April’s monthly meeting centered around the controversial topic of Cryonics.
Cults – Kate Ashcraft
Kate (Bluegrass Skeptic) will cover a brief history of cult classifications and organizational similarities. The following cults will be highlighted: Angelito Negros, Branch Davidians, Jim Jones, and a sprinkling of cargo cults and Jesus cults, like the one in Puerto Rico.
Keynote Speaker -Max Harms
Is Dr. Arthur Rowe right to say that “Believing cryonics could reanimate somebody who has been frozen is like believing you can turn hamburger back into a cow”?
There are some who say that science can bring people back from the dead. All we need to do, they say, is freeze a person’s head and then some time in the distant future they can be reanimated using technologies we can’t fathom. Their head can be given a new body, perhaps a robot body, and in this way they can cheat death and live forever (or at least indefinitely).
Max Harms is proud in identifying as one of those people. He’s not the only one. A small, but vocal minority of the world’s greatest thinkers have expressed their support for cryonics.
Come listen to an aspiring rationalist explain why he not only disagrees with other rationalists who say that cryonics is a sham, but also explain why it is one of the more important moral issues of the 21st century, and why we as humanists ought to be leading the way in support of it. We’ll discuss the philosophical assumptions of cryonics, the evidence for its viability, and the moral implication
