Our human tendency is to disguise all evidence of the reality that most frustrates us: death. We need only look at the cemeteries, the gravestones. the monuments to understand the ways in which we seek to embellish our mortality and banish from our minds this ultimate failure of our humanity. Sometimes we even resort to “canonizing” our dead. After Saint Peter’s Square, the place where most people are canonized is at wakes: usually the dead person is described as a “saint.” Of course, he was a saint because now he can’t bother us! These are just ways of camouflaging the failure that is death.
-- Pope Francis, Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus
I assume this is a pro-cryonics quote, but I don’t quite see how it relates to rationality. Its point is, quite clearly, “Accept Jesus as your personal savior and gain the gift of Eternal Life”.
It seems to me it’s anti-death rather than pro-cryonics; the two aren’t quite the same, and in particular being anti-death no more implies being pro-cryonics than it implies being pro-Jesus. And while no doubt Bergoglio’s (= Pope Francis’s) anti-death-ism is tightly tied up with his pro-Jesus-ism, what he’s written here can stand on its own as an expression of an anti-death attitude.
(I’m not sure being strongly opposed to death should really qualify something as a Rationality Quote either, but that’s a different complaint from “it’s really all about Jesus”.)
-- Pope Francis, Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus
I think it’s worth clarifying that Pope Francis and Jorge Mario Bergoglio are one and the same person.
Lesson learned: do not just copy-paste from Amazon.
I assume this is a pro-cryonics quote, but I don’t quite see how it relates to rationality. Its point is, quite clearly, “Accept Jesus as your personal savior and gain the gift of Eternal Life”.
It seems to me it’s anti-death rather than pro-cryonics; the two aren’t quite the same, and in particular being anti-death no more implies being pro-cryonics than it implies being pro-Jesus. And while no doubt Bergoglio’s (= Pope Francis’s) anti-death-ism is tightly tied up with his pro-Jesus-ism, what he’s written here can stand on its own as an expression of an anti-death attitude.
(I’m not sure being strongly opposed to death should really qualify something as a Rationality Quote either, but that’s a different complaint from “it’s really all about Jesus”.)
They are on LW :-/