X-Message-Number: 31730
From: Mark Plus <>
Subject: Skeptics' unexamined mysticism
Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 08:14:19 -0700


I've gotten the impression from reading the self-professed "skeptics" and 
"humanists" who criticize cryonics that, despite their advertised rationality, 
they have their own mystical beliefs about death.


Apparently they believe that something supernatural, or close enough to it, 
happens when a person "dies" that defies scientific intervention, so that the 
whole cryonics idea incorporates a fundamental misconception about reality from 
the outset. Otherwise we'd hear more criticisms of the cryonics
proposal along the lines of, "Cryonics could work if you assumed or did
X, Y, Z, etc. But those cryonicists currently aren't doing it right." 

Basically the pattern looks like this: 

Many skeptics and humanists = spooky death, followed by eternal oblivion.


Most religionists = spooky death, followed by an afterlife, reincarnation, 
nirvana, etc.


Cryonicists = nonspooky death, like the failure of a machine, which could allow 
for cryogenic stabilization and arrest of the process until future trauma 
medicine can effect repairs and get the individual up and running again.


In other words, many skeptics & humanists haven't liberated themselves from 
religious world views as much as they like to think.

Mark Plus

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