Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, Paperback/Michael Tymn

Descriere

Well before Darwinism, as it came to be called, impacted the educated world during the last four decades of the 19th Century, mainstream religion was in decline, as science and its concomitant, rationalism, took hold. Thomas Paine's book, The Age of Reason, published in three parts (1794, 1795, and 1807) influenced many educated people to repudiate their religious beliefs, including both God and the idea of an afterlife. For those who sat on the fence, unsure as to what to believe, Darwinism was the knock-out blow, since it was perceived as totally refuting the biblical account of creation as set forth in the Book of Genesis, which said that God created the world in seven days. Falsus in uno, falso in omnibus - false in one, then false in all - seems to have been the logical conclusion. After all, if the Bible had been inspired by God, as religious leaders proclaimed, how could an all-knowing God be so wrong? Therefore, god must not exist, and if there is no god, then there must not be an afterlife, either. If the spirits who communicated in the years immediately following the advent of Spiritualism in Hydesville, New York during 1848, are to be believed, there was a plan behind it all - a plan that resulted from a growing loss of faith and spiritual values in an increasingly materialistic world. "It is to draw mankind together in harmony, and to convince skeptics of the immortality of the soul," was the reply given to Territory of Wisconsin Governor Nathaniel P. Tallmadge when he asked a communicating spirit claiming to be John C. Calhoun, former vice-president of the United States, about the purpose of the strange phenomena. Some three years after the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in London in 1882, Leonora Piper, a young Boston, Massachusetts housewife, was "discovered" by William James, a pioneering psychologist, of Harvard University. Messages were delivered through Mrs. Piper that seemed to be coming from spirits of the dead. Soon after the