Cryonics and religion

In the United States cryonics and religion are normally seen as existing in opposition to each other. But in reality there are a wide range of opinions from various religious organizations and thinkers with both pro and anti cryonic stances.

Christian thinkers
Traditional Christian burial practices have some resemblance to cryonics. Many Christians from ancient times to present believed that bodies would have physical resurrection, often from the sacrum bone being seen as a vessel for the physical preservation of the soul, and a physical resurrection coming from a regeneration of the body from the sacrum at the second coming. Great care was taken to preserve the sacrum and this is responsible for bans on cremation in Christian countries.

This is the origin of the word sacrum meaning sacred bone.

The cremation ban was kept in the Catholic church until 1963 and as of 1991 is still present in Mormonism and Orthodoxy.

Views on whether the soul was separate from the sacrum varied over time. Thomas Hobbes was a notable materialist and believed in a strictly physical resurrection. He was also arguably an early AI theorist proposing a similar thought experiment to the more famous Chinese room experiment.

One of the earliest transhumanist thinkers Nikolai Fyodorov was a devout Russian Orthodox and perceived transhumanism as being a natural extension of Christianity. He was not a cryonics advocate, as he lived before cryonics as a concept, but he was an advocate of physical technological resurrection of all humans, and saw that as "active Christianity".