10 replies to this topic

[thefirstimmortal]

X-Message-Number: 4016
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics
From: brad@clarinet.com (Brad Templeton)
Subject: Church of Cryonics
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 10:29:45 GMT
Message-ID: <D5FEHM.Csp@clarinet.com>

Imagine a group of people with the following attributes:

a) They believe strongly in the possibility of life after death,
indeed this belief is the central reason for the group's existence.

b) They believe that what you do in this life (this animation) can
strongly affect your chances of literal resurrection into a second life.

c) After they die, a procedure far stranger than any burial ritual of any
known religion is performed by trained and certified upper level
members of the group. The procedure is exacting, gruesome and usually
involves decapitation.

d) All members of the group make regular payments to those in charge, in
order to improve their chances of life after death. Many believe that
the more they contribute, the better their chances.

e) Members believe their resurrection will be acomplished by a future
technology so advanced it is indistinguishable from magic.

f) While most members feel their beliefs in this life after death are based
on rational principles and arguments, they will also generally admit
that many of the most important principles are far from certain and
that their probability and even possibility must be taken on faith.

g) In spite of the claim of rationality, members are few in number, and
thought to be odd or fringe people by those in the mainstream. In
many cases the families of members object to their membership, and
the burial procedure in particular.

h) The group wishes to evangelize its believes to those in the mainstream,
and convert them to members of the group.

i) The group has a "burial ground" with tanks with they believe literally
contain the stored consciousnesses of the dead. They treat these dead
as actually still alive, and hold them as sacred as they do the living.
The burial ground is protected, and desecration of it would greatly
offend members of the group. They will go to great lengths to protect
it, and the dead within it. They will resist the efforts of the
justice system to gain access to or custody of the dead members remains.

j) The group is highly interested in the question of the nature of life,
being and consciousness, and whether or not the soul exists. The
presence or lack of a spiritual nature to humanity is of the keenest
interest.


I could go on, but doesn't it strike you that such a group meets many
of the standards by which mainstream society might call it a religion?

In fact, if you take clause (f) in particular, even those here might
agree it is a religion. There is a large element of faith involved
in cryonics. Not faith in a god, but faith that certain things can and
will be done, that the universe will unfold as it should.

And why would it want to be a religion?

Well, if a group is a religion, contributions to it can be tax deductable.

That could make a big difference.

For example, if you are a person in good health in your 30s, you can get
a $50K life assurance policy for about $7,000 today one time cash payment.
In addition, you might have to pay a few hundred per year for an
emergency response fee. What if these were tax deductable? The life
assurance would not be, so it would have to be done self-insured, but this
could cut that one time cost down to about $4,000 after tax, which might
mean a lot more people would be able to pay it.

I can understand why Alcor doesn't want to be the insurer, some of those
reasons financial and some legal. But with this benefit...

[thefirstimmortal]

X-Message-Number: 4026
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics
From: brad@clarinet.com (Brad Templeton)
Subject: Re: Church of Cryonics
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 1995 01:31:34 GMT

The ordinary religions claim they have some evidence as to why
their message of life after death is true. One popular one claims
documentation of the ressurection of their founder, after all. Cryonics
happens to have a better claim, but not a certain one.

[thefirstimmortal]

X-Message-Number: 4029
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics
From: brad@clarinet.com (Brad Templeton)
Subject: Re: Church of Cryonics
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 1995 02:30:49 GMT

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.

[thefirstimmortal]

X-Message-Number: 4034
Date: 18 Mar 95 10:29:09 EST
From: "Kent, Saul" <71043.1120@compuserve.com>
Subject: Faith

According to recent postings, some of you consider "faith" an
essential part of cryonics.
I disagree.
My own personal involvement in cryonics has never had anything to
do with faith.
My interest in cryonics is based on existing scientific evidence
regarding methods of freezing and vitrification as well as methods to
repair damage in biological systems and to regenerate biological systems,
plus evidence that scientific advances to improve cryonics technology
have been made in the past and are continuing to be made in the present.
My opinion that it may be possible to restore cryonics patients
to life in the future is not based on faith in the future of science, but
in the research advances currently being made by today's cryonics
scientists.
I have no faith at all in future scientists, only in today's
scientists. If they do not continue their work, there will *be* no future
cryonics scientists. If they receive enough funding to achieve rapid
progress in cryonics, the future could come *very* soon!
My message for those of you who *have* been relying on faith is
to give it up and put your money on the line for the only pathway to
success...scientific research to achieve suspended animation.

