A persistent mind

I think I have become an atheist. I say "I think" because I'm not really sure. The Roman Catholic religion is so deeply-ingrained in my psyche that I'm not really sure where the dogmatic imprisonment ends and where my free-inquiring rational mind begins. But I've stepped back far enough from it to gain a bit of an understanding of why religion is useful. It is there to mitigate the deep almost unfathomable feeling of loss, waste, and grief whenever someone we love dies. So one of the difficulties of becoming an atheist lies in coming to terms with its implications -- that we simply blink out from existence after we die.

After a bit of scrounging around I managed to find the building blocks for what is shaping out to be my personal alternative view of what happens after we die.

The New Year in the cosmic scheme of things

Tonight in Sydney we're going to be among the first cities on the planet to welcome the New Year and the new decade. Speaking of which, I was reading this week's edition of Time on the train (the one with this year's "Man of the Year" on the cover, wait, "Person of the Year" lest I be accused of being politically incorrect). In it was a letter from a certain "Lisa" who was arguing (with regard to that magazine's welcome of the new decade) that the decade is supposed to begin on 2011. If I recall right her argument went along the lines of her kid knowing how to count and always starting a count from the number one.

Funny. Even funnier if she was being serious there.

Would you consider 1970 part of the 1960's and 1971 the beginning of the 1970's?

I don't think it really matters in the cosmic scheme of things if we are to consider the brainwave I had while commenting on noted blogger Mr London Street's We kiss with dry lips when we say goodnight:

Strange, all the silliness of these holidays marking what are really just our planet's location at an arbitrary point in space and time.

Happy New Year all!

Brittany Murphy and the thing about death...

Just saw this on the news this morning: Brittany Murphy dead at 32. Brittany Murphy is the girl who played the homely sidekick of the character played by Alicia Silverstone in the movie Clueless. She went on to become a star in her own right and I read that she even had a dance track that became a dance club hit.

I can't claim to know Brittany Murphy by any stretch. But the thing about hearing news about someone's death is that it induces an almost reflex-like process in my mind to call up all memories about that person. In the case of Brittany Murphy, it was all the scenes of her in various movies she was in that I've seen. My most extensive store of images of her was from the movie Clueless.