DEATH AS NATURAL & GENERATIVE and no less sacred than life
Perhaps there is no more alluring portal for experiencing the benefits of evolutionary spirituality -- that is, a spirituality grounded in a modern, evolutionary cosmology -- than by way of a profoundly new way of understanding death. Thanks to the sciences of astronomy, astrophysics, chemistry, geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, cell biology, embryology, ecology, geography, and math, we can now not only accept but celebrate that: *** 1. Death is natural and creative at every level of reality. 2. Death is no less sacred than life.
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I. Introduction...
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Death is natural and creative at every level of reality.
Helping individuals find inspiration and hope in a larger and beneficent context for death is a core function of religions throughout the world.
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Stars that lived & died.
Stars that lived and died before our sun was born created all the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our cells.
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Stars that lived & died. (video)
This is a part of a presentation Connie made to Montessori teachers in Wilton, Connecticut on "The Science of Stardust".
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II. Paleontology & Evolutionary Biology
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PALEONTOLOGY
Not until 1796 did scientists begin to entertain the idea that species and whole types of life have gone extinct in Earth history.
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PALEONTOLOGY (video)
Connie talks about Georges Cuvier, Thomas Jefferson and Lewis & Clark.
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EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
As Loren Eiseley has written (1962, "The Firmament of Time") in order for evolution to be discovered, first scientists would have to discover that species death was natural and pervasive in Earth history.
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EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY (video)
Connie talks about the role of Charles Darwin and Loren Eisley. Death had to become natural. Another important realization was the concept of mass extinction.
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