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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Death & dying
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Inventing Afterlives - The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Life After Death (Paperback)
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Inventing Afterlives - The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Life After Death (Paperback)
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Why is belief in an afterlife so persistent across times and
cultures? And how can it coexist with disbelief in an afterlife?
Most modern thinkers hold that afterlife belief serves such
important psychological and social purposes as consoling survivors,
enforcing morality, dispensing justice, or giving life meaning. Yet
the earliest, and some more recent, afterlives strikingly fail to
satisfy those needs. In Inventing Afterlives, Regina M. Janes
proposes a new theory of the origins of the hereafter rooted in the
question that a dead body raises: where has the life gone? Humans
then and now, in communities and as individuals, ponder what they
would want or experience were they in that body. From this
endlessly recurring situation, afterlife narratives develop in all
their complexity, variety, and ingenuity. Exploring afterlives from
Egypt to Sumer, among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, to Christianity's
advent and Islam's rise, Janes reveals how little concern ancient
afterlives had with morality. In south and east Asia, karmic
rebirth makes morality self-enforcing and raises a new problem: how
to stop re-dying. The British enlightenment, Janes argues, invented
the now widespread wish-fulfilling afterlife and illustrates how
afterlives change. She also considers the surprising afterlife of
afterlives among modern artists and writers who no longer believe
in worlds beyond this one. Drawing on a variety of religious
traditions; contemporary literature and film; primatology;
cognitive science; and evolutionary psychology, Janes shows that in
asking what happens after we die, we define the worlds we inhabit
and the values by which we live.
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