Stafford Betty

In this daring and unusual novel, Stafford Betty puts us not in the twentieth-century shoes of a fisherman, but in the twenty-first-century shoes of a fisherwoman named Macrina, destined to become the first female pope. He takes us on a bittersweet, breathtaking journey of self-discovery and unflinching service to the church, the world, and the One who called both into being. Along the way, Betty wrestles with more pressing and personal issues, more spiritual and secular conflicts, than would seem possible in a single book. Yet they hold together, work together, in the life of a captivating character large enough, strong enough, brave enough, to embrace them all. Here's a roller-coaster ride with ups and downs, twists and turns, that matter even more than they amuse.

You'll find here the kind of afterlife that nonreligious research turns up. Spirits living in the afterworld have been trying to get us to listen to them for the last 170 years. Researchers like me feel this is the way it really is. We cautiously take them at their word.




rns up.

What follows is a meditation on war. Specifically, what do our spirit friends in the afterworld think about the war in Ukraine? Is there a clash of wills. Though a work of fiction, it is based on my research, as found in my books The Afterlife Unveiled and Heaven and Hell Unveiled.

Following his death Aiden Lovejoy finds himself in a strange but wonderful world--a vital, busy, challenging environment with great joy beckoning. There is much work to be done, however, and the progress that the "dead" are invited to make can stretch over eons. The Afterlife Therapist breaks new ground. Fast-paced and humanly credible, It is  based on what science has to say about our conscious survival after death.

This article was written immediately following the ISIS-inspired slaughter of 250 people, mostly Catholic Christians, in Sri Lanka in April 2019. It asks what gave rise to this violence and suggests some changes that Muslims need to consider making if true Islam, the "religion of peace," is ever to rid itself of its counterfeit, the "religion of conquest."

In writing this book I wanted to combine adventure with teaching. What is it like to be a clairvoyant child who sees what the rest of us can't? They're not as unusual as you might think, but they often think they are. Sometimes they wonder what's wrong with them. So instead of sharing their gift with the world, they hide it. Ben Conover didn't, and this is the story of the price he had to pay--with his friends, his enemies, and his parents. My favorite book as a kid was Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Like that book, Ghost Boy is full of adventure, some of it paranormal, much of it just plain boyish. Ben hates bullies and has a habit of sticking up for the underdog. This gets him into plenty of trouble. So does his nature: He takes risks, and sometimes he goes too far. I almost titled the book Better Than Cool, because that's what Ben is. In the final analysis, this is a book that teaches the young reader not only about clairvoyant kids like Ben, or ghosts like his girlfriend Abby, but how to be a human being who puts doing the right thing ahead of doing the cool thing.

The "experts" with their Ph.D.s tell us that, for a variety of reasons, often having to do with loneliness, children manage to hallucinate their playmates, project them out into space, and enjoy them. But many of these children once they grow up and think back, insist that their little friends were real—the internet is full of such testimony. In this paper we'll try to decide which side is correct.

On a trip home last month to visit family, I met Brenda, aged 67, at a neighborhood gathering. The strange story she told us lit up the dinner table. I had just mentioned I wrote a middle-grade novel about a clairvoyant child, and Brenda’s husband said that Brenda, who was back in the kitchen, had three “imaginary friends” she constantly played with when she was a little girl.

I had done a lot of reading about children’s so-called imaginary friends, and I knew what the “experts” with their Ph.D.s said about them: for a variety of reasons, often having to do with loneliness, children manage to hallucinate their playmates, project them out into space, and enjoy them.

I also knew that many of these children, once they grow into adulthood, insist that their little friends were real—the internet is full of such testimony. They claim their friends were spirits, with a life of their own, not at all imagined. I decided to get at the truth about Brenda’s friends.
Two days later I interviewed her in depth.

Brenda turned out to be a past chapter president of an international woman’s organization, a past executive director of a child advocacy center, and a past executive director of a pro bono lawyer’s program. This highly intelligent and vital woman had impressive credentials. I knew she was someone I could trust, someone who wouldn’t make things up or even exaggerate. This is what she told me.

She grew up in a house with loving parents and a sister six years her senior. She had no playmates her own age and surmised that her loneliness drew her friends, three girls her own age, to her. Their names were Francie, Belikoma, and Gopi. She played with them everyday until she went to kindergarten. During the summer between kindergarten and first grade, they showed up again. They swam with her in the nearby bay. They wore their regular clothes, no bathing suits, but never seemed to get wet. One day the leader, Gopi, drowned.

