[ExI] The void left by deleting religion

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Thu May 17 05:28:56 UTC 2007


I consider the following to be one of Samantha's greatest posts ever, and I
have time to comment on it.

On 5/4/2007, Samantha wrote

> Torstein Haldorsen wrote:
> 
>> Now, while I believe [this] 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.

It does seem odd, though, to think of the options as consisting of
either (a) embracing rationality, or (b) failing to. I take you to mean
that the progress towards rationality is disappointingly slow. Our
present luxury does make it increasingly more affordable to be
rational (i.e, in terms of our EEA driven impulses).

> There is an apparent lot of power and appeal in those [religious]
> 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. 

Very well said.

> 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. 

Perhaps you mean with our present, limited, human-nature capabilities?
But genetic engineering is not far off, is it?  Even sooner, enlightenment
about drugs could also allow whole populations to take something that they
rationally know will make them more peaceful, increase their prosperity,
and bring about much more satisfaction and happiness for all.

>> 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 [in the past] that it could though.

Even though that's rather strongly stated---and with more than a hint of
elitism---I have to say that nothing in particular is wrong with it, and like
the above has been stated very succinctly and very well.

Lee




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