Trying to live forever is associated with evil (religious cached thought):
I’m not religious, but was raised Christian. Annoying as this is, I still find religious cached thoughts sometimes. I don’t want to keep them—I’m sharing for the sake of documenting all the thoughts that are being triggered while I make my decision. Thinking about signing up for cryo triggered this:
My cached thought is associating living forever with being tempted by the devil, and seeing it as a thing that only sinful people would do.
I realize that I would not be guaranteed everlasting life. Even if I was revived, I expect it would be for a much shorter time than “forever”. That wouldn’t change the fact that I’m mortal or circumvent the threat of hell. I’m not sure where the sense of defiance comes from. I suppose it would defy the current way of things but expecting life forms to just shut up and die is silly.
I don’t see why extending your life would have to qualify as sinful. It just makes sense.
Thanks for posting that—I wasn’t raised Christian, and that objection never would have occurred to me. Do you have a feeling for whether it might be a common Christian objection? The Christian objection I’ve heard is that great longevity means putting off going to Heaven. I’ve never heard a Christian say that great longevity increases the odds of repenting and avoiding Hell.
My exposure to anti-longevity/immortality thoughts are from science fiction and fantasy, which doesn’t just have a wide streak of “you’d need evil methods” (see also Bug Jack Barron, in which it takes killing poor children for something from their glands), but a very strong streak of “if you were immortal, you wouldn’t like it”. You’d be bored or you’d go mad. I think it’s sour grapes.
The Christian objection I’ve heard is that great longevity means putting off going to Heaven. I’ve never heard a Christian say that great longevity increases the odds of repenting and avoiding Hell.
During a long life a Christian may repent many times, and sin again many times. Whether they go to Heaven or Hell depends on when they die. Suicide is a mortal sin because otherwise they’d kill themselves after repenting. So they do the next best thing, and repent when they think they’re going to die. Confession and absolution on a deathbed are standard. Conversion and baptism on a deathbed are known to happen.
Common Christian Objections: (Guesses, as I am no longer a Christian) and rebuttals (Within the Christian religious framework, as it’s not always feasible to convince them to be Atheists).
1.) You’re trying to get something that’s forbidden.
(Life is important, so God must control it, if you were supposed to have more, you would already have more. Therefore trying to get more should be viewed as bucking a limitation.)
Rebuttal: If you attribute other medical breakthroughs to God, how do we know God didn’t give this to us, too?
2.) Only God should decide when you die.
(He forbids you from living longer except at his discretion.)
Rebuttal: Why should I believe that a loving God expects me to just shut up and die?
3.) You’re making a deal with the devil.
(Because only God should decide.)
Rebuttal: Nobody asked me for my soul or to do anything evil to sign up for cryo. The ten commandments don’t tell me not to. In fact “You shall not murder.” may be interpreted as an obligation to continue your own life wherever possible, otherwise you’re knowingly choosing to die when it isn’t necessary, thereby “murdering” yourself. I see no evidence that this is temptation by the devil.
4.) You’re tinkering with the sacred.
Rebuttal: If life is sacred, and saving lives is an option, isn’t it worse to fail to do everything you can to save lives, even if your attempts are somewhere between not perfect and horribly incompetent at first?
great longevity increases the odds of repenting and avoiding Hell.
That’s a really good argument. If Christians want Atheists to come around, shouldn’t they hope we live longer so we have a better chance of finding some reason to believe in God? I’m not religious, and I really doubt any Atheists will “come around”, but I think this would work as an argument.
You might say living forever on earth is associated with being tempted by the devil. But the fundamental (it seems to me) temptation offered by Christians in trying to sign up new members and keep old ones is the promise of eternal life in heaven. Indeed, many retail christian outlets declare you will get an eternal life no matter what you do, and the reason to sign up is so that your eternal life isn’t an eternity of torture.
Just interested in pointing out that “eternal life” is not something Christians typically run from.
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...
The closest the Bible gets, as far as I remember, is the bit in Genesis about the Tree of Life, and that’s pretty ambiguous. It’s been a while since I’ve read it, though.
