Immortality
 Immortality    | |
|---|---|
| Start | 2006-07-27 |
| Immortality is not dying, i.e. eternal life | |
Religion
- Full article: Religion
- Full article: Religion
Religions typically offer some kind of immortality to their adherents, such as the promise of entry to a death free realm (e.g. heaven). Capitalism is generally recognised as an economic system rather than a religion, but the distinction is moot. Unless one takes the more extreme ideas about tehcno-Utopia literally, its promises about securing immortality are only implicitly, through the use of money as an immortality symbol.[1]
“Many often ask why do the super-rich and powerful always want more. It’s simple. They wish to transcend their human mortality and become gods – immortals. They stupidly believe that if they can lord it over others, kill, dominate, rape, achieve status, become billionaires, presidents, magnates, celebrities, etc., they will somehow live in some weird forever. Thus Epstein and his circle.”
Edward Curtin (18 February 2026) [2]
Related Quotations
| Page | Quote | Author | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Christianity | “[P]rimitive Christianity is a real threat to both commercialism and communism, at least when it takes its own message seriously. Primitive Christianity is one of the few ideologies that has kept alive the idea of the invisible dimension of nature and the priority of this dimension for assuring immortality.” | Ernest Becker | 1976 |
| Consumerism | “[T]he human animal is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting.” | Tennessee Williams | |
| Escape From Evil | “[I]t is the politician who promises to engineer the world, to raise man above his natural destiny, and so men put their whole trust in him. We saw how easily men passed from egalitarian into kingship society... because the central power promised to give them unlimited immunities and prosperities.” | Ernest Becker | 1976 |
| Escape From Evil | “The striving for perfection reflects man's effort to get some human grip on his eligibility for immortality. And he can only know if he is good if the authorities tell him so; this is why it is so vital for him emotionally to know whether he is liked or disliked, why he will do anything the group wants in order to meet its standards of "good" : his eternal life depends on it.” | Ernest Becker | 1976 |
| Escape From Evil | “What men have done is to shift the fear of death onto the higher level of cultural perpetuity; and this very triumph ushers in an ominous new problem. Since men must now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meanings of the society in which they live, onto the immortality symbols which guarantee them indefinite duration of some kind, a new kind of instability and anxiety are created. And this anxiety is precisely what spills over into the affairs of men. In seeking to avoid evil, man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man's ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.” | Ernest Becker | 1976 |
