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IFISEEUS
"There are a thousand hacking at the
branches of evil |
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Immortality The issue is simple and profound. Unless the enhancement or quality of life sinks so low that we are suffering unbearably, life is what we have and what we want, and we don't want to lose it. Ernest Becker wrote two eloquent books, The Denial of Death being a Pulitzer prize winner, dealing with the universal neuroses and psychoses attendant with the suppressed awareness of mortality. Endless systems of thought have been devised to help people accommodate the unacceptable. Most people don't have the courage to be honest and come out of denial, but that doesn't change the reality. We don't like aging and dying, but we try hard to cope with it. Book quotes: "Death is part of life." So runs another familiar philosophical consolation. Decomposition of the body, according to Watts, is "essential to life." The conversion of a human being into a lump can be "understood as the instrument of eternal renewal. It is not only the transformation of life into food; it is also the wiping away of memory..." Or as Tillich phrases the same idea: death and life "belong to each other. At the moment of our birth we begin to die, and we continue to do so daily. Growth is death..." So, coolly and complacently, our forthcoming annihilation is made to seem reasonable. Shakespeare died and became food; so did Einstein. Why not you? Why do the members of our species stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that they belong to the worms? Alan Harrington, The Immortalist, Avon Books, New York, NY 10019 p. 158-159 Unfortunately, no ethical system amounts to anything unless it can promise some kind of immortality as a reward for good conduct. If both hustler and virtuous man end up in the same dark alley, what can my teacher say to me? Alan Harrington, The Immortalist, Avon Books, New York, NY 10019 p. 123 Homer portrays the kind of cavalier attitude and thinking that can ensue in the context of not being in denial in his epic The Illiad, "O my friend, if we, leaving this war, could escape from age and death, I should not here be fighting in the van; but now, since many are the modes of death impending over us which no man can hope to shun, let us press on and give renown to other men, or win it for ourselves." Sarpedon to Glaucus Iliad So, any message that can be called "good news" must start with offering life, not dying. See the complete set of verses from the five gospels where Jesus talks about immortality, everlasting life. |
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