Why Christianity is better than Cryonics

This week, a 14 year-old girl who died of cancer, won a legal battle to have her body frozen.  This is part of a process called cryonics, which tries to stop the decaying process, by freezing the body at it is at the point of death.

It’s a heart-breaking situation; for a 14 year old who has to consider her own death; and for those left behind.

In a letter to the court, she wrote this:

“I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done. I am only 14 years old and I don’t want to die but I know I am going to die. I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up – even in hundreds of years’ time. I don’t want to be buried underground.

I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they may find a cure for my cancer and wake me up. I want to have this chance. This is my wish.”

All of us can identify with her words.  But Christ offers a better hope than cryonics, and here’s why;

1. The body you get back is not frozen at 80 with cancer and a dodgy hip. It’s yours – but made perfect.  If you’re paralysed now, in Christ you will walk.  If you’re depressed or broken in mind, you will be healed.
2. Our faith is not in science or this world’s advances; but in Jesus Christ who has defeated death and rises from it with His people.
3. Cryonics tries to defer death. But as Christians we are not afraid of it.  We recognise that all must go through it – but in Jesus, we come through it and are raised to new life and hope.
4. Cryonics tries to rescue us from physical death.  Jesus comes for something much more serious – spiritual separation from God, that no amount of freezing can reach.
5. We have no evidence that cryonics will ever work, (and no-one has ever frozen or revived the smallest mammal).  But the Bible testifies to a God who has been working since the beginning and holds life and death in His hands. A God who can bring life, even from dry bones!
6. If in the future, cryonics brings us back from death; we would have no idea how to live.  The world would be unimaginably different; and we would always be outsiders. In Jesus we are filled by a Spirit who leads and teaches us; and unites us to a universe that bows before the same King.
7. Cryonics is a business.  Christianity is life itself.
8. As Christians we rise to a universe that is also redeemed.  With cryonics, it stops with our flesh.
9. We don’t own our bodies.  Jesus does.

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