>Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?
>Answer: I would not live forever, because we should not live forever,
>because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live
>forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live
>forever.
>-- Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss Universe Contest.
Bob Heilbroner came to do lecture at Gettysburg College when I first took a position there--it was around the time when he wrote this book on differing conceptions of the future throughout human history. During the question and answer period, someone asked him about religion and he said "The idea of eternal life is really not appealing to me at all. I mean, really, who would want to live forever?" I don't know if it is one of those things where you had to have been there, because he gave a big, tired *sigh* afterward and just kind of shook his head, but it was so hilarious (Gettysburg has a loose Lutheran affiliation) and also so right on. Enjoy it while it lasts but let's not find solace in some idea of it just going on and on in our mind after the body is done.
The correspondence between Heilbroner and his mentor Adolph Lowe that is available in the New School library has some good exchanges on God and atheism and agnosticsm. (It also has some pretty juicy gossip about New school econ profs, though Heilbroner kept out the real juicy stuff.)
Heilbroner told me that when he first became close with the old Graduate Faculty crowd--Lowe, Eduard Heimann, Hans Jonas, etc., all the German emigres, he invited them to some New York cocktail parties (recall that RLH was part of the NY intellegentsia and literary crowd around the New Yorker, etc., during the fifties). He said they just could not do the cocktail 'small-talk' chatter thing--at their get-togethers they just pulled their chairs up and got right down to discussing "Gott und die Weld" until they were blue in the face, arguing intensely so that an outsider thought major fights were going to break out, but regardless of how much people differed on one subject or the other, no animosities were carried outside. Every discussion was conducted as if the future of humankind depended on it. Many of the participants had been part of the "Moot" in England in the thirties and forties, and before that the "Kairos" circle and other discussion/reading/political groups from Frankfurt and elsewhere in the Weimar period, including Mannheim, Tillich, the Niebuhrs, Michael Polanyi, etc. Tillich's "diary" of his visit to Europe in the late 1930s is a lot of fun to read. He is going around giving lectures and holding forth discussions on the future of mankind, but at the end of his entries he always gives exact info on what they drank and also all the (often young) women he meets. Without batting an eyelid.