Ask the Atheist

Question from Kamil:
This is the story of Dr Rajiv Parti. I want to know if this story proves Christainity, as it happened to a Hindu man who was raised in India, yet saw Archangels Michael and Raphael.

Parti had prostate cancer. The operation to remove the cancerous cells left him with complications: impotence, incontinence and chronic, excruciating pain. He became addicted to painkillers, and depression soon followed. Two years passed yet the complications remained. Because he couldn’t control his bodily functions, surgeons implanted an artificial urinary sphincter.

That’s when the real trouble began.

Within 48 hours, Parti’s entire pelvic area turned red and swollen. He developed a 105-degree fever. Sepsis had set in. An ambulance rushed him from Bakersfield to UCLA Medical Center, where doctors administered antibiotics for the infection and morphine for pain.

The next morning, Christmas Day 2010, the medical staff performed emergency surgery. General anesthesia was administered. But 15 minutes later, when they inserted a catheter to drain his urinary bladder, the pain was so intense that it triggered an out-of-body experience.

Parti saw himself floating above the scene. He observed the surgeons cutting him open. The smell was awful, and to counteract it, he was aware of the nurses applying eucalyptus-scented water to their surgical masks. He heard conversations taking place, even a joke told by the anesthesiologist.

Simultaneously, Parti heard a conversation occurring between his mother and sister in India. They were discussing what to prepare for dinner that night: rice, vegetables, yogurt, legumes. He saw them sitting in front of a small electric heater, his mother in a green sari, his sister in a blue sweater and blue jeans.

“I would like to say my awareness then went to a serene, happy place,” Parti says. “But no.” Instead, his mind went to a dark place where a great wild fire was raging. Lightning flashed in black clouds, and entities with crooked teeth and horns scurried around. “I was in a hellish realm.”

There, Parti realized his sins. “I was not kind to my patients. When I met someone, I always asked myself, ‘What can I get from this person?’?” He was especially harsh toward those he perceived to be lower in social or professional status. He saw how many people he’d used, how many toes he’d stepped on to get ahead.

He remembered a former patient, a 75-year-old lady with arthritis. “She wanted to talk to me. She wanted a little touch on the shoulder, because her husband was dying of cancer.” Instead, he dashed off a prescription and walked out of the room. In the hellish realm, he felt deeply sorry. He wished he had done things differently.

Then his father showed up and shepherded him to a tunnel. Crossing the tunnel, the dark hell was replaced by “the light of a thousand suns that did not hurt the eyes.” The light, Parti understood, was pure love, and he was being given a second chance to go back and change his life completely.

Awakening in the recovery room, he wanted to get down on his knees. He verified the joke he’d heard with the anesthesiologist, who reasoned, “You must have been light on anesthesia.” He confirmed facts with his family – back in India, his mom was indeed wearing a green sari that Christmas evening, and yes, she and Parti’s sister did sit around the heater discussing dinner.

In his experience, he met with two archangels, who are Christian, and was shown hell, also very Christian. I am wondering, how does a man raised Hindu see such Christian imagery? Does this demonstrate Christianity to be true?

Answer by SmartLX:
Generally speaking, if you’re hallucinating due to pain or any other medical effect you might see anything that’s in your brain, not just that which is foremost. This was an educated man in pluralistic Indian society, where Christianity is the third largest religion behind Hinduism and Islam (and ahead of Sikhism). He was aware of many elements of Christianity which then figured into his vision. If he’d been from somewhere Christianity is not widely familiar, this would carry a bit more weight.

The evidence he presents for the veracity of his out-of-body experience is the corroboration by his anaesthesiologist and his mother and sister. We have only his word for these corroborations, but even if he did confirm it with them neither claim is unambiguously supernatural. He would know some of his family’s favourite clothes (in particular, if someone likes jeans they wear a lot of them) and typical diet (also typically Indian Hindu vegetarian diet). Hearing the anaesthesiologist’s joke might well have been a failure of the anaesthetic, or else the anaesthesiologist could have told the same joke near Parti before he went under.

It’s worth reading specifically the 3-star reviews of his book about the experience on Amazon. At this level you get comments from people who don’t necessarily reject the NDE claim out of hand, but take issue with differences between Parti’s account and Christian doctrine about what’s actually going on in Heaven and Hell. If you want to accept Parti’s claims as evidence for Christianity, you must also accept them as contradictions of or wholesale additions to certain claims in scripture, such as what becomes of people with specific occupations.