To be clear, this is pretty untrue of Christianity, the dominant religion in Western civilization, so I'm constantly puzzled about this claim. (HPMOR makes the same claim.) The central story of Christianity is that God takes human form, dies, and cannot stay dead. If it were just "Jesus died for our sins", there would be no need for a resurrection story; his followers would have had way more credibility saying merely that he was killed, which is far more objectively verifiable.
From 1 Corinthians: "The last enemy to be destroyed is death" (which, incidentally, comes up in canon HP), and, quoting the prophets: "When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory.' 'Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?'" From Revelation, also quoting Isaiah: "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." From a 1500-year-old hymn: "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death."
Death is an enemy; death is not good, and should not exist. Perhaps other religions disagree, but Christians and atheists should be able to agree on this basic fact.
A species is basically self perpetuating genetic code stuck somewhere in an evolutionary local maxima. In our case there may be an advantage in adaptability by having individuals die and genetic code mix/change more frequently.
This still sucks and if we could figure out how the brain actually worked to prevent it that would be cool, but we'd start getting into identity issues (what makes you you? how does consciousness actually work?).
Sleep is interesting to think about here since it likely has something to do with re-calculating weights in a neural net, garbage collection, persisting memories etc. Though we don't consider going to sleep dying and waking up new because of the sense of continuity. If a copy of you was made and the original then killed though we wouldn't like that.
Sense of purpose difficulties still exist in our relatively brief lifespans, but at least we get an easy out with the biological one - we'd have to think more about this with death out of the way. Also the drive to have sex and reproduce would probably still be around since it's core to our existence, not sure how we deal with that.
Though I'd still prefer a star trek future where we're colonizing the galaxy and the goal is to learn.
Mostly rambling thoughts.
Evolution works at the level of genes. Genes that cause more copies of themselves to spread will spread. Even to the detriment of the group or the species.
An organism that lives longer will have time to have more offspring, and those offspring will carry it's longer living genes. An organism that lives shorter will have fewer offspring, and so fewer organisms will carry it's genes. Very rapidly these genes would be selected for or against.
A simple alternative explanation is just that evolution doesn't care. 90% of organisms will die of other causes long before they reach old age. Evolution will end up devoting almost all of it's resources on improving survival rates there, and none on fighting aging.
>This still sucks and if we could figure out how the brain actually worked to prevent it that would be cool, but we'd start getting into identity issues (what makes you you? how does consciousness actually work?).
Identity Isn't In Specific Atoms: http://lesswrong.com/lw/pm/identity_isnt_in_specific_atoms/
Heaven did exist, and our ancestors destroyed it; it was the Caribbean, and its inhabitants were all killed and/or enslaved to build... churches.
I see many atheists carry on religious memes after they deconvert. Which is only natural, religion isn't just a single idea, it's deeply ingrained into our culture. One of those memes is that death is natural and ok. Which, if you believe in religion, it absolutely is. It's the way things are supposed to be according to a trustworthy higher power. There is a life afterwards that makes it all ok. People don't really "die", they just go to a different place.
I don't see anything ok about true death. It's natural, sure, but there's no law that says nature has to be good. We are the product of an uncaring universe and plenty of bad things exist that shouldn't. Death is one of those things.
So I came to the idea that if Heaven didn't really exist, we should build it. I was quite young at the time and influenced by science fiction. I thought that maybe future humans could invent time travel and come back in time and save people who died.
I've since come to the conclusion that time travel is very unlikely to be physically possible in our universe. But other advanced technologies, like curing aging, are certainly not. Perhaps even within our reach. And if backwards time travel might be impossible, we have invented a way to do forwards time travel with cryonics.