[ExI] The void left by deleting religion

[Samantha Atkins]

Torstein Haldorsen wrote:
> Jef,
> I am currently a student of computer science and as such i have fairly 
> limited real world work experience.
> Still, any one persons skillset is generally not sufficient to 
> successfully pull of an entirely category-defying project such as this.
> Although I have had a number of advisors who have provided valuable 
> feedback in different areas, I have not been successful in recruiting 
> people who have been able to make independent contributions to this 
> project, pushing it forward so to speak.
>
> A quick search will reveal the extent to which I have promoted it so 
> far, which is really very little.
>
> Now, while I believe this idea is quite profound, and find it 
> intellectually pleasing to have a "religion" of my own design, this 
> could easily be entirely normal delusions of grandeur. I don't know, 
> but i really love this project, I believe in the potential of the 
> idea, and i would love to be able to work on it full time, somehow, 
> some time in the future.
>
I have considered such a thing myself rather seriously.  In particular I 
despair of enough humans embracing rationality and moving sufficiently 
beyond the many roots that religion feeds from to maximize our chances 
of survival.  There is an apparent lot of power and appeal in those 
memes and psychological complexes.  I thought that if they could be 
harnessed toward a more scientific worldview and transhumanist visions 
of transformation, immortality and transcendence then we would have much 
more of a chance.  The more I looked at this though and the more I 
attempted to move forward with it the less I believed it was a good 
idea.  You would be fighting an uphill battle against all the other 
religions and religious systems out there.  You would be struggling to 
create a faith, a very powerful and magnetic meme complex, working 
primarily from an intellectual perspective.  Unless you go in for full 
prophet and fanatical levels of dedication and devotion to the work you 
will not be a very powerful magnetic core for the work.   If you are not 
then the work will be picked to death in committee and die a thousand 
deaths by multiple agendas.   If you do form something cohesive you run 
high dangers of overlooking something critical that makes the result, if 
it takes hold, deadly.  At every step of the way you will be tempted to 
use language largely owned by vastly different and inimical meme sets 
and your message will get lost in the stew of assumption about what you 
mean when you use those words. 

Increasingly I think that many of the roots that feed religion are 
aspects of our EP that we will seriously need to struggle to overcome if 
we are to have a viable future.    Our future is in the realm of vision 
firmly grounded in science and reality.   Great mystical sci-fi romps 
into the future while appealing on some levels don't seem to really have 
much traction or much relationship to the work needed personally or 
collectively.  I could be wrong but I am  quite discouraged regarding 
the viability of this sort of thing. 


> Successful marketing and also sales - if you wanna call it that, is 
> absolutely essential for any project to succeed, but one needs to have 
> a marketable "package" first. And also, I would like such a solution 
> to have qualities that are immediately recognizable as superior to 
> what's already out there. Just to get there a lot of hard, consistent 
> theoretical groundwork is needed.
>
In this realm a large part of marketing is  inspiration especially of 
the highly contagious kind.   Without charisma all the solid theory in 
the world will be useless.

> If anyone would like to chip in on the theoretical / planning side 
> here, I would be very much appreciate it.
>
> As i said, if anyone can play the devils advocate and successfully 
> convince me why it _wont work_ or why I shouldn't go through with it I 
> would be grateful also, as I could stop spending a such ridiculous 
> amount of time on a maniac project that is exceedingly likely to fail 
> at any rate.
>
I think the few of us who are relatively awake and capable among all the 
world's billions are likely to accomplish far more if we see as clearly 
as we can where we want to go and build the technological (and perhaps 
cultural even political) tools for at least some of us to get there.  I 
don't think any scheme to inspire or convert or persuade any large 
portion of the masses is going to work at this point.

I rather liked believing that it could though.

- samantha