"If we are to accept religious stories as evidence, we will end up with contradictory evidence. There are many different religious stories from many different religious traditions, and these stories contradict each other... Religious stories cancel each other out... Even if one of them is true, however, none of them is evidence that anyone has ever survived bodily death. For every story there is another equally credible story that contradicts it, and contradictory evidence is self-defeating--it is like having no evidence at all." Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin, Wisdom Without Answers, (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998), p. 77