If you’ve got a couple of keyboards/synthesizers floating around your church, chances are one of them is a Kurzweil. The latest Rolling Stone (February 19, 2009) has an article about Ray Kurzweil – the guy who basically fathered everything we know about modern musical synthesizers. In the 1980s, Kurzweil used his knowledge of computer pattern recognition to create realistic orchestral instrument sounds on a keyboard (synthesizer).

What Ray Kurzweil is known for these days are his futurist theories. An excerpt (p. 57-58)…

In our lifetime, Kurzweil believes, machines will not only surpass humans in intelligence – they will irrevocably alter what it means to be human. Cell-size robots will zap disease from our blood stream. Super intelligent nanotechnology, operating on a molecular scale, will scrub pollution from our atmosphere. Our minds, our skills, our memories, our very consciousness will be backed up on computers – allowing us, in essence, to live forever, all our data saved by super-smart machines.

He also has developed a line of health supplement pills that he takes 150 of throughout the course of a day, intended to prolong his life “until we have the means to reverse-engineer the information processes underlying biology – giving us the power to ensure our immortality.” (p. 61)

I only bring this up (not to knock the man) to point out that some people believe immortality is possible apart from any traditional faith system.