Angel Studios, the entertainment production company behind the hit multi-season series “The Chosen” and the surprise summer blockbuster movie “Sound of Freedom,” has announced a new faith-based film that explores the extensive evidence for life after death.
“After Death” is a gripping feature film that explores the afterlife based on real near-death experiences, conveyed by scientists, authors, and survivors, according to the movie’s website.
Jordan Harmon, the co-founder at Angel Studio, and the film’s producer Jason Pamer hosted a livestream panel discussion with a cardiologist, oncologist, and engineer whose decades of extensive research is featured in the movie.
“It’s not a hallucination, it’s reality,” Dr. Michael Sabom said of the afterlife. “It is entirely possible that the soul can leave the body prior to final physical death…I think the near-death experience is a spiritual experience in the spiritual realm of the soul separating, but not separated entirely from the body.”
While some have experienced the peaceful bliss of heaven, others whose spirits have left their bodies have experienced true darkness:
Sabom is a cardiologist who wrote Light and Death: One Doctor’s Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences in 1982 exploring the validity of near-death experiences.
During the live stream Q&A, Sabom admitted that initially, half a century ago, he considered the afterlife to be “hogwash,” but after five years of interviewing 116 patients about their near-death experiences, it began to change.
“The breaking point between hogwash and reality was the out-of-body experiences [people described]. I, as a cardiologist, felt that if these people are floating up or similarly describing floating up out of their bodies when they are unconscious and in cardiac arrest, and they are seeing that, I felt I could poke holes in that right away. And what I found out was that what they were seeing was actual reality.”
Sabom was also joined by Dr. Jeffrey Long and Pastor John Burke to explore the subject.
As CBN News reported, Long, an oncologist and the founder of the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation said his journey started decades ago when he was studying how to best treat cancer using radiation. That’s when he stumbled across an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing near-death experiences.
“It stopped me in my tracks,” he explained. “All my medical training told me you were either alive or dead. There was no in-between. But suddenly, I was reading from a cardiologist describing patients who had died and then came back to life, reporting very distinct, almost unbelievable experiences.”
Long said he began to study near-death experiences or NDEs from a scientific standpoint and realized there were a few common themes in the described experiences.
Many people told Long about a “beautiful, unearthly, appropriately called ‘heavenly’ realm that has color and music so beautiful that it has no correlation like that on earth.”
“It is so magnificent,” he added.
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Pastor, author, and engineer John Burke shared on the panel that he “stumbled” into exploring near-death experiences.
“I was a skeptic. I was an agnostic. I didn’t believe in God or that afterlife,” he said.
Burke told listeners that in 1978 his father, who was battling cancer, received Life After Life by Dr. Raymond Moody, a research book about the afterlife.
“I started thumbing through it and read it in one night,” he continued. “I said, ‘Oh my gosh, could this actually be evidence of afterlife, God, and even Jesus…maybe there is something real here.'”
He continued, “My interest has been what has God revealed in the Bible that correlates with what these people are saying. After 35 years of studying over 1,000 of them and studying the Bible intensely I wrote to show the commonalities and what the expectations are in the scripture.”
Through the course of their research, all three experts have confirmed speaking with people who have had similar experiences when it comes to the afterlife.
“In some near-death cases of people I have interviewed, Jesus has told them ‘You haven’t died yet. You have to go back.” And yet clearly, they were clinically dead. They had no brain waves. And you are talking for some of them like an hour and 45 minutes,” Burke said.
Orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Mary Neal, is featured in the film and she previously told CBN News that she was told to go back to earth because she “has more work to do” after she died and went to heaven.
“I was absolutely overwhelmed with this sensation of being home, of being where I belonged. But just as quickly, there was this sense of disappointment that descended on everyone. The spirits who had taken me there told me that it wasn’t my time and I had more work to do on earth and I had to go back to my body,” she shared.
Sabom believes that the scriptures speak directly about near-death experiences.
“Paul’s experience in Second Corinthians 12 where he said he was in the body or out of the body, (he) didn’t know, but God knows, and then he went to the third heaven and was told that what he heard or saw up there was unlawful for him to communicate. That struck me as maybe he had some type of out-of-body experience. And that is very common for people who have these (near-death) experiences, where they say,’ I don’t know what happened to me, but this is what happened.”
The researchers pointed out that Paul had been stoned to death and left for dead in one biblical account.
“If you look at a lot of the things Paul writes it’s amazing how they correlate with the commonalities of what people who have had near-death experiences say,” Burke added. “34% of people say they come to a border or a boundary in their near-death experience that they knew they could not cross and still come back to life.”
The panel also addressed skeptics who brush off near-death experiences as merely “hallucinations” or something the brain makes up.
“We’ve had people who were born totally blind that have had highly visual near-death experiences and physical brain function cannot explain that,” Long argued. “We have scores of near-death experiences with the heart-stopping, complete cardiac arrest, while they were under general anesthesia. Under general anesthesia, you can’t have a conscious experience.”
He continued, “We’ve had many, many people bring back accurate observations hundreds of yards, even over a mile away from their physical body during the near-death experience. [It was] pinpoint accurate to what they saw and heard and that is no chance due to physical brain function of any kind.”
The film “After Death” hits theaters on October 27. Click here to find tickets in your area.
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