Death and Religion and Science

My wife and I got into a conversation about death and religion. the other day. Over the weekend we were listening to a debate on NPR over the ethical considerations of using technology to improve human lives and part of the debate turned to extending human life, perhaps indefinitely. My wife raised the question of whether the desire to live forever comes from a lack of religion, whether if people believed in an afterlife that they would less readily want to live forever. I pointed out that the Conquistadors were not lacking in religious fervor and that didn't stop them from looking for the Fountain of Youth. I postulated that maybe the idea of God, religion, and an afterlife came about because of man's desire to live forever, rather than the desire to live forever coming for a lack of belief in God. In other words, man fears death and thinks that there must be a reason we're here, that there must be something afterwards. Religion may be an result of man trying to deal with death and gaining comfort in the idea that he will live forever in the afterlife. (One of these days I'll get into a discussion of my ideas of Life the Universe and Everything (LUE) and the GIOAT.)

Of course now with technology expanding the length of time that we can actually live, ethical questions come up. Like why would we want to live forever and what would we do with an extra 50 years that we haven't already done with the earlier 70? I think that whether or not those discussions are had may be irrelevant to people actually developing techniques and technologies - and this is true for any field. Whether or not the general public or a vocal segment of the general public has not formed an opinion on a topic is irrelevant if someone in a position to make something or to do something happen has already come to their own conclusion on it. Short of physically preventing that person from actually going forward with whatever, technology will more forward, if only so that person can say "I did it!" which is probably even more of a human instinct.