X-Message-Number: 4029 Newsgroups: sci.cryonics From: (Brad Templeton) Subject: Re: Church of Cryonics Date: Thu, 16 Mar 1995 02:30:49 GMT Message-ID: <> References: <> <3k5i7p$> <> <3k822a$> In article <3k822a$>, Ken Wolfe <> wrote: >In <> (Brad Templeton) writes: >It's actually a good point that the mainstream could easily see Cryonics >as a cult. In fact, when my family first became aware that I was >interested in signing up, their first reaction was to warn me that this >could be a cult or a scam, out to swindle me and leave me nothing in >return. I have been sold on the idea of cryonics for a long time, but Actually, it would be a scam to leave your *heirs* less in return, so no wonder they were concerned. :-) >Anyway, don't you at least need some form of mysticism to qualify as a >religion? Hard to say. It helps. The Universal Church of Life quite overtly exists for tax avoidance and has as its one doctrine "The right of all people to believe and worship as they see fit" or somesuch. That church has been legal in the USA for many years, from what I have been told. Since it is now 30 years old it may also be legal in Canada, which has a 25 year establishment requirement from what I was told from a UCL member I knew back in Canada. You attain rank in the UCL by taking their tax courses. Take enough and you can be a bishop. The way it works is you declare a 3 person parish, appoint yourself parson, and donate (and deduct) up to half your income to the church. Then the church does things like rent a chapel and domicile for the parson and family (your appartment) and lease a car, buy food etc. For a low fee you file records with church HQ. The good news -- halve your taxable income, which will mean cutting your taxes by more than half. The bad news -- you have to rent everything the church pays for, so no home ownership. Or rather, the church owns what it buys, you don't. Why doesn't everybody do it? -- it's an instant audit, apparently, plus most US folks are uncomfortable with a sham church. ------------- Of course, the other big plus to the Church of Cryonics is not the tax deductability, it's the first amendment protection. Religious rules have a great deal of power when it comes to dealing with the dead. Of course, old religious rules have more power than new ones, and who knows if any religion could use its protection against a charge that somebody like Kent wasn't dead when frozen. But as the church of Cryonics became older -- and I hope it would be 50 years old by the time I would need suspension -- it might actually have considerable constitutional protection. And much more so if it's now a sham church, like the UCL is. The courts have ruled that it is not the place of the IRS to decide what a real religion is, which protects the UCL. But in spite of my non-religious nature, I am not entirely averse to calling the following my "spiritual" beliefs: a) That man is made of only matter, and the seat of consciousness is the brain. That the mind, "soul" and brain are one. b) That in spite of what the public believes about death, we are not truly dead until our brains are destroyed beyond proper repair, and that, thus: c) People properly cryosuspended are not dead, and may be returned to everybody's definition of life through sufficiently sophisticated techniques. If you accept that "beliefs about the nature of the human spirit" and beliefs about the nature of life, death and the state of consciousness are spiritual beliefs -- religious beliefs -- then the above qualify. So this means the Church of Cryonics would not be a sham religion, simply a religion not like the ones commonly thought of in the past. To me a religion is a belief system that attempts to provide or guide people to answers about the nature of life and consciousness and the origins of those and the universe itself, and in particular it is common for some of those answers to be highly speculative and even unprovable. To be a religion does *not* require that you believe in a god or creator. ------------------ To top it off, many cryonicists -- the downloaders -- believe that after death/suspension and reanimation they will actually move to a higher level of consciousness. That sure matches the beliefs of traditional religions. They just say how they expect it to happen, but again it's all a matter of faith that it can or will happen. -- Brad Templeton, publisher, ClariNet Communications Corp. | www.clari.net The net's #1 Electronic newspaper (circulation 90,000) | Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=4029