Saul Kent

[jaydfox]

Cosmos, I both agree and disagree.

My reasons for agreeing fairly well match those that you have outlined: perception in the community.

First of all, for those who have read many of my earlier posts, you know that I belong to a Christian sect, and I believe in it. I have faith. My faith is not perfect, and it's in a state of heavy change at the moment due to my involvement in this community, but it is nonetheless there. One thing that I have always liked about my religion is that, due to my inherent doubt as a once and always agnostic, I am able to incorporate much of the world of science into my religion. I'll not rehash all of this here, but one can search my former writings in the Religion forum...

At any rate, I have believed for a few years now that as technology progresses, the line dividing science and religion will both move and blur. While trends cannot always be assumed to continue to their seemingly logical conclusions, it is my opinion that in the next 40-200 years, religion and science will mesh so well that there will not be an easy way to distinguish them. Because the "DMZ" between religion and science has always been so clear in the past, both sides will want to deny that the melding of the two is taking place, but there will exist a growing culture that embraces this melding. While religion will lose much of its "mystical" portion, it will nonetheless retain its attempt to answer the questions of life and soul and afterlife and purpose; yet as science also attempts to answer these questions, there is no reason they cannot overlap.

At the moment, I agree cosmos that the scientific community does not want a blending of the two, and it would somewhat tarnish the "scientific credibility" of cryonics. But it wouldn't *really* tarnish it, it would only seem to in the minds of anachronistic scientists. They consider themselves "above religion", that somehow science is rational and religion is not: but a rational religion? It defies logic, but in words only. In actual deeds, a rational religion is possible, and the scientific community will come to accept it, at least the new generation.

I can see that claiming a religion of cryonics might hurt perception of the practice and the community in the next decade or two, but I also agree with thefirstimmortal that in 50 years, it could benefit us greatly, and not just for the 1st amendment reasons. But that's my faith, one that I don't expect anyone else here to share...

[thefirstimmortal]

I can see that claiming a religion of cryonics might hurt perception of the practice and the community in the next decade or two, but I also agree with thefirstimmortal that in 50 years, it could benefit us greatly, and not just for the 1st amendment reasons.  But that's my faith, one that I don't expect anyone else here to share...

Just to be clear, while I agree with the text you support, I'm not the author of that text, Brad Templeton is. That being said, there are already a few established religions that embrace cryonics, including the Society for Venturism, and The Universal Life Extension Church.

[Kalepha]

I agree with Cosmos.

Jay, religion may continue indefinitely, but I don't see how one could infer that science and religion are integrating. Science is induction. Religion is dogma. There is nothing intrinsically better about one than the other, but these attributes of each will always distinguish them.

[jaydfox]

I think it depends on what we consider religion. As I see it, faith is belief in that which we assume is true but cannot prove. The scientific aspect would allow a minor amendment: faith is belief in that which we assume is true but cannot yet prove.

We cannot yet prove that with sufficient technology, aging can be reversed, lifespan extending for most intents and purposes indefinitely, and people "resurrected", or resuscitated, from cryosuspension. Anyone here who takes it as a given that these things will happen is deluding himself: they are at best very likely, perhaps even absurdly likely, but not a given.

It can be reasonably assumed, and to this extent one can say that we are not applying faith, but merely a logical and rational assumption. After all, we can reasonably assume that the sun will rise tomorrow, so it does not require faith to accept it. It is an analog spectrum, rather than a binary one, where assumption meets faith. So cryonics is largely an exercise of an assumption.

But why not faith? I'm not saying necessarily that anyone else here, including cosmos, is exercising faith in cryonics. But for me to exercise faith in cryonics does not make my view of it non-scientific, nor does it denegrate the scientific/medical aspects of it. But within my worldview, I can accept it on faith and internalize it within a religious structure. I don't see why this is negative in any way, at least not in the grand battle between religion and science. Perhaps there is a social reason that it's bad, or a psychological reason, but objections of that nature are not levied exclusively against religion.

And keep in mind that I'm not talking about the mystical portion of religion, but the attempts to answer the basic questions of existence, consciousness, purpose, etc. These can be the domain of both science and religion, and when fully refined and distilled, I don't see that there will be much difference between the two.

[Kalepha]

jaydfox And keep in mind that I'm not talking about the mystical portion of religion, but the attempts to answer the basic questions of existence, consciousness, purpose, etc.

I don't think you need to change your mind of course, but analytic philosophy is a good alternative to answer these basic questions and to that which goes well interdependently with science.