[ExI] My 80 year old Mother In Law asked about Transhumanism.
Brent Allsop
brent.allsop at canonizer.com
Thu Sep 30 03:04:37 UTC 2010
Transhumanists,
As most of you know, all of my family is mostly truly believing Mormons
- Especially my mother in law. Before 5 years ago and before we started
the Mormon Transhumanist Association - I was mostly taking the same tact
some of you hating transhumanists were taking: lets excommunicate
religion and destroy it with the rational truth, or Transhumanism /
atheism. I was actively working on this for much more than 10 years
with absolutely nothing to show for my efforts, except everyone hating
me. It was probably mostly just my perception, but there were strong
feelings that during that time, likely largely because of my lets
convert everyone from and destroy religion attitude, my mother in law
wanted my wife and LDS family to divorce me. Our family did come very
close to this during those times. Even my parents seemed to want this.
However, as we got started with the MTA, I finally realized, that all
this fracturing hate was precisely the only problem with me and the
transhumanist movement. And of course, if you think there are lots of
transhumanists that want to excommunicate religion from transhumanism,
how many Mormons do you think there are that want to excommunicate the
Mormon Transhumanists Association from Mormonism? You haven't seen
anything. (The LDS church recently got a copyright on the word "Mormon"
- I wonder why). I know many of you still think hating and
excommunicating anyone or anything to do with organized religion (and
visa versa), is the best or only route to take. But I challenge you to
point out one shred of real evidence that such hateful, excommunicating
attitudes have done anything for the transhumanist movement, other than
keeping it completely dead, fractured, unable to co-operate, and
worthless - the sorry state we are all in today - most people in the
world not even knowing of the word Transhumanist.
This weekend is the semi-annual Mormon LDS General Conference in Salt
Lake City, Utah. For Mormons, this is it. There will be gazillions of
well organized volunteers filling downtown SLC. The lavish LDS
conference center seats more than 23 thousand people, and it will be
standing room only during the entire weekend. Many LDS only wishing
they could get some tickets to just one session, as thousands of them
stand outside listening to it on the radio. It's near impossible for
locals to get tickets, especially for Sunday Morning, since they reserve
these tickets mostly for people from out of town. In conjunction with
this, we are having our Transhumanist and Spirituality conference.
(see: http://www.transhumanism-spirituality.org/ ) Max More, James
Hughes, and a famous Mormon Intellectual, Terryl Givens are the key note
speakers.
Despite the difficulty of getting tickets for such, we've finally
networked with enough Mormons, that we've collected a bunch of tickets,
so a bunch of the attendees, including the keynote speakers, will all be
attending the main General Conference Session, Sunday Morning together.
My in laws know about all of this, our efforts to solicit so far and
wide trying to get these tickets, and I was also telling them the story
of the brilliant LDS Historian, Don Bradley, today. Basically, in large
part due to what Don found in LDS history, like many other smart
historians, he had resigned (or had his name formally removed from the
LDS church records). Yet, after he started getting active in the MTA,
he got re-baptized into the LDS church. My mother in law also knew how
many impossible to get conference tickets we had mustered from our world
wide MTA membership, and that we were taking people like Max More (I had
explained who he was to all of them) to conference with us.
Today as I was over at the inlaws' house, after I told this story, my
mother in law asked: "Now what do you guys call yourself again?" And as
I slowly answered: "Mormon Transhumanist Association" she was, with much
glowing interest, writing the word Transhumanist down.
Brent Allsop
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