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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple style='word-wrap:break-word'><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #E1E1E1 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b>…</b>> <b>On Behalf Of </b>Max More via extropy-chat<br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [ExI] us<o:p></o:p></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:black'>Perhaps one reason that church attendance is down is that the Green religion has gained so many followers and they don't have churches (at least in the usual sense). The Green religion has its own original sin (humankind's separation from nature due to intelligence and technology), its own god or goddess (Gaia/the Earth/Nature), its own indulgences (carbon offsets), its sacrifices (give up your inexpensive cars in favor of expensive electric vehicles -- and pretend that the latter are powered by "green energy"), its own prophets (Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Michael Mann, and many others), and it follows authoritarian, faith-based modes of thinking -- believe The Science (TM), combined with apocalyptic pronouncements and predictions that are adjusted every time they fail. <o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:black'>Especially for young people (first three or four decades), Green/extreme environmentalism/catastrophism has replaced standard religions but meets most of the same "needs".<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:black'>--Max<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><hr size=2 width="98%" align=center></div><div><div><blockquote style='border:none;border-left:solid #CCCCCC 1.0pt;padding:0in 0in 0in 6.0pt;margin-left:4.8pt;margin-right:0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><o:p> </o:p></b></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:14.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:14.0pt'>Max this is the best post I have seen here in months.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:14.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:14.0pt'>Evolutionary psychology would suggest we are fooling ourselves if we think we can just give up gods. Human society emerged from murderous chaos by inventing deities who become angry with us if we fail to adhere to social mores which lead to stable societies, leading to human cooperation and emergence from the rest of the beasts which were never able to invent such deities. We, our minds, or social structures, our ethics systems, all evolved through the worship of supernatural beings. The moral constraints such evolution puts on us still works just fine, even if we know the supernatural beings controlling our minds are a product of our minds.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:14.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:14.0pt'>Punchline: we cannot just give up that invention. We are programmed to worship something. The green movement is a perfect example of substituting new gods for the old ones.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:14.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:14.0pt'>spike<o:p></o:p></span></p></blockquote></div></div></div></body></html>