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The Necessity of the Body

Our lack of rationality regarding our dualistic existence could probably be explained by the fact that people have long believed in special properties associated with the self. In many religions there is the idea that the personality, or some element of it, will move to some other level of existence and continue. The body is left behind, being only of secondary importance. Yet in these religions, bodies often return. In Christianity and Islam there is a Resurrection of the body before the Last Judgment. For Hindus and many Buddhists the afterlife involves reincarnation in a new body. Though not all religions teach a bodily afterlife, the return of the body is nonetheless an important and common feature in religious belief that illustrates our wish for physical existence after death, and our recognition of the importance and necessity of the body. (After all, if we have no body, we are no longer human, and if we are no longer human we are no longer ourselves. Non-bodily afterlife is therefore a form of death disguised as liberation or transformation; any supposed continuity is spurious.)

Evidently, people are aware that bodies are important, but until now, they have only been able to dispose of a corpse and hope the soul will find its way to a new and "proper" form. Today however, we can preserve the dead body and stop the morbid process of total destruction in decay, while letting go the psychological crutch of belief in freed souls. Instead we can gamble on the tangible progress of science. Yet, though the technology is at hand to implement the most reasonable course of action, old and ancient ideas about life and death still grip our imaginations and hearts. We understand the importance of the body, we wish to deny physical death is the end, and so we persist with beliefs that assure us that existence with a body will continue somehow. The result is a great waste in discarding corpses as if they have no future, ignoring the possibilities inherent in cryonics. The body is devalued by this ignorance, and to make up for it, our selves are crowned as immortal, indestructible souls and our names and deeds honoured or remembered by our culture or family.

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