GRIEF: Katie Couric and the Muppets of “Seasame Street” in a new special, “When Families Grieve,” about coping with the loss of a parent.

Two photos of a brother saying goodbye.

On Andrew Sullivan’s blog there’s been a thread on this question. I’ll track back and read it from the beginning, but the question is interesting. In the Death and Immortality course we’ve touched on suicide here and there, mostly when considering whether death is a harm.

Warning! The discussion is on the creepy side. Below is a comment from a reader.

There is good evidence that Toxoplasma gondii — the parasite often found in cat feces that poses a risk to human fetuses — spreads by affecting the behavior of its rodent hosts. Infected rodents show decreased fear-responses to cats, which is thought to increase the likelihood that the cats will then eat the rodents, allowing the protozoa to complete the next phase of their reproductive cycle in a feline host.

Your reader wrote, “Can you image something like that in humans?  Scary.”  There is a growing body of evidence, which is somewhat controversial, that toxoplasmosis may induce behavioral alterations in infected humans as well.

Another epidemic it seems. This time of “genuine” suicides as opposed to “suicide bombers”.

“Young people see this as a way to give meaning to what seem like meaningless lives,” said Sudhir Kakar, a prominent psychoanalyst and novelist who has written extensively about mental health in India. “It is a way to become a hero, to take a stand.”

Suicide is generally considered taboo in Hinduism, the religion of most Indians, because it disrupts the cycle of reincarnation that is central to the soul’s progress, Mr. Kakar said.

But the willingness to die for a cause, as exemplified by Gandhi’s epic fasts during the struggle for independence, is seen as noble and worthy. Ancient warriors in Tamil Nadu, in southeastern India, would commit suicide if their commander was killed, Mr. Kakar said. And the practice of sati, or widow burning, although outlawed, remains a potent symbol of wifely devotion.

In modern, democratic India, however, such drastic measures seem like a bizarre and troubling throwback that has shattered many families.

Some surprising and not so surprising findings about a person’s religious beliefs and their socioeconomic class.

Lifelong theists (“I have always believed in God”) are disproportionately from lower socio-economic groups while lifelong atheists (“I have never believed in God”) are disproportionately from higher socio-economic groups.

But then the surprise:

Converts to theism (“I believe in God now but have not always done so”) are disproportionately from upper and upper-middle-class social groups while converts to atheism (“I used to believe in God but I no longer do so”) are disproportionately from lower social groups. Since education strongly correlates with social standing, the study came across similar findings when education was examined.

Archaeologists discover 3,500-year-old door to the afterlife:

Archaeologists have unearthed a 3,500-year-old door to the afterlife from the tomb of a high-ranking Egyptian official near Karnak temple in Luxor, the Egyptian antiquities authority said Monday.

A cartoon from The New Yorker. Hilarious as usual.

Richard Dawkins is dealing with a backlash. This time it isn’t from theists.

The prominent atheist faced a torrent of abuse from outraged fans after he announced that all further postings to the discussion forum on his website would be tightly moderated to ward off what he called “something rotten” in internet culture.

Thanks Jason!

One of the questions I ask my Intro to Philosophy students is this: If you felt called to do something but knew it would cost you your life, would you not do it and live? Or would you do it and die?

The question is prompted by Socrates and Martin Luther King, Jr. Would you continue on in obedience (they felt) to God or would you hightail it outta there?

In our discussion of Socrates’ position on death it became clear to me that I usually think of death as pertaining to some physical end. Or I should say that the notion of death is conceptualized as something completely physical. There’s the soul, sure. But whatever happens on that side of the equation has nothing to do with death.

Now I’m not so sure. Maybe death or maybe what it means to die is also wrapped up in what it means for us to live.

It was Socrates’ inability or unwillingness to live without being free to think, free to question others and himself that led him to think that kind of unexamined life (Apology 38a) just isn’t worth a hill of beans. It isn’t worth living. Aristotle would agree, I believe, and would go so far as to say that it isn’t even a human life if you’re not thinking and reasoning. This doesn’t mean that thinking here is limited to philosophical thinking, at least on Aristotle’s view. But there seems little doubt that Socrates does mean a deep, reflective activity. A life without examining oneself isn’t much of a life.

Although we briefly discussed the issues of postmortem harm, the really interesting thing was this topsy-turvy feeling I had about what is a “death” and what does it really mean to “live”. Perhaps there still is a connection between how many tubes one wants poking out of one in order to call that situation “a life”. Are you really living anymore under certain medical interventions? Is being on a respirator “living”?

The flip side, though, is coming to a point where none of the physical stuff even comes close to “defining” what death is or what dying is. And that’s the surprising part. Dying, it seems, has everything to do with how one lives. What constitutes death has everything to do with what a person considers  “living”. And if that’s the case, then what we should be “worrying about” is “living” not “dying, death, and immortality”.

When we get to DZ Phillips, I think he’ll have something to say about this and help me out. From what I gather, his view about immortality is intimately connected to the nature of the life the person lived. How we conceive of a person in his “immortal” state is completely connected to the life that person led here in the nittygritty world.