Interesting blog. Both of your examples, Pratchett and Potter, are famous for their minds not their bodies. Both, at your point of recall, were still thinking. At what point do you jump, drink, inject? When comes the point when there is nothing left to give?

I heard Pratchett on the radio talking about some conjured up little old lady, rapping on the table with her walking stick, the panel of ethical experts sitting before her, demanding she should be allowed to go now. Seems to me she had loads of life left in her.

We are all born to die. Life has no meaning without death. Our children and our books are all born from our mortality. So at what point do we give up? When does a choice become a duty? When does a duty become compulsion? When does compulsion become law? When is my time to die decided by somebody else?

Pain and suffering. We are fortunate to live in a society where these things can be cloaked to a certain extent. The fear of decline and extinction cannot. Take comfort that we all share the same fate at some point. Lets not reduce the value of life (what some would call its sanctity) to mere pragmatism; that would help solve the pensions short fall.

Efficiency and progress is ours once more...

Terry Pratchett is of course free to end his life at any time of his own choosing. I just do not feel that a process of legalisation needs to be initiated that at some point down the road will make it compulsory for old, sick and poor people to switch themselves off. In my experience of alzheimers disease, those that watch suffer the most.

Life has no meaning without death. One of the criteria that defines life is the ability to die. Immortality removes motivation. The sure arrival of death is what gives us purpose.

Seek comfort in rational thought and science. You believe there is no conscious existence after death. You may be wrong. That's a 50% chance, odds even. Worth hoping. Maybe death is a portal to a new stage of development. What was our knowledge of impending change as we turned safely in the womb?

Our thoughts, our consciousness are energy. Energy cannot be destroyed.

Comes the dawn of a brand new day...

I travel in hope rather than expectation. I look into the abyss in search of hand and foot-holds. I read literature and poetry to find ideas that feed the hope. I look at my parents and remember my grandparents to remind me that proximity to death did not destroy the enjoyment of life. I argue with friends and family about religion, hoping that I am wrong and seeking to be convinced

Hope is all that is left...,oh, and Nick Cave singing Dylan;

When the cities are on fire
With the burning flesh of men
Just remember that death is not the end

but I suspect a degree of irony here.

Ah, belief.


Beliefs based on observable fact are more valid than beliefs based on cultural superstition. The problem is that we don't always recognise this in ourselves, yet we are more than ready to see it in others.

Still, loss of consciousness can be observed and measured, yet the idea of the soul remains very firmly in the realms of belief. To entertain the realistic possibility of an afterlife is to confuse reality with a fiction borne of human nature.

Besides which, I find it insulting that anyone could be compared to the pope, a man who complains that he is being persecuted for not being allowed to persecute homosexuals.


Sophistry. By that reasoning, everyone who plays it has a fifty-fifty chance of winning the Euromillions jackpot. It's just not true.


Mathematically speaking, this is true. It is very much like Schrodinger's famous cat experiment - ie. it only works in theory, not in practice.


Then your safest bet is surely to pray to none at all. If there isn't a god, you have wasted nothing. If there is a god then:

(1) If it is a just god, as long as you tried to lead a good life then you will be all right.

(2) If it is not a just god and requires us to worship it, it is far more likely to be pissed off if you worshipped the wrong god rather than none at all. And humanity has had many gods, so the odds of you picking the right one are infinitesimally small.

(3) The above two arguments are based on deity whose behaviour is predictable. If it cannot be predicted, then there is no point in worshipping it because there is no way of knowing how to worship it or even whether it wants you to. Writing for yourself is writing for others: "My book could very well end up being reconstituted as a trestle table in a home for battered women." - Alan Partridge

Does work in practice; they did it on Horizon!