Titanic Post

Answers to those tough metaphysical questions

Where did the world come from? Why did God make the world? Where was I before I was born? Where do people go when they die?…

There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at [your] watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can’t have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn’t be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black.

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DEALING WITH MYTHS
Sam Smith
Progressive Review

Having been an anthropology major, I don’t get as riled up about mythology in public life as many in the media and politics. Myths can be helpful, benign, sad, or deadly but mostly they’re there to fill the empty places in reality.

Sometimes myths are carried on the backs of famous people because the reality isn’t powerful enough to do the job. A classic case involves the death of Dr Charles Drew, the famous black surgeon.

It is widely told that Drew, then 46, died in North Carolina in 1950 following a car accident for which he was unable to get treatment at a white hospital and had to be transported to a much more distant black hospital, wasting critical treatment time.

But the Annals of American Survey notes:

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