Can We Trust Anything Near-Death Experiencers Say?

Posted on May 17, 2026 by Lee — Leave a comment

Not long ago a reader named David submitted a Spiritual Conundrum to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life asking about near-death experiences (NDEs), why they’re so contradictory, and whether we can trust anything near-death experiencers (NDEers) say. He is also struggling with hellish NDEs. Is hell really the horrible, hopeless place described in some NDEs and in traditional Christian literature? Doesn’t this contradict how Swedenborg describes hell? David is so distressed about all the conflicting claims that he’s struggling with fear, and with his faith.

I’ll post David’s full spiritual conundrum in a moment. But here are a few basic points to get you started. I’ll cover them one by one after presenting David’s full question:

People’s experiences in their NDEs and their beliefs are two different things.
Angels use our existing beliefs to motivate us toward love and understanding.
NDEs are only a brief taste of the spiritual world, not a comprehensive tour.
NDEs take place in “the world of spirits,” not in heaven or hell.
The world of spirits is customized to our current beliefs and state of mind.
NDEs, including hellish NDEs, are more like movies than real life.
God and the angels know who will die permanently and who will return to earth.
NDEs give people the experience and message they need for their continued life on earth.

About Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) vs. NDEs, keep in mind that Swedenborg spent almost three decades regularly visiting the spiritual world and traveling throughout heaven, hell, and the world of spirits, where we first arrive after death. Unlike NDEers, who spend anywhere from a few minutes to a few days in the spiritual world, Swedenborg had ongoing experience of the spiritual world that continued for many years. Based on that extensive experience, was able to gain a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of its workings and the lay of the land.

In short, NDEs are a valuable source of varied first-hand experience about the afterlife. But if you’re looking for a solid understanding of the afterlife, Swedenborg is your guy.

For more on Swedenborg and near-death experiences, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: angels, Christian beliefs, Emanuel Swedenborg, hell, hellfire, near-death experiences, reincarnation, spiritualism, the afterlife, the spiritual world, the world of spirits
Posted in The Afterlife

The Christian Church is in its End Times. What Comes Next?

Posted on May 3, 2026 by Lee — 2 Comments

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. (Revelation 21:1–2)

Even when the Christian Church was first beginning, the Bible predicted that its end would come. People have been waiting for those end times for two thousand years now, expecting great cataclysms before the epochal Second Coming of Christ.

But according to Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), we are in those end times right now. In fact today, two or three centuries after Swedenborg said this, the New Jerusalem is already coming down out of heaven from God.

How can this be? Where are all the great wars and cataclysms that are supposed to come before the end?

These, according to Swedenborg, are not earthly, material wars and cataclysms, but spiritual ones. And they are already happening all around us as the old, traditional Christian Church dies out, and a new spiritual paradigm replaces it.

What will this “new church” look like? I’ve been scratching my head over that question for many years. And I finally have the beginnings of an answer!

For more on the end and the new beginning, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: ancient Judaism, Christianity, end times, faith, Israel, Jesus Christ, love, new Jerusalem, obedience, service, the Bible, The New Jerusalem
Posted in Science Philosophy and History

Sodom and Gomorrah

Posted on April 19, 2026 by Lee — Leave a comment

Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah, from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, including all those living in the cities, and also the vegetation in the land. (Genesis 19:24–25)

Genesis 19 is one of the most difficult stories in the Bible.

In the previous article in this series we covered a much nicer story—but it was leading up to the destruction that happens in this chapter. In the previous article, we talked about Abraham pleading for Sodom: how he went through the fifty, the forty-five, the forty, the thirty, the twenty, and the ten, pleading with God to see if there was any way the city could be saved. We talked about how this speaks of the great mercy of God: that if there is anything good and true left in us that God can reach out to, God will reach out to us, and will bring us out of the evil, meaning out of the destruction.

In this article we will look at the question: What if we completely reject goodness and truth, and choose evil instead? How does God deal with us when we entirely reject everything good? When we entirely reject God? When there is nothing good and true left in us because we refuse to let it be there, or we corrupt anything good and true in us for our own selfish purposes?

For more on Sodom and Gomorrah, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: bible, Christianity, Consider the Consequences, evil, Genesis, God, homosexuality, salvation, selfishness, sin of Sodom, Sodom, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Bible
Posted in Spiritual Growth, The Bible Re-Viewed

Why did God take 14 Billion Years to Create the Physical World?

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Lee — 6 Comments

Recently in the comments section of one of the articles here, a reader named World Questioner asked:

Why did God take 15 billion years to create the physical world? Couldn’t he have done it in just six days? What is a good reason for God to have all species descended from a common single-celled ancestor? Couldn’t he make all species distinct and create each creature to reproduce after its kind? Why did God decide humans should be descended from apes? Couldn’t the first humans have just been created separately, distinct from all animals?

You can see the comment here, and my original response here. This article is an edited and expanded version of my original reply.

