So, for the next 30 days (probably more) at the rate of one quote per day, I’m going to go through Ernest Becker’s Escape From Evil (EFE) drawing out quotes I feel are particularly powerful.  Becker’s widow and her publisher published EFE in 1975 a year after Becker’s death from cancer in a Vancouver hospital.  I consider EFE to be one of the 5 non-fiction books that has had the greatest impact on me.  I’ve read hundreds, if not thousands, of books and many have moved me, but not many to the extent that this book has.  Sometime, I’ll discuss the other four, but for now, it’s Becker I want to deal with.

My plan is to start on page 1 and go through the book until I get to page 170, the last page of text, pulling out quotes that strike me as particularly interesting and that will contribute…

My next post was supposed to be about morality and that will be the subject of a number of future posts, but I was listening to the CBC this morning and the guest host of the morning program was interviewing a comedian and talking about his upcoming show. That tweaked my interest as I sipped my coffee. The host asked the comedian if his show was going to be clean. The comedian responded that for the most part it would be but that it would also be dirty at times. Well, I just had to weigh in. Morality will just have to wait a bit.

By dirty I know, and you know, that the host and the comedian were referring to the use of  swear words like fuck and shit and piss in his routine. He was not, however, going to make specific reference to the sex act and have…

If there’s a constant in human history, it’s death denial.  Ernest Becker, in the last book he published just before his death in 1974, The Denial of Death, explores and explains the pervasiveness of death denial in all cultures all over the globe.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone interested in trying to come to grips with their own death, but also with the death of cultures, ways of life and all cultural artifacts.  According to Becker, individual death is a given, at least in the physical sense, but as human beings, we can’t accept that inevitability, so we devise sometimes very elaborate systems of death denial.  For Becker, cultures themselves are immortality projects designed to deny death.  The Christian idea of the soul is a great immortality project.  The body dies, the soul lives on forever.  Take that, death!  Life 1, Death 0.  So, Christians…