>Or are you referring to our mortality and our refusal to come to terms
>with it?
Go screaming and kicking into that dark night, say I! Coming to terms with death is, as far as I'm concerned, the equivalent of positing that we have to make human life all it could be - coz it's all there is, really. If your social system is such that this is logically denied (the capitalist race being one that must produce a great preponderence of losers - like all races really), well, the winners have got to get the losers hooked on an opiate, eh?
Here's a quote that sums it up nicely, for mine:
"The belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society's attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person's humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die. The quest to achieve true dignity fails when our bodies fail ... The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it." (Sherwin Nuland)
Stuffed indeed, then, is the society where so many lives are denied dignity, and hence so many deaths consigned to inevitable indignity.
And if religion be the opiate, then the Grim Reaper plays The Emancipator. Which logic, 'should you choose to accept it,' makes of religion a cult of death-worship ('thanatos' writ large, Ken!), committed, in its fatalistically passive pragmatism, to robbing its very defining moment of dignity.
None of which means I do not consider, say, liberation theology not to be a good thing - just inherently contradicted - as is the way of all human being, I dare say ...
Cheers, Rob.