When an aging friend appeared to be suffering from “existential angst” as he recovered from serious health challenges, I gave him one of my books, No One Really Dies, in the hope that he might see a larger and brighter picture of what’s ahead if he didn’t survive much longer in this realm. As my friend was a borderline “militant nihilist,” I doubted that he would read the book, and so I highlighted 30 quotes in the book and asked him to simply read the highlighted quotes before any attempt to read from cover to cover. I suggested we then meet again and discuss what the various people quoted had to say. I suspected that he would have the usual debunker’s response for each one – an explanation based on fraud, religious bias, wishful thinking, wild imagination, unconscious coloring, whatever – but I figured it was worth a try. Unfortunately, my friend didn’t make it to the point we could further discuss the matter and I don’t know if he read the quotes or the book. If he had and had we met, we would have discussed the following:
Importance: “Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance…A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some image of it – even if he must confess his failure. Not to have done so is a vital loss.”
– Carl Gustav Jung, M.D., pioneer in psychology and psychiatry
Resistance: “My atheistic friends resist even the slightest whiff of an argument for an afterlife. I have not seen more closed minds. Why is this? Why would anyone resist such good news – the kind of news strongly supported by serious, in-depth research on the [near-death experience], for example? I think I know. It is not so much that my hard-bitten friends hate the thought of living beyond death: what they hate is religion. And they associate religion with the afterlife. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to convince them that the contemporary case for an afterlife is not based on sacred texts, but on empirical studies conducted by well-credentialed social scientists or doctors. It doesn’t matter. Their minds are set.”
– Stafford Betty, Ph.D., retired professor of religious studies and author of Heaven & Hell Unveiled
Humanism: “The moralist must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense; and so long as this athletic attitude is possible all goes well – morality suffices. But the athletic attitude tends ever to break down and it inevitably does break down even in the most stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or when morbid fears invade the mind.”
– William James, M.D., pioneer in psychology and psychiatry
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