Death is Not the End: Understanding the Transition between Lives

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Death is Not the End: Understanding the Transition between Lives

Death is Not the End: Understanding the Transition between Lives

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Death doesn't exist in a timeless, spaceless world. Immortality doesn't mean a perpetual existence in time, but resides outside of time altogether. Protestantism isn’t without a visual culture around death, or a ritual culture for that matter (which is also a theme in this exhibition), but Catholicism is the more abundant place to look for them. The visitor may, therefore, again take away from the exhibition something important from what is not depicted, or at least from what is at least under-represented, namely that Christianity is a bustlingly diverse range of traditions, going beyond the largely Catholic centre of gravity on display here, not only in the direction of Protestantism, but also with Orthodoxy in its various forms.

Maybe that's just because, eight books in, I'm used to a certain rhythm to a Rebus story, one which can't really be achieved with this word count. A Rebus book is always playful with how it tells the story - there's always a number of different plot lines - often conflicting, calling out for our protagonist's attention and pushing him into impossible corners. And Rankin teases out these plot lines giving you a little at a time, never giving you the full picture until he has to. These sub plots work in solidarity to enhance the overall story, and their absence was the most striking thing to me about 'Death is Not the End' - leaving it feeling a little simplistic and ultimately unfulfilling. I can see where the parallel came from, but it works less than half well. Purgatory, we are told, is an “interim state . . . where the soul abides after physical death of the body to await the Last Judgement, whether it be saved or damned”. There's no agreed evidence that life does continue after death. But for religious people, it's a comfort to believe that this isn't all there is, that there is an afterlife to look forward to, and that we'll see friends and family again.

WATCH: 10 Sins Christians Downplay (and Why They're So Destructive)

Many Hindus believe that after death, a person's soul or atman is reborn in a new body to live another life as a different person or as an animal. Most Sikhs and Buddhists also believe in this cycle of birth, death and rebirth, which is called samsara. Hindus and Sikhs would say that the atman might eventually be released from the cycle of life on Earth to be reunited with God. It's an entertaining enough little story - we get a few glimpses into Rebus' childhood, meet some people from his past, get the eureka moment as he (alongside Farmer Jim) solve the crime. It's just that there wasn't a huge amount of mystery or high stakes surrounding the crime in the first place, I doubt we'll see the people from his past again, and his childhood story doesn't really change anything. In support of the idea that culture influences our natural tendency to deny the death of the mind, Harvard University psychologist Paul Harris and researcher Marta Giménez of the National University of Distance Education in Spain showed that when the wording in interviews is tweaked to include medical or scientific terms, psychological-continuity reasoning decreases. In this 2005 study published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture, seven- to 11-year-old children in Madrid who heard a story about a priest telling a child that his grandmother “is with God” were more likely to attribute ongoing mental states to the decedent than were those who heard the identical story but instead about a doctor saying a grandfather was “dead and buried.” Muslims call the place of reward in the afterlife Janna . Jahannam is the word they give to the place of punishment. Janna is described as a paradise full of joy and pleasure in the Qur’an, whereas Jahannam is written about as a place of unending punishment.

Great Australian Albums series 2 (2008) – The Screen Guide". Screen Australia . Retrieved 11 November 2022. As Jason Goldman writes for BBC, “[F]or every facet of life that is unique to our species, there are hundreds that are shared with other animals. As important as it is to avoid projecting our own feelings onto animals, we also need to remember that we are, in an inescapable way, animals ourselves.” 7) Who first buried the dead? The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for the Humanist (emphases mine):

7) Who first buried the dead?

Rolling Stone 14 July 1988". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on 18 June 2018 . Retrieved 26 August 2017. Even when we want to believe that our minds end at death, it is a real struggle to think in this way. A study I published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture in 2002 reveals the illusion of immortality operating in full swing in the minds of undergraduate students who were asked a series of questions about the psychological faculties of a dead man. A series of display boards and artefacts helps us to understand figures, both human and divine, not least in terms of postures and gestures. Also in view are implements and objects for ritual use, and some central theological concepts. Buddhism dominates here, although Hinduism and some more localised forms of indigenous religion are also in evidence. In a 2005 study published in the journal Cognition, Barrett and psychologist Tanya Behne of the University of Manchester in England reported that city-dwelling four-year-olds from Berlin were just as good at distinguishing sleeping animals from dead ones as hunter-horticulturalist children from the Shuar region of Ecuador were. Even today’s urban children appear tuned in to perceptual cues signaling death. A “violation of the body envelope” (in other words, a mutilated carcass) is a pretty good sign that one needn’t worry about tiptoeing around. Success in life, evolutionarily speaking, is passing on one’s genes to offspring. As such, most species die soon after their fecund days end. Salmon die soon after making their upriver trek to fertilize their eggs. For them, reproduction is a one-way trip.



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