X-Message-Number: 18366
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: A humanist's flirtation with Immortalism
Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2002 16:34:19 -0800

From "A Challenge for Naturalism," by S. Matthew D'Agostino:


http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dagostino_22_1.htm

Is Even Death Solvable?

Sadly, death will come to us all. Nature appears to have been unable to 
arrange for the individual to survive indefinitely. Rather, the path 
evolution followed equips us with tendencies toward sexual profligacy such 
that the species will survive. Under evolution's logic so far the individual 
is expendable but other logics are possible.

I believe that death is neither necessary nor "sacred." It's only the path 
that evolution appears to have taken to date. Human intelligence may be able 
to force evolution into a different direction. Eventually, I am convinced, 
science will overcome death.

What's perhaps a more annoying possibility these remarks may surprise you is 
that death would probably already have been overcome, long ago, had we not 
endured two thousand years of myths and mumbling priests. Christianity 
turned its back on "the glory that was Greece." The early church father 
Tertullian (c. 155-220) explained that turn succinctly: "If you have 
Jerusalem, you don't need Athens." Having turned its back on rationality and 
loosed twenty centuries of anti-science hysteria and persecutions, which 
continue even today, Christianity will deserve the "credit" for putting at 
least our grandparents' generation, and our parents' and our own in their 
graves. How many more will be lost before the conquest of death?



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