I was thinking today that part of the reason–a LARGE part of the reason–our modern world is batshit insane is that most of our power elite are atheists. They believe that when they die, that’s it. The lights go out, forever. Everything they were, everything they had become, vanishes. We are all animals, nothing more, and die like animals.
The only immortality in such a world would be changes you left in the world, marks you left in the world, and the only comfort during life they could provide would be anticipating them continuing after your chemical decomposition and decay (I wonder: if death is the end, and we are merely machines made of meat, was there ever really “life” on this analysis to begin with? A self sustaining reaction, perhaps. A complex, higher order evolutionary expression, perhaps. But could we be said to be any more alive than a robot? And if not, is it any wonder that so many otherwise intelligent people want to merge with robots?).
Thus, the only immortality on this reading–absent a “singularity” which in my considered view is empirically quite impossible–lies in SOCIAL deeds. It might lie in art. It might lie in a family. But do you see that the logical systemic impetus is to place the locus of morality in the social order, which does survive the individual, even though societies cannot be moral? Can you see that this emotional NEED for immortality could and frankly has lead to the creation of “problems” which did not need fixing, and for which the aspiring immortal proposes he or she be the leading fixer?
All deep, coherent social order begins with individual order. But if we deny the possibility of sustainable individual order, we almost necessarily create an irresistible impulse towards imposed social order as an ersatz immortality and morality.
I continue to believe that HONEST research, conducted by honest professionals (this should be redundant, not an oxymoron), will find that the evidence favoring the survival hypothesis is overwhelming. But that research has not yet been done by people both honest, and sufficiently entrenched to demand an impartial hearing.
And as I think about it, this introduction of the concept of personal immortality as something worthy of including as a factor in your life, in how you live, in what you value, was the singular merit of Christianity for the West. Heaven and hell of course messed up a lot of people’s minds, and continue to do so. But the notion of an individual relationship to God, of inner work, of inner focus, of personal development as a key purpose of life: all came about with Christianity. Love is a way of relating to the world and to people. Before that was the Law, which is another way entirely, and the way replicated by the Muslims.
And the Greeks and Latins lived on through fame, through their names, through their families. They had vague ideas of an after-world, but rarely thought about or talked about it. After all, they couldn’t see it. Their focus was sacrificial fire and incense, courage and honor, and the glory of their state and country.
Edit: it further occurs to me that if individual morality is sacrificed on the altar of “the future”, aka personal immortality, then no crime in the pursuit of that future need be weighed in any moral balance. It is not wrong, if it furthers that one task, that of personal immortality as embodied in the “greater good”. That lies are told about all this virtually continuously, is of course a profound inconvenience, and no doubt a considerable source, over and above propagandistic necessity, for the hate directed at those who retain some belief in the concept of personal goodness and personal immortality.