X-Message-Number: 32643 References: <> Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2010 12:15:24 -0700 (PDT) From: 2Arcturus <> Subject: Religion & Cryonics --0-1350749407-1276974924=:57732 I would disagree with an "expert" who was excerpted recently on this topic. Belief in an afterlife antedates belief in a _happy_ afterlife. Many of the most ancient religions saw the afterlife as a miserable existence - e.g., the Mesopotamian idea of the dead living underground, unhappy and thirsty for drink offerings, or the Greek idea of Hades, similar to the Christian idea of Hell, except that everyone, even heroes, went there. There is also the very ancient idea of ghosts as angry, resentful beings, which idea lives on in religions that would nominally deny such possibilities (such as Christianity) - witness the innumerable horror movies Hollywood puts out on the subject. We also see distinctive beliefs about the afterlife such as reincarnation, which in Hinduism and Buddhism is reason for despair not rejoicing (samsara is the cycle of endless suffering & repeated re-dying). So based on the history of religions, we can't see belief in an afterlife as wishful thinking, since much of the most ancient beliefs about it were anything but wishable! Rather, I agree with the old idea that belief in afterlife was "protoscience", an early theory of what happened after you died, based on deep intuitions about human persons having nonphysical, indestructible, and eternal aspects. I think this intuition is still widely prevalent, and is just one more reason why so few people are interested in cryonics. According to this intuition, cryonics would be unnecessary, and possibly involve even a kind of quandary (would the "spirit" stay in the cryopreserved body, or break free? Would the resuscitated cryopatient still have his soul, or would he be a soulless zombie?). Death as total extinction is dismissed, I think, not just because it is unpalatable, but also because it seems improbable. So cryonicist philosophers need to understand this widespread intuition about "spirits" and the afterlife, and understand why it is intuitive, and what the alternatives would be, and how to explain them to the general public. --0-1350749407-1276974924=:57732 Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=32643