Hi World Questioner,

All these questions zero in on a single aspect of how God creates things:

God creates things, not instantaneously, but by using step-by-step processes. Nothing just pops into existence. Everything develops over time.

Why?

It’s a very good question. I’m still thinking about it.

One answer is that God is working with material reality, which is pliable, but also resistant to change. Compared to divine reality, which operates outside of time altogether, and is present in all time and space simultaneously, and compared to spiritual reality, which also has no time and space as we know it, but which does have distance and nearness and a sequence of events, material reality exists within space and time. In material reality, things must unfold over spatial distances and on temporal time scales. This means that doing things instantaneously is contrary to the very nature of physical reality.

Why did God create material reality in this way?

For more on the design of the material universe, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: cosmology, Creation, evolution, God, life in the universe, material reality, process, science and religion, the universe, time, time and space
Posted in Science Philosophy and History

Is It Okay to Masturbate in a Sexless Marriage?

Posted on March 15, 2026 by Lee — 6 Comments

Recently a reader named Average Joe submitted a Spiritual Conundrum to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life. His question: Is it okay to continue to masturbate for sexual release considering that he is now married, but in the six years since the wedding there has been no sex at all? He also asked whether he is really married, since the ceremony was not done in a church, but in a courthouse officiated by a Justice of the Peace.

I’ll show his full question in a moment. First, here’s the short answer:

As covered in my earlier articles on the subject, masturbation, if practiced in moderation to release sexual tension, is not wrong or evil, but good and even healthful—though of course, nowhere near as good and healthful as sexual intercourse within a loving, faithful, monogamous marriage.

For the Bible-thumpers out there, the Bible does not say one word about masturbation. The traditional “Christian” prohibition on masturbation is completely unbiblical. See: “What does the Bible Say about Masturbation? Is Masturbation a Sin?”

Is a marriage performed by a Justice of the Peace a real marriage? You might be surprised to hear that throughout the Bible, and for the first 1,000 years of Christianity, marriage was a purely civil matter. The church wasn’t involved in it at all, except to forbid adultery. In Bible times there was not even a wedding ceremony, let alone a priest officiating at it. And in the Christian era it wasn’t until after the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century that it became mandatory for a priest or minister to officiate at weddings.

Is a marriage performed by a Justice of the Peace valid? From a biblical perspective, it’s just as valid as a marriage performed by a minister or priest. Neither one is required by the Bible.

For more on masturbation in a sexless marriage, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: divorce, marriage, masturbation, sex, sex drive, sexless marriage, sexual intercourse, spiritual marriage, the Bible
Posted in Sex Marriage Relationships

Will We Remember Loved Ones Who Go to Hell?

Posted on March 1, 2026 by Lee — 44 Comments

What if someone we love goes to hell? Will we still remember them? Won’t that kind of suck?

That is the essence of some questions that a reader named Max asked in several recent comment threads here on Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life. And though the answers aren’t what everyone wants to hear, the point of this website is not to be popular, but to give real answers to hard questions.

First, contrary to popular belief, hell is 100% voluntary. No one is forced to go there. During our lifetime on earth we choose whether we want to go to heaven or to hell by deciding what kind of person we want to be. If we decide to be a selfish and greedy S.O.B., we are choosing to go to hell. If that is our choice, in the afterlife neither God nor the Devil will send us to hell. We will go there of our own free will because that’s where we prefer to be. See: Is There Really a Hell? What is it Like?

Second, the afterlife is a continuation of this life. We are still the same person we have always been, but we are the same person we were inwardly. Any outward fakeries or masks that we have put on are stripped away. We become outwardly exactly the person we were within ourselves here on earth. See: What Happens To Us When We Die?

This means that the answers to these questions are human answers, based on who we are and how we function as human beings. And even here on earth, we drift away from, and sometimes consciously choose to cut ourselves off from, people who have taken paths that go in an opposite or very different direction than the path we have chosen. When it comes to people who have chosen hell, we do this not only because their life is incompatible with ours, but also to protect ourselves from the harm they would do to us if we let them keep their hooks in us.

It’s not that we can’t remember them. It’s that we choose to move on with our life, and leave them to their own very different chosen life. And eventually, yes, we forget that we ever knew them. Otherwise, it really would suck, both for us and for them.

For more on loved ones who choose hell, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: abusive relationships, family, friends, heaven, Heaven and Hell, hell, love, memory, the afterlife
Posted in The Afterlife

Furries and Therians and Satyrs, Oh My!

Posted on February 16, 2026 by Lee — 4 Comments

In recent weeks and months, the latest way for young people to annoy their parents has been in the news. Most of the action happens online, but there are in-person gatherings and conventions too. That’s when the older generation really gets worked up.

What terrible, awful thing are the youth doing now?

They’re dressing up as animals and calling themselves “furries“ and “therians.” Shocking!

