Death and Religion

"Let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom."
-Montaigne, "The Oxford Book of Death"

"if one knows that what is born will end in death, then there will be love."
-Sutra of Buddha Teachings the Seven Daughters

"But it is reasonable to enquire whether, in the mystical illusions of man, there is not a reflection of an underlying reality. Heaven is nowhere in space, but it is in time."
-Sir Arthur Eddington

Religion has in common (African, Buddhism, Catholic Church, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Judaism, Native American, Sikhism, Taoism, Islam / Muslim):
death
ceremony - wake, funeral, pilgrimage, mourning
tradition - ways of dealing with death
explanation of what comes next - afterlife, reincarnation, transition, purgatory
**Afterlife, the transition of, the reason we are alive, the things we should do while alive, ways to behave

"The equilibrium state of life is death." - Fagg

Idea that we borrow from nature to live, and eventually must give back in the form of death (human body returns to the earth in decomposition.) No matter religious viewpoint of the spirit, the physical is a cycle that cannot be denied. Shows death as absolute necessity.

I like the idea of death /mortality / time / change as a "living moment." Every second of our lives is a living moment, and every attempt at design is a living moment, or a moment to reach and interact with other human beings' living moments.