preview

Essay on Life After Death Analysis

Better Essays

Life After Death Analysis

To what extent does it make sense to talk about life after death? Nobody likes the idea that we are going to die. It’s one of those things that pop into your head whenever you get comfortable, possibly as a subconscious motivational tool. Just in case you ever get really, truly at ease with your life it strikes you that it will all come to an end (possibly quite horribly) without your say-so or even prior notification. Many people find this not only rude but also decidedly inconvenient, and refuse to accept that their lovely lives could ever end. Others are content to allow existence is occasional bout of poor manners and go quietly. This essay is about the main ways …show more content…

In this he dismissed the soul as a category mistake, or a misuse of language. He even went so far as to coin a scornful phrase for his nemesis “the ghost in the machine” – a beautifully elegant term as it embodies both his belief of the body/mind (as for Ryle, the mind is physical organ and so part of the body) as a machine and the soul as the long jibed-by-science notion of ghosts. Ryle implored us to consider the poor foreigner who asks why the team spirit is late for the sports match, only to be mocked by those of us who understand that “team spirit” is merely a colloquial term for the collective banter of many men – not a separate entity of its own. Ryle saw talk of a soul in a similar fashion, as a way to describe the way a man behaves in the world and acts around others and that to say a soul is something separate is trying to justify something that isn’t there. Unfortunately for Ryle he was speaking shortly after a very bloody war, to a nation who had just lost many loved ones, who were not really all too willing to accept they had simply been thrust into oblivion by the Nazi war machine. However we live in an altogether different time, far from any front line where we can keep the idea of death at a hypothetical arm's reach. So enters Richard Dawkins. Dawkins appears to be the classic godless heathen atheist, holding totally to his beliefs in the science of

Get Access