Belief In Continued Existence Research Articles

Personal conceptions of death in young Czech adults

Abstract There is a significant lack of psychological research on death-as-a-state thinking and expectations. This study aimed to map that unexplored terrain, using qualitative methodology to provide information about what people picture and feel when they think about what comes after death. We investigated conceptions of death, initial associations with the word death and polarity of feeling in death thoughts in 52 young Czech adults. We identified three main types of belief about what happens once we die: conceptions of a specific form of transcendence that comes in multiple shapes, mostly based on an eclectic combination of motifs from various eschatologies; conceptions of non-specific forms of transcendence based on a belief in continued existence in forms that are hard to imagine; conceptions of nothingness after life and for all eternity.

The role of spirituality and religion for those bereaved due to a traumatic death

After a sudden traumatic death, bereaved relatives may feel particularly distressed. We look at the role of spirituality (including religion, whether following communal forms or more individually expressed) in people's lives after the traumatic death of a relative. Our findings are based on narrative interviews with 40 people bereaved through murder, manslaughter, car crash, train accident, fire, bomb explosion, industrial explosion, or pedestrian incident. People were interviewed in their homes throughout the UK. A qualitative interpretive approach was taken, combining thematic analysis with constant comparison. A few people said that after the death they felt angry or cynical about religion, but many people turned to spirituality or religion for help at this time. People reported that through spirituality or religion they found practical support, comfort, help in making sense of what had happened, belief in continued existence beyond death, a way of ensuring ‘continuing bonds’, and healing. Despite declining church attendance and a decline in the number of people who call themselves Christians, it seems that in the UK religion still remains important for people bereaved by a traumatic death.

"Una Messa in Perpetuum" : Perpetual Mass Bequests in Traditional Malta, 1750-1797

In 1931 Marc Bloch, reviewing Maurice Halbwach's book, Les Causes du Suicide, criticized historians' reluctance to write about death.1 Lucien Febvre made the same comment twenty years later. He did admit that is now a fashionable subject, but it was sociologists, doctors, and psychologists who were monopolizing it, not historians.2 The appeal of these founders of the brilliant Annales School of French historians3 was not left unanswered. Philippe Aries, Pierre Chaunu, Jacques Chiffoleau, and Michel Vovelle are only a few, if the most renowned, researchers who harkened to their call.4 Thanks to their efforts is now a popular subject with the historians of most countries.5 Death was too much a part of Maltese daily life in the late eighteenth century. The reasons that made it all too common were the usual causes of disease, dearth, and what Peter Laslett calls perpetual undernourishment.6 In 1783, for instance, the cotton-crop failed and a grievous hunger afflicted the island from August till the end of the year.7 In such villages as Naxxar, with a population of around 2000, the average number of burials per year in the period 1750-1797 was 67.6, which meant one burial every five days. In some particular years, like 1780, a year of the village was at the mercy of smallpox, the annual toll doubled to 125, or one burial every three days. Death stalked the towns, proverbially unhealthy, more frequently; and at Valletta, whose population hovered round 17,000, it claimed three persons each day.8 But if was omnipresent and familiar, some Maltese negated the existence of an afterlife altogether since nobody has died and come back from the other with face burnt.9 Or, as one Pietro exclaimed,who has ever returned to tell us what is there?10 Man was like animals, fish, and birds, others said, so that when he dies soul dies with However, these examples of unbelief in a life beyond the grave, taken from the records of the Roman Inquisition,12 were only an exception. The great majority of the people, unlike the anatomy lecturer at the university who made fun of the resurrection of the body at the Last Judgment,15 were obsessed with the hereafter and attempted to ensure that they were among the elect. Like most ancient religions, Christianity shared the belief in continued existence after death.14 But at first the Church offered no precise doctrine as to where the souls stayed before rising up at the end of time. Besides, would the deceased's fate be determined on the day their soul left their body or at the second Coming?15 These problems were definitely solved with the discovery of purgatory in the twelfth century. Souls were given a fixed place of residence and therefore had to be judged at to be given the correct punishment.16 In this decisive hour, the most important experience of life, man -was his own judge and if he lost the contest (agonia) against wily adversary he was doomed forever.17 To help him in the art of dying (ars moriendiy* and navigate the journey (viaticum)19 from this world to the next the priest, who presided over the deathbed, administered to him the last liturgical rites. He heard confession, gave him communion, and, on the admonition of St. James,20 administered to him the sacrament of extreme unction.21 As the sick person lay dying brothers of the sodalita dell'agonia had a low Mass said for bono transitu;22 and the holy sacrament was displayed for three hours for them to pray for the buon passaggio (safe passage) of their colleague.23 Fortified thus with this religious ritual, the parting person eluded with greater ease the cunning of the devil who lay in wait for him. He resisted temptations to despair and instead thanks God for sickness and imminent death and called on Almighty God, the Virgin Mary and the celestial court to assist him.24 Like the young woman in one of Erasmus 'Colloquia,The Shipwreck,25 he retained calm and composure right to the end and, to repeat Aries, died a tamed death. …

Dostoevsky's Arguments for Immortality

Between 1864 and 1880, in fiction and nonfiction alike, Fedor Dostoevsky referred repeatedly to immortality of soul, and on several occasions he wrote of its great importance for spiritual and even material life. The idea of immortality, he proclaimed in 1876, is the fundamental and highest idea of human existence. It is humanity's chief source of truth and correct understanding; all other lofty ideas for which a person might live simnplyflowfrom it alone.' On strength of such assertions, Nicolas Berdyaev concluded that belief in immortality was cornerstone of Dostoevsky's world view.2 Dostoevsky appears to have believed in immortality in some form throughout his life. His Christian upbringing, guided by a devout and demanding father, imbued him with faith in traditional dogmas of Russian Orthodoxy. His reading of liberal Western literature in 1830s and 1840s shook some but not all of religious convictions of his youth; George Sand he knew, as he indicated later, was a true Christian who believed unconditionally in immortality of human person (23:37). In a letter to a skeptic in 1877, Dostoevsky wrote that he was familiar with all arguments against existence of God and immortality by time he was twenty (that is, by 1841); but there is no evidence that he ever succumbed to them, even in socialist-radical phase leading up to his arrest and mock execution in 1849 (29/11:141). Facing what he and other condemned men believed to be imminent death, Dostoevsky reportedly cried out, We shall be with Christ!3 Still, however central and persistent was Dostoevsky's belief in continued existence of soul after physical death, it was not always a confident belief. In his mature years he longed for his Christian faith to be immediate, certain, and unquestionable, as it was in his childhood, but he found that after exposure to critical secular thought he could