Let me share some thoughts with you. Let me be a source of encouragement and support. May you never forget your dreams and remember miracles happen every day. Let us laugh, have fun, and inspire one another.
How do animals think and feel?
Patrick aka Herjolf, CC BY-NC-ND
For many weeks, news of a mother orca carrying her dead infant through the icy waters of the Salish Sea captured the attention of many around the world. Keeping the infant afloat as best she could, the orca, named Tahlequah, also known as J35 by scientists, persisted for 17 days, before finally dropping the dead calf.
The grieving orca.
Among scientists, however, there remains a prejudice against the idea that animals feel “real” grief or respond in complex ways to death. Following reports of the “grieving,” zoologist Jules Howard, for example, wrote, “If you believe J35 was displaying evidence of mourning or grief, you are making a case that rests on faith, not on scientific endeavor.”
As a bioethicist, I’ve been studying the interplay between science and ethics for more than two decades. A growing body of scientific evidence supports the idea that nonhuman animals are aware of death, can experience grief and will sometimes mourn for or ritualize their dead.
You can’t see when you don’t look
Animal grief skeptics are correct about one thing: Scientists don’t know all that much about death-related behaviors such as grief in nonhuman animals. Only a few scholars have explored how the multitude of creatures with whom humans share the planet think and feel about death, either their own or others’.
But, I argue, that they don’t know because they haven’t looked.
Scientists haven’t yet turned serious attention to the study of what might be called “comparative thanatology” – the study of death and the practices associated with it. This is perhaps because most humans failed to even entertain the possibility that animals might care about the death of those they love.
Awareness of mortality has remained, for many scientists and philosophers alike, a bastion of human-perceived uniqueness.
Animal grief
Elephants are known to have strong bonds and mourn for their dead.Nigel Swales, CC BY-SA
Nevertheless, a growing collection of anecdotal reports of grieving and other death-related behaviors in a wide range of species is helping researchers frame questions about death awareness in animals and figure out how best to study these behaviors.
Elephants, for example, are known to take a great interest in the bones of their deceased and to mourn for dead relatives. One of these vivid ritual explorations of bones was caught on video in 2016 by a doctoral student studying elephants in Africa. Members of three different elephant families came to visit the body of a deceased matriarch, smelling and touching and repeatedly passing by the corpse.
Chimpanzees have also been repeatedly observed engaging in death-related behaviors. In one case, a small group of captive chimpanzees was carefully observed after one of their members, an elderly female named Pansy, died. The chimpanzees checked Pansy’s body for signs of life and cleaned bits of straw from her fur. They refused to go to the place where Pansy had died for several days afterwards.
In another instance, scientists documented a chimpanzee using a tool to clean a corpse. In 2017, a team of primate researchers in Zambia filmed a mother using a piece of dried grass to clean debris from the teeth of her deceased son. The implication, according to the scientists involved, is that chimpanzees continue to feel social bonds, even after death, and feel some sensitivity toward dead bodies.
Magpies have been observed burying their dead under twigs of grass. Ethologist Marc Bekoff, who observed this behavior, described it as a “magpie funeral.”
In one of the most fascinating recent examples, an 8-year-old boy caught video footage of peccaries, a species of wild pig-like animal found in parts of the U.S., responding to a dead herd-mate. The peccaries visited the dead body repeatedly, nuzzling it and biting at it, as well as sleeping next to it.
Do animals mourn their dead?
Crows have been seen forming what scientists call “cacophonous aggregations” – mobbing and squawking in a big group – in response to another dead crow.
These are just a few of the many examples.
Some scientists insist that behaviors such of these shouldn’t be labeled with human terms such as “grief” and “mourning” because it isn’t rigorous science. Science can observe a given behavior, but it is very difficult to know what feeling has motivated that behavior. A 2011 study published in Science that found evidence of empathy in rats and mice was met with a similar kind of skepticism.
It’s about how animals grieve
I agree that a large degree of caution is appropriate when it comes to ascribing emotions and behaviors such as grief to animals. But not because there is any doubt that animals feel or grieve, or that a mother’s anguish over the loss of her child is any less painful.
