18 September 2011 – The Good Funeral Guide

We’d all be better off if we stopped believing in belief

Following last week’s great debate between the GFG religious correspondent, various unbelievers and a handful of don’t-knows [here] it was gripping this morning to sip tea in bed and listen to John Gray arguing that ‘we’d all be better off if we stopped believing in belief’.

The ten-minute talk can be heard once more on Listen Again. Better still for those who prefer their words served written, a public-spirited blogging ex-librarian in Michigan has transcribed it. Frank White, thank you.

Gray really is worth listening to. Gloria mundi recommends him, too. He concludes:

We’d all be better off if we stopped believing in belief. Not everyone needs a religion, but if you do you shouldn’t be bothered about finding arguments for joining or practising one. Just go into the church, synagogue, mosque or temple and take it from there. What we believe doesn’t in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live.

Now go to Frank’s website for the foregoing. Here.

Deathbed visions

In her latest blog post, Sue Brayne, author of the D-Word: Talking About Dying, describes a recent meeting of the Churches’ Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies. Sue worked with Dr Peter Fenwick in researching into end-of-life experiences (ELEs). Here’s a taster:

Our end-of-life experience study included over 800 extraordinary accounts from relatives, nurses, doctors and carers who had witnessed the dying seeing apparitions of much-loved dead relatives or children appearing to them in the last few weeks, days, hours, sometimes minutes of life. The apparitions seemed to soothe the dying person and help them to let go. Some of the dying said they believed these apparitions had come to ‘take them away’, or to help them to ‘pass over.’

Many relatives who reported these stories felt greatly comforted in the knowledge that the dying person wasn’t alone, and they were being helped to die. This in turn, eased their grieving process.

Read Sue’s entire blog post here. Highly recommended.