Two other quick data points on immortality:

1. The song Xanadu by Rush, where the hero becomes immortal by "break[ing] his fast on honey dew and drink[ing] the milk of paradise" while "stand[ing] within the pleasure dome, decreed by Kubla Khan". Immortality is something he idealizes and seeks out with much difficulty.

But having achieved it, he finds that he is "held within the pleasure dome ... to taste [his] bitter triumph as a mad, immortal man", who is "waiting for the world to end, weary of the night".

His ironic lament:

"Never more shall I return

Escape these caves of ice

For I have dined on honey dew

And drunk the milk of paradise."

2. The fictional example of practical immortality presented in Iain M. Banks Culture novels, where people have a built-in operating system that keeps them healthy, back up their consciousnesses to be restored in the case of lethal accident or the choice to awaken in a few years or centuries, or choose to allow their lives to end when they feel they've lived long enough.

For my money, Banks' utopian view is far more compelling (and realistic) than the Bible's.