This one isn't new but I just happened to find it promoted by a Christian at another blog.
Atheist professor’s near-death experience in hell left him changed{Does he know they are demons?]
By Mark Ellis
In some near-death experiences, people report they were drawn toward “the light.” But in this horrifying near-death experience for an atheist art professor, he was drawn into the darkness of hell, which dramatically altered the course of his life.
...On the last day of a three-week European art tour he led, his group had returned to their hotel in Paris after a visit to the artist Delacroix’s home and studio. As Howard stood in his room with his wife and another student, suddenly he screamed and dropped to the floor in agony.
[Later in the hospital] ...he had a very unusual out-of-body experience, and found himself standing next to his bed, looking at himself lying there. As he stood there, he noticed he didn’t feel the pain in his stomach. He felt more alive than ever, and his senses seemed more heightened than usual.
...“I saw my body lying on the bed, but I refused to believe it was me. How could that be me if I was standing there,” he wondered.
Suddenly he heard people outside the room calling for him by name. ..“Come with us,” they said. “Hurry up, let’s go.”
Howard left the room and started to walk with them down a long hallway, which was very dimly lit – almost dingy. “They took me on a very long journey through a grey space that got increasingly darker and darker,” he recalls.
They walked a long time, and Howard wondered why he was not tired when he had just suffered the worst day of his life.
...Howard’s fear and apprehension grew at the same time he lost trust in his guides. “Finally it was so dark I was terrified and I said, ‘I’m not going any farther. I want to go back.”
“You’re almost there,” one replied.
Howard dug in his heels. “I’m not going any farther,” he said firmly.
...His guides began to push and pull at him. Howard fought back, but he was horribly outnumbered.
“We had a big fight and the fight turned into them annihilating me, which they did slowly and with much relish,” he says. “Mostly they were biting and tearing at me. This went on for a long time. ...
He lay there motionless for a few moments, completely spent. Then he was surprised by a small voice inside his head that said, ‘Pray to God.’
He thought, ‘I don’t pray. I don’t even believe in God.’
Then he heard the voice a second time, ‘Pray to God.’
‘But I wouldn’t know how to pray even if I wanted to pray,’ he thought. Whose voice was this, he wondered? It sounded like his voice, but the words were completely foreign to his own thinking. Then he heard the voice a third time repeat the same message. His mind drifted back to his days in Sunday school as a child. “I tried to remember things I memorized when I was very young,” he says. He struggled to think of something he could pray.
Then he managed to blurt out, “The Lord is my shepherd and I shall not want…”
When the people around him heard his attempt to pray, they became enraged. “There is no God and nobody can hear you,” they cried, along with other obscenities. “If you keep praying we will really hurt you.”
But Howard noticed something curious. The more he prayed and began to mention God, the more they backed away from him.
Emboldened, he began to shout out bits and pieces of the Lord’s Prayer, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “God Bless America.” Finally, he was screaming any fragments of God’s truth he could muster from the moldy recesses of his memory bank.
It seemed to work! Even in the darkness, he could tell they had fled, but not too far away.
As he lay there, Howard began to review his life. “I came to the conclusion I led a crummy life and I had gone down the sewer pipe of the universe. I had gone into the septic tank with other human garbage. I was being processed by the garbage people into garbage like them.”
“Whatever life was supposed to be about, I missed it,” he thought. “What I received was what I deserved and the people who attacked me were people like me. They were my kindred spirits. Now I will be stuck with them forever.” Feelings of self-loathing and hopelessness filled his mind. His thoughts floated back again to himself as a nine-year-old in Sunday School, “I remembered myself singing “Jesus Loves Me,” and I could feel it inside me. As a child, I thought Jesus was really cool and he was my buddy and he would take care of me.”[Savior? Cross? Atonement? Forgiven sin?]
...“I’ve got nothing else to lose. I’ll give Jesus a try.”
Then he yelled into the darkness, “Jesus, please save me!”
...Within an instant, a brilliant light appeared that came closer and closer. He found himself bathed in a beautiful light, and for the first time he could clearly see his own body’s miserable condition, ghastly for his own eyes to behold. “I was almost all gore.”
Immediately he recognized Jesus, the King of Kings, the Rescuer, the Deliverer.
“His arms reached down and touched me and everything healed up and came back together,” he recalls. “He filled me with a love I never knew existed.”[Cross? Atonement? Repentance?]
Then he picked up Howard, like one football player picking up a fallen teammate on the field, put his arms around him, and Howard cried like a baby in His arms. “He carried me out of there and we headed to where God lives.”[Is God somebody different from Jesus?]In his mind, Howard began to think that Jesus made a terrible mistake. “I’m garbage and I don’t belong in heaven,” he thought.
They stopped moving, and both Howard and Jesus were hanging in space, somewhere between heaven and hell. “We don’t make mistakes,” Jesus said tenderly.
“He could read everything in my mind and put His voice into my head,” Howard recalls. “We had very rapid, instantaneous conversations.”[Forgiven? Under the blood? Through the cross? Or just through his own will?]
Then Jesus told Howard He had angels who would show him his life. “It was a terrible experience because my life deteriorated after adolescence. I saw I became a selfish, unloving person. I was successful, a full tenured art professor at 27, the department head, but I was a jerk.”
In this replay, he saw his heavy drinking and adultery. “I cheated on my wife proudly. It was horrible.”
...For the first time he realized the way he lived his life hurt Jesus. “I was in the arms of the most wonderful, holy, loving, kind person and we’re looking at this stuff. Embarrassing doesn’t even begin to describe it.”
As they watched together, Howard could see the pain and disappointment on the face of Jesus. “When I did these things it was like sticking a knife into his heart.”
“Do you have any questions?” Jesus asked.
“I have a million questions,” Howard replied, and proceeded to unburden himself of anything and everything he could imagine asking an omniscient being. Jesus answered Howard’s questions kindly and patiently.
When Howard couldn’t think of anything else to ask, he said, “I’m ready to go to heaven now.”
“You’re not going to heaven. You’re going back to the world,” Jesus replied.
Howard began to argue, but it was to no avail. Jesus told him to go back and live his life differently.
...At 9:00 p.m., Howard was back in his hospital room...Less than 30 minutes had elapsed since he lost consciousness.[Why couldn't Jesus help him strengthen his first marriage, why didn't He convert his wife? Jesus said God hates divorce.]
...When his strength returned, Howard began to devour the Bible. “Since none of my atheist friends believed me, I started memorizing verses and I would give them Bible lectures, but that didn’t go over very well,” he recalls.
He grew “desperate” for fellowship in a church, and began to attend Christ Church in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, part of United Church of Christ.
...He also wrote a book about his experience, “My Descent Into Death,” which he says was written primarily to non-believers.
Howard and his second wife, Marcia, a strong Christian, are both involved in missionary work in Belize. He maintains a passion for painting, with much of his art devoted to spiritual themes.
I just encountered this story on another blog and realized I had to write about it although I don't yet know enough about it to say more than ask the questions I've raised in the brackets. I think that's enough to show that it's just another bogus demon-inspired deception of course, but it always helps to get more evidence.
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