Immortality

Nice to know that the brand spanking new Premier of Australia is going to immediately although belatedly, sign the Kyoto agreement, it's just that....well, he looks kinda creepy. Sort of like a cross between the late John Denver and some kind of happy clappy, which I fear he might be.

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Strange how immortality has unexpected consequences.
In Kim Stanley-Robinson's sci-fi world where gerontology treatments keep people alive for centuries, they lack the hard drive to remember everything over their extended lifetimes, thus they forget some of what made them.

In vampire fiction, immortality comes with a heavy price tag. The joy of eating or sunlight is denied you and if you prefer to be a vamp treading the path of righteousness, you have no limiting factors to stop you doing evil, you are outside of the law and you cannot be killed by normal means. The church doesn't want you. Be good, but do it on your own, never waver.
The ultimate Nietzschean.

In cyber fiction, if you can simply be given a new body, you can be tortured over and over again. Your self can be put into an animal, or booted up in virtual, there is no release, no hope of death.

In mediaeval Christian fiction, you can similarly be tortured for all eternity with no hope of reprieve.

But to do so to another being, relentlessly, remorselessly, is to be evil in an absolute sense.

What would our sins be? To seek immortality? If we could prolong our lives in good health of body and mind, physically youthful and able to continue our work to support ourselves, who would turn down the chance to see their grandchildren's grandchildren grow and thrive?

Does the vampire sin? Vampires are made without volition and in the making lies the inherent sin, to pass on the virus because of the necessity to feed.

And would our God allow anything eternally bad to happen to us? We can't even condemn ourselves to that, miserable wretches that we can be.

'....we do pray for mercy, and that same prayer doth teach us all to offer up the deeds of mercy.'

Sometimes we seem all too mortal, but just maybe immortality in this life would be worse.