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Books > Health, Home & Family > Mind, body & spirit > Psychic powers, ESP
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Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife (Paperback)
Loot Price: R446
Discovery Miles 4 460
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Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife (Paperback)
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Loot Price R446
Discovery Miles 4 460
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Well before Darwinism, as it came to be called, impacted the
educated world during the last four decades of the 19th Century,
mainstream religion was in decline, as science and its concomitant,
rationalism, took hold. Thomas Paine's book, The Age of Reason,
published in three parts (1794, 1795, and 1807) influenced many
educated people to repudiate their religious beliefs, including
both God and the idea of an afterlife. For those who sat on the
fence, unsure as to what to believe, Darwinism was the knock-out
blow, since it was perceived as totally refuting the biblical
account of creation as set forth in the Book of Genesis, which said
that God created the world in seven days. Falsus in uno, falso in
omnibus - false in one, then false in all - seems to have been the
logical conclusion. After all, if the Bible had been inspired by
God, as religious leaders proclaimed, how could an all-knowing God
be so wrong? Therefore, god must not exist, and if there is no god,
then there must not be an afterlife, either. If the spirits who
communicated in the years immediately following the advent of
Spiritualism in Hydesville, New York during 1848, are to be
believed, there was a plan behind it all - a plan that resulted
from a growing loss of faith and spiritual values in an
increasingly materialistic world. "It is to draw mankind together
in harmony, and to convince skeptics of the immortality of the
soul," was the reply given to Territory of Wisconsin Governor
Nathaniel P. Tallmadge when he asked a communicating spirit
claiming to be John C. Calhoun, former vice-president of the United
States, about the purpose of the strange phenomena. Some three
years after the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in
London in 1882, Leonora Piper, a young Boston, Massachusetts
housewife, was "discovered" by William James, a pioneering
psychologist, of Harvard University. Messages were delivered
through Mrs. Piper that seemed to be coming from spirits of the
dead. Soon after the discovery of Mrs. Piper, the American branch
of the SPR (ASPR) was formed under the guidance of Professor James,
and its primary task became the study of her mediumship, although
it undertook the investigation of other mediums and paranormal
phenomena, as well. A number of other reputable scientists and
scholars studied Mrs. Piper for a quarter of a century.
Unfortunately, because of the resistance of mainstream science on
one end and orthodox religion on the other, the latter seeing
communication with spirits as demonic, the research has been, for
the most part, filed away in dust-covered cabinets and written off
by many as outdated. Skeptics deride it as the product of
hallucination and delusion and conclude that Mrs. Piper was just
another charlatan, one clever enough to dupe many intelligent men
and women in hundreds of observations over some 25 years. As the
researchers came to understand, spirits face many obstacles in
communicating with the earth realm and thus their messages are
often fragmentary, confusing, distorted, meaningless, and wrong.
Professor James called it the "bosh" material, seeing it as one
major reason why Mrs. Piper's mediumship was not more widely
accepted. In this book, author Michael Tymn filters out much of the
bosh, permitting the reader to better appreciate the genuine
communication. He explores the various interpretations, other than
fraud, considered by the researchers. He approaches the subject as
a lawyer arguing for the reality of spirit communication. He
believes that those who carefully study the research and take the
time to understand it will likely see Leonora Piper as the "white
crow" that William James proclaimed her to be - the one who proved
that all crows are not black, the one who gave science some very
intriguing evidence that, under certain conditions, the "dead" can
communicate with us.
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