In an age when science can answer most things, 'what happens when you die?' is one of the few mysteries that we have left.
My rather flippant answer is always 'the same as happened before you were born' but that doesn't seem to wash with younger generations who are looking for the answer in greater numbers.
The major beneficiary seems to be Spiritual Churches and Mediums with the Spiritualists’ National Union of Great Britain estimating that they have seen a rise of 22% attending their churches to try to communicate with the spirit world, bolstered by an increasing interest from younger generations.
Spiritualist practises are now big business with sales of tarot card decks seeing a 268% boom in sales and Astrology apps attracting millions of users and sales of crystals reached £1.5 billion last year while magazines devoted solely to witchcraft have also sprung up.
Spiritualism dates back to 1848 and began when two American sisters, Maggie and Kate Fox said they could communicate with the ghost of a man murdered in their home years before their family moved in. Despite a confession in 1888 by Maggie Fox that she and her sister had faked it all along, Spiritualism had been launched and people have been trying to debunk it ever since.
Famous sceptic, James Randi, has had a million dollar challenge to anyone who can prove mediumship, psychic ability or clairvoyance and as yet is unclaimed, as Randi said: 'Under properly controlled conditions, even those mediums who genuinely think they have a gift don’t seem able to do what they claim'.
Believers will put forward the 'proof they receive at seances or readings but that is routinely dismissed as the Barnum Effect where generic statements are accepted and made to fit to make sense to the individual.
Classic supernatural TV shows such as Buffy, Charmed, True Blood and Sabrina could explain why the younger generation are turning towards this 'religion' and i feel that psychics charging for a reading leaves a bad taste but almost everyone has at some point wondered 'what's next?'
I don't believe in heaven, hell or even life after death but what Spiritualism is peddling is exactly what the other religions have been doing since they were first invented, the answer to what happens when you die.
Whether you choose to accept it from a Medium, Priest or a Rabbi that is your choice, as is the choice to dismiss the lot of them.
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