I just came across the essay that begins below and relay it for a number of reasons. This blog began as an accompaniment to a walk across Massachusetts with a friend to promote awareness that the government/media narrative about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is hokum and needs to be challenged. Edward Curtin is a “9/11 truther,” and David Ray Griffin, the author of the book he’s reviewing, is perhaps the best-known of all of us. That “mainstream” media from the New York Times on down refuse to even mention Griffin just how polluted that stream is. I’m not going to read James & Whitehead on Life after Death but I’m delighted Curtin has read it for me. — MCM
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Is There Life After Death?
A review essay of James and Whitehead on Life after Death by David Ray Griffin
Life is entwined with death from the start, for death is the price we must pay for being born, even though we don’t choose it, which may be why some people who are very angry at the deal, decide to choose how and when they will die, as if they are getting revenge on someone who dealt them a rotten hand, even if they don’t believe in the someone.
The meaning of death, and whether humans do or do not survive it in some form, has always obsessed people, from the average person to the great artists and thinkers. Death is the mother of philosophy and all the arts and sciences. It is arguably also what motivates so much human behavior, from keeping busy to waging war to trying to hit a little white ball with a long stick down a lot of grass into a hole in the ground and doing it again and again.
Death is the mother of distractions.
It is also what we cannot ultimately control, although a lot of violent and crazy rich people try. The thought of it drives many people mad.
No one is immune from wondering about it. We are born dying, and from an early age we ask why. Children often explicitly ask, but as they grow older the explicit usually retreats into implicity and avoidance because of adults’ need to deny death or their lack of answers about it that make sense.
David Ray Griffin is not a child or an adult in denial. He has spent his life in an intrepid search for truth in many realms — philosophy, theology, politics, etc. He is . . . READ MORE . . .