Abstract
Armed with these elements of understanding, we begin tracing the lineage of secular approaches to mortality and the possibility of immortality. In Western thought, the wellspring is Lucretius’ assertion, in The Nature of Things, that we ought to be no more concerned about the prospect of ceasing to exist after death than we are about that of never having lived in the first place. As inadequate as that may seem to many today, it was a line of thought that sustained the philosopher David Hume, who was the subject of the most famous deathbed inquisition of an infidel in history, at the hands of James Boswell. This experience, and others like it that followed, encouraged the resolute rejection of the possibility of an afterlife that so widely prevails today among secularists.
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Harmon, D. (2017). An Ocean of Night. In: A Naturalistic Afterlife. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57978-8_3
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