{"id":6305,"date":"2019-09-30T04:15:12","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T04:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/churchedge.com\/illustrations\/index.php\/2019\/09\/30\/the-motivation-of-a-false-obituary\/"},"modified":"2019-09-30T04:15:12","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T04:15:12","slug":"the-motivation-of-a-false-obituary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/the-motivation-of-a-false-obituary\/","title":{"rendered":"The Motivation of A False Obituary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In &#8220;Is It Real When It Doesn&#8217;t Work?&#8221; Doug Murren and Barb Shurin recount:<\/p>\n<p>Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel awoke one morning to read his own obituary in the local newspaper: &#8220;Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who died yesterday, devised a way for more people to be killed in a war than ever before, and he died a very rich man.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Actually, it was Alfred&#8217;s older brother who had died; a newspaper reporter had bungled the epitaph.<\/p>\n<p>But the account had a profound effect on Nobel.  He decided he wanted to be known for something other than developing the means to kill people efficiently and for amassing a fortune in the process.<\/p>\n<p>So he initiated the Nobel Prize, the award for scientists and writers who foster peace.  Nobel said, &#8220;Every man ought to have the chance to correct his epitaph in midstream and write a new one.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Few things will change us as much as looking at our life as though it is finished.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>[see also HolwickID #23722 and 30088]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In &#8220;Is It Real When It Doesn&#8217;t Work?&#8221; Doug Murren and Barb Shurin recount: Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel awoke one morning to read his own obituary in the local newspaper: &#8220;Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who died yesterday, devised a way for more people to be killed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1477,312,1475,739,1474,1478,1476],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6305"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}