The case of Tahlequah shows that humans have a great deal to learn about other animals. The question is not “Do animals grieve?” but “How do animals grieve?”
Even if we could find some isolated example of a politician who was scrupulously honest – former President Jimmy Carter, perhaps – the question is how to think about the rest of them.
And if most politicians lie, then why are some Americans so hard on President Donald Trump?
According to The Washington Post, Trump has told 6,420 lies so far in his presidency. In the seven weeks leading up to the midterms, his rate increased to 30 per day.
That’s a lot, but isn’t this a difference in degree and not a difference in kind with other politicians?
Yet the difference in Trump’s prevarication seems to be found not in the quantity or enormity of his lies, but in the way that Trump uses his lies in service to a proto-authoritarian political ideology.
I recently wrote a book, titled “"Post-Truth,” about what happens when “alternative facts” replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence. Looked at from this perspective, calling Trump a liar fails to capture his key strategic purpose.
Any amateur politician can engage in lying. Trump is engaging in “post-truth.”
Citing a 2,000 percent spike in usage – due to Brexit and the American presidential campaign – they defined post-truth as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
Ideology, in other words, takes precedence over reality.
When an individual believes their thoughts can influence reality, we call it “magical thinking” and might worry about their mental health. When a government official uses ideology to trump reality, it’s more like propaganda, and it puts us on the road to fascism.
As Yale philosopher Jason Stanley argues, “The key thing is that fascist politics is about identifying enemies, appealing to the in-group (usually the majority group), and smashing truth and replacing it with power.”
Consider the example of Trump’s recent decision not to cancel two political rallies on the same day as the Pittsburgh massacre. He said that this was based on the fact that the New York Stock Exchange was open the day after 9/11.
This isn’t true. The stock exchange stayed closed for six days after 9/11.
So was this a mistake? A lie? Trump didn’t seem to treat it so. In fact, he repeated the falsehood later in the same day.
When a politician gets caught in a lie, there’s usually a bit of sweat, perhaps some shame and the expectation of consequences.
The point of a lie is to convince someone that a falsehood is true. But the point of post-truth is domination. In my analysis, post-truth is an assertion of power.
As journalist Masha Gessen and others have argued, when Trump lies he does so not to get someone to accept what he’s saying as true, but to show that he is powerful enough to say it.
He has asserted, “I’m the President and you’re not,” as if such high political office comes with the prerogative of creating his own reality. This would explain why Trump doesn’t seem to care much if there is videotape or other evidence that contradicts him. When you’re the boss, what does that matter?
Should we be worried about this flight from mere lying to post-truth?
Even if all politicians lie, I believe that post-truth foreshadows something more sinister. In his powerful book “On Tyranny,”historian Timothy Snyder writes that “post-truth is pre-fascism.” It is a tactic seen in “electoral dictatorships” – where a society retains the facade of voting without the institutions or trust to ensure that it is an actual democracy, like those in Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey.
In this, Trump is following the authoritarian playbook, characterized by leaders lying, the erosion of public institutions and the consolidation of power. You do not need to convince someone that you are telling the truth when you can simply assert your will over them and dominate their reality.
In the 1960s, the Temple established nine residential care facilities for the elderly and six homes for foster children in the Redwood Valley.
Peoples Temple / Jonestown Gallery/flickr
When people hear the word “Jonestown,” they usually think of horror and death.
Located in the South American country of Guyana, the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project was supposed to be the religious group’s “promised land.” In 1977 almost 1,000 Americans had moved to Jonestown, as it was called, hoping to create a new life.
Instead, tragedy struck. When U.S. Rep. Leo J. Ryan of California and three journalists attempted to leave after a visit to the community, a group of Jonestown residents assassinated them, fearing that negative reports would destroy their communal project.
A collective murder-suicide followed, a ritual that had been rehearsed on several occasions.
This time it was no rehearsal. On Nov. 18, 1978, more than 900 men, women and children died, including my two sisters, Carolyn Layton and Annie Moore, and my nephew, Kimo Prokes.
