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<\/a>The parallels to what religions seek and\/or claim to offer are noticeable, as is the fact that the spore that infects humanity seems to offer so much that humans claim to want. But at what price? May it in fact be the case that in order to achieve such goals as utter tranquility of spirit, total ending of all conflict and tension, we would have to give up that which in fact makes us human? And if so, then are those things really desirable as ends in themselves? Are they even genuine possibilities?<\/p>\nIn his book God\u2019s Problem<\/i> (Harper Collins, 2008, pp.12-13), Bart Ehrman in fact notices an issue along these lines that is often neglected in discussions of Christian theology, free will and the afterlife. Christians have historically claimed that the afterlife will be akin to what I\u2019ve described: no stress, no war, no evil. But can such a world be realized with human free will intact? If so, then why did God not simply make such a world to begin with? If not, will freedom be eliminated? But then why give us free will in the first place? Or will it in fact be possible for the order of eternity to descend once again into chaos, a never-ending cycle?<\/p>\n
It is tempting to draw the comparison further between the spore in the movie and the \u201cmeme\u201d understanding of religion. But as John Gray puts it in his recent article \u201cThe Atheist Delusion\u201d<\/a> in The Guardian<\/i>, \u201cthe theory of memes is science only in the sense that Intelligent Design is science. Strictly speaking, it is not even a theory. Talk of memes is just the latest in a succession of ill-judged Darwinian metaphors\u201d.<\/p>\n