But don’t call a therian a furry, or a furry a therian. You’ll get an earful about how they’re not at all the same! Here’s how to tell the difference:

A furry is an animal being human.
A therian is a human being an animal.

Otherkin heptagram

In fancier terms, a furry is someone who’s into anthropomorphized animals, whereas a therian is a person who identifies with, or as, a mammalian animal. Therians are part the broader phenomenon of “otherkin,” which is a blanket term for people who identify with various non-human creatures and species.

One classic expression of the “furry” idea is the 1972 novel Watership Down, by Richard Adams. The novel centers on a clan of talking rabbits that are culturally very human. Therians, on the other hand, are more akin to individuals in some indigenous cultures identifying with the spirit of a particular animal.

Though furries and therians are effective at annoying the older generation, they’re really nothing new. Even the Bible has a story about a talking donkey.

And what about those satyrs? We’ll get to that. As it turns out, there is a real connection between humans and animals, not only physically, but spiritually.

For more on furries and therians, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: animals, Emanuel Swedenborg, furries, furry, satyr, the Bible, therian, therians
Posted in Current Events, Popular Culture

Love, Mercy, and Evil

Posted on January 11, 2026 by Lee — Leave a comment

Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? (Genesis 18:23)

In the previous article in our series on the inner life of Jesus, we followed the story of Abraham having a meal with three visitors, who predicted Isaac’s birth. That was the second prediction of the birth, and it was made in person by three angels who were filled with God’s presence. That story, in the first half of Genesis 18, relates to Jesus’ deep sense of connection with the Divine within. The previous article talked about communion: about communing with God. Eating a meal with God is sharing God’s love and feeling a sense of closeness to God in our hearts.

This relates to our human feelings of closeness to God, and to a period in Jesus’ life when he was feeling close to the Divine within. “The Father” is another name for the divine nature within Jesus, or the soul of the Lord from which Jesus came. The story in the first half of Genesis 18 is about a sense of closeness to God. It speaks of our feeling that God is right there present with us, and that everything is good because of God’s presence.

As we head into the second half of Genesis 18—specifically, Genesis 18:16–33, which I invite you to read at the link—we get a rude awakening from that wonderful reverie with God. Right after the deep connection with God comes the story of Sodom, which continues through chapter 19.

For more on love, mercy, and evil, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: Abraham, bible, Christianity, compassion, God, healing, Jesus, love, mercy, perfectionism, salvation, Sodom, spirituality, the Bible
Posted in All About God, The Bible Re-Viewed

Flight of the Condor

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Lee — 4 Comments

Imagine for a moment that you suffered a catastrophic illness that has kept you hospitalized for such a long time that you forget what it feels like to be out in the world. In the early days of your illness, you were bedbound and barely conscious. A few months later you remain bedbound, but your mind is becoming alert. You see the nurses and doctors moving around you, smell the pervasive disinfectant, hear the hums and beats of medical equipment toiling to keep you alive. From your supine position you are starting to follow the daily rhythms of hospital life. This is your new normal. It is your new world. The old you and your life in the outside world fades from your mind.

And then you are moved to a rehabilitation ward where you are kept busy as you painfully relearn how to operate your body, how to move from one spot to another, how to bring food to your mouth so you can eat. The rehabilitation ward is now your new normal, and memories of your bedbound hospital experience begin to fade. You imbibe the daily rhythms of the rehabilitation ward as you work towards becoming a new you. Your life here is now your complete existence. The outside world doesn’t exist for you. In fact, you rarely dwell on the mundanities of the outside world.

As your body heals and your limbs regain strength, you are informed that it is time for you to return to the outside world. You understand the outside world intellectually, but you have lost your feel for it. Despite previously living in the outside world, you find yourself suddenly uncertain and cautious about rejoining it. You want to, but you are uncertain whether you are able to.

For more on the flight of the condor, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: andean condor, bible, condor, eagle's wings, greed, love, Martin Luther King Jr, race relations, racial politics, racism, rationality, selfishness, spirituality
Posted in Current Events

Is God Free?

Posted on September 28, 2025 by Lee — 6 Comments

In a recent comment here on Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life, a reader called sran4275 posted two videos by American intellectual Robert Lawrence Kuhn titled “Is God Totally Free?” and “How Free is God?” The videos feature interviews with various thinkers on the issue of God’s freedom. They are heady and fascinating if you’re into that sort of thing. Each video is a little over 25 minutes long. Here they are, if you would like to watch them:

Sran4275 wanted to know what I thought of the videos. You can see the original comment here, and read my original reply here. This post is an edited version of my reply.

Short version: I think the discussion of God’s freedom in the interviews is missing some key elements of God’s nature, and of the nature of freedom. If we truly consider God’s eternity, omniscience, and omnipotence, and take it seriously that God is the source of everything that exists, a different picture emerges about God’s freedom.

For more on God’s freedom, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: divine law, free will, freedom, freedom of choice, God, love, omnipotence, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, time and space
Posted in All About God

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