Spiritualism
Spiritualism is the metaphysical school of thought opposing physicalism and also is the category of all spiritual beliefs/views (in monism and dualism) from ancient to modern. In the long nineteenth century, Spiritualism (when not lowercase) became most known as a social religious movement according to which the laws of nature and of God include "the continuity of consciousness after the transition of death" and "the possibility of communication between those living on Earth and those who have made the transition". The afterlife, or the " spirit world", is seen by spiritualists not as a static place, but as one in which spirits continue to evolve. These two beliefs—that contact with spirits is possible, and that spirits are more advanced than humans—lead spiritualists to a third belief: that spirits are capable of providing useful insight regarding moral and ethical issues, as well as about the nature of God. Some spiritualists will speak of a concept which they refer ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mediumship
Mediumship is the practice of purportedly mediating communication between familiar spirits or ghost, spirits of the dead and living human beings. Practitioners are known as "mediums" or "spirit mediums". There are different types of mediumship or spirit conduit (channeling), channelling, including table-turning, séance tables, trance, and ouija. Belief in psychic ability is widespread despite the absence of objective evidence for its existence. Scientific researchers have attempted to ascertain the validity of claims of mediumship. An experiment undertaken by the British Psychological Society led to the conclusion that the test subjects demonstrated no mediumistic ability. Mediumship gained popularity during the nineteenth century, when ouija boards were used as a source of entertainment. Investigations during this period revealed widespread fraud—with some practitioners employing techniques used by Magic (illusion), stage magicians—and the practice began to lose credibilit ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Spiritualist Church
A spiritualist church is a church affiliated with the informal spiritualist movement which began in the United States in the 1840s. Spiritualist churches are now found around the world, but are most common in English-speaking countries, while in Latin America, Central America, Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa, where a form of spiritualism called spiritism is more popular, meetings are held in spiritist centres, most of which are non-profit organizations rather than ecclesiastical bodies. History The origin of mediumship is usually linked to the seances conducted by the Fox sisters at Hydesville, Arcadia, New York in 1848, but some believers date the unofficial beginning of modern American Spiritualism to the Shakers and similar religious groups. By 1853 the movement had reached San Francisco and London, and by 1860 was worldwide. The Fox family remained very active in Spiritualism for many years. Other notable Spiritualists of that era were Mercy Cadwallader, who became a sort of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Spiritism
Spiritism (French: ''spiritisme''; Portuguese: ''espiritismo'') is a spiritualist, religious, and philosophical doctrine established in France in the 1850s by the French teacher, educational writer, and translator Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail. He wrote books on "the nature, origin, and destiny of spirits, and their relation with the corporeal world" under the pen name Allan Kardec.Moreira-Almeida, Alexander (2008). Kardec's works are the result of the study of mediumistic phenomena, which he initially believed to be of a fraudulent nature. By questioning several mediums, while they were in trance state, on a variety of matters, he compiled, compared, and synthesized the answers obtained from spirits into a body of knowledge known as the codification. It speaks of the constant need to investigate the world around us (science), to make sense of our findings (philosophy), and to apply them to our day-to-day living so as to improve ourselves and the world around us (religion). T ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Spirit Guide
A spirit guide, in Western spiritualism, is an entity that remains as a discarnate spirit to act as a guide or protector to a living incarnation, incarnated human being. Description In traditional African belief systems, well before the spread of Christianity and Islam, Africans believed and continue to believe in the eternal and ubiquitous spirit of the ancestors and the Almighty God. The ancestors are thought of as the ‘living-dead’, who continue to show a compassionate interest in the daily lives of their living descendants. Ancestor spirit guides are superior to the living and may include deceased parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles or aunts. It is believed that because they have crossed over to the other side of life, the spirit guides act as mediators between the living and the Almighty God. This way of life is regarded as ancestor reverence, communication or remembering, and not as ancestor worship per se. According to Western Theosophy (Blavatskian), ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Allan Kardec
Allan Kardec () is the pen name of the French educator, translator, and author Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (; 3 October 1804 – 31 March 1869). He is the author of the five books known as the Spiritist Codification, and the founder of Spiritism.Moreira-Almeida, Alexander (2008)''Allan Kardec and the development of a research program in psychic experiences'' Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association & Society for Psychical Research Convention. Winchester, UK. Early life Rivail was born in Lyon in 1804 and raised as a Roman Catholic. He pursued interests in philosophy and the sciences, and became an acolyte and colleague of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Rivail completed a number of educational courses including a Bachelor of Arts degrees in science and a doctorate in medicine. He was also fluent in German, English, Italian, and Spanish, in addition to his native French. Kardec became interested in Protestantism after his education in Switzerland. He was a member of s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Emanuel Swedenborg
