🚀 go-pugleaf

bpl@lynx.co.nz (Brian Paul Lilburn) writes:

>>Actually, I strongly dispute it - people who want to live as long as
>>they can pursue life-extension practices, cryonics and transhumanism.

>I think you're onto a different track there.

How so? 

>In the sense I meant it, it appears they do. A nurse with a lot of 
>experience once remarked to me that she'd noticed that Christians 
>at the end of their lives in hospital hung on more tenaciously to what
>few days and hours might be left to them than did athiests or patients
>not (willingly) visited by priests etc. This was a good many years ago,
>but I suspect there'd still be some truth in it.

Perhaps there is, but I don't see that this maximises longevity in the
slightest. Someone who smokes and drinks all their life, but struggles
religiously for an extra day or two when dying of emphesema and liver
cancer at the age of 50, can hardly be thought of as a person who was
concerned for their longevity.

>>Religion is often simply a means of abrogating responsibility for yourself.

>You mean that for a lot of people it is, but for you it is not?

I mean that some people enjoy their religions without giving up
responsibility for themselves to the spirits, but that many use religion
as justification for non-rational, often apathetic, behaviour. Place
your trust in Jesus/Buddha/Krishna, and it will all be well kind of a thing.

-- 
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