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Last week, I took a break from all the news and cares of this life to spend a couple of hours thinking about the next one.

My role was to serve as moderator in a discussion titled “Is There an Afterlife?” featuring two rabbis, David Wolpe and Bradley Shavit Artson, and two atheists, Sam Harris, author of “The End of Faith,” and Christopher Hitchens, author of “God Is Not Great.”