In yesterday’s Sunday Los Angeles Times, one of the obituaries had a strange symbol in it. It was a clockwise swirl. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the individual’s name, but he travelled a lot. The LA Times uses symbols such as a US flag for veterans, a badge for police and a cross for religious, but this one is new to me. Anyone have any idea what it stands for?
Link?
I don’t know if this will help but here are illustrations of all of the religious-type of emblems that the Department of Veterans Affairs permits to be placed on the headstones of dead servicemembers. Was it one of them?
Well, none of them seem to be describable as a “clockwise swirl”.
Might it be yin-yang symbol?
(Considering that the VA list includes several religions I have never heard of, I am a bit surprised this is not on their list. Are there no Taoists in America?)
Who decided atheists needed a logo too? That just plays into the whole fallacious atheism-is-a-religion-too routine.
I went to the LA Times and used their online ad service to start writing an obituary. Then I reached the part where I could add a graphic.
It’s a Circle of Life. Doesn’t exactly jump out at you as a “circle of life”, huh? Might help if it was an actual circle as opposed to the “Swirl of Life”.
Well, it is round, I guess. What’s the “100” for, by the way?
I’m guessing people who lived a century before perishing.
That or the rare event where someone named Ben Franklin dies in the great Los Angeles area.
The Lion King died?:dubious:
Because the families of atheists who died (and who were atheists themselves, in most cases) asked for a symbol, so that the gravestone wouldn’t be blank in the symbol area.
More fitting would be the lay out the text so there *is no *symbol area.
My point exactly.
Maybe, but the point is that even if you think that there should be no symbol for atheists, other atheists disagreed, and the VA decided to listen to them.
South of the equator, is the swirl shown anti-clockwise?
Where I work, a large metropolitan daily newspaper, we use this symbol, if the family requests it, to indicate an organ donor (hence circle of life). It has nothing to do with religion or headstones or group affiliations.
Roddy
Perry White, editor
Apparently a fan of the Springfield Isotopes.