Death with Interruptions Read Online Free PDF

saved from catastrophe by the skin of their teeth. It is assumed that at the next election, the president of the federation will be re-elected to the post he fills so very brilliantly.

 
     
     
     
     
    ONE CAN SAY ALMOST ANYTHING ABOUT THE FIRST MEETING of the interdisciplinary commission except that it went well. The blame, if such a weighty term can be applied here, rests on the dramatic memorandum sent to the government by the eventide homes, especially those final ominous words, Rather death, prime minister, than such a destiny. The philosophers, divided as always between frowning pessimists and smiling optimists, readied themselves to recommence for the thousandth time the ancient dispute over whether the glass was half full or half empty, a dispute which, when transferred to the matter they had been summoned there to discuss, would probably come down to a mere inventory of the advantages and disadvantages of being dead or of living forever, while the religious delegates, from the outset, presented a united front, hoping to set the debate on the only dialectical terrain that interested them, that is, the explicit acceptance that death was fundamental to the existence of the kingdom of god and that, therefore, any discussion about a future without death would be not only blasphemous but absurd, since it would, inevitably, presuppose an absent or, rather, vanished god. This was not a new attitude, the cardinal himself had already put his finger on the implications of this theological version of squaring the circle, when, in his phone conversation with the prime minister, he admitted, although not in so many words, that if there was no death, there could be no resurrection, and if there was no resurrection, then there would be no point in having a church. Now, since this was clearly the only agricultural implement god possessed with which to plough the roads that would lead to his kingdom, the obvious, irrefutable conclusion is that the entire holy story ends, inevitably, in a cul-de-sac. This bitter argument came from the mouth of the oldest of the pessimistic philosophers, who did not stop there, but went on, Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat. The religious delegates did not bother to protest. On the contrary, one of them, a highly regarded member of the catholic sector, said, You're absolutely right, my dear philosopher, that, of course, is why we exist, so that people will spend their entire life with fear hanging round their neck, and when their time comes, they will then welcome death as a liberation, You mean paradise, Paradise or hell, or nothing at all, what happens after death matters to us far less than is generally believed, religion, sir, is an earthly matter, and has nothing to do with heaven, That isn't what we're usually told, We had to say something to make the merchandise attractive, So does that mean you don't believe in eternal life, We pretend we do. For a minute no one spoke. The oldest of the pessimists allowed a wry smile to spread across his face and he adopted the air of someone who has just seen a particularly difficult laboratory experiment crowned with success. In that case, said a philosopher from the optimistic wing, why are you so alarmed by the fact that death has ended, We don't know that it has, we know only that it has ceased to kill, which is not the same thing, Agreed, but given that this doubt remains unresolved, I repeat my question, Because if human beings do not die then everything will be permissible, And would that be a bad thing, asked the old philosopher, As bad as nothing being permissible. There was another silence. The eight men seated round the table had been asked to reflect upon the consequences of a future without death and to construct from the present information a plausible forecast of what new problems a society would have to confront, quite apart, of course,