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

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