X-Message-Number: 12637
From: 
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 18:55:14 EDT
Subject: Driven from the pack?

Someone said those who are not pack animals are driven from the pack. He has 
it  wrong.

Those who hold minority opinions are not automatically outcasts. I don't know 
of any cryonicists who have been ostracized by previous friends or colleagues 
for their participation. (Yes, a couple of marriages may have been wrecked, 
but that doesn't take much.) The writer said specifically that he is an 
atheist; there are not many social groups in which being an atheist will 
automatically earn you enmity or discrimination.

What MAY earn you antipathy is having offensive mannerisms or demeanor, a 
conscious or apparent lack of respect for the feelings of others. If you are 
an atheist and you make fun of believers, you should not be surprised if some 
of them resent it. If you display habitual suspicion, bitterness, hostility, 
haughter, condescension, sarcasm, sullenness, cruelty, indifference, 
dishonesty, fear, defensiveness, belligerence, superciliousness, sanctimony, 
hypocrisy, or a variety of other unpleasant traits, people are likely to 
avoid you. 

Whether they are right or wrong, blaming others for your problems is seldom 
useful, except perhaps as a salve for your wounded ego. 

To embrace cryonics, we must reject thousands of generations of tradition. In 
some respects, our revolution is more profound than any previous. If the 
writer were correct in the spirit of his message, we would all have been 
lynched long ago. Nothing remotely like this has happened, only occasional 
ridicule and rare denunciations. And the immortalist tide is coming in.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org 

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