To make things worse, all of the above legal problems are complicated by a religious overlay. Many religions conceive of death as a sharp event which takes place when the soul leaves the body. The religious confusion generated in the last 25 years by the changing technological definition of death is to be gauged by the proliferation of stories about ---------------------------------------------------------------------(46)
people whose souls left their bodies during clinical death and then were jerked back by resuscitation (one envisions a sort of Platonic/metaphysical elastic paddle-ball for the souls of folks who are resuscitated several times). Thus, many people are convinced that death does occur as an event sometime after the heart stops, and therefore that murder of a person already in cardiac arrest may indeed be theoretically possible. And once the possibility is admitted of a crime for which there are no hard and fast defining criteria, then the way becomes open for prosecution (or persecution) of people who just seem vaguely "up to no good." Thus, it might be entirely possible for a jury of believers to convict on the "impression" that someone was "alive" or "dead" when they underwent a given cryonics procedure, in somewhat the same fashion that a Inquisitorial tribunal might have judged persons guilty of heresy in the middle ages.
IV.
Transitional Ceremonies
All societies have ways of dealing with gradual social changes in which status would otherwise not be clear. Some of these social functions are grouped under the heading of "rites of passage," and they are often elaborate. An example is the puberty ceremony in many cultures (for example, the bar mitzvah in Jewish culture) in which adolescents are formally accepted into society as adults. In areas where the status of a social transition or the new status of an individual would not otherwise be immediately clear to the average member of society, ceremonies may be especially ornate. Examples here are marriage ceremonies and award ceremonies of various kinds. Under many circumstances, the ceremony itself often becomes part of the new status of the individual, and one consequently sometimes sees ceremonies performed in this context even when they make little physical sense. For example, one sees empty coffins buried sometimes when missing persons are declared formally dead. Transition ceremonies and rites of passage are only extensions of our definitional language. They are used to draw lines in continuous processes so as to minimize confusion and anxiety in a society. As in law, they seem to be necessary. Also as in law, however, they become dangerous when the people who perform them come to believe that their words make an objective change in reality. An official pronouncement of marriage by a priest is such a transition ceremony. An official pronouncement of death by a doctor is such a transition ceremony. The danger comes when a society forgets that the one is no more an indication of an objective physical change than the other.
Conclusion