Photojournalist David Hume Kennerly’s aerial photograph of a landscape of brightly clothed lifeless bodies captures the magnitude of the disaster of that day.
In the 40 years since the tragedy, most stories, books, films and scholarship have tended to focus on the leader of Peoples Temple, Jim Jones, and the community that his followers attempted to carve out of the dense jungles of northwest Guyana. They might highlight the dangers of cults or the hazards of blind obedience.
But by fixating on the tragedy – and on the Jones of Jonestown – we miss the larger story of the Temple. We lose sight of a significant social movement that mobilized thousands of activists to change the world in ways small and large, from offering legal services to people too poor to afford a lawyer, to campaigning against apartheid.
It is a disservice to the lives, labors and aspirations of those who died to simply focus on their deaths.
I know that what happened on Nov. 18, 1978 doesn’t tell the complete story of my own family’s involvement – neither what happened in the years leading up to that dreadful day, nor the four decades that followed.
The impulse to learn the whole story prompted my husband, Fielding McGehee, and me to create the website Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple in 1998 – a large digital archive documenting the movement primarily in its own words through documents, reports and audiotapes. This, in turn, led the Special Collections Department at San Diego State University to develop the Peoples Temple Collection.
The problems with Jonestown are self-evident.
But that single event shouldn’t define the movement.
The Temple began as a church in the Pentecostal-Holiness tradition in Indianapolis in the 1950s.
In a deeply segregated city, it was one of the few places where black and white working-class congregants sat together in church on a Sunday morning. Its members provided various kinds of assistance to the poor – food, clothing, housing, legal advice – and the church and its pastor, Jim Jones, gained a reputation for fostering racial integration.
Church members also mobilized to promote desegregation efforts at local restaurants and businesses, and the Temple formed an employment service that placed African-Americans in a number of entry-level positions.
While it’s the kind of action some churches engage in today, it was innovative – even radical – for the 1950s.
In 1962, Jones had a prophetic vision of a nuclear catastrophe, so he urged his Indiana congregation to relocate to Northern California.
Scholars suspect that an Esquire magazine article – which listed nine parts of the world that would be safe in the event of nuclear war, and included a region of Northern California – gave Jones the idea for the move.
In the mid-1960s, more than 80 members of the group packed up and headed west together.
Under the guidance of Marceline, the Temple acquired a number of properties in the Redwood Valley and established nine residential care facilities for the elderly, six homes for foster children, and Happy Acres, a state-licensed ranch for mentally disabled adults. In addition, Temple families took in others needing assistance through informal networks.
Sociologist of religion John R. Hall has studied the various ways the Temple raised money at that time. The care homes were profitable, as were other moneymaking ventures; there was a small food truck the Temple operated, and members were also able to sell grapes from the Temple’s vineyards to Parducci Wine Cellars.
These fundraising schemes, along with more traditional donations and tithes, helped underwrite free services.
My younger sister, Annie, seemed to be drawn to the Temple’s ethos of diversity and equality.
“There is the largest group of people I have ever seen who are concerned about the world and are fighting for truth and justice for the world,” she wrote in a 1972 letter to me. “And all the people have come from such different backgrounds, every color, every age, every income group.”
Rebecca Moore reads from a letter her sister Annie Moore wrote to her, in which Annie explains why she joined Peoples Temple.
But the core constituency comprised thousands of urban African-Americans, as the Temple expanded south to San Francisco, and eventually to Los Angeles.
Frequently depicted as poor and dispossessed, these new African-American recruits actually came from the working and professional classes: They were teachers, postal clerks, civil service employees, domestics, military veterans, laborers and more.
The promise of racial equality and social activism operating within a Christian context enticed them. The Temple’s revolutionary politics and substantial programs sold them.
Regardless of the motives of their leader, the followers wholeheartedly believed in the possibility of change.
During an era that witnessed the collapse of the civil rights movement, the decimation of the Black Panther Party and the assassinations of black activists, the group was especially committed to a program of racial reconciliation.
But even the Temple couldn’t escape structural racism, as “eight revolutionaries” pointed out in a letter to Jim Jones in 1973. These eight young adults left the organization, in part, because they watched new white members advance into leadership ahead of experienced, older black members.
