洋式お盆から - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

Giles Fraser*1 “Superstition can’t be exorcised just by simply turning off the God switch” http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/nov/01/superstition-cant-exorcised-simply-turning-off-god-switch

ハロウィーン *2、万聖節（All Saints' Day）、万霊節（All Souls' Day）と続く数日間というのは要するに洋式お盆だということは異教の地でどのくらい意識されているのだろうか。
Giles Fraser氏はハロウィーンに因んで、基督教と〈死〉について省察している。
基督教と世俗主義における「死者への態度」は大方似ている；

Christian and post-Christian/secular attitudes to the dead in modern Britain still share much in common. Not only does Halloween piggyback on an ancient Christian festival, but many of the rites and ceremonies of the secular funeral borrow their stage directions from religious equivalents: they generally last a certain amount of time, they have readings and singing, often in a sandwich-type arrangement, often a few moments of quiet, sometimes candles. I often take non-religious funerals for friends and they feel remarkably similar as events.

しかし、基督教が優位に立つのは、死者が（例えば「ペドフィリア」のような）とんでもない悪人であった場合である；

But one of the things a religious funeral is able to accommodate in a way the secular funeral cannot is when the deceased was a complete and utter bastard. I have taken a number of funerals for men who were paedophiles – but I have never been to a memorial service for one. Being built around eulogies, the secular memorial service generally finds it difficult to conduct a service for someone about whom nobody has a good word. In this regard, the Christian liturgy – however much the atheist believes it to be built on a fantasy – allows for a greater accommodation of reality. When I take the funeral for a man who used to beat up his wife, no one is lying about him or pretending it didn’t happen. Talk of judgment is a reminder of that, if nothing else.

また、神の不死性と人間の可死性について；

(…) Christians believe in the immortality of God and the mortality of the human. Now a great many people believe in the mortality of God and the immortality of the human. From pseudo-scientific ramblings about the post-human and uploading our personality on to computers to produce digital immortality, to the popular superstition of the dead still being with us – God is dead but human beings have borrowed some of his power. Ironically, this can make the post-religious worldview much less realistic about the reality of death.

ハロウィーンに戻って、植田重雄『ヨーロッパ歳時記』をマークしておく。

ヨーロッパ歳時記 (岩波新書黄版 245)

作者: 植田重雄
出版社/メーカー: 岩波書店
発売日: 1983/10
メディア: 新書
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