[extropy-chat] proto-extropian religions

[Spike]

> Damien Broderick
> Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Bush and Kerry on abortion funding
> 
> At 12:31 PM 10/11/2004 -0500, I wrote:
> 
> Adventists aghast that hospitals are funded *with their money* to 
> transfuse blood
> 
> Oops. I probably should have written `Jehovah's Witnesses'. 
> The former theologian Spike Jones will be down on me like a wolf on
the 
> fold. ... Jehovah's Witnesses are known for their rejection of blood
transfusion, 
> even when it is necessary to save life...


I saw the earlier comment and was in the middle of a reply
when I decided to check if someone else had caught the
error.  Turns out the author himself had done so.  I
was coming down upon Damien not as the wolf on the fold but
rather more as the three-toed sloth, comes down gently,
like...  well, whatever it is that the three toed sloth
gently comes down gradually upon in order to eventually 
devour with no great haste or ferocity.  Rutabagas?

Four religious groups, Jehovah's Witness, Christian
Science, Seventh Day Adventist and Later Day Saints,
are often confused with each other, but usually, as
in the case of Damien, it is done clearly without malice.  

An oversimplified summary: 

Jehovah's Witness = no transfusions, 
Christian Science = no doctors, 
LDS = Mormon = huge white families, all American values,
SDA = Seventh Day Adventist = no war, vegetarian, church 
on Saturday.

I would argue that in many ways Seventh Day Adventist
is highly compatible with extropian principles, for we
owe a great debt to the early SDA John Harvey Kellogg, a
shining example of a forward thinking proto-extropian.

As a young doctor, businessman and inventor in the 1880s, 
Kellogg looked at the typical breakfast table and realized 
there was not one food item present that would contribute to
good health.  So he invented some.  Several actually,
the most famous being corn flakes.  Perhaps even more
brilliantly, he figured out how to tell god to tell
the prophetess Ellen White to tell the proletariat to
purchase and devour his corn flakes, which caused him
to earn so much money that any good capitalist would
stand and salute.  

Kellogg also inadvertently launched a new industry in
Battle Creek Michigan, by making his breakfast foods
without sugar or sweeteners.  Competitors merely took
the recipes, sweetened the concoctions to make them far
more palatable, making them better sellers, giving birth
to the even more profitable Post cereals.  But I digress.

Kellogg was a forward thinking doctor who was always
eager to experiment with the newest technologies available.
In this way I nominate him as an outstanding proto-extropian.


Perpetual Progress: Kellogg was always looking for ways
to do things better in medical science.  He set the precedent
for experimentation that lives on to this day in hospitals
such as the highly esteemed Loma Linda medical center in
southern Taxifornia, where the Baby Fae baboon heart transplant 
was attempted, and where mechanical hearts are still being 
developed to this day.  They also have some of the world's 
most advanced proton-accelerator treatment for prostate cancer.  
The latest inverted food pyramid is one Kellogg figured out
over a century ago.

Self-Transformation:  Kellogg's big thing was daily exercise,
which was cutting edge stuff at the dawn of the 20th century.
That physical fitness is such well-established dogma today
is a tribute to Kellogg and others who were pushing it back
then.

Practical Optimism:  Kellogg preached to anyone who would listen
and plenty who wouldn't that a person who paid attention to 
health principles could live to be 90.  He lived to 91.

Intelligent Technology:  Kellogg held 30 patents for food products,
medical equipment, exercise gear, diverse things such as peanut
butter, a vapor inhaler, the electric blanket, etc.

Open Society:  ok, Kellogg didn't say anything about open
society that I know of.

Self-Direction:  Kellogg might have actually preferred the 
proletariat would take direction from him as opposed to their
own misguided selves.  Moving right along...

Rational Thinking: Kellogg showed thru his writing that he
was a forward thinker and a rational thinker, traits that are
often absent in today's highly restricted medical sciences.
Doctors are forced by the medical malpractice industry to
practice only the most accepted cookbook methods.  Kellogg
carefully reasoned out new treatments and recorded his
theories and findings.  The precedent is seen in experiments
like the afore mentioned Baby Fae heart transplant.  The 
reasoning was that a baby's immune system is not developed
at birth, therefore perhaps an immunologically incompatible
organ could be introduced in such a way that the immune 
system could learn to accept it, obviating the need for 
immunosuppressants, which would cause a baby's life to
be short anyway.  Didn't work, but an intriguing idea that
merited an attempt or two.  Kellogg's ideas weren't always
right either: he did some things like a radon inhaler for
treating asthma.  It surely did eventually rid the patient
of asthma.  After they were slain.  He recorded the outcomes 
carefully, and consequently he stopped delivering megadoses 
of radiation to the ailing lungs of the eerily glowing
patients, forthwith.

So, Kellogg scores 5 out of 7, not bad for a guy who was
born in 1852.

In Kellogg's tradition, SDA doctors and medical centers
will seriously consider cryonics as a form of medical
treatment.  In a recent meeting of my alma mater, I
introduced several of the participants to the notion
of cryonics.  I found them far more open and receptive
to the idea than is found in the general public.  You and
I may one day go to Loma Linda, Florida Hospital, or one
of the other SDA medical centers to be frozen upon our
ultimate demise, assuming the apocalypse or the
singularity do not intervene.

As a parting shot, the SDA church is (finally!) holding
serious talks on how to deal with the evolution issue.
They are trying to decide what are they to do about the 
fact that most of the smarter Adventists have quietly 
accepted Darwin's heresy, in spite of their parents' most
sincere efforts and staggering expense in private schooling 
to keep their larvae on the straight and narrow creationist 
road.

The shocking truth is that the *average* typical American
is a creationist!  Or might as well be.  Adventist historian
Ron Numbers, in his excellent book The Creationists, shows that 
when people are randomly selected and given questionnaires about
evolution, their answers demonstrate so little basic understanding
of evolution, answers that are clearly and repeatedly self-
contradictory, it is almost meaningless to label the person either 
creationist or evolutionist.  Fellow Americans, we know not
jack about evolution.  Sad.  

Adventists are forced to confront creationism, so they 
must spend more than three minutes of a lifetime 
thinking about life's origins.  If one thinks, there 
is a good chance one will eventually accept Darwin's 
breakthrough heresy.  If Kellogg were alive today, he
would be leading the heretical charge.
 
> So even silly ideas can become modified under the pressures of
reality...
> Damien Broderick 

Well said, sir, well said indeed.  {8-]

spike