X-Message-Number: 31507 References: <> Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:04:18 -0700 (PDT) From: 2Arcturus <> Subject: Re: religion declining --0-163242783-1237223058=:27558 >>>Message #31495 >>>From: David Stodolsky <> >>>Subject: Re: CryoNet #31480 - #31487 >>>Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2009 16:24:28 +0100 >>>References: <> >>>The use of "religion" and "highest ideals" as equivalent doesn't conform to common use, as has been pointed out earlier. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion. Also the initial discussion on definition of religion in my article http://jetpress.org/volume15/jordan2.html. I esp. like Clifford Geertz's famous later formulation, which I paraphrase, "religion is what integrates world view and ethos. That is, religion is what relates the broadest and deepest possible understanding of the world with the way of life, attitudes, and beliefs that correspond to this world view in an emotional, value-laden way." In other words, the intersection of what you believe about life and how you live. I am not attached to the word, religion. One could call it worldview, philosophy, lifestance. But from a scholarly point of, I feel the appropriate technical term for the phenomenon is 'religion'. >>>This could be a result of the fact that it is the center of cryonics activity and that could be due to the size of the Country or other factors making it possible for a tiny minority to organize effectively. Maybe. But it is just a problem for the thesis of the article that was presented, if it is applied to support for cryonics. It may also be a complete coincidence, but I find it interesting that the first cryonics facility in Europe has gone up in one of the most traditionally religious countries in Europe, Russia. >>>Also, any idea that Italy is a secular society fails to recognize the degree to which religion saturates that society, both in terms of belief and in the power of the Catholic Church. Well, that was the presumption of the article, the generalization that Europe is more 'secular' than the USA. But I would agree that there is religiosity in Europe, esp. by my definition. I would expect more support for cryonics from those indirectly influenced by Roman Catholicism's ideals about the value and immortality of the individual, etc., even if they are not traditionally 'pious'. Also there are strongly countercultural 'secular' individualist worldviews in Italty, e.g., Nietzschean prometheanism, that might also be more supportive of cryonics. >>>This hasn't actually criminalize cryonics. In fact, the organizational format I propose testing would be permitted there, since it doesn't explicitly market cryonics. Why shouldn't cryonics be able to be marketed in Canada? What *secular* case was made against it in Canada? Not that I, personally, would "market" cryonics. >>>This could be due to the fact that cryonics is regarded there as a type of religion. I haven't been able to find the text of the circular, but I doubt cryonics was banned because it was viewed as religious. Secular legal precedent seems to be the idea in http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9B03E4D91339F937A25750C0A9649C8B63. But this is a very complex subject, impossible to discuss fully in emails. I would just say religions can be reflected in legal codes and political systems. In fact, the old religions made no distinction between church and state or religious law and secular law; religions like Judaism and Islam *contained* legal codes and political systems. I would argue USA and European laws and political systems reflect worldviews very clearly, and this is where the potential conflict with cryonics comes from, since most people, in the USA or Europe, disagree with both with the practice of cryonics and the assumptions, ideals and beliefs, upon which the practice is based. --0-163242783-1237223058=:27558 Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=31507