Blog Stats
- 2,950,740 readers since June 2008
Recent Comments
- Anonymous on Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Stacked Corpses
- Anonymous on Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris: Is This What a Rising Christian Political Star Looks Like?
- Anonymous on Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris: Is This What a Rising Christian Political Star Looks Like?
- Anonymous on Christopher Hitchens Recites From Memory Wilfred Owen’s Great Anti-War Poem, “Dulce et Decorum est”
- How Meditation Changes The Brain | Addiction Treatment Strategies - addictions on Neurons That Fire Together Wire Together: The New York Times Says 8 Weeks of Meditation, 30 Minutes a Day, May Change the Brain
- Anonymous on Matthew 27:51-53: The Bible’s “Night of the Living Dead” Passage
- Anonymous on John Wayne Cast as Hamlet: A Great Joke About the Plays and Language of Shakespeare
- Anonymous on John Wayne Cast as Hamlet: A Great Joke About the Plays and Language of Shakespeare
- Anonymous on Book Review of “Spectacles of Empire: Monsters, Martyrs, and the Book of Revelation”
- Anonymous on Book Review of “Spectacles of Empire: Monsters, Martyrs, and the Book of Revelation”
- Anonymous on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Anonymous on In 1935, Were Cary Grant and Randolf Scott Sex Partners? No, But These Images Look Rather Camp
- LG Zambanini on Hanger 18: 1950s Military Clerk-Typist, June Crane, Claims That There Were Alien Bodies Stored at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio
- Sonny Walteco on Josh Timonen: Richard Dawkins’s Judas Iscariot?
- Sheilah V Madrid on In 1935, Were Cary Grant and Randolf Scott Sex Partners? No, But These Images Look Rather Camp
Top Posts
- What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- A List Of Republican Dog Whistles That No Longer Seem To Work
- Walt Whitman: "To be indeed a God!"
- Clit Rubbing Bonobos: A Clue to the Evolutionary Origin of Human Homosexuality?
- "The Future Has Been Shown to Me to the Year 2037": Jeane Dixon and the Marketing of Miracle, Mystery, and Authority
- Are Luke 24:6 and Mark 16:6-7 in Contradiction?
- Matthew 27:51-53: The Bible's "Night of the Living Dead" Passage
- Thinking about Symmetry via Stuart Kauffman, William Blake, AR Ammons, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Robert Frost---and My Wife
- "The Fixation of Belief": Charles Sanders Peirce's Terrific Introduction to Critical Thinking
-
Recent Posts
Recent Haiku Tweets
Tweets by SantiTafarella-
Tag Archives: death
Writing or Art? Mel Bochner’s “LANGUAGE IS NOT TRANSPARENT” (1970)
Is it art? Is this the sort of art one passes by impatiently as not really art? Notice that it has no conventional images in it, such as, say, a Madonna with child. Where Mary and the baby Jesus might … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged art, atheism, death, derrida, God, life, philosophy, time, writing
2 Comments
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel: Get an Annual Flu Shot and a Colonoscopy Every Ten Years, But Skip Your Annual Physical
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, writes at The New York Times today that you should get an annual flu shot and a colonoscopy every ten years, but skip annual physicals. Seriously. He says there is no evidence that they save lives. … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged cancer, death, health, heart disease, hypochondria, life, wellness, worry
Leave a comment
A New Golden Age? The Empty Soul Revs Up, Getting Ever Better at Gobbling Things Into Its Seemingly Bottomless And Insatiable Abyss, And We Call It Prosperity
Some good news. We are basically living in the most peaceful and prosperous moment in human history. Ever. Here’s Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator: A study in the current issue of The Lancet shows […] Global life expectancy now … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, Buddhism, death, ecology, economics, emptiness, God, life, prosperity
2 Comments
ATP, Not The Soul Or A Vital Essence, Is Why You’re Alive–And Why You Might Live Again
In our bodies, oxygen and glucose are transformed by protein machines in our cells into the molecule ATP. ATP is the bomb. It’s what stands between you and “the point of no return.” Shakespeare seems apt here (from Hamlet’s famous … Continue reading
One Shall Be Taken
Two horses–look again– Winged, like cherubim– Watering at a marble trough, Ivy in riot about them. Reality? Silence, bones Saline, a coffin–not a trough– And a tale in the main that Had been uneven, rough, harsh. I’d have done it differently. This … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged cemeteries, creative writing, death, literature, poem, poetry, rapture, writing
1 Comment
Brute Facts and Sufficient Reasons
The most brute fact of all is learning that we will die, which we then cast about for an explanation that will sufficiently account for this fact: “As in, forever? Does someone will this death of mine?” In our searching … Continue reading
Between Gods And Animals, The Sweet Spot
From the vantage of the Greco-Roman pagans, because we’re neither gods nor exclusively animals, human beings are in a very, very sweet spot. Arguably the best spot. Think about it. The gods can make choices; they can fight and have … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged art, atheism, death, God, happiness, life, Nietzsche, philosophy, psychology
Leave a comment
Female Elephants Rescue a Baby Elephant from Drowning
Pretty life affirming. Watching this works your nerves, but they do manage to get the baby out. Absent hands and tools, these adult elephants use their trunks, their bodies, and a willingness to run risks to their own lives to … Continue reading
Stay
JD Schramm on coming out of the suicide closet: __________ And here’s a good new book on the issue of suicide.