I’m not actually sure, but I think this is mainly a hubris thing. For whatever reason, there’s a fairly well-defined set of activities in our culture that are thought of as outside the proper domain of humanity; this might have gotten its start in a religious context, but it’s certainly not limited to that anymore. (Consider “frankenfoods”.) Seeking immortality’s on that list, along with playing with the building blocks of life or, worse, creating new life; doing any of these things seems to be considered usurping the role of God or nature, and therefore blasphemous or at least very close to it. This is, of course, nothing new.
Where we get that list from is another question. I don’t think it’s purely Christian; cautionary tales about immortality go back at least to the Epic of Gilgamesh, although as far as mythological treatments go I think the Cumaean Sibyl’s has more punch.
cautionary tales about immortality go back at least to the Epic of Gilgamesh
I never read Gilgamesh as a story against immortality. On the contrary, it is a tragedy that Gilgamesh loses the flower of immortality that he has brought back. The gods in this story are enemies who keep immortality for themselves.
Lol somebody ate an apple once, now we’re not allowed to live forever.
Even if that was real, I don’t see cryonics as a means of living forever. Forever is a long time. There’s no guarantee of that.
set of activities … thought of as outside the proper domain of humanity
Now that’s interesting. I wonder if that might actually be more of an instinct to avoid screwing up important things, or just common sense, than something that’s religious. Even if it has been codified in religion, might it have originally stemmed from a sense of not wanting to screw up something important. It’s true that we are flawed and that whenever we attempt to do something ambitious, there is a risk of horribly screwing things up. Eg: communism. There can be unintended side-effects. Eg. X-ray technicians used to x-ray their hands every morning to make sure the machine was warmed up. You can imagine the horror they encountered years later...
I think we’re right to have a sense of trepidation about messing with life and death. It’s a big deal, and we really could gravely screw something up, there really could be unexpected consequences.
Living forever isn’t quite impossible. If we ever develop acausal computing, or a way to beat the first law of thermodynamics (AND the universe turns out to be spatially infinite), then it’s possible that a sufficiently powerful mind could construct a mathematical system containing representations of all our minds that it could formally prove would keep us existent and value-fulfilled forever, and then just… run it.
Not very likely, though. In the mean time, more life is definitely better than less.
Let me ask you this. Somebody makes a copy of your mind. They turn it on. Do you see what it sees? Someone touches the new instance of you. Do you feel it?
Depends on your definition of ‘you.’ Mine are pretty broad. The way I see it, my only causal link to myself of yesterday is that I remember being him. I can’t prove we’re made of the same matter. Under quantum mechanics, that isn’t even a coherent concept. So, if I believe that I didn’t die in the night, then I must accept that that’s a form of survival.
Uploaded copies of you are still ‘you’ in the sense that the you of tomorrow is you. I can talk about myself tomorrow, and believe that he’s me (and his existence guarantees my survival), even though if he were teleported back in time to now, we would not share a single thread of conscious experience. I can also consider different possibilities tomorrow. I could go to class, or I could go to the store. Both of those hypothetical people are still me, but they are not quite exactly each other.
So, to make a long story short, yes: if an adequately detailed model is made of my brain, then I consider that to be survival. I don’t want bad things to happen to future me’s.
Actually trying to live forever (“saving your soul”) is the central stated point of religions such as Christianity and Islam.
Religious opposition to cryonics could stem from the fact that cryonics is preceived (correctly, IMHO) as a competing religion. Note that there is no strong religious opposition to most other procedures that promise a lifespan extension.
Huh. That is such a simplistic way of viewing religion. I think you’re right in a sense—that it may very well threaten religions by providing an alternative for a key reason people become religious. However, I think most religious people I know (I’m not one so I am guessing at their reasoning) would object to this, saying that there is a lot more to religion than that, and that if the person is in it only to go to heaven, they’re being superficial and not really “getting” it. For that reason, I think they’d say that they do not categorize their religion as a religion because it promises to save your soul, and they’d probably also not categorize cryonics that way either.