Nevertheless, throughout the movement’s history, African-Americans and whites lived and worked side by side. It was one of the few long-term experiments in American interracial communalism, along with Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement, which Jim Jones emulated.
Members saw themselves as battling on the front lines against colonialism, as they listened to guests from Pan-African organizations and from the recently deposed Marxist Chilean government speak in their San Francisco gatherings. They joined coalition groups that were agitating against the Bakke case, which ruled that race-based admissions quotas were unconstitutional, and demonstrating in support of the Wilmington Ten, 10 African Americans who were wrongfully convicted of arson in North Carolina.
Members of Peoples Temple join the picket line in an anti-eviction protest at San Francisco’s International Hotel in January 1977.Peoples Temple/Jonestown Gallery/Courtesy Nancy Wong
Members and nonmembers received a variety of free social services: rental assistance, funds for shopping trips, health exams, legal assistance and student scholarships. By pooling their resources, in addition to filling the collection plates, members received more in goods and services than they might have earned on their own. They called it “apostolic socialism.”
Living communally not only saved money, but also built solidarity. Although communal housing existed in Redwood Valley, it was greatly expanded in San Francisco. Entire apartment buildings in the city were dedicated to accommodating unrelated Temple members – many of them senior citizens – who lived with and cared for one another.
As early as 1974, a few hardy volunteers began clearing land for an agricultural settlement in the Northwest District of Guyana, near the disputed border with Venezuela.
A page from the October 1973 resolution establishing an agricultural mission in Guyana.Peoples Temple Collection, 1942–2015, (I.D. MS-0183), Special Collections and University Archives, San Diego State University
While the ostensible reason was to “provide food for the hungry,” the real reason was to create a community where they could escape the racism and injustice they experienced in the United States.
Even as they toiled to clear hundreds of acres of jungle, build roads and construct housing, the first settlers were filled with hope, freedom and a sense of possibility.
“My memories from 1974 till the beginning of ‘78 are many and full of love, and to this day they still bring tears to my eyes,” recalled Peoples Temple member Mike Touchette, who was working on a boat in the Caribbean as the deaths were occurring. “Not only the memories of building of Jonestown, but the friendships and camaraderie we had before 1978 is beyond words.”
But Jim Jones arrived 1977, and an influx of 1,000 immigrants – including more than 300 children and 200 senior citizens – followed. The situation changed. Conditions were primitive, and though the residents of Jonestown were no worse off than their Guyanese neighbors, it was a far cry from the lives they were used to.
The community of Jonestown is best understood as a small town in need of infrastructure, or, as one visitor described it, an “unfinished construction site.”
Everything – sidewalks, sanitation, housing, water, electricity, food production, livestock care, schools, libraries, meal preparation, laundry, security – had to be developed from scratch. Everyone but the youngest of children needed to pitch in to develop and maintain the community.
In several respects that is true: People weren’t free to leave. Dissidents were cruelly punished.
Others have described it as heaven on earth.
Undoubtedly it was both; it depends on who – and when – you ask.
But then there is the final day, which seems to erase all the promise of the Temple’s utopian experiment. It’s easy to identify the elements that contributed to the final tragedy: the anti-democratic hierarchy, the violence used against members, the culture of secrecy, the racism, and the inability to question the leader.
The failures are apparent. But the successes?
For years, Peoples Temple provided decent housing for hundreds of church members; it ran care homes for hundreds of mentally ill or disabled individuals; and it created a social and political space for African-Americans and whites to live and work together in California and in Guyana.
Most importantly, it mobilized thousands of people yearning for a just society.
To focus on the leader is to overlook the basic decency and genuine idealism of the members. Jim Jones would have accomplished nothing without the people of Peoples Temple. They were the activists, the foot soldiers, the letter writers, the demonstrators, the organizers.
Don Beck, a former Temple member, has written that the legacy of the movement is “to cherish the people and remember the goodness that brought us together.”
In the face of all those bodies, that’s a difficult thing to do.
But it’s worth a try.
Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff Armando Viera, center, consoles an unidentified woman after a motorcade with the body of Ventura County Sheriff’s Sgt. Ron Helus went by Nov. 8, 2018.
Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP PhotoArash Javanbakht, Wayne State University
Mass shootings seem to have become a sad new normal in the American life. They happen too often, and in very unexpected places. Concerts, movie theaters, places of worship, schools, bars and restaurants are no longer secure from gun violence.
Often, and especially when a person who is not a minority or Muslim perpetrates a mass shooting, mental health is raised as a real concern or, critics say, a diversion from the real issue easy access to firearms.
Less is discussed, however, about the stress of such events on the rest of the society. That includes those who survived the shooting, those who were in the vicinity, including the first responders, those who lost someone in the shooting, and those who hear about it via the media.
I am a trauma and anxiety researcher and clinician psychiatrist, and I know that the effects of such violence are far-reaching. While the immediate survivors are most affected, the rest of society suffers, too.
First, the immediate survivors
Like other animals, we humans get stressed or terrified via direct exposure to a dangerous event. The extent of that stress or fear could vary. For example, survivors may want to avoid the neighborhood where a shooting occurred or the context related to shooting, such as outdoor concerts if the shooting happened there. In the worst case, a person may develop post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
PTSD is a debilitating condition which develops after exposure to serious traumatic experiences such as war, natural disasters, rape, assault, robbery, car accidents, and of course gun violence. Nearly 8 percent of the U.S. population deals with PTSD. Symptoms include high anxiety, avoiding reminders of the trauma, emotional numbness, hyper-vigilance, frequent intrusive memories of trauma, nightmares and flashbacks [https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/essentials/dsm5_ptsd.asp]. The brain switches to fight and flight mode, or survival mode, and the person is always waiting for something terrible to happen.
When the trauma is man-made, the impact can be profound: the rate of PTSD in mass shootings may be as high as 36 percent among survivors . Depression, another debilitating psychiatric condition, occurs in as many as 80 percent of people with PTSD.
Survivors of shootings may also experience survivor’s guilt, the feeling that they failed others who died, did not do enough to help them survive, or just because they survived. PTSD can improve by itself, but many need treatment. We have effective treatments available in form of psychotherapy, and medications. The more chronic it gets, the more negative the impact on the brain, and the harder to treat.
The effect on those close by, or who arrive later
PTSD not only can develop through personal exposure to trauma, but also via exposure to others’ severe trauma. Humans are evolved to be very sensitive to social cues and have survived as a species particularly because of the ability to fear as a group. We therefore learn fear and experience terror via exposure to trauma and fear of others. Even seeing a black and white scared face on a computer, will make our amygdala, the fear area of our brain, light up in brain imaging studies.
People in the vicinity of mass shooting may see exposed, disfigured or burned dead bodies, injured people in agony, terror of others, extremely loud noises, chaos and terror of post shooting, and the unknown. The unknown – a sense of lack of control over the situation – has a very important role in making people feel insecure, terrified, and traumatized.
I, sadly, see this form of trauma often times in asylum seekers exposed to torture of their loved ones, refugees exposed to casualties of war, combat veterans who lost their comrades, and people who lost a loved one in car accidents, natural disasters, or shootings.
A first responder after the shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh Oct. 27, 2018.B Peterson
Another group whose trauma is usually overlooked is the first responders. When we all run away, the police, the firefighters, and the paramedics rush into the danger zone, and frequently face uncertainty, threats to themselves, their colleagues, and others, as well as terrible bloody scenes of post shooting. This exposure happens to them too frequently. PTSD has been reported in up to 20 percent of first responders to man-made mass violence.
How does it affect those who were not even near the shooting?
There is evidence of distress, anxiety, or even PTSD symptoms among people who were not directly exposed to a disaster, but were exposed to the news, including post-9/11 . Fear, the coming unknown (is there another shooting, are other co-conspirators involved?) and reduced faith in our perceived safety may all play a role in this.
Every time there is a mass shooting in a new place, we learn that kind of place is now on the not-very-safe list. When at the temple or church, the club or in the class, someone may walk in and open fire. People not only worry about themselves but also the safety of their children and other loved ones.
