X-Message-Number: 31458
References: <>
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 09:36:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: 2Arcturus <>
Subject: Alex Doherty reprinted posting, refutation

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>>>Goodness!  Did anyone else find  this breathless nonsense to be mildly 
annoying?  LOL!


>>>It is  remeniscent of the radical green agenda, or Bill McKibben's philosophy
(He  wrote a book called,"Enough." )

Exactly, Rudi.


By portraying cryonics as a kind of "fundamentalism", the author attempts to 
deceive people who agree with the current spate of books criticizing religion.


My sense from reading the essay was that the author was truly of that school of 
"deep ecology" and McKibben. 


The reverence for nature is deeply flawed by excluding human beings, and their 
desires, from consideration AS nature, part of nature. This sort of "nature" 
worship is kind of in denial about evolution, about the unity of human beings 
and the rest of nature, and so it sees human beings as inherently unnatural, 
evil. It sees the best destiny of human individuals as death and the best 
destiny of the human species as extinction. Its profound pessimism and 
misanthropy despise the human desire for life, comfort, and happiness.


The pretended reverence for "community" is also deeply flawed, since it sees 
community only as a social order in which the needs and desires of individuals 
are categorically denied and thwarted, a social order which works against its 
members rather than for them, a social order which inhibits human flourishing 
rather than encourages it. It is opposed to market of any kind ("consumerism").


There is also the self-fulfilling belief in scarcity -- that resources must be 
limited, therefore human beings must fatalistically accept their limited 
condition. The entire history of human progress has been discovering new 
resources, new opportunities for growth, new sources of life and new modes and 
conditions of existing. The philosophy of scarcity is in denial about all of 
human history -- it is only comfortable with a (false) vision of so-called 
pre-civilized humanity in which humans passively live only on what "nature" 
gives out. We are supposed to imagine australopithecine hunters waiting for game
to walk into their mouths, I suppose.


So we see here a cynical misappropriation of the term fundamentalism, a flawed 
understanding of nature and human beings, a frightening authoritarian and 
misanthropic vision of society/community, and a disbelief in progress or the 
ability of human effort to overcome natural limitations.

It is truly a sad, poisonous, stew of ideas.


   
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