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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

The secular religion spoken of by nabla has nothing to do with afterlives. It's for people who don't believe in any afterlife trying to placate their fear of death by having faith that technology will somehow grant them an indefinite life, not an afterlife.

(Context: I am firmly an atheist, but I also disapprove of the people who want to live forever. I think that's selfish and childish. People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that.)

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> People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that.

  The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

- George Bernard Shaw

That's nice, but you're still going to die. We all will, and the world is better off for it because progress happens one funeral at a time.

That mistakes academic personal power for all power:

If funerals were in general the only way progress happened, every genocide would cause scientific/technological/economic revolutions.

Recessions are sufficient to clear bad leadership in the private sector; elections in democratic governments.

I agree. For one, most people don't change. In the sense that their ideas don't change. For the ideas to change in the society, sometimes people themselves have to be replaced, i.e. generations have to change.

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