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Our hope of immortality does not come from any religions,
but nearly all religions come from that hope. - Ingersoll
Immortality
Updated:
01/10/2021
The issue is just 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 intensely want to
retain. We don't want to lose it! Ernest Becker wrote two eloquent books dealing
with the issue. One, The Denial of Death, being a Pulitzer prize winner, is an erudite and
eloquent primal scream, and deals with the
universal neuroses and psychoses attendant with mankind's suppressed awareness
of mortality. Endless systems of thought have been devised to help
people accommodate the unacceptable aspect of their "inevitable" mortality. 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, and we incessantly 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
"Our Creator would never have made such lovely
days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy
them, above and beyond all thought, unless we
were meant to be immortal." Nathaniel Hawthorne
Homer portrays the kind of cavalier
attitude and thinking that often ensues in the context of not being in
denial in his epic The Iliad,
"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 in The Iliad
So, any message that can legitimately and enthusiastically be called "good news" must start with
offering life, living not dying. In simple terms, if there is any
significance to Jesus, he either came to set us free from the fear of dying
by making it acceptable, OR, he came to save us from dying itself! Which is
better? Which interpretation is better supported by his words?
See the complete set of verses from the five gospels where Jesus talks
about immortality, living and not dying, everlasting life.
You are free to do what you want, but you are
not free to want what you want. - Schopenhauer
Every human being has a natural, intrinsic and legitimate desire for
immortality. |