http://youtu.be/N-ewaCVARtM

This film is another worthwhile film that might not be a CC Cinephile event, but is worth taking a look at, but if you don't want to pay $ at a matinee now, it will make for a good rental or streaming video experience later in the year.

"Heaven Is For Real" definitely spurs controversy and conversations on near death experiences.  Is it possible to die, take a quick look around, and come back to life to describe what you found? Seekers have asked the question for millennia, with the answers elusive and inconclusive at best.  The film need not have taken a religious bent, except for the fact that the child who experienced near death was a son of a pastor.  Lots to think about in this film, and Greg Kinnear did a great job of playing the everyday kind of Dad and pastor in a close knit community that is dealing with the harsh economy, and his son's medical experience causes him to question his beliefs and decisions.  All the actors were really good, and you will recognize most of them.  Despite all the religious hype, this movie and its characters are more down to earth than the title implies.  Certainly not a boring film.

Every day in the U.S., an average of 774 near-death experiences happen, according to the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, an organization run since 1999 by Jeffrey Long, a Houma, La.-based physician who specializes in radiation oncology and is part of a wide network of independent researchers on near-death experiences. In 1991, the last time Gallup polled Americans on near-death experiences, about 63 percent said they believed in they were plausible. A 1997 Gallup poll that asked if people had experienced a "close call" with death found that 35 percent had.

And even the term "near-death experience" is relatively new, having been coined in 1975 in psychologist Raymond Moody's book Life after Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon -- Survival of Bodily Death. Of the nearly 800 testimonies that the Durham, N.C.-based International Association for Near-Death Studies has catalogued, about a quarter happened while people were clinically dead. The rest happened during moments of near catastrophe -- like Colton Burpo's operation, during which he didn't clinically die --- or at the other end of the spectrum, moments of intense meditation or hypnosis-like therapy intended to induce an out-of-body experience.

"The stories vary, though they usually involve something like being in a place of all-knowledge or a city of light, seeing a tunnel, heaven or angels, being out of your body and watching yourself or a very fast life review before people are told or have the feeling they need to 'come back' to life," said Robert Mays, a retired software engineer and former high school chemistry teacher who is a board member of International Association for Near-Death Studies. "The theory is that consciousness can separate from the body itself."

There's no way to prove that near-death experiences are real. Some scientists have suggested that they are creations of the mind, with a lack of oxygen and an awry mix of brain chemicals being responsible for visions and the sense of being out of the body. Accounts also vary of what people see, though similarities such as intense light and feelings of peace and wonder are common.

"There's an incredible interest over the years in this idea of dying and coming back to life and having a peek into the heavenly," said Gary Smith, a history professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania who wrote the book Heaven in the American Imagination. The film, Smith says, hits "a precise point of fascination and contention among Americans. Near-death journeys, perhaps more so than many other transformative personal religious experiences, are the closest thing to proof of God's existence [for many]," said Smith, explaining why they are so compelling in film, books and religious testimonies.

He said a culture of "wanting proof" of faith and proselytizing has increased the fervor around near-death stories. The American curiosity about the afterlife, he added, stems from a natural realization of adulthood.

"We all will die someday,” Smith said, “and we want to know about what comes next.”