If a Man Die...
The Desperate Attempts of the Godless to Confront their Mortality
AI? Transhumanism? Robots? Human minds implanted in machines? Faster-than-light travel to distant planets orbiting around distant stars many light years away?
Are these realistic ways for mankind to live forever? Is this the path to eternal life? Some people think so.
But no. These are Godless, desperate pipe dreams indulged in by those who, in the face of the inevitable, reject the inner way, the rigorous spiritual discipline that leads to life and thus have no other hope but the cheap glitter offered up by science fiction.
The natural structure of the universe includes an absolute speed limit - the speed of light. It isn't an arbitrary limit - declared by religious fanatics or Luddites saying "Oh no! Don't you dare!" - but one that, God or not, is built into the very physical nature of things:
"Time ran slower for the moving clocks just as Einstein predicted. So the faster something travels, the more massive it gets, and the more time slows – until you finally reach the speed of light, at which point time stops altogether. And if time stops, well then, so does speed. And so nothing can travel faster than the speed of light." - Cosmos Magazine
Accordingly, short of achieving the godlike power to change the very physical nature of the universe, mortal man will never travel remotely close to the speeds necessary to travel to distant stars in our own galaxy to say nothing of the nearest neighboring galaxies.
Man's been to the Moon - hey! what a great place to hang out! - and might one day travel to Mars, but why would he want to? It is a cold, dead world and will never be a place suitable for human habitation ("terraforming" makes for great science fiction but nothing more) - certainly never a safe, luxurious and enjoyable abode like Mother Earth. Venus is a pressure cooker and Mercury, with the Sun looking right over its shoulder, is a seared-over, burned out hunk of igneous rock. Well, whoop-dee-do! Let's go there and live!
We can learn all we need to know about the absolutely inhospitable planets in our solar system - the only objects in space remotely within our reach - by means of remote exploration, as we are presently doing. Apart from satisfying out curiosity, there is nothing in the least inviting about any of what we see out there. It’s all too cold, or too hot, or too dry - and it’s all dead.
No, the hard and unforgiving reality - again, not one decreed by the Luddites among us but by Mother Nature herself - is that we, for better or worse, are stuck for the duration right here on Earth and we are all going to die right here - unless some few poor souls make it to Mars and die there.
Mortal man will have no more success in traveling to the stars in pursuit of immortality than the Babel ancients had in building a tower to get to heaven. Interestingly, the mentality of the two groups is the same. Moderns these days vainly aspire to input their minds into machines, travel out into space and live forever on a New Earth orbiting a distant star - their own Godless version of heaven - and the people of Babel sought to do an around-the-man on God and get to heaven by building a tower. Only the means differ.
The ancients sought to get to heaven by their own devices, and the moderns - railing against death and aspiring to live forever on their own terms - do the same. The common mentality they share is a determination to live in a fantasy world rather than confront reality. They are determined to avoid the unpleasant business of having to confront and deal with the whole business of God, his order of things, and especially really inconvenient things like God's commandments - all those "thou-shalts" and "thou shalt-nots". You know the thing... all that business about right and wrong, good and evil, heaven and hell, reward and punishment, life eternal and damnation... all that stuff that flies in the face of arrogant, uncontrollable, Godless human nature - the nature the unregenerate, chest-thumping natural man will fight to the last ditch to protect.
If there is such a thing as faster-than-light travel - and I suppose there probably is - it must exist outside the realm governed immutably by the physics we know, the realm that began with the Big Bang, when time and matter had their beginnings, the universe received its exquisite fine-tuning and the absolute speed limit for everything was set - a speed limit that effectively places almost all the visible universe forever beyond our mortal reach. We simply can’t get there from here. The realm where such things as FTL are possible will likely be accessible only to beings not constrained by the rules of the universe we inhabit.
But what rules govern that realm and access to it? Is the truth to be found in physics, or metaphysics? - the material world or the spiritual?
In describing what awaits those who do qualify to enter that domain, Jesus said “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man”. In other words, it’ll be the best sci-fi movie you’ve ever seen. And you can’t buy a ticket - you have to earn it.
The way to that glorious sphere of existence - eternal life - will never, I suspect, be opened via technology, AI or a nifty FTL spaceship (though I must confess I am an avid sci-fi fan) but by our learning to be good boys and girls - finding and embracing the truth - the way things really are and really work - that knowledge Jesus said would set us free - fighting life's moral and spiritual battles and finding the rarely trodden path to winning them. It is a hard road:
"... strait is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it."
"I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."
- Jesus Christ
“For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.”
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Book of Mormon, Mosiah 3:19
The real question is the one Job asked:
"If a man die, shall he live again?"
If so, how?
You can run, but you can't hide...
Blow away all the smoke and make a choice… You will, one way or another.
Right vs. wrong, truth vs. lies, reality vs. fantasy, law vs. lawlessness, order vs. chaos, liberty vs. tyranny, courage vs. cowardice, light vs. darkness, good vs. evil, life vs. death, God vs. the Godless…
If you can be fooled, you will be…
These are the times that try men’s souls…
Torquemada