I know many people who find the very notion of “resurrection” preposterous, not to mention “eternal life.” Some of them I know in person, some via reading only. Many of them I love and respect. For these people, arguments about the subject are beside the point. Some of them—like the science fiction writer, scholar of nineteenth-century British literature, and irrepressible polymath Adam Roberts—say that, apart from the absurdity of any belief in an “afterlife,” they find the notion of living “forever” extremely repugnant, nightmarish. Others say they’d like to believe but find it impossible to do so.