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By Root 2454 0

often used as a goad to dispel them. Ferocious emotional tirades on both sides are nothing but bad faith. We must be careful to allow ourselves to live with the ambiguity, not to try to impress ourselves with the rationality of our faith because of the strength of our emotions, when there are no sure claims to make. The justification for this is not just to preserve dispassionate or disinterested inquiry. We live in a marketplace of ideas, where people are constantly trying to sell something expensive to us with extravagent claims. The American critical stance should be: “Let the buyer beware.” We have frequent recent examples of televangelists convicted of preying on our innocence and our legitimate religious hopes and fears for their own enormous financial gain. Some of our recent films are, without doubt, just as surely pandering to our hopes. We have witnessed firsthand the scurrilous use of Muslim notions of the afterlife to motivate murder, resulting in a national tragedy of unprecedented proportions.

Even academic research has fallen victim to this temptation, for far less reward, if far less damage. I think of the example of Elizabeth KüblerRoss, who wrote On Death and Dying, as a salutary example.31 This famous and justly praised book on the grieving process was a passionate defense of giving the dying the opportunity to face their own deaths in a constructive way. The book came out of a clinical setting, the result of a study of persons dying of cancer, and concluded that our medical procedures were designed to protect the feelings of doctors and caregivers rather than to allow the dying the dignity to deal with their impending deaths. The study maintained that when those who know that they will die soon are given the opportunity to grieve for themselves, some experienced more honest, meaningful, and less painful deaths. Kübler-Ross described the grieving process as a healing one, going from anger and denial through depression to somber acceptance. Her observations struck a chord with everyone. Her analysis of the treatment of the dying in hospitals, with the attendant later techniques to encourage the dying through the grieving process, significantly changed hospital attitudes and therapeutic techniques, among both physicians and other caregivers. Kübler-Ross’s first book concerned only the process of dying and grieving; quite soon, however, her books began to propound that she had found sure evidence of life after death in her clinical settings, mostly in Near Death Experiences.

Then Kübler-Ross personally experienced yet another turn of events: a series of strokes, the last being as late as 1995, which left her facing the prospect of her own slow and debilitating death. Don Lattin in a report for the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed her in 1997 and found her very unhappy about her situation, recanting her previous, more religious, philosophy. She described her current state: “It’s neither living nor dying. It’s stuck in the middle. My only regret is that for 40 years I spoke of a good God who helps people, who knows what you need and how all you have to do is ask for it. Well that’s baloney. I want to tell the world that it’s a bunch of bull. Don’t believe a word of it.”32

It is bad enough that the person who had done most in the twentieth century to define the successful grieving process should herself fall victim to one of its most obvious pitfalls: “stage 2: anger” as she called it. Kübler-Ross was widely reported to have recanted her observations about the afterlife, and worse still, to have admitted that she cynically invented her surety both to enrich herself and to benefit her clinical work. Some say her religious belief was a kind of “stage 1: denial.” Others say that her cynicism and admissions of fraud were the result of her depression, from which she has now recovered. Maybe so, but what does it say of her later reaffirmations? Perhaps Kübler-Ross’s experience means that we all harbor affirmations as well as doubts in our mind about an afterlife and that both can be helpful as well as