Saved

[Brian D. McCary]

> From Vineland: "How are THEY supposed to control a population that knows 
> it'll never die?" 

This is just to point out that in basic Judeo/Christian mythology, Adam and
Eve are not thrown out of the garden because they ate the forbidden fruit;
they are thrown out because, having eaten it, they could now eat the fruit
of the tree of life, and become like god.  God was threatened by this,
so he threw them out of the garden to prevent it.

Thus, at least to the Mosaic authors, there was the perception that if a 
population (of people, knowing good and evil) never dies, they have the 
ability to be as powerful as any other "superior being", and so will
represent a threat to the beings in control.

This issue has alwasy seemed to me to be the backbone of Judeic (and its
monotheistic decendants') ideology, although it rarely gets mentioned as
such.  To answer TRP's question, they can't control immortal populations,
so they try to prevent them from arising.

That, in turn, means salvation may be one more way to repress: suggest
the opportunity for immortality behind door number one, so that the suckers
don't look to hard elsewhere.  The preterite may well be the truly lucky:
unsnared by the carney, they are left free to find a way to sneak over the
garden wall....

Brian McCary