[ExI] Christianity: where to now?

[The Avantguardian]

--- Alan Brooks <alaneugenebrooks52 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> In an age of STDs celibacy makes sense for many weaker persons.
> This brings up the bigger issue of whether or not we've entered or are
> starting to enter a post- futurist interregnum wherein the necessary fiction
> of religion becomes a default glue holding what we optimistically call
> 'civilization' together.  you think?

And how would that be different from mostg of human history?

> Didn't Naisbitt give it a name like "high tech, high touch"?
> Older people have every reason to turn to religion-- what do they have to
> lose?

Their sense of reality and their children: "Oh what the hell, by xian
eschatology the world is about due to end any way. Why don't we start World War
III early this time?" 

One can't live forever and experience time. Time is our gift as mortals, we
should use it wisely. We should also realize that for it to have any value to
us, it must be finite. I have been alive for a few decades and I hope to be
hundreds of years old someday. But if I die tonight in my sleep, I will not be
bothered one bit. Time has existed for 13.5 billion years, I have been dead for
most of that time. Being dead is my default state. If it didn't bother me
before I was alive, why would it bother me after?
  
> I turned to religion because the time when (if *luck* prevails) I'll be
> suspended at Alcor draws closer. Spent a month volunteering at Alcor last
> year and would gaze at the dewars, imagining being inside.. Only thing
> disturbing was the laboratory odors, the "smells of death" I was thinking.

Death is like being under anaesthesia for the rest of time. But after time is
finished, all bets are off.




Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"Fear is proof of a degenerate mind [...] Fortune favors the bold [...] Persevere and preserve yourselves for better circumstances [...] Love conquers all."- Virgil