In this free-for-all-Friday Trent analyzes the actual consequences of choosing immortality in this life.
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Immortality is a concept that has been explored in fiction for centuries. Millennia, really? And I want to talk about it today here on free for All Friday. Really? The downsides of it and why, if a genie, a person who works at an odd emporium of, magical artifacts gives you a potion to live forever, you should turn around and walk the other.
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Don’t just walk. Run in the other direction. Don’t take that deal. It’s always going to be a bad deal. That is, we’re discussing day here on free for on Friday. Welcome. Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology. But Friday we, you know, we talk about whatever I want to talk about. And today I’m talking about the curse of immortality.
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So imagine that you could live forever. Would you take that bet? There are a lot of people who might do that. If they. If they didn’t think about it really, really well. Now, as a caveat, though, as a faithful Catholic, I know one that all of us are actually immortal. We have immortal souls and we will have and we have an endless life ahead of us.
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So the question is, do you want that life to be with God or without God? If that life is with God, who is perfect, being itself infinite, and love, goodness, power and knowledge, well, we call that kind of life heaven. If you have that unending life without God, we call that hell. Now a lot of people think of hell is, you know, fire and flames and people in red tights poking you with a pitchfork.
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And there’s imagery that’s used of hell in Scripture. We have to be careful about that imagery not being stretched too literally. Because honestly, when I think about immortality, if you wanted to create a hellish experience of someone, just let them live a life on earth that is immortal, that would that would truly be hellish. And that’s on and get through here.
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So and that’s why I’m talking about, legitimate immortality. So there’s people who are trying to, you know, live forever, like, make themselves, impervious to disease or things like that. And we have improved lifespans, but we’re never going to get to that point. But there’s people who really, they really want to try. There’s people think, oh, I’ll just upload my brain to a computer and I’ll live forever that way.
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Well, one, those circuits are going to degrade over time. And two, that is not you. That is a fancy copy of you. You died, my friend. If you if you think that you could do something like that. So when I’m talking about immortality, I’m talking about the classic model in a lot of fiction where you live forever and you retain your youthful appearance, so you stay the same age.
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I guess you want to take. You probably want to take this, dial up by way of the the the devilish shop owner who’s usually the devil in disguise, offers you the potion. Be sure to take it when you’re at an age that you really want to stay at forever. I was, I think when I was a kid, I read that book, Tuck Everlasting.
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And so it’s the family, the drinks in the spring, and then all of them are different ages, and they’re stuck at that, except for the dog. The dog didn’t drink, and he died. That’s how we know. It’s like the one line from the book that I, that I remember. So, you know, so there’s you’re going to stay the same age, but also, you can’t die.
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So you wouldn’t just not just die of old age, but somehow, you know, you would not. It would be impossible for you to be killed. Now, how would that work out? Different fiction writers go in different ways a lot of times for immortal characters in fiction, they just regrow limbs. They regrow parts of their body, as needed, I think.
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And, the, the comic series invincible, which is an Amazon Prime show. There’s Mr. Immortal, the only way you can. No, not kill him, but stop him from regrowing is if you separate the head from the body. I think that’s common in immortal characters in fiction. So would you take the deal? You will live forever. You won’t get.
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You won’t get sick. You cannot be injured. So nothing can kill you. You would die and you would stay the same age. Yeah, who absolutely should not do that. I’ve got a list of problems here. I’m just going to start right off with the most terrifying problem I can think of. If you’re in this scenario, and that is the odds that you will be trapped forever in some kind of horrifying, hellish confinement.
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Our base are 100%, 100%. You will end up trapped in some kind of horrifying, confined state. So, I mean, just think about it like, imagine if you took this. You drank the immortality potion on, September 10th, 2001, and you walked into the World Trade Center on September 11th. And then, you know, there are everyone’s freaking out.
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Towers have been have you think, hey, I’m going to live forever. I’m I can’t die. I’m not afraid of anything. And you just. And you think, oh, a little smoke won’t hurt me, and you’re just casually strolling down the stairs, not taking your sweet time. And then the building collapses. And then it collapses, completely on top of you.
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And now you are. You’re not dead, but you can’t move. You’re embedded. And, millions of pounds of concrete, steel, rebar, and you’re stuck. You can’t go anywhere and you can’t get out. Now, you might be hoping like it still screams someone will eventually come get me. Maybe. But eventually, once they try to rescue people and they think, okay, nobody could have survived this, they give up on rescue operations.
