X-Message-Number: 29568 From: Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 10:01:27 EDT Subject: Response to Ettinger re: Dennett, Harris, Dawkins, Yes it mat... In a message dated 6/18/2007 4:11:52 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, writes: As regards Harris' case against faith, I haven't read his stuff, but it ought to be clear that we cannot realistically push our agenda by telling people to be logical and abandon their inculcated mindsets, which are buttressed not only by upbringing but by evolution. Some of those tendencies are hard-wired. There are built-in bological tendencies not only for self preservation (to a certain degree, and under certain circumstances), but also e.g. for protecting your children and for defending your community. Response: Professor Ettinger, I have the greatest respect for you and your ideas. And I REALLY liked your book "Youniverse" and think it deserves much wider dissemination and consideration than it seems to have received at this time. I am proud to have a signed copy, bought from you at one of the gatherings at CI. And I agree that to a "full frontal assault" on "hard wired" behaviors is not generally the best way to win friends and influence people. But civilization, culture, and society do indeed put curbs on MUCH hard wired behavior. It may be a fine veneer, but most of us do all SORTS of things that our nearest cousins, other apes and monkeys, do NOT do. Tribalism and xenophobia and "selfish gene promoting" behaviors may be our heritage, but they are not necessarily our future, nor do they represent the best of humanity we wish to express. Many of us reading this list have had SIGNIFICANT attitudinal changes regarding matters of religion, belief, and epistemology which are sometimes in direct contradiction to those we were brought up with. How did these change of mindsets happen? Because we came into contact with people and ideas who CHALLENGED the status quo. Who challenged OUR status quo and comfortable mythologies and superstitions. I may be wrong, I often am, but I think some of on this list have the intellectual and emotional capacity to encourage others to reconsider some foundational belief structures. And do this in such a way that we don't alienate people. Well, not alienate them permanently, anyway. :) Ettinger wrote: "Religion" is not just bibles and gods. It is any kind of ideology or consecration to a cause. And if we want converts to cryonics, we generally won't get them by tellling people how stupid their beliefs are and how they should look down upon the people they look up to. We are interested primarily in what people do, not what they believe or say they believe or think they believe. Polls "show" that Americans in a large majority "believe" in "God" and in many other things where actions show something very different. My response: Yes. Well, let's take a look at what kind of things people actually DO who are deluded by faith based nonsense. They fly airplanes into buildings. They blow themselves and innocent parties up to create political and religious statements...and to spend time with 72 virgins. I won't run the litany of "Muslim" behaviors here because it is too obvious. What may be less obvious are the BEHAVIORS of those closer to home, and how they impact humanistic values. Thousands of people are suffering today from diseases that may be curable with research on stem cells. These precious bits of tissue are blastocysts, with 50 to 150 cells, without a single nerve cell much less a developed brain. (To put this into perspective, a fly has about 150,000 brain cells, and most of us don't worry about the moral consequences of swatting them. ) Despite the fact that they will be destroyed anyway, the Christian Right has institutionalized significant barriers to research with these blastocysts. We could, given time, go into other BEHAVIORS which most reasonable people would ascribe a religious basis for, like the Inquistion, the Crusades, or the current Catholic official position on birth control and condom usage. Does it MATTER if the Pope tells you that it is a sin to use condoms even to prevent the spread of AIDS between married couples? Well, it may not to most of us who ignore this pointy hatted neocheater. But obviously MILLIONS of people base their BEHAVIORS on doctrines espoused by this geezer and his minions. And these "Cannonical laws" get institutionalized into ACTUAL laws criminalizing scientific research! (BTW, please, don't write in to tell me that the actual government position until recently was more precisely a ban on government FUNDING of stem cell research. The point is that the billions of dollars in investor capital which could and will flow toward research has gone towards less litigious and risky ventures. Do you want to put your millions or your career into a field that could at any point become outlawed? How many years and lives have been lost due to these delays?) So, yes, it MATTERS that people think it is GOOD thing, a RESPECTABLE thing, to have beliefs based on nothing but cultural fairly tales. You can be a good person, an ethical person, without believing that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that the Bible, or the Quoran, is written by the creator of the Universe, or that Jesus came back from the dead on the third day. One does not have to that fairy tales are real to evidence ethical behavior. (Indeed, the god of the Christian Old Testament, if he is real, is jealous, capricious, vengeful, vain, and just plain cruel. What a ridiculous and contradictory figure to worship.) Fortunately, most of us are BETTER than our religion. Most Muslims, Christians, and Jews do not really do the truly silly and awful things their scripture tells them to do. This is a good thing. But it does not mean we should give religion a free pass from the kind of critical thinking every other field of human endeavor is subject to. Here endeth this particular rant. Again, any thing that makes sense here has been written better by Sam Harris and others, including Professor Ettinger at some points. Is this relevant to cryonics? Yes, I submit that it is. Because ideas and ideologies matter, it would behoove us all to get rather competent in di scussing these in a civil and pleasant and entertaining manner. Behaviors and public policy grow out of ideologies. It is time we let the humanistic ideals of the Enlightenment emerge in society. And, yes, some are these are directly in conflict with religion. Although it would be nice, I agree, if we can learn to come across as something other than totally obnoxious and arrogant when we discuss these matters with those of dissenting points of view. :) Kind Regards, Respectfully Submitted, Rudi Rudi Richard Hoffman CFP CLU ChFC Board Member Financial Planning Association fpafla.org Board Member Salvation Army salvationarmy.org Member Alcor Life Extension Foundation alcor.org Certified Financial Planner(TM) CFP Board of Standards Member Libertarian Party libertarianparty.org Member National Rifle Association nra.org Member World Transhumanist Association http://transhumanism.org/ World's Leading Cryonics Insurance Provider rudihoffman.com ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=29568