The difference between saving the soul and extending life is that saving the soul means preserving it to live in a particular way (i.e. the imago Dei). Extending life is neutral with regard to how you live it.
But the cryo people aren’t prescriptive about what imago FAI looks like, that’s the point. They’ll give you more life, but they won’t tell you how to live it. Whereas religion doesn’t change your material circumstances but is very emphatic about how you should live with them.
“Imago FAI” is a serendipitous coinage. It sounds like what I had in mind here, when I talked about the mature form of a friendly “AI” being like a ubiquitous meme rather than a great brain in space. If a civilization has widely available knowledge and technology that’s dangerous (because it can make WMDs or UFAIs), then any “intelligence” with access to dangerous power, needs to possess the traits we would call “friendly”, if they were found in a developing AI. Or at least, empowered elements of the civilization must not have the potential or the tendency to start overturning the core values of the civilization (values which need not be friendly by human standards, for this to be a condition of the civilization’s stability and survival). It implies that access to technological power in such a civilization must come at the price of consenting to whatever form of mental monitoring and debugging is employed to enforce the analogue of friendliness.
Cryonics itself makes no moral prescriptions. You can consider it as a type of burial ritual.
But rituals are not performed in isolation, they are performed in the context of religions (or religious-like ideologies, if you prefer) that do make moral prescriptions.
Cryonics typically comes in the transhumanist/singularitarian ideological package, which has a moral content.
I don’t see why extending your life would have to qualify as sinful.
This is speculation: I’m not a Christian.
In Christianity, death brings the judgment of God who sends you to heaven or hell (or purgatory).
If you expect heaven, you don’t want to put off death. Suicide is a sin but as long as you don’t see non-cryonics as willful suicide, you would want to die early to get to heaven early.
If you expect hell, then you think you’ve sinned mortally. Most brands of Christianity allow for redemption by various means. If you think you’re a sinner, trying to put off death means trying to avoid the judgement of God, which is both just and good; so struggling against it would make you evil. If you fear hell, instead of focusing on avoiding death, you would focus on expiating your sins in order to go to heaven.
In addition, some but not all brands of Christianity have the meme that this world is impure, and one should abstain from it, and not be attached to it. Trying to live longer than is natural is attachment to the profane; one should instead spend their lives thinking of God, praying, abjuring the pleasures of the flesh, etc. in order to obtain heaven.
Hypothesis: Religious people (or at least Jews and Christians, which are the religions I’m most familiar with) tend to say that life and death are ultimately in the hands of God/G-d. I suspect this is a way of avoiding survivor’s guilt, though both groups are generally in favor of medicine.
From memory: a news story about a conference on medical ethics where the Orthodox Jews were the only ones in favor of life extension.
I suspect that any religion with a vividly imagined heaven has to have rules against suicide, or else the religion won’t survive. It’s plausible to me that the revulsion against life extension is a mere side effect of the rule against suicide.
My hypothesis is that the rule (life and death are in the hands of God) was instituted when suicide was available and life extension wasn’t. Life is in the hands of God wasn’t really relevant, it was just thrown in to make God sound more benevolent (so that He isn’t just killing people) and more powerful.
Hmm. Most of these seem to ignore the fact (not saying YOU are ignoring the fact, but that the religion would have to be ignoring the fact) that there are reasons to extend life that have nothing to do with heaven and hell.
It’s interesting that you mention “trying to live longer than is natural is attachment to the profane”—this strikes me as more Buddhist, but I could see Christians believing that, too. However, if cryo is attachment to the profane, so is eating healthy and exercising. Heck, so is eating at all. I am so glad I’m not religious. It causes such horrible cognitive dissonance to harmonize these types of beliefs with other information I have about life.
However, if cryo is attachment to the profane, so is eating healthy and exercising. Heck, so is eating at all.
Yes—hence the idea of religious fasting. The Catholic and Orthodox Christian traditions consider “mortification of the flesh” to be holy, and luxuries of the flesh (enjoying eating, sex, and bodily sensations in general) to be wicked or at least a dangerous temptation.
