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Short Story

The Parable of the Atheist and the Logical Positivist

Michael Langford drops in on the afterlife for an argument about personal identity.

Two years before his death Professor Jones had a near death experience. The experience had been extraordinary, and surprisingly similar to the accounts he had read of other people’s near death experiences. In particular, there was that rehearsal of his whole life and that long tunnel with the friendly white light at the end of it. For all the following week, for the first time since he had jettisoned his juvenile religious faith (at seventeen), serious doubts about his atheism assailed him. Eventually, however, sanity returned – in no small part thanks to his friend, Professor Thomson.

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