The atheist would have a much more difficult time with immortality, because they build their philosophy around the assumption of a short life. They don't put off things beyond this perception of the future, like immediate gratification. The religious people train their mind with the goal of immortality in mind, albeit, in another realm.
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the assumption of a short life
It's not just an assumption, unless you consider 70-80 years to be eons. And nobody has yet proven the existence of an afterlife.
The religious have this funny notion that what they do on Earth - and quite pointedly to the Earth - is completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things because they're getting paradise when they die and the end is *always* nigh. Some take that last part to such an extreme that they make absolutely no plans for the future and just trust that God is looking out for them until they fall over dead and their eternal reward is to keep waiting to be told exactly what to do every day forever.
To an atheist like me everything we do has a consequence even if we don't live to see it and those of us who arent utter douchebags try to make sure the world's a little better off than when we got here. We don't have the luxury of washing our hands of responsibility and paying lip service to some infallible master plan so it's all the more important to own our actions. Immortality means living long enough to see just how each and every one of our actions plays out and hopefully learning from it.
Now whose view of the future seems narrow?
Doesn't even get to the level of Pascal's wager.
If I don't train for immortality I'll have difficulties with it?
I think in that unlikely event I'd get the hang of it in time - give me twenty minutes or so.
A) Bull-fucking-shit. If there is anything you're not doing, it's training your mind. Not unless we're talking about the kind of "training" that involves beatings and starvation for the purpose of breaking one's will.
B) NOBODY is currently mentally equipped to handle the full implications and consequences of immortality. I will say, however, that those of us with a more laid back approach to life would handle the rigors of immortality a hell of a lot better than people like you. People who are constantly worrying about how things that aren't important and don't impact them in any identifiable way will affect their future in an afterlife that they don't even have any evidence exists in the first place.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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