What would human life look like if it were not about images of this world and the otherworld? Could such a life sustain people, their societies and cultures in an appropriate way? These are questions, which preoccupy the contributors to this special issue. The goal of this volume is to gather a large scale of discussions to highlight how the questions may be taken seriously. Also, the aim is to...

Early Buddhist karma is an impersonal moral force that impartially and inevitably causes the consequences of actions to be visited upon the actor, especially determining their afterlife destination. The story of King Ajātasattu in the Pāli Samaññaphala Sutta, where not even the Buddha can intervene to save him, epitomizes the criterion of inescapability. Zoroastrian ethical thought runs along s...

Very often, when I talk to the public or the media about “global warming”, they ask me if I believe in global warming. This unfortunate question is apparently very popular among scientists as well. And I say ‘unfortunate’ because when we are dealing with a scientific problem ‘believing’ has no place. In science we either ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’. We ‘believe’ only when we cannot possibly prove a t...

This special issue poses questions concerning death, afterlife and immortality in the age of the Internet. It extends previous work by examining current and emerging practices of grieving and memorializing supported by new media. It suggests that people’s lives today are extended, prolonged, and ultimately transformed through the new circulations, repetitions, and recontextualizations on the In...

Problem 2. [15 points] In ”Die Hard: The Afterlife”, the ghosts of Bruce and Sam have been sent by the evil Simon on another mission to save midtown Manhattan. They have been told that there is a bomb on a street corner that lies in Midtown Manhattan, which Simon defines as extending from 41st Street to 59th Street and from 3rd Avenue to 9th Avenue. Additionally, the code that they need to defu...