From a great book ...

"Two of the more startling discoveries I made in the course of working on this book were that Joe Waynick, chief executive of Alcor, is a Seventh Day Adventist, and David Gobel, founder of the Methusaleh Foundation which supports research in longevity, is a Jehovah's Witness. Only Americans, I thought, could so smoothly combine such a secular goal as a medicinal immortality with such fundamentalist belief systems.'
- Bryan Appleyard, How to Live Forever or Die Trying

This does not surprise me, though I was surprised to read it only a day after the thought had occurred to me that reductive naturalism and fundamentalism are but two sides of the same coin. The adherents of both are literalists, resistant if not actually immune to symbol, ambiguity or nuance.

Bryan's book, by the way, which I will have more to say about eventually, is so good that I would advise you not to wait for it to be published here. Just go to Amazon. com UK and pay the extra pence. The chapter I read last night, "The Mirror of Death," is simply extraordinary.

Update: Bryan makes the same point as I do above in his next chapter: "Both Islamic and Christian fundamentalists insist on the actual physical reality of what will occur after death. They do so in the global cultural context of - and in reaction to - scientism, another fundamentalism whose faith is in the literal possibility of the omniscience and omni-competence of science. For these faiths, metaphor and analogy are not enough, nor is the vagueness of the eternal contemplation of the deity. Rather, the reward of the afterlife will be understandable in the terms of this life - as sensual pleasures, reunion with loved ones and so on. In the faith of scientism the compeletion of the scientific project would also involve a complete solution to the problems attendant on being human."