Emanuel Swedenborg (, ; born Emanuel Swedberg; 29 March 1772) was a Swedish pluralistic-Christian theologian, scientist, philosopher and mystic. He became best known for his book on the afterlife, ''Heaven and Hell'' (1758). Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist. In 1741, at 53, he entered into a spiritual phase in which he began to experience dreams and visions, notably on Easter Weekend, on 6 April 1744. His experiences culminated in a "spiritual awakening" in which he received a revelation that Jesus Christ had appointed him to write ''The Heavenly Doctrine'' to reform Christianity. According to ''The Heavenly Doctrine'', the Lord had opened Swedenborg's spiritual eyes so that from then on, he could freely visit heaven and hell to converse with angels, demons and other spirits, and that the Last Judgment had already occurred in 1757, the year before the 1758 publication of ''De Nova Hierosolyma et ejus doctrina coelesti'' (English: ''Concernin ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Religion
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements; however, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacred things, faith,Tillich, P. (1957) ''Dynamics of faith''. Harper Perennial; (p. 1). a supernatural being or supernatural beings or "some sort of ultimacy and transcendence that will provide norms and power for the rest of life". Religious practices may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities or saints), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, public service, or other aspects of human cultur ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Latin America
Latin America or * french: Amérique Latine, link=no * ht, Amerik Latin, link=no * pt, América Latina, link=no, name=a, sometimes referred to as LatAm is a large cultural region in the Americas where Romance languages — languages derived from Latin — are predominantly spoken. The term was coined in the nineteenth century, to refer to regions in the Americas that were ruled by the Spanish, Portuguese and French empires. The term does not have a precise definition, but it is "commonly used to describe South America, Central America, Mexico, and the islands of the Caribbean." In a narrow sense, it refers to Spanish America plus Brazil (Portuguese America). The term "Latin America" is broader than categories such as ''Hispanic America'', which specifically refers to Spanish-speaking countries; and ''Ibero-America'', which specifically refers to both Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries while leaving French and British excolonies aside. The term ''Latin America'' was f ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Physicalism
In philosophy, physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality as opposed to a "two-substance" ( dualism) or "many-substance" ( pluralism) view. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated. Physicalism is closely related to materialism. Physicalism grew out of materialism with advancements of the physical sciences in explaining observed phenomena. The terms are often used interchangeably, although they are sometimes distinguished, for example on the basis of physics describing more than just matter (including energy and physical law). According to a 2009 survey, physicalism is the majority view among philosophers, but there remains significant opposition to physicalism. Neuroplasticity has been used as an argument in support of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Women's Suffrage
Women's suffrage is the right of women to vote in elections. Beginning in the start of the 18th century, some people sought to change voting laws to allow women to vote. Liberal political parties would go on to grant women the right to vote, increasing the number of those parties' potential constituencies. National and international organizations formed to coordinate efforts towards women voting, especially the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (founded in 1904 in Berlin, Germany). Many instances occurred in recent centuries where women were selectively given, then stripped of, the right to vote. The first place in the world to award and maintain women's suffrage was New Jersey in 1776 (though in 1807 this was reverted so that only white men could vote). The first province to ''continuously'' allow women to vote was Pitcairn Islands in 1838, and the first sovereign nation was Norway in 1913, as the Kingdom of Hawai'i, which originally had universal suffrage in 1840, r ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Abolitionism
Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery. In Western Europe and the Americas, abolitionism was a historic movement that sought to end the Atlantic slave trade and liberate the enslaved people. The British abolitionist movement started in the late 18th century when English and American Quakers began to question the morality of slavery. James Oglethorpe was among the first to articulate the Enlightenment case against slavery, banning it in the Province of Georgia on humanitarian grounds, and arguing against it in Parliament, and eventually encouraging his friends Granville Sharp and Hannah More to vigorously pursue the cause. Soon after Oglethorpe's death in 1785, Sharp and More united with William Wilberforce and others in forming the Clapham Sect. The Somersett case in 1772, in which a fugitive slave was freed with the judgement that slavery did not exist under English common law, helped launch the British movement to abolish slavery. T ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Upper Class
Upper class in modern societies is the social class composed of people who hold the highest social status, usually are the wealthiest members of class society, and wield the greatest political power. According to this view, the upper class is generally distinguished by immense wealth which is passed on from generation to generation. Prior to the 20th century, the emphasis was on ''aristocracy'', which emphasized generations of inherited noble status, not just recent wealth. Because the upper classes of a society may no longer rule the society in which they are living, they are often referred to as the old upper classes, and they are often culturally distinct from the newly rich middle classes that tend to dominate public life in modern social democracies. According to the latter view held by the traditional upper classes, no amount of individual wealth or fame would make a person from an undistinguished background into a member of the upper class as one must be born into a famil ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |