X-Message-Number: 26385 From: "John de Rivaz" <> Subject: do religions promise eternal life? Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 12:44:31 +0100 I am not sure that this debate is strictly accurate in that religions promise eternal life **only if you join the religion**. What they promise is that eternal life exists, and if you join the religion and do as you are told, unquestioningly, then the quality of your eternal life will (not might) be improved. There are other arguments that eternal life exists that do not involve religion, such as "conservation of information", "many worlds interpretation" (out of an infinite number, there must be worlds in which any given individual never dies) and so on. Whether you join a religion, or read popular physics books (or even psychic books), it can slow the process of logic that arrives at the conclusion that death and annihilation are one and the same thing. It is true to say that no one can be certain that death brings annihilation. It is equally true to say that no one has ever managed to prove rigorously that consciousness continues beyond the grave or crematorium at any time ever, even unthinkable aeons into the future after a long period of unconsciousness. Indeed, no one has even produced a rigorous definition of consciousness. And for more people than exist in the cryonics movement are trying. Cryonics offers no certainty either: as none of us know the future, none of us can say whether any given process of preservation will present future technologists with something capable of reanimation. Indeed, none of us can predict whether it would be possible to send a mummified person a given period into the future, for example ten or twenty thousand years, even if reanimation wasn't the objective. (Organisationally he could be lost) All of it is a leap into the unknown and unknowable. But cryonics offers something - those that use it have tried to survive. Religion assumes (with no scientific justification) that something exists, and tries to improve its quality. -- Sincerely, John de Rivaz: http://John.deRivaz.com for websites including Cryonics Europe, Longevity Report, The Venturists, Porthtowan, Alec Harley Reeves - inventor, Arthur Bowker - potter, de Rivaz genealogy, Nomad .. and more Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=26385