What, no harps?

As an atheist I am appalled by the kind of fairy tale crap most fundamentalists will believe without an ounce of proof. Now we have reached a new plateau of absurdity with the near-death experience of Colton Burpo, a young fraud with a story as idiotic as his name: that he died and went to heaven, had a few adventures and caught the last cloud home. It seems that with the help of his mother, Sonja, and some other ghost, he has "written" a book about his little getaway: Heaven is Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back. The news items don't seem to make it clear how old he is. From what I can gather he is now 11 and his revelations started when he was four and briefly died from a burst appendix. I guess it was then that his parents saw the light of heavenly profits and decided to create the fiction that little Burpy had been to heaven and, of course, back. He must have been there because he saw his miscarried nameless sister whom he had never been told about. Oh, and Gramps was there, too. But much younger of course. Asked what heaven was like the Burper had been provided with nothing but Sunday school cliches from his unimaginative Nebraskan parents. (Why is heaven always populated by white Midwesterners?) It seems, yes, the streets were actually paved with gold and—guess what?—there were pearly gates. (Interesting that gold and pearls also have value in heaven.) Naturally everybody flew around except Jesus, who apparently preferred to just levitate. And to top it all off everybody had halos or at least "lights above their heads." Another wonderful quote from the child charlatan was that heaven had many "shades and hues." And we all know how often children use the word "hues." Did I mention everyone wore white robes. This new book doesn't prove there's a heaven so much as it demonstrates this Colt's parents have seen Albert Brooks' movie Defending Your Life, and think only in terms of religious cliches of the Protestant variety (Colton didn't mention Mary). This best-selling paperback also proves, once again, that people of faith who continually fall for this kind of religious fakery are the most gullible group that has ever almost evolved since the Big Bang.

NOTE: Needless to say, the lazy news media, who have no scruples or integrity at all anymore, have fallen all over themselves to promote these godified grifters.