Posthuman Religion Main Menu

Eschatological Concern

33519
Eschatological concern is so-called because it encompasses the two aspects of the concern for death, dying and what is supposed to happen that I wish to encompass. Eschatological concern includes two strands vital to religion: first, the individual aspect of dying-- that is, the biopolitics of death. Second, it includes the the group facet of death: the necropolitics of apocalypse, rapture and extinction.

This is my least informed concept, unfortunately, as the concept of death is a little weird. There is something extraordinarily self-centred about the concept of death, I learned: it is difficult to think of death outside oneself, let alone one's own species. Extinction is the closest to a Posthuman concept I feel I can get with species that are not my own-- the effects of an individual Orca calf is irrelevant to me, whereas the extinction of an entire species is very concerning. If spiders were to go extinct, the insect population would be completely distorted, upsetting the balance of things as we have them here. Then, insect-eating bird populations might explode in number, and chaos would ensue. Many species would develop better bird-catching and bird-eating abilities, for example, as they would become one of the most abundant food sources for omni- and carnivores. Death on a larger scale has much more of an effect on species than individual death, I learned, and there is not much information regarding the effects felt of the world as we know it teetering on the edge of another mass extinction.

I learned through this facet of religion, perhaps unrelated or irrelevantly, that over 99% of all species that ever existed, somewhere well over 500 billion different species, are all extinct. A humbling thought.

This page has paths:

  1. REQUIREMENTS HUB Sam Henrickson

Contents of this path:

  1. Animals
  2. Bacteria
  3. Humans
  4. Plants