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Maybe you think, well, maybe they’ll just recover my body. Then they’ll find out I’m alive. Which will of course get to other problems here in this. But there have been cases where buildings collapse. The things happen and they decide, well, you know, it’s too dangerous to try to go find the person there, but the. You hear news reports, right?
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Their bodies were never recovered. And then you’re stuck there for a very, very, very, very long time. Not forever. We’ll get to why, but could be hundreds of years. Thousands of years, until somebody excavates the site in an archeological dig and finds you. And there’s lots of ways escape. You could be out skiing, enjoying skiing, get buried in an avalanche, and you can’t get out.
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And nobody ever can’t hear your muffled screams under the snow and you’re just stuck. There’s so many ways you can fall off a ship in the middle of the ocean, and normally you would drown or get eaten by a shark, but you can’t die. So you’re you’re swimming and eventually you get. I mean, we also have to say if you if you’re like a normal person, you get tired.
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I guess you could say with the immortality elixir, maybe you say, oh, I’ll never get tired. I guess you could try to keep swimming forever, and you’re going to get tired, and eventually you get back to land or an island somewhere, or you get tired. You’ll just sink to the bottom of the ocean, and you’re walking around in the darkness at the bottom of the ocean, trying to find your way back out to dry land somewhere you could spend centuries walking the earth trying.
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Try and do that, and you could fall down in a chasm in there and never be able to get back up again. So you’re going to be trapped somewhere until eventually millions or billions of years into the future. At the worst case scenario, you’re trapped somewhere. Nobody ever finds you. You know, the sun will explode and vaporize the Earth, and you’ll get sent hurtling into outer space.
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Eventually. What will happen is, if you’re indestructible, you’ll end up floating in outer space with a bunch of hydrogen atoms. The question is, when will your, with your hellish experience, begin? The next day when you go to the World Trade Center, or thousands of years later? Oh, here’s something else. You know what? If you don’t get trapped in or you get falsely accused of murder, and then you’re you’re given a life sentence.
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There’s an episode of The Twilight Zone called Escape Clause where this guy, he’s a hypochondriac. He’s worried about getting sick. The devil shows up to him. He says, I’ll give you immortal life. He says, okay, I’ll take it. But I’m giving. But just in exchange for your soul. But hey, you’re not going to miss it. And I will give you an escape clause.
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By the way, if you ever want to die, just summon me and I’ll. You know I’ll kill you. So he does it. And then he, through a chain of events, he falsely confesses to a murder that never happened because he wants to see what it’d be like to get the electric chair. Then he goes and the judge says, I sentence you to life without parole is like life.
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And then he’s there, and then the devil comes. You want that escape clause now, and the guy has a heart attack. But the implication is now he’s gone to hell because the devil owns his soul. You can’t be the devil unless you’re, Your name is Johnny. In a fiddling contest. So my name’s Johnny, and it might be a sin, but I’ll take your bet.
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You’re going to regret because I’m the best has ever been found out on the road. I’m thinking. Charlie. Charlie Daniels band, The Devil Went Down to Georgia, a great song, by the way, which I love, by the way the devil went Down to Georgia and most other cultures. The lesson is, if you get into a bet with the devil, Johnny would have lost and would have suffered a horrible consequence, and it would be a telltale lesson for people.
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But in America we say, yeah, he beat the devil. He’s awesome. Amazing that you was a USA. So like, American Stories are all about we win and we’re awesome basically. So I’ll, I’ll play the clip showing the the the end monologue or Rod Serling from Escape Clause. There’s a saying every man is put on earth, condemned to die.
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Time and method of execution are known. Perhaps this is as it should be. Case in point. Want to better go lately deceased a little man with such a yet to live beaten by the devil by his own boredom, and by the scheme of things in this the twilight zone. And then at the end of the episode, I’m going to play another, end monologue that deals with, the subject of death, because that really does play into a lot of this.
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But okay, let’s say that you did get trapped in a building collapse, and you’ve been there for like six months, and they film finally hears you and they dig you up and they find you by the other example I didn’t bring up earlier. Also, there was a guy in Florida. There was like a sinkhole that opened up and his bed and room fell into the sinkhole.
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They never found him and they buried and they just filled in the sinkhole. And that’s the end of that. Like, I was immortal and I want to be him. Let’s say they do find you and they’ll wonder, That’s kind of weird. How are you alive? Well, once you figure out you’re immortal, then every government in the world and crime syndicates going to be after you, trying to figure out the secret of your immortality so they can mine it for themselves.
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So you always. You are always going to be on the run, always change your identity, even if you’re not found in a situation like that. There is, a movie with, Blake Lively. It’s called Age of Adeline, where she gets, like, struck by lightning after a car accident, standing in a puddle of water. And she’s immortal.
