ck27 said:
First to start out with Im a atheists and i do not believe in any higher power or any afterlife or anything like that.
After Reading thorugh many of the posts in the religion section, i noticed alot of the nonbelievers here that dont believe in a afterlife think their is gonna be some major medical breakthrough that will stop the aging process, and make them live alot longer. Some how humans will find immortality before their death cause they are scared of not existing.
to be or not to be...
For a person, no matter what their belief system is or is not, to want to avoid death is not abnormal thought. To avoid death is a normal part of living. Fight or Flight. People who believe there is an eternal afterlife or reincarnation, or any of the other idealisms that people foster, may or may not include spending time thinking about how medicine may extent their lifetimes.
Your focus seems to be on the atheists who ponder these same things, using a different avenue to achieve this self-preservation. A type of immortality I guess. To think that someday medicine will allow "immortality" is probably stretching the things that medicine will be able to do in our lifetime. But to imagine that there is the potential to increase the average lifespan by 20 to 50 years (for those born now) does not seem unreasonable to me, considering all the things that are being researched in the areas of genetics, stem cell research, cancer and heart disease, etc.
But people should also reflect on how these advances in medicine will affect them, should this become a reality. When we imagine such things occurring, I think we tend to assume there will be no consequences to this. And what I am meaning here is something like this. If they eliminate heart disease without curing other decays of the human condition, would most of us end up with an Alzheimer type ending taking up the added 20 - 50 years? And if this does not become the issue, would it be something else, such as digestive tract issues becoming the Number 1 killer of people? Would most persons over 130 become insulin dependent? These are issues I am just tossing out there. I havent any idea if they would actually become a problem.
The focus shouldnt be on extending life exponentially via medicine. That should be (and I think it is), a potential side effect of medicine that will probably cause unimagined issues that will balance out the "immortality" that medicine seems to promise, sometime in the future. So for me, the more I think about this issue, the more I tend to think medical “immortality” is much further off in the future, than this lifetime.