Trying to live forever is associated with evil (religious cached thought):
I’m not religious, but was raised Christian. Annoying as this is, I still find religious cached thoughts sometimes. I don’t want to keep them—I’m sharing for the sake of documenting all the thoughts that are being triggered while I make my decision. Thinking about signing up for cryo triggered this:
My cached thought is associating living forever with being tempted by the devil, and seeing it as a thing that only sinful people would do.
I realize that I would not be guaranteed everlasting life. Even if I was revived, I expect it would be for a much shorter time than “forever”. That wouldn’t change the fact that I’m mortal or circumvent the threat of hell. I’m not sure where the sense of defiance comes from. I suppose it would defy the current way of things but expecting life forms to just shut up and die is silly.
I don’t see why extending your life would have to qualify as sinful. It just makes sense.
Thanks for posting that—I wasn’t raised Christian, and that objection never would have occurred to me. Do you have a feeling for whether it might be a common Christian objection? The Christian objection I’ve heard is that great longevity means putting off going to Heaven. I’ve never heard a Christian say that great longevity increases the odds of repenting and avoiding Hell.
My exposure to anti-longevity/immortality thoughts are from science fiction and fantasy, which doesn’t just have a wide streak of “you’d need evil methods” (see also Bug Jack Barron, in which it takes killing poor children for something from their glands), but a very strong streak of “if you were immortal, you wouldn’t like it”. You’d be bored or you’d go mad. I think it’s sour grapes.
During a long life a Christian may repent many times, and sin again many times. Whether they go to Heaven or Hell depends on when they die. Suicide is a mortal sin because otherwise they’d kill themselves after repenting. So they do the next best thing, and repent when they think they’re going to die. Confession and absolution on a deathbed are standard. Conversion and baptism on a deathbed are known to happen.
Common Christian Objections: (Guesses, as I am no longer a Christian) and rebuttals (Within the Christian religious framework, as it’s not always feasible to convince them to be Atheists).
1.) You’re trying to get something that’s forbidden. (Life is important, so God must control it, if you were supposed to have more, you would already have more. Therefore trying to get more should be viewed as bucking a limitation.)
Rebuttal: If you attribute other medical breakthroughs to God, how do we know God didn’t give this to us, too?
2.) Only God should decide when you die. (He forbids you from living longer except at his discretion.)
Rebuttal: Why should I believe that a loving God expects me to just shut up and die?
3.) You’re making a deal with the devil. (Because only God should decide.)
Rebuttal: Nobody asked me for my soul or to do anything evil to sign up for cryo. The ten commandments don’t tell me not to. In fact “You shall not murder.” may be interpreted as an obligation to continue your own life wherever possible, otherwise you’re knowingly choosing to die when it isn’t necessary, thereby “murdering” yourself. I see no evidence that this is temptation by the devil.
4.) You’re tinkering with the sacred.
Rebuttal: If life is sacred, and saving lives is an option, isn’t it worse to fail to do everything you can to save lives, even if your attempts are somewhere between not perfect and horribly incompetent at first?
That’s a really good argument. If Christians want Atheists to come around, shouldn’t they hope we live longer so we have a better chance of finding some reason to believe in God? I’m not religious, and I really doubt any Atheists will “come around”, but I think this would work as an argument.
+1 Karma
You might say living forever on earth is associated with being tempted by the devil. But the fundamental (it seems to me) temptation offered by Christians in trying to sign up new members and keep old ones is the promise of eternal life in heaven. Indeed, many retail christian outlets declare you will get an eternal life no matter what you do, and the reason to sign up is so that your eternal life isn’t an eternity of torture.
Just interested in pointing out that “eternal life” is not something Christians typically run from.
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...
The closest the Bible gets, as far as I remember, is the bit in Genesis about the Tree of Life, and that’s pretty ambiguous. It’s been a while since I’ve read it, though.
