Amortals Among Us

The March 23 issue of Time magazine included a list of “10 Ideas that are Changing the World”. The list ran the gamut from such ground-breaking concepts as the #1 listed “Jobs are the New Assets” (i.e., you make money from working – insert collective “ahhhhh” here) to more disturbing things like #8 “Biobanks” (facilities that collect and store blood & tissue samples from as many people as possible so that they may be available for use in unrestricted scientific research).

Huh.

Also included in the list at #5 was something entitled “Amortality”. You read that right; not "immortality", but "amortality". What does that mean? Here are some selected passages from the article:

[Amortality] is about more than just the ripple effect of baby boomers’ resisting the onset of age. Amortality is a stranger, stronger alchemy, created by the intersection of that trend with a massive increase in life expectancy and a deep decline in the influence of organized religion – all viewed through the blue haze of Viagra.

The defining characteristic of amortality is to live in the same way, at the same pitch, doing the same things, from late teens right up until death.

Amortals don’t just dread extinction. They deny it.

“We are in serious striking distance of stopping aging,” says De Grey, founder and chairman of the Methuselah Foundation . . .

It is “bleeding obvious,” he adds, that it is possible to extend the human life span indefinitely. “Most people take the view that aging is this natural thing that is going on independently of disease. That’s nonsense”.

To sum it all up then, to be “amortal” is to be Peter Pan: To refuse to grow up; to pretend you will never die; to believe that science will save you; and to make no plans for – and indeed, to deny completely – your own eventual demise.

How sad. And yet, how entirely predictable if we’d given it any forethought.

We have taken God out of our society and our culture, which means - by logical default - that we have created a godless society and a godless culture. Is that really what we wanted?

Put it this way: When you hear the term “godless society”, what do you think of?

Do you think of things like utopia, happiness, fulfillment, and light?
Or do other words come to mind, like mayhem, pain, hopelessness, and darkness? "Godlessness” is, by definition, “evil and wicked”.

Funny that we would ever want to create a world like that. Funny too, that once we created it, we would then have the desire to live in it forever.

Sorry, but I’ll pass.