D.den Otter wrote:
>
> Yep, Hell sure kicks ass. Here are some fine tortures to
> choose from. Or better yet, try 'em all!
>
> Sin ~^~ Punishment
> ---------
> Pride...............broken on the wheel
> Envy................put in freezing water
> Anger...............dismembered alive
> Sloth...............thrown in snake pits
> Greed...............put in cauldrons of boiling oil
> Gluttony............forced to eat rats, toads, and snakes
> Lust................smothered in fire and brimstone
>
> There are some relevant pictures at:
> http://www.50megs.com/matterer/macabre/gallery4/macabre4.htm
All,
May I share a fantasy with you all? I used to be a christian even a
fundamentalist one. Well no one is perfect, sorry John ;). I became an atheist
and at first I felt like Robert Ingersoll in his quote here:
"When I became convinced that the Universe
is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are
myths, there entered into my soul, into every
drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, of
the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison
crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded
with light and all the bolts, and bars, and
manacles became dust." -Robert Ingersoll
Then slowly crept in a feeling of slight remorse. No I wasn't backsliding,
reason and logic would not allow that. However, I'd see on the news some deeply
heinous act of cruelty of one or several human beings against others and think
"Too bad there's not a hell!". Some people truly deserve more punishment than
this life can ever offer.
I'd already figured out, even without knowing of the existence of Extropianism,
that we would one day truly become as godlike as technologically possible and
that we would create our own heaven. I reasoned out that we might even find a
way to resurrect the dead from the past.
My first inclination was time travel. Having an eternity to do so we could go
back to the recent past (in my newly learned vernacular "pre-singularity"--is
this correct?) and snatch someone just milliseconds before death and whisk them
to our glorious future. I hadn't worked out the finer details but it would
entail not disturbing the timeline (provided time travel to our own timeline
were possible rather than a parallel one). In their past those around them
wouldn't be the wiser that they had disappeared. There was a sci-fi movie called
"Millennium" somewhat along these lines but not for the same purpose.
Information gathered from them would lead to the coordinates and histories of
their relatives and friends and then from those the same and on marching
backward in time extracting people from eternal death. How far back we might go
in the human evolutionary continuum might be food for interesting discussion.
Lately I've considered that their uploadable information might be the thing to
get. Kip Thorn doesn't believe time travel will be possible to any time prior to
the building of the time machine, if at all. However, some Germans have been
successful at sending information faster than the speed of light so to me the
jury is still out. Going on this, if it's not possible to physically go back in
time and therefore violate any paradox concerning too much matter from your
matter being duplicated, then perhaps information can still be sent and
received. I'll leave the details for those much more clever than I. The how of
it all is not my core point.
My point is that maybe one day we could bring people to justice that in the past
escaped it. I don't propose any eternal torment or even the medieval physical
tortures, though some might. If you had the opportunity to resurrect Hitler or
Stalin, how would you make them appreciate their crime? How much time would you
give them to learn remorse? Consider that they wouldn't be allowed to just die
and forget it all. All six million of Hitler's Jewish victims could parade his
cell each day. He could be made to believe they were ghosts so that he wouldn't
be able to rationalize that they now were alive so "what's the harm?".
What psychological torments could you devise for John Wayne Gecy or Ted Bundy?
I thought maybe a thousand years of solitary confinement for each death one
caused maliciously. Conversely those wrongly accused and jailed or executed
could be exonerated and compensated. So what do you all think of my fantasy? I'm
sure I'm not alone. I don't read a lot of sci-fi so I don't know if this idea's
in some book somewhere. Well perhaps I've sparked some discussion.
James
-- "Quod de futuris non est determinata omnino veritas" NOSTRADAMUS 15TH Century
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:03:58 MDT