Question from Jay:
Hello, I was wondering what you thought of Ian McCormack’s NDE testimony, this is a man who claims he was swimming in the ocean in Mauritius, was stung by a box jellyfish, died, went to hell, was then given a second chance, shown heaven, etc. He claims that he has been retelling his testimony for over 30 years hundreds of times at these religious conventions, and tons of people approach him, saying they saw hell in an NDE of their own and it is exactly the way he described it. He was also apparently an atheist when this took place. When I typed down “box jellyfish sting survival rate” into google, his testimony comes up, even though I didn’t search for NDEs. It seems he beat the odds by surviving, as the sting kills most people, and he had such a vivid testimony. Do you think even though he claims thousands of people came to him and told him they saw hell in NDEs just like he did that it doesn’t prove a hell?
Answer by SmartLX:
For reference, here’s his story in the first person.
See Wikipedia: most box jellyfish encounters aren’t too serious, so the survival rate is pretty good. There are no statistics on survival rates for a full-blown sting, only a very rough number of fatalities per year in a few regions.
Hell to McCormack was darkness, disembodiment, angry voices and a sense of unease. This is a very easy dream to have if you are under stress, so I wouldn’t be surprised if many people remember something similar as they listen to him. That said, we have only his word how many people have corroborated his story, so to speak, and even that is an estimate.
Primarily, we have absolutely no evidence for the critical facts of the story itself: the severity and location (even the occurence) of the sting, the time he went untreated and unconscious, the doctor’s reaction, how long he was in hospital, whether he was an atheist beforehand, etc. And that’s before the claims of anything supernatural. A “vivid” testimony counts for nothing; think of your favourite work of fiction and consider how vivid a narrative can be without being at all true.