Media: the good, bad, and the sometimes ugly
The Daily Telegraph front page of the shootings in Las Vegas on Oct 1, 2017.Hadrian/Shutterstock.com
I always say American cable news are “disaster pornographers.” When there is a mass shooting or a terrorist attack, they make sure to add enough dramatic tone to it to get all the attention for the duration of the time they desire. If there is one shooting in a corner of a city of millions, the cable news will make sure that you feel like the whole city is under seige.
Besides informing the public and logically analyzing the events, one job of the media is to get viewers and readers, and viewers are better glued to the TV when their positive or negative emotions are stirred, with fear being one. Thus, the media, along with the politicians, can also play a role in stirring fear, anger, or paranoia about one or another group of people.
When we are scared, we are vulnerable to regress to more tribal, and stereotyping attitudes. We can get trapped in fear of perceiving all members of another tribe a threat, if a member of that group acted violently. In general, people may become less open, and more cautious around others when they perceive a high risk of exposure to danger.
Is there a good side to it?
As we are used to happy endings, I will try to also address potentially positive outcomes: we may consider making our gun laws safer and open constructive discussions, including informing the public about the risks. As a group species, we are able to consolidate group dynamics and integrity when pressured and stressed, so we may raise a more positive sense of community. One beautiful outcome of the recent tragic shooting in the Tree of Life was the solidarity of Muslim community with the Jewish . This is especially productive in the current political environment where fear and division are common.
The bottom line is that we get angry, we get scared and we get confused. When united, we can do much better. And, do not spend too much time watching cable TV; turn it off when it stresses you too much.
Robertson said that the channel would help viewers understand how current events both in the United States and abroad affect them. The Christian Broadcasting Network has considerable influence among evangelicals, and President Trump, at times, has used the outlet to reach this support base.
But this is not the first time Christians have shared and shaped the content of world news and information through a distinctly Christian viewpoint.
They kept churches and missionary societies up to date on the societies in which they lived through regular letters and – by the late 19th century – photographs. Their letters were often reprinted in pamphlets and newsletters, or shared informally through extensive church networks.
One of the most notable examples of the use of missionary networks in bridging the imagined distance between a Western Christian public and distant people comes from the Congo Free State, which was established in 1885 and ruled solely by King Leopold of Belgium.
Leopold’s rule was characterized by widespread atrocities. Some estimates of the death toll of Leopold’s policies exceed 10 million people. Leopold used his reign to extract natural resources from the region. Following a boom in rubber prices, his agents were quick to use violence against the local population to make them harvest and process rubber.
In 1904, Alice Harris, a Protestant missionary with the Congo Balolo Mission, which was organized and supported by British Baptists, took what would become an iconic image of the horrors. Her image has a Congolese father sitting in a kind of stupor, gazing at his daughter’s severed hand and foot, which lie in front of him on the missionary’s porch.
A Congolese man looks at the severed hand and foot of his daughter.From a photograph taken at Baringa, Congo State, May 15, 1904.
Harris’s image was reproduced in a host of pamphlets, books and newspapers in both Britain and the United States. Along with other images and reports, it helped foment an international reaction against Leopold’s brutal reign.
Armenian genocide
At around the same time, missionaries also highlighted the pogroms and genocidal violence committed against Assyrian and Armenian Christians in the eastern Ottoman Empire.
When Assyrian and Armenian Christians experienced systematic mass violence at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, evangelical missionaries from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions were among the first to report on the atrocities.
Missionaries believed that God worked with them through religious conversions, moral reform and material and economic progress, to spread the truth of Christianity. The role of missionary media became foundational in providing information and images of suffering in the world.
This role often pushed them into ever more remote territories. The information that they sent enabled many Christians in the West to more easily imagine the world as a globally connected community.
Scholars in a wide range of emerging academic disciplines consulted missionary newsletters and updates for knowledge about the world. These networks also established a model for creating public humanitarian campaigns on behalf of those who were suffering on the other side of the globe – one that continues to shape contemporary humanitarian efforts.
