[extropy-chat] Engineered Religion (was Atheism in decline)

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Joseph Bloch <jbloch at humanenhancement.com> wrote:
> Samantha Atkins wrote:
> > On Mar 18, 2005, at 3:03 PM, john-c-wright at sff.net wrote:
> >
> > No religion I know of, engineered or not,  has stayed under the 
> > control of its founder or true to its initial vision.  Most of the 
> > non-founders, especially after a generation or two, seem to
> enshroud, 
> > mummify and dogmatize the form and lose touch with or never really 
> > fully grasp the essence.  over time the layers of form even make
> > the essence much more difficult to obtain.
> 
> 
> I don't have any first-hand knowledge of it, but wouldn't Scientology
> fall into this category? How has it strayed from L. Mother Hubbard's 
> original vision?

Yes, and the seventh day adventists also fall into this category, as
they have an organization specifically in charge of editing their
version of the bible to reflect changes in organization orthodoxy. They
are clearly engaged in long term social engineering.

The Council of Nicea, back in the fourth century, was another episode
in which a lot of more authentic documents, like the gospels of mary
magdalene and of the apostle Thomas, were excluded as apocrypha in
favor of gospels written third or fourth hand many decades after the
events written about. Since then, generations of hand copying prior to
the invention of the printing press left open the possibility for
significant editing of the gospel.

These sorts of activities can be used either to filter out pernicious
information viruses or to inject them in.

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"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://intlib.blogspot.com

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