I think the largest part of it is having grown up in fundamentalist evangelical christianity -- the rapture and all that. I view such SF as a secularized rende

I think the largest part of it is having grown up in fundamentalist evangelical christianity -- the rapture and all that. I view such SF as a secularized render of such conceptualizations -- along with the concepts of the singularity, etc. Much of Asimov's work does this. Many of the robot stories are simply recastings of old Jewish folk legends about golems. In one sense, I don't have a problem with recasting old fiction into a newer mold. Such is a mainstay of cultural development. However, there is a particular vain which I do find pernicious. It calls itself 'science' fiction, but is prejudicial to the concept. Such operates as a palliative to a condition that seemingly cannot be resolved: our knowledge that the universe, so far as we understand the laws of physics, the knowledge that science has given us, will come to an end. One way or another, our species is headed for extinction. For the species to choose death at a massive drug orgy this weekend is indistinguishable from the obliteration of this planet by meteor in a hundred or a thousand years is indistinguishable from the engulfment of this planet by its expanding and dying sun is indistinguishable from the heat death of the universe. Though concepts of 'souls' are bandied about in Christianity (and in all appropriated from the ancient pagan Greeks the early church fathers so admired), an examination of the actual deployment of the theology indicates that more generally the bodily nature of an eternity is fundamental. But a purely materialistic understanding of the universe cannot seemingly grant such a possibility of a bodily eternity (whether simulated or not). And if the individual can be in some way assuaged as to their lack of access to such an eternity, they are typically comforted so by the concept of the eternal continuity of the human race (or its ensuing evolutionary descendants) as a process in the universe. Rather than a palingenetism in which some 'golden age' is reborn and the true knowledge of 'god' returns, the timeline has been inverted: we do not recede from 'god' but are distant from 'god' because we are still on approach. In a way, it is the full acceptance that 'god' is crafted by Man. We will make 'god', the AI, etc, who will stand beyond the boundaries of the universe, beyond time and space.