NANOBOTS AND GODLESS IMMORTALITY

Recently, I’ve come across several anecdotal reports that Christians are saying more frequently that they’re ready to face the afterlife which they anticipate will soon be upon the human race when the rapture comes. They happily anticipate it. That’s all well and good, but I see a complicating factor ahead for their rosy anticipation.

A real test is coming. Scientists predict that soon science may be able to loose nanobots to run around in human bodies and repair damage and destroy disease. If aging is only a disease, then science can begin to use the word “immortal” in connection with living human beings.

What will Christians and other religious (with afterlives in their mythologies) do when faced with a choice of living eternally on earth with the rest of us skeptics or going to see their makers? Will they accept eternal life without god or will they suddenly discover the sacrament of suicide in their holy books?

HEARTS AND MINDS INSEPARABLE

Now America’s trying to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi’s. Many years back, we tried to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese. In both cases our heartfelt attempts to win other’s hearts and minds were accompanied by weapons of mass destruction leveled by our troops against their troops and civilians too.

However, to the skeptic the best recent result in winning hearts and minds that he’s aware of is the worldwide craze for the Beetles and other bug groups back in the 60s and 70s. In that case, the Soviet hearts and minds who smuggled in Beetle records (with their freedom, joy and peace-oriented spirit) and other voices and ideas of the 60s were so won over that when their turn came to rule their nation, they brought in glasnost and the end of yet another dictatorship. That Ronald Reagan's devotees want to give him credit for ending the USSR is a travesty of justice and a bad misreading of history. Peace and love brought peace and love to the USSR, not the guns of capitalism.

Let’s hope that American neocons don’t make the world so inhospitable for peace and love that Gorbachev becomes a bad word in the Russian language. He and other young people in the Soviet Union were the hidden hippies in Russia who loved freedom and peace so much that they almost peacefully ended a dictatorship. If America continues to be a nation for empire, led by religious and political fools, many in Russia may rue that they chose peace and freedom and put down their guard. Like North Korea, they may again build up their weapons of mass destruction to defend against the American neocon’s aim of world domination.

But let me throw another curve in here while speaking of peace and love. According to studies in consciousness, the hearts and minds to be won are not separated in the human body, and we all certainly know that the heart muscle is not the seat of emotions no more than the brain is exactly the entire cause of thinking. One is the other and vice-versa. Feeling and thought lie on a continuum of synaptical firings out of which emerge the sensations we call thought and emotion. The process by which one experiences an emotion is similar to the process which produces a thought. Each is little more than a chemical electrical phenomena.

Understanding these distinctions, these bodily biological processes, will do more for world peace than all the wars and propaganda in the world meant to win “hearts and minds”. When a science educated humankind begins to see that all its fondest causes and purposes are barely more than animal mechanical processes, the humility we gain from that knowledge alone should undermine the most dedicated terrorist whose high religious purposes will be reduced to little more than animal urges in a world which understands the mechanisms of human behavior.

In future, terrorists and all rigid idealists whose fear drenched thinking drives them to violence will be laughed at by those in the know rather than encouraged in their follies. Skeptics already laugh at the high-minded follies of the disillusioned idealists of the world. They stand on the lip of an imaginary hill, awaiting the rest of mankind to lift up its eyes from their evolutionary roots in struggle and mistrust and come join them where vision is cleared by rational thinking. The superstitious religious have certainly had their millenniums and have failed to produce peace. Now is a time to let skepticism have a century or two.
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"Which is it, is man one of god's blunders or is god one of man's" —Friederich N. (1844-1900)