A Religion without a Soul: Don’t Die Misses Life’s Meaning

Early in the Netflix documentary Do not die: the man who was going to live forever” The anti -aging expert, Dr. Andrew Steele, said something that fell short: “We are so accustomed to seeing our friends, family and pets aging and dying, we believe that it is somehow natural and somehow good.”

We do it?

Of course, it is fair to say that it is a consensus on the naturalness of death. It is part of the life cycle of every human and animal: we are born, we live, we. Oh well”? That is not exactly a common feeling. Even those of us who believe that death is why we must go to get to God, do not maintain that death be inherently Good.

But Bryan Johnson, the technological billionaire that is the focus of Do not dieHe carries his own anti-death attitude towards unworthy heights. Johnson has gained fame in recent years for the Blueprint protocol, a strenuous diet, exercise and medical care program designed to remove the years of his life literally. As the documentary in exhaustive detail shows, Johnson spends hours measuring portions of vegetables, pills to swallow and pumping, with the result, according to reports, it is a lower biological age in approximately five years.

The ultimate goal, as is clear in the title of films, is to defeat death.

The documentary is largely comprehensive with Johnson and his goal, who No Why face the oldest enemy and humanity sausages, after all? Who among us, if we had billions of dollars, would not consider at least plow those dollars to find a way to stay here on the ground as long as possible? What better use is for all that money to defeat death?

Therefore, the film softens about Johnson’s eccentricities and the Settens aspects of its history that tend to obtain a rescuer treatment of the press. That story you have heard about Johnson Siushoning Blood, and then Plasma, of his teenage son to help stay young? Do not die It presents this strange practice as a good family bond to the old. Johnson; His father, Richard; And his son, Talmage, all participate in the Plasma Exchange Ritual, which is presented not only as part of Bryan’s Device Plan, but also as a way of trying to boost the mental skills that fade of Richard. “Bryan told me that it would be something to do something for his loved one that mattered,” says Richard.

The parallels obvious to vampirism, etc., never seem to occur to any of them.

That is not, I think, an accident. As with that novel idea mentioned above that death is bad, Johnson and his associates seem to think and act as if they were inventing the world as they advance. Maybe it’s not surprising, then Johnson speaks, just jokingly invent his own religion, along with his search for immortality.

Born in the Sud faith, Johnson practiced it to the adult, until, he says, “with the intensity of what life was delivering, I felt that [the church’s] The answers, the only reality I knew, no longer made sense. “Attacted with suicide depression, he left his faith, sold his company, divorced his wife and” found strength and liberation by making a plane. “

That is to say too strongly to say that Johnson’s new religion is the worship of the body. It is quite clear only from the images we are seeing on the screen: obsessive exercise, careful appearance, the scene in which his son enters him that photographed him naked. But if that is enough, they come out and say it.

“I didn’t want a future life, I didn’t want this life, I didn’t want consciousness at all,” Johnson recalls of his depressive period.

My mind was like a vicious storm, he literally told me to commit suicide, and it became clear that the mind is not a reliable source of judgment. I needed a different way of being. . . . When I give my body authority, I do not commit this self -destructive damage. My heart does not offer paint thesis. My lungs do not do it either. My kidney either. Remaking my mind has been the best I have done in my life.

I am not minimizing the seriousness of Johnson’s depression when I say this is a rather drastic case of baby and bath water. His ideas call me, he thought, how to be in Parth, those who want us to externalize our writing, our art and our thinking in general to artificial intelligence. In the botos, our creative minds and skills given by God are devalued, our actions became mechanical and meaningless.

There is also the matter of the intense self -register approach requesting the Johnson regime: a self -confidence that, it admits, is a poor romantic perspective and a person without a large company in general, apart from their staff and Talmage, in the latter. (Johnson’s other children were not interviewed for the film, and the state of their relationship with them is not clear.) Try to argue that the plan could adapt to help everyone in the world, but the stab in altruismus in the whistle or a heis in their Hisnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. Biology is not terrible convincing, special when you consider your station in life. I apologize for generalization, but yes, so special after recent months, you really think that technological billionaires such as class have the best interests of the public in the heart, I have a chainsaw to sell you.

In addition, there are reasons to ask if Johnson’s efforts could be real to him.

But, above all, Johnson’s attempt to defeat death neglects the nature of reality. As I said before, nobody seriously argues that death is good. CS Lewis, in his book MiraclesHe rightly describes him as “the triumph of Satan, the punishment of the fall and the last enemy” and reminds us that Christ himself “detest this criminal obscenity no less than us, but more.”

“On the other hand,” Lewis continues, “only the one who loses his life will save him. We are baptized in the Death Or Christ, and is the remedy for the fall. “

Johnson’s religion falls separately because he does not understand these final truths. Together with the mind, devalue the soul when it raises the body above all. And what would be the point of living forever without a mind or soul, two essential ingredients or our humanity? I hate the idea of ​​dying too, but if the alternative is to pour all my resources and all my energy to create an immortal body at the expense of everything else, well, again, that raises the unpleasant idea of ​​vampirism, a way of life without a soul that can do nothing more than a real life. It is a difficult fact to face, and Do not die He never faces to face it, but it seems that the only immortality that can be given at the same time is the child we gain through the acceptance of our common mortality. In other words, only through death we can find a true life.