Heaven hell - The general conclusion from research of experiences beyond death is that experiences of heaven seem to happen equally to people of all faiths and religious affiliations, and they also happen to both atheists and even people who commit suicide.

   But what about hell then: what can we learn from the Near Death Experience? The International Association for Near Death Studies concludes that there is no evidence to suggest that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell:

Although people have sometimes wondered whether good people have pleasurable experiences and bad people have distressing ones, research has shown no such relationship between apparent life deeds and type of NDE.

   This does not mean that the concept of ‘hell’ is completely relative, as people do have unpleasant and hell-like experiences. Also just to put the record straight: this does also not mean that NDE research concludes that there are no consequences for our actions or for breaking the Golden Rule. This does, however, suggest that to try to understand the experience of hell, we will need to look deeper into the nature of the hellish NDE.

   A Gallup Poll in 1982 estimated that out of eight million NDEs in the U.S., only about 1 percent had an “unpleasant” experience. And as mentioned before, some NDE researchers have come up with the same number of about 1 percent but they have also openly admitted an emphasis on pleasant or heaven-like experiences.

   That is why the NDE researchers who have actually looked at unpleasant and hellish experiences within the NDE are the most reliable estimate we can get. As we saw in chapter two, researcher Margot Grey found a high rate of 12 percent “hellish experiences” and Peter Fenwick found that 15 percent of the people in his study had “moments of terror.”

   Here the most reliable number, according to statistical certainty, was P. M. H. Atwater’s large sample of 3,000 NDEs. She found that out of 3,000 adult NDEs 15 percent had an “unpleasant” experience whereof one third, 5 percent, had a hellish experience where they described it as “truly hellish.” She also confirmed this number from a smaller sample of 700 NDEs where is found 105 cases of unpleasant experience which again makes it 15 percent.  

   Does this mean that there proof of hell then? We could conclude that hell is real based on these statistics and the fact that people do have unpleasant “hellish experiences” in their NDE. However, in an ultimate sense the reality of hell is very complex and requires deeper investigation.

   In her article Is There a Hell, Atwater concludes the following:

Is there a hell? To one who thinks he or she has been there, the answer is yes. To a person like myself, who has studied what evidence exists and has conducted countless interviews, the answer is this: there is more to the near-death experience than anyone currently knows. The phenomenon is vast in scope, its implications more important and more dynamic than most people are willing to admit. Heaven and hell may seem more conceptual than fact, but right now they are all we have to go on as we search further afield into what the mind and its mental imagery might reveal about the source of our being.

   The fact that people do have unpleasant NDEs with hellish experiences, does count as a proof that people do have experiences of hell. However, as Atwater also tells us: hell may ultimately be more a conceptual or relative reality rather than an actual reality. 

   NDE research in general agrees with this conclusion that we cannot take these “hellish experiences” as an absolute proof of the religious interpretation of hell. One major point is that the angry judgmental God of dogmatic religion does not exist in the light of NDEs. To confirm that God is not angry in relation to hell, I also asked about the following statement in my study: “God wants to punish us in hell.” Here in total rejection 100 percent said that they disagreed with 86 percent saying that they strongly disagreed.

   Then how are we to understand unpleasant NDEs in relation to the religious understand of hell? This, as Atwater points out, takes a deeper investigation because the phenomenon of the NDE is vast in scope and has more important implications than most of us are willing to accept or able to understand.