Before Tom pulls my words out of his comment box, and causes me to steal my own thunder again at his blog….

I wish Catholics would stop talking about death like the death of the flesh is, in and of itself, an evil. It is not. Death by certain means, for certain purposes, surely can be evil, but it need not be so.

There is a creeping materialism about many Catholic arguments against war, that seems to imply that physical death caused by anything but God’s own Hand is inherently evil. That is the argument for people who see existence as random and life is meaningless. Death is not bad; it simply is.

UPDATE: Tom informs me in the comment box that what I've said here makes me a heretic. Well, I disagree with the word choice (I would not call death an evil, though the reasons for this have as much to do with emphasis as anything else), but since my main point is that materialists view death as a literal annihilation and Catholics shouldn't, I'll not quibble about whether it is evil per se and leave it there.