Ransen's Blog

 From Wikipedia: Martin Amis and Agnosticism In 2006, Amis said that "agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast" that atheism is "premature". Clearly "there's not going to be any kind of anthropomorphic entity at all", but the universe is "so incredibly complicated", "so over our heads", that we cannot exclude the existence of "an intelligence" behind it. [134] In 2010, he said: "I'm an agnostic, which is the only rational position. It's not because I feel a God or think that anything resembling the banal God of religion will turn up. But I think that atheism sounds like a proof of something, and it's incredibly evident that we are nowhere near intelligent enough to understand the universe ... Writers are above all individualists, and above all writing is freedom, so they will go off in all sorts of directions. I think it does apply to

 Most religions have a way of saying that death is just a passage to another world, another way of being. There's " go beyond the veil" , " pass over" (or the more ridiculous abbreviation " pass "), and " go to a better place " etc. etc. Even some Buddhist meditations on death talk about " not being able to take it with you " (body, possessions etc.), which implies that the dead person is going somewhere. The Japanese have two ways of expressing death. shinimasu ( 死 ( ) に ま す ) and nakunarimasu ( 亡 ( ) く な り ま す ). This latter seems more real, though it is politer than shinimasu. Nakunarimasu can be interpreted as "to become nothing". Which is a more honest expression of the reality. I had a shock after reading Bad Blood by Lorna Sage... ...she had become nothing. The book was so good I looked for more writings by her, but discovered she had died in January 2001 and did not leave any similar works to Bad Blood. I am not