> I see people spending money for a chance at an afterlife they have absolutely no proof of.
There is a casual, down-to-Earth, no-supernatural-powers-required, fully constrained to known laws of physics and mechanisms of biology chain of reasoning that this could work. There's a huge qualitative difference between this and believing in God.
Sure, we can argue whether or not it's worth spending money on right now; if you start including things like "burden on your relatives" or "probability of undesirable future" or "probability that current preservation techniques destroy too much information" in your calculations you might end up deciding it's not worth the cost yet, but it doesn't change that the idea is sound in principle.
> I see vast exaggeration of some anecdotal observations (miracles?) as "knowledge" of life.
Are you calling modern molecular biology, chemistry and information theory a bunch of "anecdotal observations"? Sure, whatever. But even if, it's still the best thing we have to reason from.
> I see people finding comfort in an unknown future predicated on the powers of some super-human entity (at least super-human compared to the present) and on the optimistic belief in the benevolence of that entity.
You're bundling two different concepts together (which might be excusable, because people who believe in cryonics also often believe in superhuman AIs). Still, cryonics does not depend on any super-human entity or its values, it only depends on whether or not we crack nanotech (or some other technology we don't know yet).
> In short I see religious texts and religious arguments, hence: religion.
Where you see religion, I see reasonable assumptions based on current scientific knowledge, extrapolated by applying cold, hard rationality.
> There's a huge qualitative difference between this and believing in God.
Don't confuse God with religion. A lack of deities does not make this not a religion (see nontheistic religions[1]). Also, why are you discounting what you call "supernatural" beliefs? Even physics is based on some assumptions (laws of symmetry) and ends at the big bang. If you look at the past 50 years of medicine and biology -- especially human biology -- you'll find many wrong conclusions (see Ioannidis's "why most published medical research is false"). You're exaggerating our scientific capabilities while discounting the limits to our understanding. In fact, you're turning science and technology into your religion. Don't overestimate human capacity and don't underestimate our stupidity (but don't do the opposite either).
BTW, I'm not even sure cryonics falls under the category of nontheistic religions, as "humans" with the power to resurrect the dead (and by extension eliminate natural death) are no different from a deity. Your religion is justified by what we know, as were others. The only qualitative mistake here, I think, is yours: as people who know (some) and love science, we know that it has limits. We have limits to observation, and, most pertinently, we have limits of tractability and understanding of complex systems. I don't think scientists assume we'll one day know something, and they certainly don't assume we'll have a specific far-fetched technology.
> Still, cryonics does not depend on any super-human entity or its values
I wasn't talking about AI, I was talking about future "humans" (is that what they would be in a world without death?) with technology we do not possess, hence super-compared-to-us-humans.
There is a casual, down-to-Earth, no-supernatural-powers-required, fully constrained to known laws of physics and mechanisms of biology chain of reasoning that this could work. There's a huge qualitative difference between this and believing in God.
Sure, we can argue whether or not it's worth spending money on right now; if you start including things like "burden on your relatives" or "probability of undesirable future" or "probability that current preservation techniques destroy too much information" in your calculations you might end up deciding it's not worth the cost yet, but it doesn't change that the idea is sound in principle.
> I see vast exaggeration of some anecdotal observations (miracles?) as "knowledge" of life.
Are you calling modern molecular biology, chemistry and information theory a bunch of "anecdotal observations"? Sure, whatever. But even if, it's still the best thing we have to reason from.
> I see people finding comfort in an unknown future predicated on the powers of some super-human entity (at least super-human compared to the present) and on the optimistic belief in the benevolence of that entity.
You're bundling two different concepts together (which might be excusable, because people who believe in cryonics also often believe in superhuman AIs). Still, cryonics does not depend on any super-human entity or its values, it only depends on whether or not we crack nanotech (or some other technology we don't know yet).
> In short I see religious texts and religious arguments, hence: religion.
Where you see religion, I see reasonable assumptions based on current scientific knowledge, extrapolated by applying cold, hard rationality.