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And like, she has to keep changing her identity because, like, the police think, like she has a fake driver’s license and this other stuff. And so she falls in love with a man, but has to leave him because she’s immortal and doesn’t want him to know. Then she falls in love with another man like 40 years later, and it turns out the guy she falls in love with is the son of the first guy who sees her and is like Adeline.
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She’s like, that was my mom. And it’s, it’s an interesting, film, you know, romantic drama trading on themes of, of immortality. But yeah, you’re always going to be on the run. So that’s the problem right there. But let’s say you do stay on the run. Let’s say nobody ever finds out about your mortality.
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It’s still going to be awful. It’s still going to be an awful experience. So here’s a few things will happen. You’re going to get a sense of isolation, like you’re going to fall in love with people form friendships are going to keep dying, and you’re always going to be sad and isolated from that. And then when you get new friends and new loved ones, you know, it’s going to get old.
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After I was like, oh, it’s the new season, or these people, you won’t be able to form meaningful attachments, and your perception of time is going to be crazy weird. Like, even now, time flies by so fast for me. When I was eight years old, summer vacation lasted forever because the three months of summer vacation when I was eight were a much larger portion of my life than now, when I’m when I’m in my 40s.
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And so the older you get, time appears to go faster. So once you get to be thousands of years old, you know, everything just, you know, becomes kind of meaningless. It’d be like people popping in and out of existence, like a time lapse photography going off around you. So, you’ll feel isolated. There’s one harm I’ve read that may not actually be that harm of as much at all that, I don’t I think it might be an overstated harm.
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That’s. You’ll be horribly bored. But also, people say that you’re not going to remember things. Your mind, you know, it’s not going to be a great life. Is you going to forget all this stuff? How do you remember all these relationships, people I’ve had? Well, if you forget everything, you’re going to be that bored. People say, well, you you could travel the whole world and you’ve already done that.
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You know, I’ve traveled to places and I like to go back there. If I forget about it, I can get into a pattern and it won’t be that boring. So I don’t think that’s much of a harm. But what’s interesting is if you keep going on this this way, living forever in this earthly life, you might die anyways psychologically, because you might become a brand new person.
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That’s totally unlike the person who wish for immortality in the first place and regrets it. So you could die by losing your losing your identity. In that respect, nothing. Let’s say you don’t even. You don’t get caught and you don’t get trapped, but you will be isolated because another weird thing will happen. Humans will keep evolving. Like, look at cavemen, right?
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Cavemen that lived 100,000, let’s say, 300,000 years ago. Well, if you live 300,000 years and the human species doesn’t annihilate itself, of course I’m assuming that, you know, the Lord will return and you know, Christian worldviews wouldn’t happen. But let’s say in and let’s say this is a non-Christian fictional worldview, if the human race hasn’t destroyed itself, which means you’re alone on the rest of the rest of your life, if humans still exist after 300,000 years, you are going to be like a caveman to them because your body hasn’t evolved in that time.
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You might not like their food, you might not be able to talk to them. You might not you. You might look hideous to them. Just like a cave. People are not like that. Exciting us. You might. You literally might have to be in commercials and be like the Geico, caveman. Is that the faith that you want now?
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So we need to be okay with death. Is death a bad thing? Absolutely. Death is a bad thing. Was never part of God’s plan. But it’s a bad thing. But it’s not as bad as living forever in an earthly life that would truly be hellish. So I’m going to play for you. This is the end, monologue from,
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What is it? Fear, as I think it’s called. Like fear in the darkness. There is a Twilight zone episode about a woman who is. Oh, it’s called nothing in the dark. And she’s afraid of death. And she’s an old lady. Lives in a little tenement, and, she lets. She’s worried that death is going to come to her door and get her.
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And there’s a guy who claims to be a police officer has been shot, like, come help me. And a few things. And then finally she figures out that guy was death the whole time. And he says, you know, you were you know, you were afraid of me. What are you afraid of? You. You just didn’t you didn’t know what was ahead.
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But there’s nothing to be afraid of. And so I’ll play the last, monologue from that. There was an old woman who lived in a room and, like all of us, was frightened of the dark, but who discovered in a minute last fragment of a life that there was nothing in the dark that wasn’t there when the lights were on.
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Object lesson for the more frightened amongst us. And we’re out of the twilight zone. All right, so now you know about the curse of immortality. At least in this life. Always pursue the true blessing of immortality. In Christ, in heaven with God. That’s what we should really be pursuing. Thank you all so much. I hope you have a very blessed weekend.