D
djeter
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"The European tradition’s ritualized culture of dying and burial was a dialectical phenomenon that enabled society to relativize itself. By embedding death in cultic forms, society integrated into itself the very thing that called it into question. This integration required a religious sense. The thing that relativized society also legitimated it. By acknowledging that it was not God, it was also able to understand its authority as divinely sanctioned. Faith in eternal life also relativized the opposition between life and death. There is an old executioner’s axe in Münster that bears the words, “When I raise the axe I’m wishing eternity for a poor sinner.”
Because modernity is structurally atheistic, it has to conceive the opposition between life and death as if it were absolute. **“I’ll live on in my children.” — What an empty phrase in the face of man’s experience of himself as an individual person. **Society thus struggles doggedly to prolong life, only to be forced to capitulate in the end. It is unable to develop any authentic rituals to accompany the journey to this end because it lacks any horizon in which to relativize itself.
The first result of this is a tendency to put death out of its mind. Death takes place with increasing frequency in some out-of- the- way holding room in a clinic. The consequence: repressed and yet increased fear of death. Most people today face the prospect of their own death without ever having been present at another’s.
But then there is a further tendency simply to eliminate quietly those who can no longer be perceived as members of the social world. **Holland has legalized euthanasia and yet it is by no means ejected from the international community. On the contrary: its doctors think they are in the avant garde when they kill. **And all of a sudden it seems as if things cannot happen quickly enough.
The new definition of death as “brain death” makes it possible to declare people dead while they are still breathing and to bypass the dying process in order to quarry spare parts for the living from the dying. Death no longer comes at the end of the dying process, but — by the fiat of a Harvard commission — at its beginning. The Jewish-Christian custom of burial is increasingly replaced by the machine-like disposal of corpses through cremation without any public to look on."
more here.
Your comments most welcome. TIA
dj
"The European tradition’s ritualized culture of dying and burial was a dialectical phenomenon that enabled society to relativize itself. By embedding death in cultic forms, society integrated into itself the very thing that called it into question. This integration required a religious sense. The thing that relativized society also legitimated it. By acknowledging that it was not God, it was also able to understand its authority as divinely sanctioned. Faith in eternal life also relativized the opposition between life and death. There is an old executioner’s axe in Münster that bears the words, “When I raise the axe I’m wishing eternity for a poor sinner.”
Because modernity is structurally atheistic, it has to conceive the opposition between life and death as if it were absolute. **“I’ll live on in my children.” — What an empty phrase in the face of man’s experience of himself as an individual person. **Society thus struggles doggedly to prolong life, only to be forced to capitulate in the end. It is unable to develop any authentic rituals to accompany the journey to this end because it lacks any horizon in which to relativize itself.
The first result of this is a tendency to put death out of its mind. Death takes place with increasing frequency in some out-of- the- way holding room in a clinic. The consequence: repressed and yet increased fear of death. Most people today face the prospect of their own death without ever having been present at another’s.
But then there is a further tendency simply to eliminate quietly those who can no longer be perceived as members of the social world. **Holland has legalized euthanasia and yet it is by no means ejected from the international community. On the contrary: its doctors think they are in the avant garde when they kill. **And all of a sudden it seems as if things cannot happen quickly enough.
The new definition of death as “brain death” makes it possible to declare people dead while they are still breathing and to bypass the dying process in order to quarry spare parts for the living from the dying. Death no longer comes at the end of the dying process, but — by the fiat of a Harvard commission — at its beginning. The Jewish-Christian custom of burial is increasingly replaced by the machine-like disposal of corpses through cremation without any public to look on."
more here.
Your comments most welcome. TIA
dj
