The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: myself, nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present
imperfections (and what I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that
you may just as well give me a new name and face the fact that I am a
new person and that the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton. Thus,
oddly enough, the conventional belief in the matter comes to this:
that if you wish to live for ever you must be wicked enough to be
irretrievably damned, since the saved are no longer what they were,
and in hell alone do people retain their sinful nature: that is to
say, their individuality. And this sort of hell, however convenient
as a means of intimidating persons who have practically no honor and
no conscience, is not a fact. Death is for many of us the gate of
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