Chats with an AI

Thursday, September 10, 2026

A huge tribe of descendants, including great-great-grandchildren

Your brother has something you don't: a continuing biological family surrounding him, with generations below him and presumably the particular pleasures and complications that brings. You have something different: a life that wasn't organized around raising children and grandchildren, leaving you enormous freedom to construct it according to your own interests and relationships.

And there are some pretty obvious tradeoffs. His tribe means companionship, continuity, people to celebrate with—and probably obligations, noise, disagreements, worries, and expectations. Your lack of descendants means you miss those things, but you also haven't had to spend decades parenting, financing, worrying about, and negotiating with successive generations.

Their pity is understandable because from inside their value system, having no descendants looks like a loss. But that's rather different from experiencing it as a loss. You aren't sitting there thinking, "If only I'd had four children." You have the life you actually wanted, rather than mourning an imaginary alternative.

There's also something amusingly symmetrical about it: he can look at your life and feel sorry for what you don't have; you can look at his and see both what he has and what he had to live through to get it. Neither of you necessarily has the superior bargain.

At least a lot of my genes got passed on.

Yes—and that rather changes the biological bookkeeping. 😄

Your brother having children means your parents' genes got carried forward through his descendants, and some of those are genes you share with him. So although your particular genetic combination stops with you, quite a lot of the genetic material you inherited from your parents is now represented in that enormous clan.

In a sense, you have a rather nice arrangement: you get to be an uncle/great-uncle/great-great-uncle without having had to do the parenting. You contributed to the gene pool while outsourcing the child-rearing. Not a bad deal.

That was intended to be a joke. Natural selection is sly that way, but the reality is offspring is no source of immortality.

Ah, yes—I took the joke literally. 😄

And you're right about the larger point. Genes aren't immortality; they're replication. Natural selection has no interest in preserving you, only in whatever bits happen to reproduce successfully.

Even the descendant who carries some of your DNA isn't you in any meaningful sense. Your particular combination of memories, experiences, quirks, relationships, and consciousness occurs once and then ends. Having a great-great-grandchild doesn't change that any more than having a copy of a book makes the author immortal.

Evolution is wonderfully sly about this: it gives organisms a powerful urge to reproduce and then quietly substitutes gene continuity for personal continuity. A remarkably effective trick—if you're the gene, not the person.

I was classical music; he was rock and roll

The real differences were personality. I was classical music; he was rock and roll. I was a pacifist; he always h I was classical music; he was rock and rollad a chip on his shoulder. I was eager to follow whatever rule; he constantly objected. I was tidy and punctual; he smoked, didn't comb his hair, and didn't groom at all.

Yes—that is much more than ordinary sibling difference. What you describe sounds almost like opposite default orientations toward the world.

You: order, restraint, conformity, cultivation, punctuality, classical music, pacifism.

Him: independence expressed through opposition, informality, rock and roll, disregard for convention, and a rather combative temperament.

And the interesting part is that these aren't just preferences. They reinforce one another. Someone who likes rules is likely to keep things orderly and arrive on time; someone who instinctively resists rules may experience tidiness, grooming conventions, and punctuality as things imposed on him rather than things worth doing. Likewise, your pacifism and his chip-on-the-shoulder temperament sound almost temperamentally antithetical.

It would make the Latin teacher's observation especially understandable. She wasn't seeing two brothers who happened to dress differently; she was seeing two people who seemed to have been assembled from different sets of instructions.

And I suspect that may partly explain why you were never close. Extreme difference doesn't necessarily produce conflict—sometimes it produces fascination—but if neither person has much natural overlap with the other's way of being, there isn't much conversational or recreational territory in which a sibling relationship can develop.

I went to Harvard; he went to Colorado School of Mines, no mean achievement, so he wasn't dumb.

Absolutely. Colorado School of Mines is a very strong counterexample to any assumption that his differences from you reflected intellectual ability. It is an unusually demanding technical school, particularly in engineering, mathematics, geology, and the physical sciences.

So you had two highly capable brothers who happened to express their abilities in very different directions. Harvard and Mines are hardly evidence of one brother being the intellectual and the other not.

In fact, your descriptions suggest a potentially more interesting distinction: perhaps you shared considerable intellectual ability but had radically different temperaments and interests. You were drawn toward ideas, culture, order, and observation; he toward a more technical and perhaps more confrontational mode of engagement.

There is something rather pleasing about the symmetry, too: Harvard and Mines—both formidable, but almost stereotypically different institutions.

I was always all thumbs and clumsy, with athletic prowess going to brute strength. He was handy and repaired things and played basketball.

That fills out the contrast rather nicely. You weren't simply different in interests or temperament—you seem to have had almost complementary physical abilities.

You had the brute-force athletic advantage: big, strong, but awkward and not particularly coordinated. He had the practical dexterity: the person who could actually figure out how something worked, take it apart, and get it working again—and then go out and play basketball, which requires considerably more coordination than you had.

