One of the wonders of the American publishing world is the persistence of Todd Burpo's "Heaven Is For Real" on best seller lists -- as of May 24 at the top of the pile for 184 weeks -- three and half years.

We will avoid more than a brief mention of a similar book a bit further down the list, which was committed by a neurosurgeon under the title "Proof of Heaven." My next book will be entitled "Proof of Lobotomies," and I shall expect it to be taken seriously by all neurosurgeons.

"Heaven Is For Real" is an as-told-to book, Burpo being the object of "told to," a young boy who told Burpo of his encounter with Jesus and the angels whilst in surgery being the subject.

The story is beyond the realm not only of credulity but of objective investigation, there being no supporting data worthy of the name to be considered -- other than the purported testimony of the youngster.

Knowing, as we do, that we live largely in a non-book reading society, and knowing, furthermore, that economic data strongly suggest that those willing to be parted from their cash for such a book must include the more affluent and more educated, we must inquire as to why so many people are buying and reading that particular book. The following story may be the beginning of an answer.

In a 1997 book, published just at the halfway mark of my tenure as pastor of a suburban Detroit parish, I wrote these words: [The idea of heaven] is a product of highly creative and imaginative wishful thinking. [The reality is that] those who die are returned in one way or another to the cosmos out of which, atom by atom, they came through the processes of evolution, conception, gestation and birth. Beyond that, anything is speculation, need-based hope or irrational and delusional propaganda.

As parishioners -- many of them well-educated -- got to reading the book, there was raised up a considerable din of umbrage, some marked by mean invective. How dare I have written such words when the creed says this or says that? How dare I contradict the teaching of the church?

One response I gave to the latter inquiry -- and that from the pulpit -- was that people wondered the same about Galileo, too, and Darwin and later about Einstein, an avowed Jew. You mean the great Aristotle was wrong about the immutability of the universe? What about Genesis? And on it went far into the last portion of my years there.

What I had done was to ignore a taboo. Actually, I had been doing that very thing in a micro kind of way from the day I first turned up for work at the parish and continued to do so until the day, 22 years later, I retired and threw myself on the mercy of the Church Pension Fund. That is, I never said in a pastoral conversation, or in offering condolences to survivors or succor to the dying, never said in a homily or lecture that -- as the lad's amanuensis, Burpo, put it -- heaven is for real.

Not often was my omission noticed, but on the occasions it was I was hard put to maintain my intellectual honesty in refusing to say things I not only didn't believe but for which there is not so much as a scintilla of support. The ideas of life after death and of heaven as however conceived were then and are now unavailable to rational, data-based discourse. To have said otherwise would have amounted to dereliction of duty insofar as I was concerned. I would not do it.

Relying on education as a tool, more than once I offered philological studies of such biblical or religious terms as "heaven" in which I explained their Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek derivations, how the concepts they referenced were clearly mythological, and how they may be found elsewhere, for example, in Homer's Iliad, in Mesopotamian riddles as well as in Jewish and Muslim folklore.

And then there is the second most moronic piece of verse in the language (the first is any line of Joyce Kilmer's "Trees"): Robert Browning's hopelessly saccharine "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

I saw then and see no reason now that the otherwise religiously observant should invest themselves in heaven-talk unless it is admitted that doing so is an exercise meant to palliate both a fear of oblivion or, more immediately, of the agency that would start one on his way toward it.

As with so very much of religious doctrine strewn here and there across the millennia of Western religious teaching, the concepts of heaven and an after-life within its precincts are as indestructible as those who believe in them wish they themselves were.

It was, I am sorry to report, attorneys, graduate engineers and physicians that were among those who sent up the fusillade of objection to the straight goods laid out in that book of mine, the sales of which are accounted all these years along in four digits, the first being a lowly 2. What few parishioners bought the book, and that out of morbid curiosity, approached it as a sheep would a wolf.

Whether or not the story told above may help explain the wildly profitable sales of the as-told-to Burpo book, I cannot tell you.