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"The existing evidence does not support the conclusion that free will is an illusion. First of all, it does not show that a decision has been made before people are aware of having made it. It simply finds discernible patterns of neural activity that precede decisions. If we assume that conscious decisions have neural correlates, then we should expect to find early signs of those correlates "ramping up" to the moment of consciousness. It would be miraculous if the brain did nothing at all until the moment when people became aware of a decision to move. These experiments all involve quick, repetitive decisions, and people are told not to plan their decisions but just to wait for an urge to come upon them. The early neural activity measured in the experiments likely represents these urges or other preparations for movement that precede conscious awareness. "This is what we should expect with simple decisions. Indeed, we are lucky that conscious thinking plays little or no role in quick or habitual decisions and actions. If we had to consciously consider our every move, we'd be bumbling fools."

>'With unrealistic expectations of our ability to prolong life, with death as an unfamiliar and unnatural event, and without a realistic, tactile sense of how much a worn-out elderly patient is suffering, it's easy for patients and families to keep insisting on more tests, more medications, more procedures. >Doing something often feels better than doing nothing. Inaction feeds the sense of guilt-ridden ineptness family members already feel as they ask themselves, "Why can't I do more for this person I love so much?" >...At a certain stage of life, aggressive medical treatment can become sanctioned torture. When a case such as this comes along, nurses, physicians and therapists sometimes feel conflicted and immoral. We've committed ourselves to relieving suffering, not causing it. A retired nurse once wrote to me: "I am so glad I don't have to hurt old people any more." '

Martini, once favoured by Vatican progressives to succeed Pope John Paul II and a prominent voice in the church until his death at the age of 85 on Friday (8/30), gave a scathing portrayal of a pompous and bureaucratic church failing to move with the times.

Quality of living & dying

Poor analysis of mis-spent $ at EOL

>THE DIVINE COMMANDS to commit genocide found in the Old Testament are some of the most difficult and disturbing parts of scripture. Consider God's decree against the Amalekites: "Totally destroy everything ... Do not spare them; put to death ... children and infants" (1 Samuel 15:2-3). Such passages have been used repeatedly to justify bloodshed in the name of God, beginning with the Crusades and continuing right up through U.S. history, where texts were used in sermons to justify the slaughter of American Indians.... I'd like to propose that there is a better way-a way found in learning to read our Bibles as the apostle Paul read his. >Paul has removed the references to violence against Gentiles, and recontextualized these passages to instead declare God's mercy in Christ for Gentiles. This constitutes a major redefinition of how salvation is conceived: Instead of salvation meaning God "delivering" the ancient Israelites from the hands of their enemies through military victory (as described in Psalm 18, above), Paul now understands salvation to mean the restoration of all people in Christ, including those same "enemy" Gentiles.

26,000 premature deaths/yr in US b/o no health insurance

'If you met me, you'd never know I was mentally ill. In fact, I've gone through most of my adult life without anyone ever knowing - except when I've had to reveal it to a doctor. And that revelation changes everything. It wipes clean the rest of my résumé, my education, my accomplishments, reduces me to a diagnosis. I was surprised when, after one of these run-ins, my psychopharmacologist said this sort of behavior was all too common. At least 14 studies have shown that patients with a serious mental illness receive worse medical care than "normal" people. Last year the World Health Organization called the stigma and discrimination endured by people with mental health conditions "a hidden human rights emergency." If you met me, you'd never know I was mentally ill. In fact, I've gone through most of my adult life without anyone ever knowing - except when I've had to reveal it to a doctor. And that revelation changes everything. It wipes clean the rest of my résumé, my education, my accomplishments, reduces me to a diagnosis. I was surprised when, after one of these run-ins, my psychopharmacologist said this sort of behavior was all too common. At least 14 studies have shown that patients with a serious mental illness receive worse medical care than "normal" people. Last year the World Health Organization called the stigma and discrimination endured by people with mental health conditions "a hidden human rights emergency." I never knew it until I started poking around, but this particular kind of discriminatory doctoring has a name. It's called "diagnostic overshadowing." According to a review of studies done by the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, it happens a lot. As a result, people with a serious mental illness - including bipolar disorder, major depression, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder - end up with wrong diagnoses and are under-treated. That is a problem, because if yo

'That undercurrent of violence I felt when I was 6 was there again, present in the easy devaluation of the word "nigger." I knew that it was that very history of violence - my dead great-great-grandfather's ghost and all the young black men who died at the hands of people who thought they were lesser - that was the subtext. This was why I felt so threatened, so overwhelmed, why I was often silenced when people said these things to me. [Violence] in fact exerted a strong undertow in the present. That it could take my great-great-grandfather, but also take young men like Oscar Grant III, shot to death by a transit officer in Oakland in 2009, like Trayvon Martin, like my only brother, killed by a hit-and-run drunken driver who was charged with leaving the scene of an accident but never with the crime of my brother's death. That it could assert they were less in life and deny them justice after death as well. That living in a country where one group of people owned another group of people for some 250 years yielded a culture where one life was worth less than another. Again and again. Then and now.... There is power in naming racism for what it is, in shining a bright light on it, brighter than any torch or flashlight. A thing as simple as naming it allows us to root it out of the darkness and hushed conversation where it likes to breed like roaches. It makes us acknowledge it. Confront it. And in confronting it, we rob it of some of its dark pull. Its senseless, cold drag. When we speak, we assert our human dignity. That is the worth of a word.'

