I wouldn’t want to live forever. Immortality would negate the entire point of living, which is to seize the brief time that we have here on earth and make something beautiful for our children and grandchildren and so on.

The christian belief that this world is a disposable shell and that real meaning can only be found in escaping it is (I believe) at the root of the callous disregard with which so many of them treat our planet. after all, why conserve and take care of the earth when Jesus is going to come and destroy it all anyway in the Rapture? That kind of a world view is anti-life, anti-human, and utterly nihilistic in the worst possible sense of the word.

Far better to be an athiest or agnostic or pantheist and recognize that this world is all we’ve got and so we should take care of it, and that this life is all we get so we should live it as well as possible. Meaning is found in a life well lived and in the things one creates, not in religions endless morbid fascination with death and all the ridiculous fantasies that religious people come up with about what is after it.

The very concept of “after death” is absurd – death and life are constants, twin facets of the same experience. The only thing that comes after death is more life, as your body decomposes and becomes a part of the soil and new things grow out of it. Given a choice I’d take that over an eternity spent in heaven singing the praises of some egomaniac god any day.