Essentially the most profound, deeply affecting questions we are facing as people is the problem of our mortality--and its connection to immortality. old animist ghost cultures, Egyptian mummification, overdue Jewish hopes of resurrection, Christian everlasting salvation, Muslim trust in hell and paradise all spring from a remarkably constant impulse to tether a overcome loss of life to our behavior in life.
In After Lives, British pupil John Casey offers a wealthy historic and philosophical exploration of the realm past, from the traditional Egyptians to St. Thomas Aquinas, from Martin Luther to fashionable Mormons. In a full of life, wide-ranging dialogue, he examines such subject matters as predestination, purgatory, Spiritualism, the Rapture, Armageddon and present Muslim apocalyptics, in addition to the impression of such affects because the New testomony, St. Augustine, Dante, and the second one Vatican Council. principles of heaven and hell, Casey argues, remove darkness from how we comprehend the last word nature of sin, justice, punishment, and our judgment of right and wrong itself. The techniques of everlasting bliss and everlasting punishment express--and test--our principles of fine and evil. for instance, the traditional Egyptians observed the afterlife as flowing from ma'at, a feeling of being in concord with lifestyles, an idea that comes with fact, order, justice, and the basic legislation of the universe. "It is an positive view of life," he writes. "It is an ethic that connects knowledge with ethical goodness." probably simply as revealing, Casey reveals, are sleek secular interpretations of heaven and hell, as he probes where of goodness, advantage, and happiness within the age of psychology and clinical investigation.
With stylish prose, a magisterial clutch of an unlimited literary and non secular heritage, and moments of humor and irony, After Lives sheds new mild at the query of lifestyles, dying, and morality in human culture.
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