salvation

I'm posting this here so it doesn't get buried.

Ok I'll elaborate cause I don't think I was very clear about what I was talking about with the salvation/retirement analogy. Stick with cause I want some intelligent intellectual retaliation. (first when I say retirement I'm also referring to the state of having enough money to allow us not to work for the rest of our lives.) I am not comparing the reality of retirement to heaven. That would be stupid because they are apples and oranges because one exists and one does not. I did not say that retirement is the secular substitute for heaven sociologically, I said it was a psychological substitute. Some of us talked about how the concept of suffering now in order to achieve happiness later is a concept very specific to western culture. It's very obvious in every aspect of our media and education. It is also at the core of our cultural narcissism disguised as selfless respectability. Pirsig talked about the implications of the word 'just' in the phrase 'just what you want.' Same idea. I know this isn't a very complex idea, but it's not the endpoint of my argument. Another perhaps contradictory aspect of our cultural consciousness and subconscious is strict rationalism. It is not rational, when we know as a fact that our life is finite, to waste it not doing what we want to do. It takes a very sophisticated, convincing moralist indoctrination to convince a person to suffer, or at least conform to a whole complex of social obligations. So when I say that what salvation and retirement have in common, and what necessitates them in the social consciousness, is that they immortalize the boon of our materialistic strife, immortalize is the key word. In order to rationalize the sacrifice of whatever will make us lastingly happy, no mere mortal, transient boon will suffice, because we die and all material possessions we've acquired along the way are meaningless. So our boon must be timeless, eternal, and provide bliss that would never have been possible following our own path, which is dismissed as hedonism. Not that we consciously believe we will live forever after we retire, but the way retirement appears in our fundamental social conditioning is as a timeless state. None of this is conscious. It is the way the West as always reconciled its method of relinquishing the individual from suffering with death. Now, I'm using specific examples to describe a general pattern, so there are semantical arguments and inter-social variants, but they are all faces on the same ghost. I'd point out, for old times sake, that this is a good example of subconscious logic. Now have at me.