[extropy-chat] Re: Athiesm in decline

[john-c-wright at sff.net]

Kevin Freels asks: 

>Religion changes over time. Which religion would be the easiest to change to
>something more transhumanistic? Or would it be better to create a new
>religion? What would it take to do that? Can a set of beliefs be created
>that can meld any partivular religion into something more extropian?

I might suggest something like "Adventism" appearing in HARVEST OF STARS by Poul
Anderson. In that book, the inevitable supremacy of the Sophotects (as he called
his artificial intelligences) was greeted with pleasure and anticipation by a
politcal group devoted to the advent of a super-human mode of consciousness. One
of the characters daydreams that one day his loyalty to the coming super-race of
pure intelligences will be rewarded by an upload into an eternal computerized
fiction of bliss and perfection: a robotic paradise. 

What is interesting here is that the author takes reasonable political faction,
(the por-reason, pro-progress group) but shows how the natural human hunger for
the lording it over others turns them into tyrants; and the natural human
longing for the supernatural turns their political philosophy into a religion,
complete with a promise of life eternal in the New Garden.  

Anderson makes his Adventists his black-hats, not necessarily, I suppose,
because the author has anything against progress in artificial intelligence, but
because any movement or any idea, even a reasonable one, when it becomes an idol
to which one is willing to sacrifice other virtues and scruples, becomes
all-consuming, and hence unreasonable. 

(The novel, by the way is a monumental work, the crowning triumph of a lifetime
of work in the field, and it astonishes and disappoints me that this book is not
more well known.) 

The idea of designing a religion to a deliberate purpose is an intriguing one,
which has also been the topic of speculations in science fiction. GATHER
DARKNESS by Fritz Leiber, or the "Great Galactic Spirit" of Asimov's FOUNDATION
spring to mind, not to mention the more obscure SIXTH COLUMN by Robert Heinlein.
  I note that in these optimistic tales, the con men who fool the rubes with
their made-believe religions win. DUNE by Frank Herbert is an exception; one of
his themes is that the Messiah cannot control the events he sets in motion, the
Jihad world-destroying he sparks cannot be stopped. 

Serious students of the matter might be advised to adapt Transhumanism to an
existing faith, rather than invent one whole cloth. This has two advantages:
one, God may spare you, despite your hubris, if you unwittingly do His work for
Him. Two, you have a pre-sold market. 

Having said that, I am unsure which religion to recommend to the cause.
Neopaganism or pantheism might be ripe for exploitation on this matter, since no
Acquinas yet has risen among them to codify their beliefs. The belief in
reincarnation, which some New Age types admire, could be used to promote the
idea that the current human race has a duty to create a superior species of
child-races, into which we will all one day be reborn. Oriental religions, with
their otherworldliness and concept of reincarnation as an eternal trap, a wheel
of punishment meant to be escaped, would not lend themselves easily to the
enterprise. A puritan Christianity, whose members were convinced that working to
better the state of men on earth and create a race of after-men to replace them,
is possible, but unlikely, within the Christian world-view: a puritan work-ethic
and a devotion to a higher cause, however, would be good allies. I am not sure
how, if at all, Mohammadism could be suborned to the Transhumanist cause: the
doctrine of fatalism and utter submission to God do not lend themselves to
notions of progress toward uploaded immortality in the computerspace. 

John C. Wright