X-Message-Number: 26395
From: "Brian Wowk" <>
Subject: Cryonics vs. Burial ?!?
Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 00:07:13 -0700

In Cryomsg   #26388 Tim Freeman wrote:

> If the religion specifies burial practices that are incompatible with 
> cryonics, there's no room for compromise there.

    This is not an issue at all.  It only becomes an issue because of 
prejudices reinforced by the unfortunate habit of cryonicists describing 
cryonics as an "alternative" to burial and cremation.  This is highly 
counterproductive, and ultimately absurd when the true motives and goals of 
cryonics are considered.

    Ettinger's idea of bypassing normal medicine by implementing cryonics as 
an unproven procedure immediately after legal death was certainly brilliant. 
But cryonicists must learn that any relationship with death ends right 
there.  The *intent* of cryonics is essentially medical: to save lives by 
stabilizing the condition of patients until more advanced medicine can make 
a final determination of whether they are really dead or not.  Cryonics is 
therefore morally, ethically, and religously identical to maintaining 
unconscious patients on chronic life support until their neurological status 
can be determined with proper certainty.  Cryonics is NOT an interment 
method, mortuary practice, or alternative method of dealing with dead 
bodies.  It is the diametric opposite of interment.

    There are powerful taboos associated with death and dead bodies wired 
into the human psyche.  That's why there are zombie movies, and why people 
are creeped out by the whole idea of dead bodies.  That's why there is a 
sharp cultural line between where medicine ends and religion and interment 
ritual begins.  CRYONICS MUST POSITION ITSELF ON THE LIFE SIDE OF THAT LINE. 
Describing cryonics as an alternative interment method for dead bodies makes 
cryonics utterly incomprehensible to the worldview of normal human beings.

    What physician would ever describe a therapeutic coma as an alternative 
to burial and cremation?  What religion would ever measure an emergency 
medical procedure against its burial practices?  None.  Burial practices 
pertain to dead bodies, not therapies done in an effort to keep a body from 
becoming dead in the first place.

    Yes, cryonics patients are legally dead.  Yes, most people don't draw a 
distinction between legally dead and really dead.  But that's the 
misconception that cryonicists must work to overcome, not reinforce.  Any 
characterization of cryonics as a competing interment practice or competing 
religious view only reinforces the false premises upon which cryonics is 
dismissed in the first place.

    To all cryonicists who want to declare war on religion: Lay off! 
Cryonics has no beef with religion.  Cryonics is not in conflict with any 
religion.  The field that cryonics really has a beef with is MEDICINE.  If 
someone must be sued, sue some doctor for failure to properly consider the 
impact of the government's nanomedicine initiatives on contemporary 
treatment of cardiac arrest.

---Brian Wowk




-- 
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.8.1/28 - Release Date: 6/24/2005

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=26395