Navigation: current directory home
06 May 2026
Living enables repentance. Those who get insufficient time to live may have insufficient time to complete their repentance. If you die at age 5, you don't get as much time in this life as someone who dies at age 80. You get the 1,000 years of the Millennium just as they do, but the lost 75 years is significant (if there's literally 1,000 years, that's about 7% of the time you could have had).
That's (I think) about how I say things are in Formulalessness. But it occurs to me, maybe God would just give people who die at age 5 a head start on the Millennium. They could be resurrected 75 years earlier than those who live to be 80.
On first inspection, this looks rational, and I'm not sure why God wouldn't do that (or enact some other plan that also gives people time to make up for dying young).
Any problem just saying that? It takes away somewhat from the moral weight of working to prolong people's lives. It's still good to help people live longer if your brain is part atheist as I think is the case with many believers -- the atheist in you doesn't believe people live beyond this life. (Or maybe you aren't an atheist, but like the author of Ecclesiastes, you are a theist who believes that there is no afterlife.) It's also good to practice respect for that which exists, which should continue existing forever unless it is sin. (That opens the question of "does that mean that gusts of wind, specks of dust, garden parties, and other small and ephemeral things should last forever?" -- something to consider in another post.)
(This leaves aside purely deontological issues like, suppose murder or failing to help people live longer just are wrong -- somehow we know that. Extended MSL does factor in deontology. The thing that we need to maximize (consequentialism) -- holiness -- contains deontology in it, which may be known, at least to a significant degree. This knowledge of what deontology demands or recommends is not something I think I can necessarily derive from the first principles of extended MSL, but there are a lot of real things that I can't derive that way, which must be known through some kind of other observation. Likewise there are pragmatic concerns: how can you have a society with murder, or without people helping each other live longer?)
The Bible (I think, maybe) makes it sound like everyone is resurrected at once. At least, that's the impression remaining in my brain from when I read about this topic in New Wine for the End Times. So if that's the case, that would be a reason to think that people who die young get less time to develop spiritually than those who live a "full" number of years.
The Bible seems to give some support to the idea that there can be some kind of "awakeness" after death but before the Resurrection, at least in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. Maybe both the rich man and Lazarus died before age 80? (Or whatever age is the real standard.) So then they got some time to catch up, before going back to "sleep", awaiting the Resurrection.
The way that all makes it sound, it sounds unlikely, but still maybe possible, that people won't have their lifespans corrected by getting extra time before the Resurrection, or something like that. (I can't think of a reason from extended MSL, and I can think of reasons for and against from the Bible, given above). In case it still matters, it lends some weight to the idea that extending people's lives gives them a better chance of being saved from hell, and thus some additional weight on acting like that's true. There are other reasons for acting that way (respecting the preservation of personal beings, behaving like a good atheist since in a way we often tend to be atheists / non-afterlife theists, and deontology).