You Can't Fight With the Fella in the Brite Nitegown

Instapunk looks at death:

...achieving acceptance of death is one of the primary purposes of all major religions. Why is it that Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and all the other great faiths work so hard to eliminate the fear of death, to describe it as a rite of passage rather than an end? Because like all unconquered fears, the fear of death distorts our values and creates a self-defined prison. Lives that should be lived become instead a kind of bunker in which we hide and peek out at the world through ragged slits in our fortifications against death...

...Here are the facts we don't want to hear about in the media. We are all going to die, and the overwhelming majority of us are going to die from heart disease (28.5%), cancer (22.8%), stroke (6.7%), emphysema (5.1%), and accidents (4.4%), to the tune of more than 1.5 million a year. Another 70,000 of us will die from diabetes every year, 62,000 from flu or pneumonia, 55,000 from Alzheimer's, and about 115,000 from various other diseases. That's more than 5,000 a day, 80 percent of the total. The wild hope of curing any or all of these diseases is merely rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. If we eliminate these ills, we'll just die from something else.

The point, of course, is that it's how we live our lives that matter. As always, read the whole thing.