A Good Death?

While I am sympathetic to Kinsley's medical condition, I am bothered by his self-centered view of life and death, and by the "chilly religious void" in his article. Kinsley may be an "ironic cultural observer" in some respects, but I didn't find much in the way of irony in this article. Perhaps that was because I read the article with awareness of his atheism, which he has spoken about in several articles, including in a book review last year in the Int'l Herald Tribune of Christopher Hitchens's book, "God Is Not Great."(Kinsley lavished praise on the book.) Kinsley's choice or inclination not to be other-centered was also evident in an article he wrote in 2006 for the Washington Post about embryonic stem cell research: "Even strong believers in abortion rights (I'm one) ought to acknowledge and respect the moral sincerity of many right-to-lifers. I cannot share, or even fathom, their conviction that a microscopic dot -- as oblivious as a rock, more primitive than a worm -- has the same human rights as anyone reading this article. I don't have their problem with the question of when human life begins. (When did "human" life begin during evolution? Obviously, there is no magic point. But that doesn't prevent us from claiming humanity for ourselves and denying it to the embryo-like entities we evolved from.)" I agree that "[f]acing death does appear to clarify the mind in every generation," but I hope that Kinsley's 'me-first' attitude is more the exception than the rule in this generation.