I’m not actually sure, but I think this is mainly a hubris thing. For whatever reason, there’s a fairly well-defined set of activities in our culture that are thought of as outside the proper domain of humanity; this might have gotten its start in a religious context, but it’s certainly not limited to that anymore. (Consider “frankenfoods”.) Seeking immortality’s on that list, along with playing with the building blocks of life or, worse, creating new life; doing any of these things seems to be considered usurping the role of God or nature, and therefore blasphemous or at least very close to it. This is, of course, nothing new.
Where we get that list from is another question. I don’t think it’s purely Christian; cautionary tales about immortality go back at least to the Epic of Gilgamesh, although as far as mythological treatments go I think the Cumaean Sibyl’s has more punch.
I never read Gilgamesh as a story against immortality. On the contrary, it is a tragedy that Gilgamesh loses the flower of immortality that he has brought back. The gods in this story are enemies who keep immortality for themselves.
Lol somebody ate an apple once, now we’re not allowed to live forever.
Even if that was real, I don’t see cryonics as a means of living forever. Forever is a long time. There’s no guarantee of that.
Now that’s interesting. I wonder if that might actually be more of an instinct to avoid screwing up important things, or just common sense, than something that’s religious. Even if it has been codified in religion, might it have originally stemmed from a sense of not wanting to screw up something important. It’s true that we are flawed and that whenever we attempt to do something ambitious, there is a risk of horribly screwing things up. Eg: communism. There can be unintended side-effects. Eg. X-ray technicians used to x-ray their hands every morning to make sure the machine was warmed up. You can imagine the horror they encountered years later...
I think we’re right to have a sense of trepidation about messing with life and death. It’s a big deal, and we really could gravely screw something up, there really could be unexpected consequences.
New objection: Unexpected Consequences
Living forever isn’t quite impossible. If we ever develop acausal computing, or a way to beat the first law of thermodynamics (AND the universe turns out to be spatially infinite), then it’s possible that a sufficiently powerful mind could construct a mathematical system containing representations of all our minds that it could formally prove would keep us existent and value-fulfilled forever, and then just… run it.
Not very likely, though. In the mean time, more life is definitely better than less.
Let me ask you this. Somebody makes a copy of your mind. They turn it on. Do you see what it sees? Someone touches the new instance of you. Do you feel it?
When you die, do you inhabit it? Or are you dead?
Depends on your definition of ‘you.’ Mine are pretty broad. The way I see it, my only causal link to myself of yesterday is that I remember being him. I can’t prove we’re made of the same matter. Under quantum mechanics, that isn’t even a coherent concept. So, if I believe that I didn’t die in the night, then I must accept that that’s a form of survival.
Uploaded copies of you are still ‘you’ in the sense that the you of tomorrow is you. I can talk about myself tomorrow, and believe that he’s me (and his existence guarantees my survival), even though if he were teleported back in time to now, we would not share a single thread of conscious experience. I can also consider different possibilities tomorrow. I could go to class, or I could go to the store. Both of those hypothetical people are still me, but they are not quite exactly each other.
So, to make a long story short, yes: if an adequately detailed model is made of my brain, then I consider that to be survival. I don’t want bad things to happen to future me’s.
Actually trying to live forever (“saving your soul”) is the central stated point of religions such as Christianity and Islam.
Religious opposition to cryonics could stem from the fact that cryonics is preceived (correctly, IMHO) as a competing religion. Note that there is no strong religious opposition to most other procedures that promise a lifespan extension.
Huh. That is such a simplistic way of viewing religion. I think you’re right in a sense—that it may very well threaten religions by providing an alternative for a key reason people become religious. However, I think most religious people I know (I’m not one so I am guessing at their reasoning) would object to this, saying that there is a lot more to religion than that, and that if the person is in it only to go to heaven, they’re being superficial and not really “getting” it. For that reason, I think they’d say that they do not categorize their religion as a religion because it promises to save your soul, and they’d probably also not categorize cryonics that way either.
Indeed there is much more to religion than saving your soul, but that’s a major point in Christian and Muslim preaching.
