unfortunately are peddled from pulpits around the world every Sunday.  Some day one can only hope that more people will wake up to the reality that religion is focused on money and controlling others.  If there is a higher being, he/she/it is not what is being marketed by those motivated by greed and a desire to exploit others.

A Long Ago Defense of Sexual Liberty

The burning of the knight of Hohenburg with his servant before the walls of Zürich, for sodomy, 1482

In addition to power and money one of the things that has always defined religion and religious leaders is a desire to control others.  And given that the majority of Christianity's history has been dominated by bitter supposedly celibate men in the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church, one of the areas of control that became an obsession was the control of other peoples' bodies and their sex lives. If the bitter old men could not openly enjoy sex, then they wanted to make sure that no one else did either. Throughout time their have been rebellious free thinkers who are not afraid to think or question the all too often oppressive status quo.  One such person was British thinker and essayist Jeremy Bentham.  Andrew Sullivan notes the publishing of previously unpublished writings of Betham which would make the bitter old queens at the Vatican and the sexually frustrated males at the Southern Baptist Convention have conniptions.  Here are excerpts:

Jeremy Bentham’s collected writings on religion and sex have recently been published for the first time. Bentham argued for a perspective on sexual morality that was, to say the least, unusual for his era:

If an activity did not cause harm, Bentham had argued as early as the 1770s and 1780s, then it should not be subject to legal punishment, and had called for the decriminalization of homosexuality. By the mid-1810s he was prepared to link the problem not only with law, but with religion. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was taken by ‘religionists’, as Bentham called religious believers, to prove that God had issued a universal condemnation of homosexuality. Bentham pointed out that what the Bible story condemned was gang rape. Paul’s injunctions against homosexuality were also taken to be authoritative by the Church. Bentham pointed out that not only did Jesus never condemn homosexuality, but that the Gospels presented evidence that Jesus engaged in sexual activity, and that he had his male lovers — the disciple whom he loved, traditionally said to be John, and the boy, probably a male prostitute, who remained with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane after all the disciples had fled (for a more detailed account see ‘Not Paul, but Jesus’). …

Bentham looked to ancient Greece and Rome, where certain forms of homosexual activity were not only permitted but regarded as normal, as more appropriate models for sexual morality than that which existed in modern Christian Europe.

 Bentham attacked the notion, still propagated by religious apologists, that homosexuality was ‘unnatural’. All that ‘unnatural’ meant, argued Bentham, was ‘not common’. The fact that something was not common was not a ground for condemning it. Neither was the fact that something was not to your taste. It was a form of tyranny to say that, because you did not like to do a particular thing, you were going to punish another person for doing it. Because you thought something was ‘disgusting’ did not mean that everyone else thought it was disgusting. You might not want to have sex with a sow, but the father of her piglets thought differently.

These writings were, for Bentham, a critical part of a much broader attack on religion and the ‘gloomy terrors’ inspired by the religious mentality. By putting forward the case for sexual liberty, he was undermining religion in one of the areas where, in his view, it was most pernicious.

Conservative fundamentalist religion is a pernicious evil whether it be Christian or Muslim in its dogma.  The main goal is to degridate individuals and give power to the clerics who are ultimately only concerned about their own power, ability to control others and wealth.

Australian Expert: End Celibacy to Reduce Sex Abuse by Priests

While the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy continues to claim that the requirement of of celibacy for priests has played no role in the Church's worldwide sex abuse problem, an Australian experts says otherwise.  Moreover, he gets directly to why celibacy has been a requirement: money,  The Church doesn't want to have to support the wives and families of priests.  It is the bottom line reason why celibacy first came into vogue in the 12th century.  Money, the Vatican's one true god.  He also notes that the caliber of men becoming priests continues to drop as fewer normal men are willing to accept the celibacy requirement.  The Herald Sun looks at this expert's testimony.  Here are excerpts:

Former clinical director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Health, Professor Paul Mullen, says celibacy has no basis in theology and is just a form of discipline in the priesthood.

Prof Mullen added the issue is a financial one for the church.  "I've have heard a Catholic bishop say that the reason celibacy is maintained is that they could not afford to pay priests, they couldn't afford to pay them pensions, they couldn't afford to pay them enough if they had a wife and children," he told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry today.

"This is entirely discipline and its main motivation is money."  Prof Mullen said he was not sure what would spark the church to change.

But he said the problem of clergy preying on children would remain for as long as they are required to remain celibate. He said for this reason, fewer people were joining the priesthood, leading some to be selected who were not cut out for it.

"As long as there are increasing numbers of priests who are not intellectually, culturally, socially of the highest calibre, let alone spiritually, you've just got to prevent them any access to children. Simple as that," he said.

"There will come a point where financially, it is cheaper to have married priests than to keep on being sued."  Prof Mullen called for a public education campaign on child sex abuse, just like there was for bullying and smoking.  Sex education should also include sexual abuse of children, he told the inquiry, which is looking into how religious and other organisations handle child sex abuse allegations.

From my experience before leaving Catholicism, I have to agree with Mullen.  In addition, I have always maintained that had priests and bishops and cardinals had children of their own, we would never have seen this callous - and criminal - effort to merely seep sexual abuse of children under the rug.  No one with children of their own could have countenanced the crimes that were done and have protected the predators.