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"But can God love us if [God] allows us to cease, while [God] lives on? The answer lies in a simple ambiguity in the word 'cease.' That our lives are finite in time as well as in space does not mean that at death we become nothing, or a mere corpse. For our past experiences are not cancelled out. The past is indestructible, ever-living. Persons who truly love those who have died feel this vividly, though they usually, thanks to the strange blinders worn by philosophers and theologians who have taught them no better, misconceive the nature of the feeling. The past reality of the person is not dead and cannot die. It 'lives forevermore,' in Whitehead's phrase. Where? How? In the Whole, whose appreciation is infinitely tenacious of every item
3 unendurable. That species do no not last forever is even more obviously not an evil. Species other than man cannot know that they are temporary, and man can understand how his temporary existence can contribute to what is not temporary, the all-encompassing Whole. [Since Hartshorne speaks earlier in the same essay of "the races of rational beings which, according to all reasonable probability, people the great spaces" (75), he should have said, "Species other than rational . . . "]. . . .

"But should creatures live, while they live, by destroying others? Is this not vicious or cruel? We have granted that creatures should not live forever. How then are they to die? The only causes must be other creatures, either within, as parts, or without as members of the external environment. And what harm does it do a deer that it dies through the attack of a lion, rather than of old age? Old age is a dull mode of existence; if death generally came that way, then instead of the species being composed mostly of creatures enjoying the prime of life, it would be more largely composed of half-bored elders. The sum of intense enjoyment would be less, not more" (81 f.).