Human relics

Probably your friend will put your letter away, and it ll be read again a few years from now—and it will improve with age. And forty years from now, your friend s grandkids will dig it out of the attic and read it, a sweet and precious relic of the ancient Eighties that gives them a sudden clear glimpse of you and her and the world we old-timers knew. You will have then created an object of art. Your simple lines about where you went, who you saw, what they said, will speak to those children, and they will feel in their hearts the humanity of our times. 

Mental illness and sainthood are both fictions, that is, fabricated products. One is manufactured by authoritative rhetorical acts of malediction, the other by authoritative rhetorical acts of benediction. In his hoo i Making Saints, Kenneth Woodward describes the process by which the Vatican transforms persons from mortal humans into quasi-divine beings. The process rests on a belief in saints They [Catholics] pray to them, they honor them, they treasure their relics, they name their children and their churches after them. Christianity is... unlivable without saints. Similarly, the process of transforming human conflicts into mental diseases rests on a belief in mental illness psychiatrists give certain behaviors medical names, write books about them, teach them in schools, treat them with drugs and electricity, and build hospitals to house their victims. Modernity is unlivable without mental illnesses. 

Fairbanks, DanielJ. Relics of Eden ThePowerfulEvidence of Evolution in Human DNA. Amherst, N.Y Prometheus Books, 2007. An examination of the field of evolutionary genomics that asserts that there is no dichotomy between religion and science. 

Fixing the dates of relics and stone implements or pieces of charcoal from ancient campsites is an application based on radioactive decay rates. Because the rate of radioactive decay of a nuclide is constant, this rate can serve as a clock for dating very old rocks and human implements. Dating wood and similar carbon-containing objects that are several thousand to fifty thousand years old can be done with radioactive carbon, carbon-14, which has a half-life of 5730 y. 

The 1951 Convention is sometimes portrayed today as a relic of the Cold War, inadequate in the face of new refugees from ethnic violence and gender-based persecution, (p. 45) insensitive to security concerns, particulariy terrorism and organized crime, and even redundant, given the protection now due in principle to everyone under international human rights law. 

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