I found this surprising claim intensely interesting and asked Brenda a series of questions. Did she, a child of six, witness the drowning? Was she upset, distraught? Were Francie and Belikoma distraught? What happened next? Her answer was not what you would expect. Brenda did not witness the drowning. Somehow she just knew that Gopi drowned. Brenda does not remember being distraught at all, even though she would never see any of the three again. Thinking back, she remembers feeling that her friends had become a little boring. It was as if their presence could not compete with her new school friends, and they knew it. The drowning was not literal; it was a symbol of their permanent departure.

But they played an important role for Brenda before kindergarten. They were always present, always accessible. And they constantly communicated, though not in words. Their mode of expression, as Brenda remembers it, was telepathic. Each of the playmates had a distinct personality, but Brenda doesn’t remember naming them. Their faces were mobile and fit the conversation. Brenda never doubted their love for her, and she returned their love.

How did her parents deal with the strange situation? They took her to a psychiatrist, who wisely counseled them not to worry. So they went along with their little girl’s demand that three extra chairs be set at the table. Brenda doesn’t remember their actually eating and is certain they didn’t “pass the bread.” Today she doesn’t recall a single episode of being embarrassed about her friends or disapproved of by anyone.

What does Brenda take away from her vivid early memories? Did the questions a professional like me bombarded her with loosen her belief in the reality of her friends? After all was said, might they have been imagined? “Not a chance,” she said. “I know what it means to imagine something. We all do. These were spirits with a life of their own. I believe they came to me because I was lonely, but I also believe they had something to gain by coming.”

What about all those dismissals by the professionals? Clinical psychiatrist Eileen Kennedy-Moore speaks for most of them. In Psychology Today she writes, “According to Marjorie Taylor and her colleagues at the University of Oregon, by age seven, about 37% of children take imaginative play a step farther and create an invisible friend.” She goes on to say, “On the other hand, if it’s not too much trouble, go ahead [and] play along. Set an extra place at the table for the imaginary friend, if your child asks you to do so…An imaginary friend is a unique and magical expression of your child’s imagination, so let your child be in charge of it.”

Rebecca Rosen comes to a different conclusion. In her blog she writes, “Children’s imaginary friends are often Spirits – usually guides or angels – who are making their presence known in a friendly, non-threatening way. I used to have them as a kid. My parents thought I was crazy at the time until I discovered my gift. Turns out I was talking with my spirit guides.”

Perhaps the most charming testimony for this other view comes from a girl whose mother posted her daughter’s eleven stick-figure drawings and running commentary on the net. Written in the child’s own hand, it reads, “This is Lisa. She is my friend. My mom and dad cant see her so they said she is an imaganery friend. Lisa is a nice friend.”

In my view there is a single overarching reason for the professional’s quick dismissal of Lisa’s realness: she doesn’t fit the materialist paradigm they learned in graduate school, and that paradigm says that spirits aren’t real. Brenda knows better, and she, and thousands of others like her, are, in my view, the true experts.

In this book Professor Stafford Betty pulls together the best evidences for survival of death. The very best, he maintains, come from psychical research. The near-death experience, deathbed visions, reincarnational memories of little children, communications from the so-called dead through mediums, apparitions, poltergeists, spirits that reach out to us through electronic instruments, spirits that attach themselves to our bodies, and episodes of terminal lucidity in Alzheimer's patients form the better part of the book. But philosophy has a lot to say as well. In simple terms Betty lays out the evidence against reductive materialism that claims all our experience is generated by the brain and that we perish at death. Viewing the brain as an instrument put to good use by the immaterial self is much more consistent with the evidence. Finally, he surveys the universal affirmation by the world's religions that we survive death. Betty brings together memorable examples and careful analysis of each type of evidence. Each type is imposing enough by itself, but taken together they build a case for survival of death that is insurmountable. He shows that life after death, as mysterious as it is, should no longer be regarded as a hypothesis, but, like dark matter, a fact.

