[ExI] My 80 year old Mother In Law asked about Transhumanism.

[Brent Allsop]

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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