Not Ready to Meet their Maker?

Reading through my back issues of the Economist, I came across this article from March. According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association religious people seem curiously unwilling and unready to die. According to the study, by Andrea Phelps and her colleagues at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, religious people seem to use their faith simply to cope with the pain and degradation involved in treatment, and that they are more willing to experiment with more aggressive treatments, even though such treatment rarely makes much difference to the outcome or their life expectancy.

Dr Phelps and her team followed the last months of 345 cancer patients. The participants were not asked directly how religious they were but, rather, about how they used any religious belief they had to cope with difficult situations by, for example, “seeking God’s love and care”. The score from this questionnaire was compared with their requests for such things as the use of mechanical ventilation to keep them alive and resuscitation to bring them back from the dead.
According to the study, three times as many 'religious' people requested aggressive life extension measures (mechanical ventilation and resuscitation) versus the least religious. I would expect that the religious would be happy to eventually 'meet their maker' - but I suppose this is yet another aspect of the cognitive dissonance we find among religion and it's adherents.

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Principal drowns hundreds of grade school students in school basement

ASSIMULATED PRESS 2009 As the police were hauling Principal Soeht away in handcuffs, a reporter shouted one last question: “Why did you drown hundreds of students in the basement of Tarara Elementary School?” Soeht stared angrily at the reporter and replied, “Because almost all of those children were badly behaved…

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Assisted suicide under the microscope

I'm a lot different than Jerry, a former co-worker. About twelve years ago, Jerry told me that he had a collection of guns and ammunition for when times got bad. He foresaw that all decent society might collapse someday. At that point, large numbers of people would become violent, running around in every neighborhood breaking into each others' houses and shooting each other in order to steal each others' stuff. If this ever happened, he assumed that he would be spending considerable time sitting on his front porch defending his family with his guns. Jerry asked me what I would do if that day happened. I told him that I had already purchased a copy of a book called "Final Exit." If society got that bad--so bad that I'd need to sit on my front porch shooting my neighbors in order to survive--I'd rather check out. Jerry, a conservative and religious man, had never heard of Final Exit. I explained that it is a book written by the founder of the group formerly known as the Hemlock Society. The book explains a relatively painless method of killing one's self. The author was largely motivated by the fact that so many people in great and unrelenting physical pain longer wanted to live, yet they had no socially acceptable way of ending their lives. After I explained this, Jerry was aghast. You'd kill yourself? At that time I had no children. I figured that it was my wife's choice whether she wanted to sit on the porch and shoot the neighbors. Now that I do have children, the decision of what to do, assuming society-wide pandemonium from which there is no physical escape, would be all the more wrenching. I don't know what I'd do. It would depend on how bad things actually got. I am utterly repulsed by the thought of shooting my neighbors. My conversation with Jerry recurred to me as I read "Death Watch: Final Exit's clandestine ways have put the assisted-suicide network on life support," by Aimee Levitt, published 4/8/09 by the Riverfront Times, a free alternative newspaper in St. Louis. Levitt dug deeply into the facts, carefully considering the divergent perspectives on the moral/emotional/legal issues generated by the actions of a group that calls itself, "Final Exit," a group that assist its "clients" to commit suicide. The right to kill one's self always seems to be a simple issue in my mind, at least at first glance: My body, my choice.

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Why no worries about life before life?

This is a comment in the February/March 2009 issue of Scientific American Mind - Letters section. The author is "identified as Farlo":

[W]hy do we perceive death to be different from prebirth or, more precisely, pre-conception? That is also a time when our brain is not functioning--when it does not exist. Yet we do not spend nearly as much time pondering what happened to us or where our minds were before we were born.

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Are you looking for a gift that functions as both a musical instrument and a weapon?

Are you looking for a really unusual gift idea?  I found one at a non-profit Mennonite store in University City, Missouri, Plowsharing Crafts. I spotted this object in the musical instruments section of the store.  It looked like an animal's jawbone.  The proprietor told me that it was, indeed, "a…

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