Fucking with dead people’s minds: The strange case of Darwin and the Dalai Lama

You need to talk to the dead.

For one, they are terribly bored. You know that most of you reading this partake of tabloid news stories and opinion pieces and silly little blogs, because you are bored - and you still have your whole life lying there on the side, like an under-appreciated bowl of salad or sad bits of slowly cooling cauliflower.

The dead don’t even have that much, so they could do with your stories, however trivial, mundane or boring they are - filled with trips to the supermarket, the hours spent in the dentist’s chair or the cute little thing your two-year-old kid (or kitten) did only this morning. The dead aren’t fussy.

They are, however, dead, so they may not laugh at your feeble jokes, or whistle appreciatively, or applaud your pointless pointes but they are a captive audience.

Which is another thing about the dead. Since they hardly ever do talk back, you can use them for all kinds of weird and shabby purposes. Ask any person who has heard some relative say, “Your mother/father would never have approved of this” or “It’s what she/he would have wanted.”

Hell, ask Jesus about the stuff His followers say that He would disapprove of or would have wanted.

When it comes to this particular form of abuse, the dead will always make the perfect victims. As the following tabloid news story so perfectly shows:

“Charles Darwin could have been a Buddhist, according to a scholar who has identified “amazing” similarities between his writing and Tibetan philosophy. Passages in which the Victorian scientist addressed compassion and morality were “virtually the same, or exactly the same” as Tibetan Buddhist texts, according to Professor Paul Ekman, a psychologist who studies the links between human emotions and facial expression.”