David McElroy

The United States is the only country in world history (so far) to use nuclear weapons. In bombing two Japanese cities, the U.S. government killed close to a quarter of a million people — the vast majority of them innocent civilians. At the time, almost all Americans were thrilled at the slaughter and heartily approved. Today, a lot of us believe that what happened was unjustified murder of innocents. Which view is best?

When I was growing up, I believed the atomic bombings were justified. I know all the standard arguments in favor of them, because I used to agree with them completely. (Here’s a sampling of arguments on both sides of the issue.) I came to see the bombings in a very different way, though, as I started questioning the legitimacy of coercive governments.

Before I started seeing the world in a different way, I saw every person living in a land as part of the organism of a nation-state, so they were collectively guilty for their government’s actions. Now, I see those people as individuals, most of whom couldn’t change “their” government’s actions if they wanted to. (And I realize now that many of them would have wanted to.)

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What if police were warned that James Holmes might be dangerous at some point before he took guns to a Colorado theater and started shooting people? Surely he would have been arrested and many lives would have been saved. Right?

That’s the standard sort of thing we tend to assume, but it appears that police were warned about Holmes ahead of time and did nothing to stop him. Does this mean police are indirectly to blame for the shootings? This article from The Atlantic certainly implies something like that. It says the latest revelation is “bound to elicit even more frustration and anger.” The writer then says “it’d be infuriating” to learn that police had a warning and didn’t act on it.

What kind of world does that writer want to live in?

According to ABC News, a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado was worried about her patient weeks before the shooting occurred. So she talked to a university police officer, but we don’t know what (if anything) the officer did with the warning. What should police have done?

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What if I told you that some people who are alive today are never going to die? To some Russian scientists, that’s a very real possibility. They believe they might have the technology by 2045 to allow a human being to live forever.

The human body is always going to wear out — as far as we know — so how is this possible? The scientists of the 2045 Initiative believe they’ll have the technology by then to transfer what they see as the essence of a human being into a machine. If you’re interested in the stages of development they plan to go through to get there, this story will interest you.

For the most part, I’m going to set aside the science of this and assume that some very smart people are able to develop the technology to sustain a human brain. I’m even going to assume that human consciousness is centered there, at least for the purpose of this discussion, even though I have serious doubts about that. (If you’re interested in why I started doubting this commonly accepted belief, you might be fascinated by Paul Pearsall’s book, “The Heart’s Code.”) I’m mostly interested now in the question of whether this kind of immortality would be a good thing or not.

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