An obstacle to "religionizing" cryonics

People attracted to cryonics so far have shown secular orientations, and atheists seem over-represented. Mike Darwin even argues that the startup cryonics movement in Russia could have a better cultural environment to work with than in the U.S. because the Russian population hasn't reverted to religious belief despite the collapse of Soviet ideology, even though living conditions in Russia leave a lot to desire relative to other developed countries.

And in other developed countries, we see continuing evidence of a collapse of religious belief, with the prospect of its eventual "extinction":

Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says

"The idea is pretty simple," said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona.

"It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility.

"For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there's some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not."

Dr Wiener continued: "In a large number of modern secular democracies, there's been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%."

The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the "non-religious" category.

They found, in a study published online, that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them.

And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction.

Bring on the "Jesus who?" era!

This trend shows the real problem cryonics faces as a social movement: We don't need to figure out how to "religionize" cryonics, namely, frame it in ways which appeal to the declining religious sectors in developed countries. (Religiosity shows signs of decline even in the U.S.) We need to figure out how to make it more appealing to the rising proportions of atheists, agnostics, humanists, Objectivists, secularists, "nones," etc. They form cryonics' organic constituency.