X-Message-Number: 17183
Date: Thu, 02 Aug 2001 16:24:57 -0500
From: david pizer <>
Subject: Morality

The comment was made:

>So you consider it immoral to seek to
>persuade people to change their minds?

Sorry, I may not have expressed the original thought as clearly as it
should have been.  Please, let me try again.

1.	If a religious person (who thinks cryonics is bunk) talks a cryonics
person out of getting frozen at death, and if cryonics turns out to work,
and if it turns out that there is no god nor heaven, then that religious
person, (who was trying to help), has caused a terrible thing to happen.
He/she has cost another person his eternal life.

2.	On the other hand --- If a cryonics person, talks a religious person out
of being religious, and convinces that person to give up his/her religious
ways, and if it turns out that cryonics doesn't work, and that God and
Heaven *do* exist and the religious person (because of the persuasion of
the cryonics person) gave up his/her only chance to have eternal religious
salvation, then the cryonics person has done a terrible thing.

3.	So, since we can neither know whether religion offers eternal life nor
can we know cryonics offers eternal life (or even merely extended life), we
should not try to talk anyone out of either one.

So, yes, I do consider it immoral to talk someone out of something,
(persuade them to change their minds),  *if* I don't know what the real
answer is.  I consider it a moral obligation to be very careful when trying
to convince people to do things, to be sure that you don't misrepresent
anything and to be sure that you disclose all the possible problems with
the view your are defending.

============================================================================
=====

That is why I advocate trying to talk people into going for cryonics,
without trying to talk them out of their religious beliefs.  In addition, I
do not see cryonics as an opposite to religious salvation.  Most religions
(if not all), consider it important for the individual to try to live here
on earth for as long as possible.  In addition to this, the Christian
religion suggests that people should try to heal the sick and raise the
dead.  

You raise your ideas up by really raising them up, not by lowering the
ideas of others.

David Pizer

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