Facing death-7: The problem of prolonged death

Part of the aversion to thinking about death may not be the actual fact of dying but unease about the way we might die. In many ways we are fortunate that we live in a time when medical advances have enabled us to have much greater life expectancies than our ancestors. While much of this improvement has arisen because of reduced infant mortality, some has been because of our ability to combat many illnesses that once used to be quickly fatal. Because of the possibility of rapid response and treatment, many of the quick ways of dying such as due to heart attacks and strokes have been eliminated. But that improvement is not without its costs. We now see many more people having long and lingering deaths, the body and mind gradually losing functionality in ways that cannot be fixed, like an old car in which one part after another starts breaking down and one starts to wonder how much more one should invest in keeping it going.
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Christians in internal exile?

Nonbelievers in the US are only too aware of the ubiquity of religion. Churches and religious billboards are everywhere, Christian broadcasters fill the radio and TV, and public prayer and other forms of pandering to religion by politicians and other public figures is commonplace and even required if they are to be elected to office. So it is a little disconcerting to discover that some Christian conservatives see themselves as a persecuted minority.
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Black Panthers decide to carry guns in public

Extreme supporters of gun rights who think that people should be allowed to carry rifles and other guns openly in almost any public place including schools, libraries, and churches, may now be tempted to temper that gung-ho, anything goes, attitude. The Black Panthers have decided that they too should carry guns openly in order to combat what they see as reckless and unjustified violence by the police against the black community.
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Stealing grass

No, not marijuana, real grass.

Someone in England who wanted to put down a new lawn decided that the easiest and cheapest way to do so was, with a friend, to roll up strips of someone else’s new lawn when the owner was not there and take them away. They were caught on video but police have not been able to identify the pair as yet. What I don’t understand is why the neighbor who observed this and filmed it did not confront the thieves or even yell out from their upstairs window. Maybe they called the police but they did not come in time.
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Supreme Court agreement

We tend to think of the US Supreme Court as being sharply split along ideological lines. But as this article points out, that is because the media focuses on a few high profile cases which have an elevated profile precisely because they are split that way. In actuality, there is a remarkable degree of agreement among the justices in their rulings, with even the lowest level being 66% between Ginsburg and Thomas
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Marcus Brigstocke on the Abrahamic faiths

Once in a while, especially at times when people are fighting and killing over religion more than usual, I like to link to this audio of a rant by British comedian Marcus Brigstocke. The whole thing is worth listening to but especially the part where he talks about how while the violence is committed by a few extremists, the undoubtedly much larger number of religious people who are peaceful cannot completely escape responsibility for what is done.
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