The AMA is only one institution that is likely to diminish in stature in an immortalist society. Organized religion is another. The power of established religion up to the present has certainly been bound up in its monopoly on immortality.
Religion was a simple way of explaining the various natural phenomena our earliest ancestors found too baffling to cope with on a rational basis: thunder, lightning, storms, earthquakes, eclipses-all of them must have seemed mind-boggling to a species that had yet to invent a wheel or control fire. But the most irrational and inevitable natural disaster, one that confronted every living person-persists even today, even as science has brought under control or explained other natural phenomena. It is the fear of death that is the prime impetus behind our modern religions.
If oblivion beyond the grave was too horrifying to contemplate, some kind of religion was the perfect answer to that fear. Life forever in the clouds, Armageddon, miracles, walking on water, resurrecting the dead, virgin births, blessed trinities, and spiritual life eternal were more acceptable alternatives to the prospect of festering in the ground.
For years our spiritual leaders have been exhorting us to go with God/Allah/Yahweh, holding out to us the prospect of spending eternity in such exalted company. Anyone who promised to show us the way to eternal life and happiness was guaranteed a fair hearing.
