From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Jul 13 2002 - 23:08:50 MDT
At 09:01 PM 7/13/02 -0700, Kenneth Hurst wrote:
>> We asked medical ethicist Art Caplan, and he's published on this issue
>>many times, ... what are the chances that this would work, that you'd be
>>able to cure the person and revive them? And he said zero percent, this is a
>>scam.
>It is just his opinion that
>this is a scam. As untrue as you or I may think it is, it is his opinion
>nonetheless and he is entitled to it. He should certainly be notified why
>you believe his opinion to be incorrect, but should not be threatened with
>litigation.
Don't be bloody ridiculous. A `scam' is a deliberate enterprise knowingly
based on fraud designed to extract payment from the gullible.
Cryonics would be a fraud only if all those involved *knew* that recovery
in the future was absolutely ruled out, or pretended to preserve the
deceased at cryogenic temperatures while actually cremating them (which
Caplan presumably would prefer to see done, ironically and incredibly
enough), in order to obtain unearned profit. It is, of course, none of
those things, *even if* it eventually turns out that people cryonically
preserved *can't* be revived, for technical reasons still unknown.
>Would it be slander if I said that evolution was a crackpot
>theory?
No, just evidence of ignorance or stupidity. If you said it was a *scam*,
however, that would imply a vast conspiracy of biologists, teachers and
intelligent observers, a conspiracy designed to hide the truth, so it would
be not only ignorant and stupid but possibly psychotically delusive as well.
Damien Broderick
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