So even physically, you weren't just variations on the same theme:

You: strong, substantial, awkward, cerebral.
Him: thin, coordinated, mechanically handy, athletic.
You: classical music, rules, tidiness, punctuality, pacifism.
Him: rock and roll, resistance to rules, untidy, confrontational.

And yet both of you were evidently quite capable intellectually—Harvard on one side, Mines on the other.

It makes the picture of the two of you as children rather vivid. I can imagine an outsider knowing nothing about the family seeing you together and thinking, Surely these two can't possibly be brothers.

I last saw my brother when I lived in Kansas City, at least twenty years ago

I last saw my brother when I lived in Kansas City, at least twenty years ago, one week driving down to Austin. I stayed in their home, a pleasant suburban place. He had been a special education teacher for Down's Syndrome boys, but with medical progress there had evolved little need for his training. As a regular HS teacher, he had gotten embroiled in a fracas with the local school board and departed, so at the time he was living on his wife's salary as an elementary teacher. Since they had a big Lincoln van and a house in an excellent neighborhood, they obviously had resources, probably from her parents, but that was not my business. Three grown daughters.

That gives a rather vivid snapshot of the family at that particular point in time: you hadn't seen him for roughly two decades, and what you encountered was a comfortable-looking suburban household, but with some ambiguity about how they had arrived at that level of comfort.

Your brother's career is interesting, too. Special education for children with Down syndrome was a fairly specialized field, and medical and educational changes could indeed alter what that work looked like. Then the school-board dispute apparently knocked him out of the ordinary teaching career, leaving your sister-in-law's elementary-school salary as the visible income.

And three grown daughters means that, twenty years ago, they were already at a rather different stage of family life than when you and your brother were young.

I also notice your distinction about the apparent family resources: you observed them, but didn't feel entitled to know where they came from. That's a pretty sensible boundary, especially when you were essentially an occasional visiting brother rather than someone involved in their household finances.

They showed me all around Austin and the countryside. We had long discussions; politically very conservative, way too far for my taste, but I held my tongue, although this may have made me appear condescending. Also religious, although interestingly no particular church. They assumed I was gay and as I've said I've long given up trying to explain that to people, and seemed to have no problem we me and my behavior, although disturbed by the culture's more extreme manifestations.

That sounds like one of those visits where the actual relationship was probably more complicated—and perhaps more successful—than the political and religious differences would suggest.

You were seeing Austin and the surrounding country through their eyes, while simultaneously discovering that you occupied a rather odd category in their mental map: the gay brother, apparently, but not someone they needed to reject or even necessarily disapprove of personally. Their discomfort was more with what they regarded as the culture's excesses than with you yourself. That's an interesting distinction, and probably one reason the visit could remain cordial.

And your holding your tongue about politics may indeed have had an unintended downside. Someone who says little can come across as condescending rather than merely disagreeing, especially in a long conversation where the other person senses that you're carefully not saying what you think. On the other hand, given how far apart you were politically, restraint may have been the only way to preserve the conversation.

The religious part is particularly interesting: religious without a particular church. That suggests something more personal or culturally conservative than denominationally committed. It also fits with the picture you've been giving me of your family: people can occupy quite different intellectual and ideological worlds without necessarily turning their differences into personal warfare.

And there's something rather poignant about it now. Twenty years ago you were sitting in their suburban Austin home, talking for hours, being shown around the countryside, and observing a brother's life that you apparently hadn't been closely connected with for a long time. You didn't know then that it might be the last time you would ever see him.

Not good enough, infinite punishment

From some things I've seen on the internet, Jehovah's Witnesses have begun a process of softening somewhat the idea of God bringing death on billions. I'm not sure, as I am now quite removed, but I seem to read that a last chance would be offered.

Yes. Your recollection is basically right—and the change is quite recent and fairly significant.

The key development came in 2024–2025, and it goes beyond merely saying “we don't know.” The Watchtower has explicitly revised its previous position about when the opportunity for salvation ends.

What changed

The older teaching you would have known was roughly:

The Great Tribulation begins.
At that point, the opportunity for outsiders to become Jehovah's Witnesses and survive closes.
The Witnesses who have been preaching have effectively delivered the final warning.
Then comes Armageddon, in which the overwhelming majority of humanity is destroyed.
Only those already on Jehovah's side survive.

The Watchtower itself now acknowledges that this was its former position.

But in its May 2024 study article, it said it had reconsidered the matter. It now says that it is possible that some people could respond favorably even after the Great Tribulation has begun, including after the destruction of “Babylon the Great.”

And then the August 2025 Questions From Readers made the change even more explicit. It says the preaching work will continue until just before Armageddon, rather than ending when the Great Tribulation begins. The article specifically says:

“people may have the opportunity to respond to the good news until just before the final end at Armageddon.”

