Funny, I was aware of this meme in Western culture but I never associated it with religion. (I was raised mostly secular, modulo a little residual Catholicism in my family.) Immortality often shows up as a goal in media, but almost exclusively as a villainous one: heroes accept their fate, villains fight against it. Often the methods of obtaining immortality lean towards the cartoonishly evil (the mythical version of Elizabeth Bathory bathing in virgins' blood; Lord Voldemort's horcruces), but just as often they're fairly benign and the pursuit itself is seen as hubristic and therefore evil. At best, a hero (Gilgamesh, say) will pursue it for a while before learning better, but this is actually pretty rare.
This seems to tie into another thought of mine about how villains and heroes get constructed in our culture, but that'd be a bit of a sideline in this context. I don't think I'm familiar with the construction of immortality in a Christian context, though, aside from incredibly esoteric stuff like medieval alchemy; can you tell me more?
Yeah, you know what, why is immortality portrayed as evil in all of these different places? There must be some specific spot in the bible, but I can't recall it. Maybe it isn't even from the bible. Now I'm really curious to find out exactly where this cultural association between immortality and evil came from...
I heard that women are difficult to convince when it comes to signing up for cryo. In mentioning cryonics to a dying person, there seems to be a consensus that it's not going to happen. I encountered a post: Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach, which addressed my main objection (that the amount of money spent on cryo may be better spent on saving starving children, especially considering that you could save multiple children for that amount of money with high probability whereas you save only one life with low probability by paying for cryo). Now I'm open to being persuaded.
My first instinct was to go read a lot about cryo, but it dawned on me that there are a lot of people here who will want to convince family members, some of them female, to sign up - and these people may appreciate the opportunity to practice on somebody. It has been argued that "Brilliant and creative minds have explored the argument territory quite thoroughly." but if we already know all of the objections and have working rebuttals for each, why is it still thought of as extra difficult to get through to women? If there were a solution to this, it would not be seen as difficult. There must be something that pro-cryo people need for persuading women that they either haven't figured out or aren't good enough at yet.
So, I decided to offer myself for experiments in attempting to convince a woman to sign up for cryo and took a poll in an open thread to see whether there was interest. I don't claim to be perfectly representative of the female population, but I assume that I will have at least some objections in common with them and that persuading me would still be good practice for anyone planning to convince family members in the future. Having a study on persuading women would be more scientific but how do you come up with hypotheses to test for such a study if you have no actual experience persuading women?
So, here is your opportunity to try whatever methods of persuasion you feel like with no guilt, explore my full list of objections without worrying about it being socially awkward, (I will even share cached religious thoughts, as annoyed as I am that I still have them.), and I will document as many of my impressions and objections as I can before I forget them.
I am putting each objection / impression into a new comment for organization. Also, I have decided to avoid reading anything further on cryo, until/unless it is suggested by one of my persuaders.
Well, have fun getting inside my head.