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Article: Immortality
- Article from:
- Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Immortality
Western belief systems believe that there is life after death. William James waited until the final pages of his classic
Varieties of Religious Experiences
(1902) before trying to evaluate this belief. In those pages he endeavored to answer the question: Suppose that there is a God; What difference would humans expect God to make within the natural world? Although James believed that God was the producer of immortality, his far-ranging study of religious experience did not provide clear support for personal immortality. He could conclude only:
... that we can experience union with
something
larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. ...Anything larger ...
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Encyclopedia entry: Raven, The
The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature;
460 words
... ... beautiful woman (in this case “Lenore”), the distinctive theme of despair at the denial of personal immortality, and the sonorous sound of the o and r in the refrain itself. A weary student is visited in his room, one ...
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