Wrestling with Religion

I have been dead forever--or for 13.8 billion years if you count time from the Big Bang. I am alive now, of course, but I was dead less than a century ago, and don’t miss all of those oblivious eons. According to actuarial tables, I can expect to be dead forever again in about ten years. My longest reasonable expectation is a bit more than double that, and it overlaps with likely dementia and disability. At most, my life expectancy is one billionth the time I've  already spent comfortably dead, so why I should take health and safety precautions for a reward so trivial: a fifth of a lifetime and an infinitely smaller proportion of my inevitable death-time? Healthy behaviors are a game of diminishing returns, especially since many risky indulgences tend to kill or disable us slowly. It may take years, even decades, for fat to clog arteries, smoking to kill lung tissue, alcohol to destroy the liver, or speeding to kill. Most people die from only one of these (if not from someth...