Immortality, Dueling Reviews at Betterhumans

Fight Aging!

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Two critical reviews at Betterhumans today: Bruce J. Klein of the Immortality Institute reviews Aging, Death and the Quest for Immortality by C. Ben Mitchell. In return, Mitchell reviews the Immortality Institute's The Scientific Conquest of Death. Sparks fly (politely), as might be expected when two essentially opposing viewpoints meet. On the one hand we have scientific rationalism and the quest for physical immortality through better medicine and other forms of advanced technology. On the other hand, we have religion and the acceptance of spiritualism, faith - and aging and death as inevitable.

You will have to excuse my bias in this sort of debate; the very mildest criticism I can think to make of pro-death religious views is that they smack of surrender in the face of a hard problem. Those of us reading this today have been dealt a raw hand, destined to age, suffer progressive degeneration and die. Yet our situation is far better than that of our ancestors - we are in a position to do something about the aging process and death through age-related disease. Do we sit back and invent justifications for a terrible, horrible state of affairs just because it'll take work, imagination and fire to make a better world? Of course not.