'For decades the dominant story of postwar American religious history has been the triumph of evangelical Christians. Beginning in the 1940s, the story goes, a rising tide of evangelicals began asserting their power and identity, ultimately routing their more liberal mainline Protestant counterparts in the pews, on the offering plate and at the ballot box. In "After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History," published in April by Princeton University Press, Mr. Hollinger argues that the mainline won a broader cultural victory that historians have underestimated. Liberals, he maintains, may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed. Mr. Hollinger's argument generated much chatter among his colleagues when he first presented it at the 2011 meeting. But his sometimes pugnacious new book, he said, is just a "punctuation mark" on the recent spate of work reconsidering the left-hand side of the American religious spectrum, which includes titles like Matthew S. Hedstrom's "Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century"; Jill K. Gill's "Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War and the Trials of the Protestant Left"; and David Burns's "Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus." The surge of interest in liberal religion, many say, reflects the renewed vitality of religious history more generally, which has spread beyond its traditional redoubts in divinity schools to become one of the most popular specializations among academic historians, according to the American Historical Association.

UPDATE ON: 'In 1994, The New York Times reported on how those members, or "partners," as they called themselves, had settled into their first year of life as a community ("Retirement? For 11 Friends, It's Off to Camp"). It was one of a number of such experiments, known as cohousing communities, that were springing up around the country at the time, based on a Danish model developed in the 1960s.... How did the experiment turn out? On the 20th anniversary, the consensus was generally positive. As Helen Papke, 84, observed, it has been a lesson in patience. "When it's good, it's so good," she said. "And when it's bad, it's so bad, the angst and argument we have with each other. But we have a conviction to work it out - and we will." Dick Browning, 78, whose wife, Louise, died in 2007, was more effusive. "I love it," he said. "I love the community." Of the original 11 members, seven are still here, although apart from Ms. Browning, no one has died. (One couple and one woman left for personal reasons.) The community has taken on new members, so there are now 13 altogether...,'

UPDATE ON: 'In 1994, The New York Times reported on how those members, or "partners," as they called themselves, had settled into their first year of life as a community ("Retirement? For 11 Friends, It's Off to Camp"). It was one of a number of such experiments, known as cohousing communities, that were springing up around the country at the time, based on a Danish model developed in the 1960s.... How did the experiment turn out? On the 20th anniversary, the consensus was generally positive. As Helen Papke, 84, observed, it has been a lesson in patience. "When it's good, it's so good," she said. "And when it's bad, it's so bad, the angst and argument we have with each other. But we have a conviction to work it out - and we will." Dick Browning, 78, whose wife, Louise, died in 2007, was more effusive. "I love it," he said. "I love the community." Of the original 11 members, seven are still here, although apart from Ms. Browning, no one has died. (One couple and one woman left for personal reasons.) The community has taken on new members, so there are now 13 altogether...,'

'50 years to the day after his death, Clive Staples Lewis, known to his friends and family as Jack, will be among the more than 100 people commemorated in some fashion in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, alongside figures like Geoffrey Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, the Brontë sisters, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keats, John Milton and Ted Hughes.'

'50 years to the day after his death, Clive Staples Lewis, known to his friends and family as Jack, will be among the more than 100 people commemorated in some fashion in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, alongside figures like Geoffrey Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, the Brontë sisters, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keats, John Milton and Ted Hughes.'

NYH palliativist fights for her own life to the end

J.L.A. Garcia sees as wicked the viewpoint he attributes to Singer: "He has little use for most of the central elements of ethical sensibility and compunction, seeing rights and virtues as mere instruments in the service of maximizing the satisfaction of interests; and indeed he vigorously rejects the notion that there are distinctively human values-a view he dismisses as the pernicious consequence of "speciesism."

Out of Tragedy, Questions About God: 4 out of 5 letters (surprising proportion for NYTimes) object to Wood's either/or view of theodicy: if God is omnipotent (& doesn't prevent suffering), he is cruel; if God is loving and good (and only comforts, but doesn't prevent suffering), he is weak and worth ignoring. They affirm the mystery "that God is deeply present in and through the events of the world - often inscrutably, but always powerfully and lovingly - and though we cannot for the life of us see how, even catastrophes include divine presence and power." A Christian notes that fellow believer "might counter [that] suffering and death come to all, even to a God who in his love took on our mortal, vulnerable condition as his own."

3 classic (& lousy) arguments that it's irrational to fear death - review of Simon Critchley's 'Book of Dead Philosophers'

Conservative criticism of Republican scare tactics about Medicare limiting futile care at EOL

Most readers favor palliative sedation if its primary intent is to allay intolerable suffering even if it may accelerate dying - as opposed to allowing the suffering because its treatment may lead to an earlier death.