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Transhumanists,<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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: <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.transhumanism-spirituality.org/">http://www.transhumanism-spirituality.org/</a>
) Max More, James Hughes, and a famous Mormon Intellectual, <span
class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-style: normal;
font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal;
line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform:
none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;
font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:
rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:
Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,FreeSans,sans-serif; font-size: 15px;
line-height: 20px;">Terryl Givens</span></span> are the key note
speakers.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Brent Allsop<br>
<br>
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