One of the gargantuan benefits of religion is that it provides believers with the promise of eternal life. The narrative varies across religions but generally speaking the message is as follows: "Don't worry. Your time on Earth is only one small component of your greater eternal journey." I am here to tell you that each of us can be immortal albeit without the need of having to believe in invisible deities.
In an endless number of species (including humans), organisms display great levels of costly altruism toward their kin. Charles Darwin believed that natural selection operated on individuals, which made it difficult to explain why an individual would risk his/her life to save family members. In 1964, Bill Hamilton resolved this conundrum via his theory of kin selection, namely once one moves the level of selection from the individual to the gene, it becomes evident that altruistic acts/favoritism toward one's kin makes evolutionary sense. As such, any individual can augment his fitness not only via reproduction (direct fitness) but also via an investment in his kin (indirect fitness). This is the notion of inclusive fitness, namely it recognizes that one's fitness can increase via multiple pathways.
This brings me to the first path to immortality. To the extent that your kin (e.g., your children) carry your genes, you live on. When parents claim that it is unnatural for them to outlive their children, they are effectively recognizing that it makes evolutionary sense for one's offspring to carry the genetic torch forward. Most parents would be willing to die to protect their children. This is not rooted in some Divine mechanism. Rather, it is a mere instantiation of kin selection. It makes evolutionary sense for you to die in the commission of saving your three children from a burning building. This does not mean that we are consciously aware of the evolutionary calculus that drives our parental love. Nonetheless, there is nothing mystical about the unconditional love that you might provide your child. He/she is literally your ticket to immortality.
What if you do not wish to have any children? Are you doomed to a miserable finitude? Have you sealed your mortal fate? Rest assured, you can still be immortal. In 1976, Richard Dawkins introduced the notion of a meme, as the cultural analog of the gene. Since Homo sapiens is both a biological and cultural animal, Dawkins argued that the meme is the substrate on which cultural evolution operates. A meme can be any informational content that can be passed from one brain to another (e.g., an idea, belief, jingle, song, narrative, etc.). Professors are fertile meme propagators, as they are in the business of "infecting" the minds of their students, their readers, their colleagues, etc. with their ideas. Ironically, the world's most virulent memeplex (a structured set of related memes) is none other than religion!
This brings me to the second path to immortality. You can be immortal by having your memes live on forever. In a sense, this is similar in spirit to the notion of "leaving a legacy behind." One can be immortalized for the songs that they wrote, the buildings that they built, the books that they authored, the lives that they've touched, the love that they've spread, etc. Mere mortals performed each of these acts yet the effects can live on forever.
Hence, whether you become immortal via genetic and/or memetic propagation, there are ways for you to "live" forever that in no way involves your having to believe in religious narratives. This strikes me as an extraordinarily more noble way to live one's life rather than hoping to be "rescued" by an invisible deity into an eternal life of servitude.
On a related note, you may wish to check out my earlier post on the relationship between carpe diem (seizing the day) and atheism here.
Finally, I wish my American readers a Happy Memorial Day.
Source for Image:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v188/smoki_loki/musicdna.jpg
