The seeds of despair provide the hosts with another set of incentives for others to devote lives that they think are spent in service to God, instead spent in the service to those who claim to speak for God.”

Yes, this scenario has certainly played out many times. The number of such occurrences, of course, goes up dramatically when the “God” part may be filled in by anything else. For instance:

“Serve the nation, and I am the voice of the nation”
“Serve our family, and I am the voice of our family”
“Serve freedom, and I am the voice of freedom”

Whether people serving those who represent God also, coincidentally serve God, is a separate question. But the idea of “borrowing” imperative from an external ideal is clearly not limited to the religious (or would-be religious).

Nothing in here denies the real pain that some feel at the thought that their own life, or the end of all who know about and remember the human race, may end. However, it denies the necessity of these sentiments and the suffering that it causes. It offers a reason for their very real existence, but it is not a reason that has merit.

Humans have an innate desire to control their environment and their destiny, and death is the ultimate loss of control. Further, humans have an innate appreciation of unique complexity and beauty, life being the best example; and death is the destruction of uniqueness and beauty. Finally, humans value relationships with other humans, and death destroys those relationships.

These are three forms of desires that are thwarted by death and I don’t see that they are easily malleable, nor that despair can be easily averted.

Lorkas: Perhaps a bad example, since Ghengis Khan was said to be of divine birth and he believed his empire to be divine in nature.

No, that doesn’t make it a bad example. A leader of divine origin is still saying “Serve me” which was supposed to be some sort of sticking point. Someone saying “Serve me, I am of divine origin” is saying something quite different from the Mohammadian “Serve God, and I am the voice of God”. A prophet is different from a divine leader. Of course leaders will claim the Mandate of Heaven or just straightforwardly say that they are gods but that’s another thing entirely. A prophet can appear to be humble, which is what I think AF was getting at, but a living god can’t very well do that.

And on the heat death stuff – we don’t really know what the ultimate fate of the universe will be or whether it’s possible to get around it. It’s way, way, premature to worry about it.

Rhys: This seems to me a sticky situation, since many theoretical physicists and philosophers of time have said that the reason time is asymmetric (only moves forward) is because entropy only proceeds in a positive direction.

That’s only true in a closed system. Chemical reactions occur all the time that decrease entropy in one area by increasing it in another area. So, we could theoretically save our universe from heat death if we found a way to create another “universe” to accept the entropy increase from our universe.

Also, the increase of entropy is governed by probability, not certainty. This means that even in a closed system, it’s possible (though inconceivably unlikely) that entropy could decrease on its own. The concession of this possibility means that the laws of physics might permit some kind of technology that decreases entropy without increasing entropy elsewhere.

Haukur: Meh. Aren’t there just as many Genghis Khan types as there are Mohammad types?

Perhaps a bad example, since Ghengis Khan was said to be of divine birth and he believed his empire to be divine in nature. The same is true for many other famously strong leaders in history, like Alexander the Great (and his dad), nearly all of the Caesars, Guan Yu, and I hear this is probably what happened with Odin and Frigg as well.

Sure there are examples of leaders who didn’t assert any kind of divine support, but I think that the statement made in the OP (“serve God, and I’m his prophet” works better in general than “serve me”) is probably justified based on the pattern of leaders throughout history. Even today, most [religious] people seem to be more likely to listen to their own religious leaders than they are to listen to scientists or politicians.

(the qualifier in brackets isn’t meant as a put-down to religious people–it just points out that nonreligious people don’t have religious leaders to listen to in the stead of politicians and scientists)

Justfinethanks: The heat death isn’t a problem that can be solved with technology. The moon landing harnessed the laws of physics, with attempting to “solve” the heat death you are fighting against the laws of physics. I really don’t see how that is feasible even in the wildest of sci fi writers’ imaginations.

Like I said, call me in a billion years. If, at that point, you tell me “20th century physicists were right, there’s still no way we can think of to get around the heat death of the universe” then I’ll start worrying about this.

Good luck with that.

Haukur: It took industrial civilization a few centuries to get to the moon – why wouldn’t a few billion years be enough to fix such a teensy little problem as the predicted end of the universe?

The heat death isn’t a problem that can be solved with technology. The moon landing harnessed the laws of physics, with attempting to “solve” the heat death you are fighting against the laws of physics. I really don’t see how that is feasible even in the wildest of sci fi writers’ imaginations.

You’re right, however, that we still don’t know a lot about cosmology and physics. While the heat death is the best explanation according to our current knowledge, new areas of research, like Loom Quantum Cosmology, bring up the possibility that firstly “before the big bang” isn’t as absurd as we thought a generation ago, and secondly that the universe will end in a “big bounce” instead of a heat death. It’s using new advances in physics to revive the cyclical universe idea.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026861.500-did-our-cosmos-exist-before-the-big-bang.html?full=true

Of course, the Large Hadron Collider won’t be fired up at full power until 2013, so we might have to wait until after then to get a clearer picture.

Among these are the fact that … the universe itself will come to an end in which all humans and all human descendants – all beings that have or even could have an awareness of our existence – will cease to exist.

I’m so not worried about this. It took industrial civilization a few centuries to get to the moon – why wouldn’t a few billion years be enough to fix such a teensy little problem as the predicted end of the universe? Especially considering that there is a huge amount we don’t know about physics and cosmology and the current theories about the fate of the universe are just a few decades old. Call me in a billion years and if this is still an unsolved problem at that point, then I’ll consider feeling bummed about it.

“Serve me,” is a command that is too often difficult to pull off. “Serve God, and I am the voice of God,” has historically seemed to work much better.

Meh. Aren’t there just as many Genghis Khan types as there are Mohammad types? Submitting your will to a powerful person is a natural – and often rewarding – thing to do. He doesn’t have to be a prophet.