The difference between saving the soul and extending life is that saving the soul means preserving it to live in a particular way (i.e. the imago Dei). Extending life is neutral with regard to how you live it.
Brain upload? Imago FAI? Come on, it’s the same sort of stuff, just with supernatural miracles replaced by technological ones.
But the cryo people aren’t prescriptive about what imago FAI looks like, that’s the point. They’ll give you more life, but they won’t tell you how to live it. Whereas religion doesn’t change your material circumstances but is very emphatic about how you should live with them.
“Imago FAI” is a serendipitous coinage. It sounds like what I had in mind here, when I talked about the mature form of a friendly “AI” being like a ubiquitous meme rather than a great brain in space. If a civilization has widely available knowledge and technology that’s dangerous (because it can make WMDs or UFAIs), then any “intelligence” with access to dangerous power, needs to possess the traits we would call “friendly”, if they were found in a developing AI. Or at least, empowered elements of the civilization must not have the potential or the tendency to start overturning the core values of the civilization (values which need not be friendly by human standards, for this to be a condition of the civilization’s stability and survival). It implies that access to technological power in such a civilization must come at the price of consenting to whatever form of mental monitoring and debugging is employed to enforce the analogue of friendliness.
Cryonics itself makes no moral prescriptions. You can consider it as a type of burial ritual.
But rituals are not performed in isolation, they are performed in the context of religions (or religious-like ideologies, if you prefer) that do make moral prescriptions.
Cryonics typically comes in the transhumanist/singularitarian ideological package, which has a moral content.
This is speculation: I’m not a Christian.
In Christianity, death brings the judgment of God who sends you to heaven or hell (or purgatory).
If you expect heaven, you don’t want to put off death. Suicide is a sin but as long as you don’t see non-cryonics as willful suicide, you would want to die early to get to heaven early.
If you expect hell, then you think you’ve sinned mortally. Most brands of Christianity allow for redemption by various means. If you think you’re a sinner, trying to put off death means trying to avoid the judgement of God, which is both just and good; so struggling against it would make you evil. If you fear hell, instead of focusing on avoiding death, you would focus on expiating your sins in order to go to heaven.
In addition, some but not all brands of Christianity have the meme that this world is impure, and one should abstain from it, and not be attached to it. Trying to live longer than is natural is attachment to the profane; one should instead spend their lives thinking of God, praying, abjuring the pleasures of the flesh, etc. in order to obtain heaven.
Hypothesis: Religious people (or at least Jews and Christians, which are the religions I’m most familiar with) tend to say that life and death are ultimately in the hands of God/G-d. I suspect this is a way of avoiding survivor’s guilt, though both groups are generally in favor of medicine.
From memory: a news story about a conference on medical ethics where the Orthodox Jews were the only ones in favor of life extension.
I suspect that any religion with a vividly imagined heaven has to have rules against suicide, or else the religion won’t survive. It’s plausible to me that the revulsion against life extension is a mere side effect of the rule against suicide.
This seems strange, I would think an aversion to suicide would make people more pro-life extension.
My hypothesis is that the rule (life and death are in the hands of God) was instituted when suicide was available and life extension wasn’t. Life is in the hands of God wasn’t really relevant, it was just thrown in to make God sound more benevolent (so that He isn’t just killing people) and more powerful.
Hmm. Most of these seem to ignore the fact (not saying YOU are ignoring the fact, but that the religion would have to be ignoring the fact) that there are reasons to extend life that have nothing to do with heaven and hell.
It’s interesting that you mention “trying to live longer than is natural is attachment to the profane”—this strikes me as more Buddhist, but I could see Christians believing that, too. However, if cryo is attachment to the profane, so is eating healthy and exercising. Heck, so is eating at all. I am so glad I’m not religious. It causes such horrible cognitive dissonance to harmonize these types of beliefs with other information I have about life.
Yes—hence the idea of religious fasting. The Catholic and Orthodox Christian traditions consider “mortification of the flesh” to be holy, and luxuries of the flesh (enjoying eating, sex, and bodily sensations in general) to be wicked or at least a dangerous temptation.