In a 2014 YouGov poll, 34% of Britons claimed to believe in ghosts.
That is in the context of only 23% who described themselves as religious. Secularism does not seem to be shaking the deep-rooted conviction that there is more to reality than meets the eye.
The earliest stories in the world include accounts of ghosts. The Epic of Gilgamesh, set in the Middle East, includes a meeting of its hero with an appearance of his dead friend Enkidu. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol continued to reference this widespread belief. Ghosts are not the exclusive preserve of any particular religion. Buddhist literature includes an entire realm of ghosts, Islam refers to the ‘jinn’ and the Hebrew Bible includes an appearance of a ghost (1 Samuel 28).
Comedy, free speech and warnings from the past
Hannah Arendt was a Jewish philosopher who grew up in Nazi Germany. Eventually she had to flee to France and, …