Because I love life and there’s nothing after this?
You'd most likely have been born into society as something between a serf and a slave, with your life strictly by controlled to ensure you never might imperil the perpetuation of those who would almost certainly come to see themselves as Gods. And no, you wouldn't be immortal. That'd be too risky for the Gods. It'd be the absolute worst of humanity, frozen in time, due to the lack of death.
And oh boy, imagine the punishments they could contrive for anybody who might indeed imperil (or even deny) their utter supremacy. How about a million years of torture, if for no other reason than to use you (and the millions of others granted similar accommodation) as warnings to the rest of society? I can say, with at least as much confidence as you express about there being nothing after this life, that this life will end. But the thing I can add to this, is that that's also a very good thing for all of humanity to come.
They were looking to experience all that life could offer, because in the end - what's the worst that happens? Well you die, but you're going to die anyhow. And living a rich life, ended prematurely, seems infinitely more desirable than living a drawn out life, doing everything to minimize risk, where you die all the same but perhaps without having ever given yourself a chance to live.
But imagine those individuals could have reasonably expected they might be able to live forever. I expect there is exactly 0 chance they would have even considered going on that sub, in one of Bezos' rockets, or engaged in basically any activity with any possible risk whatsoever. Because suddenly what you're risking, your life, has literally infinite value unless you happen to be suicidal to begin with. And this would pose a major problem for society doing much of anything.
There's going to be a high rate of mortality for the first colonists on Mars because there's a zillion things that can go wrong, and we aren't going to be able to anticipate even a fraction of them. Who in the world would ever want to risk this if you could live forever?
Eh, you can't slow an exponential growth with a linear gain in living space. There might be a lot of space out there but not nearly enough of the stuff we need to live in order to consider physical space the limiting factor. You might buy time but you'll run up against the familiar discomfort of too little living space again, and will have to downsize or expand out again before very long. Same as it ever was.
You dont treat any other piece of knowledge with the same demand as you do the (lack of) afterlife.
This is just a limitation of science, because we need a conscious mind to test and/or interpret the results.
Human exceptionalism -- our nascent ability to reason -- does not exempt us from being animals in the biosphere in which we evolved.
And space (beyond our planet) is observably not a paradise for things that live on Earth. Unless we are all reincarnated as tardigrades.
Where's your evidence?
What if I claimed when you die you are reincarnated as a zebra on omnicrom-5? Why is that more or less reasonable than an explanation some religious leader made up one time when he was high?
Anyone can come up with some ungabunga, but unless you have evidence there's no rational to believe it.
> All empirical evidence from thousands of years of scrutiny
Yes, I'm very curious to see empirical evidence of what happens post-death and someone who lived to tell us.
On other hand, guess since we don't know what is after death, we can't also say with complete 100% certainty that it is nothing. But for there to be something, then that would mean there is something in this physical reality that gets transported, and we should be able to detect it. And since there has been nothing detected after a lot of tries (experiments), at this time there is nothing.
Maybe I should hold out for "and everyone gets a pony."
And I'm not sure what Lazarus has to do with this unless your suggesting that his raising means that he couldn't die i.e. he's still alive. That would be a very unusual interpretation.
Worth looking into?
* not Christian other religions in the Roman Empire, or (more generally)
* not Christian religions.
Easier to say most, if not all, religions have an afterlife story.
The early usage (according to the OED) was
[ad. L. pāgān-us, orig. ‘villager, rustic; civilian, non-militant’, opposed to mīlēs ‘soldier, one of the army’, in Christian L. (Tertullian, Augustine) ‘heathen’ as opposed to Christian or Jewish. The Christians called themselves mīlitēs ‘enrolled soldiers’ of Christ, members of his militant church, and applied to non-Christians the term applied by soldiers to all who were ‘not enrolled in the army’. Cf. Tertullian De Corona Militis xi, ‘Apud hunc [Christum] tam miles est paganus fidelis quam paganus est miles infidelis’. See also Gibbon xxi.
Cf. payen.
The explanation of L. pāgānus in the sense ‘non-Christian, heathen’, as arising out of that of ‘villager, rustic’, (supposedly indicating the fact that the ancient idolatry lingered on in the rural villages and hamlets after Christianity had been generally accepted in the towns and cities of the Roman Empire: see Trench Study of Words 102, and cf. Orosius i Præf. ‘Ex locorum agrestium compitis et pagis pagani vocantur’) has been shown to be chronologically and historically untenable, for this use of the word goes back to Tertullian c 202, when paganism was still the public and dominant religion, and even appears, according to Lanciani, in an epitaph of the 2nd cent.]
1. One of a nation or community which does not hold the true religion, or does not worship the true God; a heathen. (†In earlier use practically = non-Christian, and so including Muslims and, sometimes, Jews.)
2. fig. or allusively. A person of heathenish character or habits, or one who holds a position analogous to that of a heathen in relation to Christian society.
So maybe they didn't use Pagan, but Figuratively, they thought of Christians as the weird/low class/savage, "A person of heathenish character or habits, or one who holds a position analogous to that of a heathen".
If you are disputing this because by definition "Pagan" means non-Christian, thus by definition Christians can't be "Pagan".
Fine, how about "Superstitio"?
Suetonius and Tacitus used the terms "superstitio"
"On the other hand, Romans believed Christians, who were thought to take part in strange rituals and nocturnal rites, cultivated a dangerous and superstitious" sect.[60]: 125
I just meant to reaffirm that it's not an Abrahamic religion innovation.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-convert...
whatever that means
eg: at least 50k established by genetics for most of the land area: