"To Heaven and Back" is Hogwash

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I'm not one to pooh-pooh the religious beliefs of others.  But Dr. Eben Alexander, author of  Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife is a medical researcher, not a theologian.  And he wants to be taken seriously outside religious circles.  But does he also want to be taken seriously among the world's four billion people who are neither Christian nor Jewish? Do Hindus and Buddhists also experience the heaven of "puffy pink-white clouds" in addition to the companionship of an attractive female when they die, even though they believe in reincarnation or rebirth rather than the Abrahamic concept of heaven and hell?

 Dr. Alexander tells in his book of having slipped into a coma from meningitis.  Attending physicians believed that he was near death, with critical brain functions appearing to have shut down.  However the Harvard-trained neurosurgeon woke up, with an extraordinary story of having gone to heaven and returned to earth. He wrote:

 Toward the beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky.
Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamer-like lines behind them.

 His experience seemed to validate the narratives collected from thousands of Americans and Europeans,  who  have had near-death experiences.  The scientific world, on the other hand, remains skeptical of the author's claims, arguing that the minds of seriously ill people may produce such fantasies under extreme stress.     A less charitable review of the book in Gawker  suggests that the author may have cribbed some of his experiences from narratives of people who have taken hallucinogenic drugs. 

Being human, of course I'm sympathetic to the core problem Dr. Alexander's book attempts to  address. Somewhere around the age of five or six if not sooner, all humans lose their spiritual innocence.  The uncontained happiness of a four year old is not seen on the faces of those who've turned eight, because the latter understand without the details having to be spelled out why they must look both ways before they cross the street, and never take candy from strangers.  Life represents the creative ways we find to feed and entertain ourselves while we wait for our number to be called.   No one other than  suicide victims want to die.    But that's no excuse for a trained medical researcher, whose life up to this point has been steeped in the universal applicability of science, to insist that the Christian version of heaven is where everybody goes after death.