Taking governments too seriously in what sense? Adopting values implicit in in government rhetoric? Following laws? Give some examples if you'd like.

Also, are you considering the counterfactual here? Without religion there's atheism. What happens when people don't take governments too seriously? It's actually unclear to me that religion does more harm than good; I would guess that the harm done apparently done by religion is largely due to general human nature and that there are upsides of organic community so that on balance it's a wash.

Our current civilization runs lots of computer simulations, nearly all of them are for entertainment purpose. For one "ancestor simulation" trying to be accurate there are millions of WoW and other games with no attempt of realism whatsoever.

Therefore, we if we are in simulation, we are orcs and trolls waiting to be slaughtered by players for few measly XP :-P

Buying lottery ticket as a purchase of fantasy is irrational - fantasy is for free. You can dream about being a millionaire without spending money on tiny scrap of paper :P

You are not the first one to come with this idea :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Comte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_of_Humanity

http://www.igrejapositivistabrasil.org.br/english/

I'm concerned with margins, not extremes. I can find my country on the map. I have an idea of how close my country is to revolution. I can come up with impressive-sounding political theories to discuss with others that signal the personality traits I value.

But I think I'd benefit more by studying the details of physics than the details of politics.

I'm fairly certain there is no god, and there's no marginal benefit to learning more about the philosophy of religion.

No matter how much or little I think about politics, the chances of me being the marginal vote are negligible. There are better uses for my time than that mind-killer.

I doubt it. Signing up for a lottery for cryonics is still suspicious. There is only one payoff, and that is of the suspicious thing. No one objects to the end of lotteries because we all like money, what is objected to is the lottery as efficient means of obtaining money (or entertainment).

Suppose that the object were something you and I regard with equal revulsion as many regard cryonics. Child molestation, perhaps. Would you really regard someone buying a ticket as not being quite evil and condoning and supporting the eventual rape?

This might depend on how long it takes to develop revival. Any estimates?

If it's just a few decades, cryonics companies might want to signal trustworthiness by reviving everyone.

In The First Immortal, a science fiction novel about cryonics, there's a law that no one gets revived unless there's someone willing to do the work of integrating them into the future society.

In other words, you'd do well to be an interesting person, and better to be from a family with a very strong culture of loyalty, though I suppose that integration could also be a matter of contract with a cryonics company.

Conclusion - to me it seems that if you want to maximize chance of future society resurrecting you, keep cryonics as close guarded secret of tiny elite...

I hear this from cryo skeptics all the time. Doubts -- not so much as to whether it works or not, but as to whether the patients who could be revived are human or not. Your whole argument treats the patients as dead and gone, and the people who would die without cryonics as expendable. It is simply not consistent with cryonics working in the first place.

If cryonics works in the first place, it means everyone who could be preserved but isn't, is a human casualty -- and everyone who could be reanimated but isn't is stuck in a coma against their will. I don't care if you give that an arbitrarily low probability, but if you are going to argue about what is the case if it does work, you have to remain consistent with that assumption if you want to criticize it effectively.

Luckily, future humans will have experience with suspended animation and radical surgery long before they can realistically revive a cryonics patient. Getting someone suspended with near-zero damage is an unsolved challenge, but few seem doubtful that it will be solved at some point. Repairing the damage of a current-day cryonics case is necessarily further down the road.

Simply having experience with reanimating suspendees (and seeing major surgery such as full body replacement using regrown organs), I expect they will have a much more enlightened perspective on this situation than your average cryonics critic today. Death will then be viewed as something extremely uncommon and in need of extremely good evidence before medical procedures and ethics can be cast aside.

the optimal decision for what belief to choose might well to be to ignore that and believe something else.

Can you describe what you mean by "choosing to believe" in something? Right now it's raining where I am, and I don't seem to be able to choose to believe otherwise. I have the same difficulty in choosing to believe things I don't know the truth of, like whether it will stop raining by the time I go home.

On the other hand, I know someone who became interested in paganism, tested it by believing in it, and found it worked, so continued to believe. I would have been fascinated to probe him further on the matter, but I didn't think I could manage to not sound like an anthropologist inquiring somewhat condescendingly into the strange superstitions of tribal savages.