[extropy-chat] Bone for the Extropian Wolves

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Hara Ra <harara at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> A friend wrote:
> 
> In my not always so humble opinion though, "hope" is not the greatest
> of bio-engineering strategies.
> 
> And I replied:
> 
>Both 'hope' and 'faith' carry strong subtexts of 'death' and'failure'.

> Prior to the scientific age, the associated social and religious
> mechanisms did promote slightly better chances of survival by
> these means. Religious conversion and mystical insight (which I
> have experienced) both operate by making the real world irrelevant
> and an imaginary 'higher' world the ultimate reality. It has to be
> ultimate to be effective, and the main effect is to delete the fear
> response, freeing one for a wider field of action, often contrary
> to one's social programming. "God said so" is a 
> panacea for ignoring social constraints. Evolution only conserves 
> survivability, so we are saddled with these Stone Age mechanisms,
> which do work in their limited way.

They work because pure rationality embodied in scientific logic is a
constrained set by which to view the world. As Natasha, myself, Ramez,
and others have posted on occasion, the history books are littered by
the pronouncements by the best scientific minds that this or that was
impossible, only to be proven wrong by those whose want, drive, NEED,
for something to be true, to become real, was so great that they
ignored the best scientific information and made reality so. This
demand to believe in a future reality which is better than the one we
live in now is possible the greatest motivator for human progress, and
is at the core of the extropian ethic.

Only a pessimist would say that hope and faith subtext death and
failure. To me, they subtext transcending, avoiding, evading, or
otherwise conquering them. An extropian beleives that walls are made to
be gone over, under, around, or through, when the wall itself doesn't
serve the extropians purpose.


=====
Mike Lorrey
Chairman, Free Town Land Development
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                         -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=Sadomikeyism


		
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