One of the most revolutionary ideas ever conceived is that we are more than our bodies and that our true home lies beyond our physical planet. This idea, that we are or have souls that do not die at death, is found in all the earth's religions. Under attack since the Enlightenment, it is reemerging in our own day as a revolutionary idea for a materialist culture. But the idea has an entirely different face today. Evidence for it is not based on traditional religious teaching, but on secular research into the mysterious depths of human consciousness. Researchers as diverse as physicians studying the near-death experience and engineers setting up electronic equipment through which the deceased can communicate are the new high priests telling us about what to expect when we die. Missing, happily, are those primitive theologies of eternal damnation for some and divinely favored fates for others. What is emerging from spirit sources is not only fascinating but of potential importance for the wellbeing of our planet. Here is a brief list of the advantages we can expect if we as a global society begin to pay more attention to these sources. • Our lives would be seen as " going somewhere " or " adding up to something. " We would grow in confidence that a Source of immense proportions is at the helm of a meaningful soul-building process. • We would see that life doesn't end at death, that those cut off early in life would not be denied their share, and that ancestors and their descendants would be reunited. • We would picture the afterlife in a new way. Most religious people live with notions of a heaven that is static, even boring, with nothing more left to achieve; or vague, with nothing concrete and colorful and beautiful to recommend it. The heavens would be reconceived as a challenging, stimulating, dynamic environment. • We would be able to deal better with our grief over the death of a young child, or a son lost in combat, or a daughter lost to breast cancer, for we would know they were still very much alive and in good hands. • We would rise above the crippling melancholy that fear of personal extinction presently brings to billions of us. • We would see why it is rational to give play to the near universal instinct to pray, and through prayer help alleviate loneliness and despair in the face of personal tragedy. • We would find strong support for the conviction that good actions meet with a happy destiny and selfish or criminal actions with the opposite. This " law of karma " has through the centuries provided the glue that helps societies stay more or less law-abiding, and it is affirmed over and over by spirit sources. • The growing perception of a link between loving service to one's neighbor and a happy outcome following death would gradually change society for the better. • Young people would find incentive to get serious about their lives and give back something meaningful to the world. The law of karma would help them resist the temptation to throw their lives away in drugs and alcohol.

The Severed Breast, a novel by Stafford Betty Set in first-century India, The Severed Breast tells the story of the Apostle Thomas's epic struggle to convert India's Hindus and Buddhists to Christianity. Stafford Betty, a college professor and world religions expert, evokes unforgettably ancient South India'

This is a research-based novel set in the afterlife. It describes the world we'll be stepping into when we die. It's not the humdrum heaven of eternal peace or the horrifying hell many of us have been brought up to believe in. It's a place of intense and interesting activity where we are challenged to grow our souls on the way to still higher worlds. All in all it's an otherworldly adventure story.

This book is a comprehensive collection of the different kinds of evidence  that human beings survive death and move into an afterlife.  The evidence owes nothing to any religion or scripture, but draws from empirical data and philosophical analysis.  Dying and surviving death is a purely natural event, but with momentous implications for the way we should think about ourselves.

The paper looks at three different solutions to the problem of evil: the classic free will defense, the karmic/reincarnation defense, and a defense built around a God who can't do everything we might imagine a fully divine being can and should do.

In "Guardians of the Afterworld," author, university professor emeritus and afterlife researcher Stafford Betty offers a genre-spanning experience that condenses a generous amount of afterlife research and philosophical thought into the format of an engaging novel.
    In the story, two newly appointed guardians of the world of the dead, the world we are all headed for, engage and debate issues spanning this life and the next.
    As the appointed Guardians, alien both to our world and to each other, grow in understanding of the earth and its inhabitants, they simultaneously develop a new life of love for each other. Although this is a philosophical novel, clearly intended to engage the reader with ideas and spark debate, it is surprisingly hard to put down.
Betty's afterlife world echoes Dante's, with deepening levels of shadowlands and increasingly light-filled levels of classic heaven-worlds. It matches people's individual obsessions and fits their personal comfort level, while ever encouraging soul growth to higher and better levels.
    As the story unfolds, we get a sense of how a believable afterlife might operate, making space for people at every level of character development and personal belief system, allowing for growth and change while protecting the innocent from those who might harm them.
    Betty wants to make us think, question, stretch ourselves. He is a courageous thinker who is not afraid to consider thorny social, political, and spiritual questions. Issues as diverse as the education of orphaned children, the politics of the afterworld, trans and other gender issues as seen from the other side, depression and suicide, and even alien invasion are not off-limits.
    He wades into many potential minefields, carefully presenting multiple opinions and straddling many sides of an issue in heated debates. It is an excellent book for courageous book groups and college philosophy, religious studies, and critical thinking seminars. Sometimes I was irritated, sometimes impressed, always challenged. People on either end of every social spectrum should expect to have their viewpoints broadened as their personal buttons are pushed in the most gentle, nondogmatic way.
    In the end, Betty's beautiful afterlife world is a world that makes room for all. With its many, many layers of worlds upon worlds, it allows the afterlife to be a continuation of who and what we've been. There is endless opportunity for development or change, without the strong temptations to regress.
    Rebirth is possible as part of an infinite growth into new worlds ever approaching the source. What brings us back to earth for another try are various forms of attachment. What sets us free is forgiveness, humility and hard work.
    If you can stretch a little, and take a moment to explore the many competing opinions that Betty's afterworld inhabitants debate, you may find yourself with a freer, more spacious perspective.
    This book is less about answers than about exploring the questions. A book to widen the walls of your mind a little or a lot. It is above all a book of hope for those wanting more; for those wanting a reason to believe that life goes on.