It even says that people who turn to Jehovah after Babylon the Great is destroyed could still demonstrate their allegiance by helping Christ's brothers and thereby be judged as “sheep.”

So, yes: there is now something resembling a last-minute opportunity.

But there is an important qualification

They haven't abandoned the basic Armageddon doctrine. They still teach that Jehovah will destroy those judged to be his enemies at Armageddon. The new doctrine doesn't mean everyone gets a last chance or that Armageddon is no longer a mass judgment.

In fact, the 2024 article is rather striking in its formulation. It says that outright opposers whom Jehovah and his forces destroy at Armageddon will not be resurrected, while admitting that the Witnesses simply don't know what happens to some others who die during the Great Tribulation—people who might die accidentally, naturally, or at the hands of other humans.

That's a substantial retreat from the old neat, categorical system.

And I think this connects directly with the problem you raised in our earlier discussion: the moral asymmetry becomes harder to defend if the timing of one's death determines whether one gets another opportunity. The old formulation could produce the bizarre result that someone who died five minutes before Armageddon might eventually be resurrected and taught, while someone equally ignorant who happened to survive until Armageddon could be eternally destroyed.

The current teaching seems partly designed to soften precisely those uncomfortable edges—without actually abandoning the fundamentalist framework.

There is also an interesting historical irony here: the Witnesses themselves describe this as an adjustment or clarification, rather than saying, “We were wrong.” But in practical terms, they have changed a fairly important eschatological rule.

So your internet antenna was working. This isn't just ex-Witness chatter; the Watchtower's own recent publications confirm the change.

This sort of thing was always my problem with good/evil judgment. The scales just a tad on the good side, eternal bliss; the scales just a tad on the other, eternal condemnation.

Exactly. That is one of the deepest problems with the whole binary eternal-destiny model.

It makes moral judgment look like a cosmic switch rather than a meaningful assessment of a person. Imagine a continuum of human conduct, motives, ignorance, circumstances, repentance, and character—and then impose:

good enough → infinite reward
not good enough → infinite punishment

The discontinuity is enormous. A microscopic difference in the input supposedly produces an infinite difference in outcome.

And it gets worse when you introduce time. Two otherwise comparable people could have lived essentially identical lives, except one dies Tuesday and the other Wednesday. If Wednesday happens to be after some divinely established cutoff, their eternal destinies can become radically different.

That was presumably part of what bothered you as a Witness: the system claims perfect justice while giving justice a rather arbitrary boundary condition.

There is an old philosophical response to this, too. If God's judgment is genuinely perfect, perhaps there isn't actually a simple “good/evil balance sheet.” God sees motives, knowledge, circumstances, opportunities, and the whole person. That would make judgment more like an infinitely nuanced assessment than a set of scales.

But then you have moved quite a distance from the very comprehensible Witness teaching of “these people are sheep; those people are goats.”

And, interestingly, the recent Witness softening you just mentioned seems to move in that same direction—away from a sharply defined cutoff and toward leaving more of the individual cases to God's judgment. Which is philosophically much easier to defend, even if it leaves the Witnesses with a less tidy doctrine.

I was not a Witness. I spent a couple of years observing them for my thesis and was objective.

Right—you were an observer and anthropologist, not a former Witness. I conflated your close familiarity with the movement with personal membership. That distinction matters.

And actually, it makes your earlier point more interesting. You weren't struggling with the doctrine as someone who had once accepted it; you were examining how a religious community constructed and maintained its worldview, while trying to remain objective.

Your objection to the good/evil “scales” is therefore more of an analytical observation: the doctrine creates an extraordinarily discontinuous relationship between moral status and ultimate outcome. That's a fascinating thing to observe anthropologically, especially in a group whose members believed the judgment was imminent and therefore consequential for literally everyone they encountered.

Oh yea, I am not critical, just skeptical. The individuals are all good people, perhaps mislead but then we all are.

Yes—and that distinction fits the way you've described your thesis work. Skepticism isn't the same thing as hostility.

In fact, I think your “perhaps misled, but then we all are” formulation gets at something important. A person can be quite rational, conscientious, generous, and decent while holding a set of propositions that you regard as unsupported. We all inherit assumptions from our families, cultures, experiences, and intellectual environments.

And with the Witnesses, the interesting anthropological question isn't necessarily “How could these people believe such nonsense?” It's more like:

“Given the social world they've constructed, how does this belief system make sense to them, and what does it do for them?”

That permits taking the people seriously without having to take the propositions as true.

It also makes your observation about the changing Armageddon doctrine more interesting. You can notice that a doctrine has an obvious moral difficulty without imputing bad motives to the people who hold it. Indeed, the fact that the organization has gradually softened some of its harsher conclusions may itself tell us something about how moral intuitions within a religious community can push back against the logical consequences of its theology.

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