Posted on 06/19/2014 10:34:45 AM PDT by 6ft2inhighheelshoes
After reading Jon Gabriel’s recent piece regarding funerals, it occurred to me that ever since I learned about mortality (at about age four), I’ve wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. I’ve kept in shape and have always enjoyed lots of butter (I knew it was good for me before Time announced it!). But I still know that, in the end, death is a place where we are all equal.
Science and technology will eventually find a way for people to live a very long time, if not “forever.” The first to benefit will be the very wealthy, but the technology will presumably become accessible to the masses with time. Or will it? Should it? If you were given the choice to live 1,000 years in good health or die a natural death at 90, which would you choose? And what if the only choices were natural death or Highlander-style immortality?
Finally, without Christ living is just a day-to-day plod with no purpose to your life.
Amen.
Something like that would be a variety of hell.
True ‘nuff.
In the not too distant future it may be possible to just have your brain connected to a psuedo-cyber body or container and stay that way until the sun burns the earth to a cinder in a few billion years. How many would choose that form of immortality?
Yes, but they’re much better than the generations that follow.
At *best* it would be such a plod, or endless frivolities.
At worst it could be another sort of hell.
Yep.
NO WAY!
WE already have the choice of life immortal or death immortal. Just not here in this world.
Ah, Woody the warrior of existential worry.
There is a God. He’s closed in on me. I would have been spooked out of my wits if I hadn’t known the bible for a looooong time before that.
I’m not fanatical about immortality, but it’s so much better than the alternative.
That said, how long would you like to live? 500 years? 1,000 years? Would you get the urge to make a new family every 30 years or so? Would your kids live 500 years or 1,000 years? With everyone doing that, how quickly would we exceed the earth's carrying capacity? Keeping life interesting would be a challenge. There are so many things that are best enjoyed the first time, that get stale when repeated: loves, careers, so forth. Schopenhauer said something quite profound: "Living a long time is like staying too long at the conjurer's booth at the fair; the tricks are meant to be seen only once."
For every Baby Boomer who protested during the 60’s at least 3 served sometime during the 60s in Vietnam. Also, only about half of Vietnam vets were draftees. The rest volunteered for military service.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Which in turn depends on the accuracy of various physical models of the universe. We still have recently encountered surprises, such as so called dark matter.
But a reasonable projection is going to have the stars all dying out. I felt there was something “existentially” wrong when I read, as a child, science books that foretold the stars burning out in billions of years. From my point of view, they might as well be scheduled to burn out tomorrow, and the lack of permanence distressed me. Only much, much, much later did I realize that was God beginning to knock on the door of my mind.
Until you meet the Magician and he invites you to dinner! (Very, very metaphorically speaking.)
No thanks. As much as I try to live a Godly life, I fail all day long and sometimes I despair of ever being a decent person. I could not stomach living forever in my present state. Likely things would get worse not better and I would never have the hope that one day in the not-too-distant future I can be in the presence of my Lord and Savior and will become incorruptible.
“Science and technology will eventually find a way for people to live a very long time, if not “forever.”
If not “forever? Where on Planet Earth? That takes a lot of faith!
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