Why do religious people desire immortality more than skeptics? And a fun speculative explanation

As I write this post, I'm pondering what I consider to be one of the greatest, inexplicable disconnects in the world. There are billions of people who express a clear aspiration for pleasant immortality: professed Christians (Roman Catholic and Protestant variants) and Muslims. They transparently attempt to fulfill this aspiration through following the dictates of their faith. Then there are hundreds of millions of people who claim to attempt to fulfill aspirations through empirically grounded methods (even if they don't know the actual word "empiricism"), but this large subset of the world transparently attempts to solve challenges they face technologically rather than spiritually. Yet this same population, in the order of hundreds of millions, seems weirdly resistant to memes put out by people like Aubrey de Gray and Ray Kurzweil, advocating heavy investing into technological solutions to the near term challenge all of us currently living face of dying by aging. Billions pray at least weekly for a pleasant immortality. But more than a few thousand seem to work weekly, transparently, towards technological enabling of a pleasant immortality. I'd understand living in a world where many of the religious were aspiring towards religious solutions for pleasant immortality and many of the non-religious were aspiring towards non-religious solutions for pleasant immortality, and I'd understand living in a world where very few of the religious and very few of the non-religious were interested in aspiring toward pleasant immortality. But the current dynamic doesn't match well to me with the various attempted explanations I've encountered for it, which heightens my skepticism of current general sociological models. It's not just that most people accept death, or that people "smart" enough to doubt religious dogma are also smart enough to realize that death is inescapable. There seems to me to be something weirder going on, and I haven't yet encountered explanations that seem compelling to me.

Here's a fun early explanation I attempted to construct myself (although I now doubt it a lot more than when I initially constructed it). 1. Very few people, religious or non-religious, are interested in immortality. Almost all humans are probably wired to accept something of a normal lifespan, and it's either a quirk of neural wiring or a an aspiriation that comes with a very high threshhold intelligence to desire immortality. 2. The smartest of the cohort that has desired immortality throughout history have realized that immortality technology would not be available within their lifetime, and so they consciously (though non-transparently) created constituents for their future technology-based ressurection. Jesus' Christianity is probably the most successful of these plays: one can look at Christianity as being a set of organizations with over a billion constituents for Jesus' future technology-based "ressurection". Thus, pleasant immortality (for Jesus and his followers) may be a meme important to Jesus personally, that he attached to other memes more naturally salient to most people. An indication of this is that Christianity doesn't contrast pleasant immortality with non-existence, but rather pleasant immortality with very unpleasant immortality (hell). Like he wants christians to believe: even if you don't really want to be immortal, you're fucked. So if you want to at least not be tortured for eternity, you're going to be constituents for a future where I'm ressurected and I have unchallengeable hierarchical status.

Now, I've been exposed to some good arguments about why all this is improbable, at least for religions or movements whose founders didn't seem to attempt to preserve themselves well, and Jesus does seem to fit into that unfortunate category. It doesn't take much mental analogizing, living at almost any point in history, to think that a better preserved body would be easier to fix/ressurect than a less well preserved body. If nothing else, the concept might make for a good thriller: "The Da Vinci Code" meets "Left Behind" meets "Vitals".

Comments

[TGGP]

The ancient Hebrews didn't have much of a conception of hell because they didn't care much about what happened to the goyim. You were simply left out of the book of life and that was that. Our modern conception of hell owes a lot to Dante.

I really doubt that anyone in the first century could have imagined technology based immortality. There was hardly any technological advancement in the Roman era, and a backward tribe of the sort that produced Jesus would have been even less cognizant of it. My favorite speculation about the "real Jesus" is here.

[jim]

I think most people want immortality, but there's a dissonance between that wish, and the obvious fact that everybody dies. To get over that hump, most folks glom onto one of the prevailing fairytales; usually, the one they were raised with. Of the few who can't go that route...well, I suppose a small number go for the life extension stuff. But for somebody who's already skeptical, the immortalized human on earth scenario is probably not very realistic. I mean, show me the track record so far...no immortals around yet, as far as I can see. I think the answer for most of these folks comes through the more psychologically subtle approach: vicarious immortality through children, work, or artistic acheivment. For others, there's identification through race, or some other cultural route, which gives them the false feeling of personal survival through generations past and present.

Personally, I find great solace in the concept of annihilation; the idea of everlasting life bores me to no end. Actually, I'm looking forward to that last, long afernoon nap that stretches on into infinity. If I could pray, my only prayer would be that, for everyone, the going might come easily. Unfortunately, that's not often the case. Bummer.

[Nick Tarleton]

Hmm. I'll be thinking about your first paragraph for a while.

One idea: most atheists reject everything that smacks of religion. including the idea of immortality (or radically extended life). Another idea: religious people are not actually "working towards immortality" in any sense that an atheist immortalist (longevity advocate) could empathize with, but just perform certain rituals in the course of living their day-to-day life; these rituals happen to nominally promise immortality, but in spite of this those practicing them don't actually think about the immortality aspect that much, or at least aren't motivated by it so much as by tradition, social acceptance, the momentary feeling of religious experience, or whatever.

Hmm...

[jim]

You might be right as far as the immortality thing goes, if you're talking about immortality within the sphere of metaphysics. It seems like the 'radically extended life' scenario might have more to do with scientism than religion, though.

I'd also agree with you about the aspects of religion, other than an afterlife, that appeal to people; though, I'm not as tempted to understate the religionist's hope for eternal life as, perhaps, you are. But essentially, you're correct when you infer that religion fulfills many personal and communal needs, the belief in a particular afterlife scenario being just one of them.

[Roko]

Jim: "I think most people want immortality, but there's a dissonance between that wish, and the obvious fact that everybody dies."

- indeed. Do not underestimate the power of cognitive dissonance to mess with people's minds, and cause them to come up with very odd thought patterns.

Also, I think that we may be underestimating the power of what people are brought up with. It'll be interesting to see whether, if 30 years time, the situation changes radically because lots of younger people today are being exposed to the life extension meme.

[retired urologist]

HA: In a former life, I intended to be a Baptist Christian missionary; I'm very familiar with the scripts. What I have never understood is the conflict between what they describe as "heaven", and their attitudes toward going there. The heaven definition I was given was: perfection in every way. What about missing loved ones left behind? Can't happen: wouldn't be perfection. What about the rest of the stuff that you'll miss if you die? Can't happen: wouldn't be perfection. What about sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll? Perfect. And so on. There can be no downside to it at all. All Christians want to go there, but I can't recall ever meeting one who wanted to go today. I don' t think they really believe it, as Roko's and Jim's comments on dissonance suggests.

On the other hand, the really wacko religious cults show much more devotion to their beliefs in the reward of afterlife, and frequently they have little hesitation to show it. Remember that cult in New Mexico that believed the Hale-Bopp comet was a screen for a spaceship that was coming to get them for a trip to eternal paradise? The catch was you had to end your earthly life first. What did they do? They stepped right up and ended it. (BTW, I never did see the follow-up; was there really a spaceship?) It's like Robin Hanson telling me that it's OK for him to have health insurance, even though he has proven that the only medical care one should elect is that for which one is willing to pay out-of-pocket. He says, "Yeah, but I was willing to pay for it; I just didn't need to, because I had insurance. This is different than the other bozos who used their insurance, because they didn't stop to consider whether they were willing to pay for it." Well, we'll never know if he was really willing to pay for it, because he didn't. And all those Christians may really believe in heaven, but they don't act like it, because they're not anxious to get there.