CBN News’ insistence that “God is everywhere – even in the news” echoes similar sentiments. It places the network in a longer line of creating a global Christian identity through knowledge production. News is an essential component of this.
A Halloween ghost.
Werner Reischel/Flickr.com, CC BY
Halloween is a time when ghosts and spooky decorations are on public display, reminding us of the realm of the dead. But could they also be instructing us in important lessons on how to lead moral lives?
Roots of Halloween
The origins of modern-day Halloween go back to “samhain,” a Celtic celebration for the beginning of the dark half of the year when, it was widely believed, the realm between the living and the dead overlapped and ghosts could be commonly encountered.
In 601 A.D., to help his drive to Christianize northern Europe, Pope Gregory I directed missionaries not to stop pagan celebrations, but rather to Christianize them.
Accordingly, over time, the celebrations of samhain became All Souls’ Day and All Saint’s Day, when speaking with the dead was considered religiously appropriate. All Saint’s Day was also known as All Hallows’ Day and the night before became All Hallows’ Evening, or “Hallowe’en.”
Christian ghosts
Not only did the pagan beliefs around spirits of the dead continue, but they also became part of many of early church practices.
During the Middle Ages, beliefs around souls trapped in purgatory led to the church’s increasing practice of selling indulgences – payments to the church to reduce penalties for sins. The widespread belief in ghosts turned the sale of indulgences into a lucrative practice for the church.
It was such beliefs that contributed to the Reformation, the division of Christianity into Protestantism and Catholicism led by German theologian Martin Luther. Indeed, Luther’s “95 Theses,” that he nailed to the All Saints Church in Wittenburg on Oct. 31, 1517, was largely a protest against the selling of indulgences.
Subsequently, ghosts became identified with “Catholic superstitions” in Protestant countries.
Debates, however, continued about the existence of ghosts and people increasingly turned to science to deal with the issue. By the 19th century, Spiritualism, a new movement which claimed that the dead could converse with the living, was fast becoming mainstream, and featured popular techniques such as seances, the ouija board, spirit photography and the like.
Although Spiritualism faded in cultural importance after World War I, many of its approaches can be seen in the “ghost hunters” of today, who often seek to prove the existence of ghosts using scientific techniques.
An elaborate model house is being guided into the ocean as an offering to wandering ghosts during the beginning of the Ghost Month Festival in Taiwan.AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying
Along with many Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam, Taiwan celebrates a “Ghost Month,” which includes a central “Ghost Day,” when ghosts are believed to freely roam the world of the living. These festivals and beliefs are often tied to the Buddhist story of the Urabon Sutra, where Buddha instructs a young priest on how to help his mother whom he sees suffering as a “hungry ghost.”
As in many traditions, Taiwanese ghosts are seen either as “friendly” or “unfriendly.” The “friendly” ghosts are commonly ancestral or familial and welcomed into the home during the ghost festival. The “unfriendly” ghosts are those angry or “hungry” ghosts that haunt the living.
Role of ghosts in our lives
As a scholar who has studied and taught ghost stories for many years, I have found that ghosts generally haunt for good reasons. These could range from unsolved murders, lack of proper funerals, forced suicides, preventable tragedies and other ethical failures.
Ghosts, in this light, are often found seeking justice from beyond the grave. They could make such demands from individuals, or from societies as a whole. For example, in the U.S., sightings have been reported of African-American slaves and murdered Native Americans. Scholar Elizabeth Tucker details many of these reported sightings on university campuses, often tied in with sordid aspects of the campus’s past.
A ghost dance on Halloween.Chris Jepsen/Flickr.com, CC BY-NC-ND
In this way, ghosts reveal the shadow side of ethics. Their sightings are often a reminder that ethics and morality transcend our lives and that ethical lapses can carry a heavy spiritual burden.
Yet ghost stories are also hopeful. In suggesting a life after death, they offer a chance to be in contact with those that have passed and therefore a chance for redemption – a way to atone for past wrongs.
This Halloween, along with the shrieks and shtick, you may want to take a few minutes to appreciate the role of ghosts in our haunted pasts and how they guide us to lead moral and ethical lives.
