[extropy-chat] No Joy in Mudville

[Damien Broderick]

At 07:00 AM 11/4/2004 -0800, the Spikester wrote:

>Isn't it shocking?  Religion Incorporated seems
>to be making a raging comeback in our modern world.

In all sorts of brands and guises. It's bitterly ironic (to me, anyway) 
that avowedly hi-tech widely educated societies such as the USA and Russia 
have so many citizens reaching for the god pill, while their antagonists 
are swigging madly from the god bottle, all factions boiling away with 
contrived and almost arbitrary iconologies of bigotry. It starts to look as 
if people really *do* find secular scientific cultures too `cold' and 
`impersonal' and even `inhaman' to sustain the glow of life. True, there 
are parts of Europe and Australasia where Religion Incorporated has been 
sidelined for a few generations, but I'll bet it comes ripping back in the 
clutches. Time for humanism and transhumanism to start thinking seriously 
once again (as Bertrand Russell and Wells and others did nearly a century 
ago, without getting anywhere) about some sort of secular equivalent of 
worship (ugh; whatever) and mutually supportive emotionally enriched 
fellowship. But I don't imagine it will emerge from any bunch of INTJs like 
this list...

Damien Broderick