Sandra Bullock As Odysseus: The Film “Gravity” Is Insanely Good
I saw Gravity, and plan to see it again before it leaves theatres. But it’s not a perfect movie. With its inane exchange of banter between the ground crew and astronauts at the beginning of the film, it gets off … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged death, existentialism, film, gravity, life, movies, Sandra Bullock, space
Leave a comment
James Baldwin on Death
Nicely, nicely said: Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged African American, atheism, death, existentialism, gay, gay equality, james baldwin, life, nationalism
1 Comment
Existentialism Defined in Two Sentences
The following occurred to me on waking from a nap this afternoon: Existentialism can be summed up in just six words consisting of two sentences: You’re going to die. Your move. Chess players, medieval Germany, circa 1305-1340. (Image source: Wikipedia … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, Camus, death, existentialism, Kierkegaard, life, philosophy, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir
4 Comments
Our Collective Existential Situation in a Nutshell (In Case You Missed It)
Here’s the two-fold problem: (1) each of us is limited to a body we did not choose and that dies, and (2) science since Darwin has revealed living things to be machines that evolve by competition (the proteins in cells, … Continue reading
The Meaning of Life in the Midst of Large Numbers
In For the Time Being (1999), Annie Dillard (b. 1945) writes the following: “There is now, living in New York City, a church-sanctioned hermit, Theresa Mancuso, who wrote recently, ‘The thing we desperately need is to face the way it is’” … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged death, demographics, existentialism, happiness, life, numbers, statistics, suicide
2 Comments
Aging Before Your Very Eyes
A plausible scenario of start to finish based on a related family of girls and women:
Dog Plays By Itself
Pleasure in concentration and pursuit. And notice the constant tail wagging. On your way to dusty death (Heidegger called us “beings unto death”), do you have a satisfying mental and physical practice that keeps you occupied? Aside from giving you … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged death, dogs, existentialism, games, intelligence, life, philosophy, play, psychology, vanity
2 Comments
Death and Persona
Heidegger calls each human being a “being unto death”–that is, a being turned toward and moving in death’s direction. What is the consequence of this? One is that each of us adopts a persona. The time-limiting nature of your existence … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged death, existentialism, persona, philosophy, psychology
Leave a comment
We Live Without a Net on the Outskirts of Nowheresville
The below image of the Earth and our moon (the starburst is our planet and the tiny dot under it, the moon), recently taken by the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn 900 million miles away, is more than a little unnerving. … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged alone, atheism, death, existentialism, life, margins, science, space
1 Comment
James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano) Died Today
Apparently of a heart attack while in Italy. He was 51. Here’s a bit from The New York Times’ obituary: James Joseph Gandolfini Jr. was born in Westwood, N.J., on Sept. 18, 1961. His father was an Italian immigrant who … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged carpe diem, death, James Gandolfini, life, obituary, the sopranos
Leave a comment
Prometheus Unbound 