The Archbishop of Canterbury said Friday night Britain had become an atheist society in which people looked to medicine to provide them with eternal life rather than religion.
Death is assumed to be the end of life, bleak though that thought is.
If we need hope to clutch to our breast at all it will be in such greatly scaled down forms, such as our longings for family happiness, the next holiday or personal fulfilment. Our concentration on the here and now renders thoughts of eternity irrelevant. Addressing a congregation at St German's Cathedral on the Isle of Man, Dr Carey said most people no longer believed in eternal life and desperately sought to postpone death by medical means. Once people who felt fed up or mildly depressed, as we all do at times, talked to their neighbours, to their older relatives or to their parish priest. Many GPs are bombarded with demands upon their time and the desire for pills for every ill.