[ExI] riots again

[Joshua Job]

I absolutely believe religion will disappear in the future as a direct
consequence of technology.

When Death has been vanquished,  poverty and scarcity are foreign
concepts,  and we live in a world where the real world is almost as easily
changeable as the digital world thanks to full molecular nanotechnology,
the things which drive the religious instinct will have been destroyed by
the march of science.

Even our ignorance, the room reserved through our ignorance will have been
eliminated. When we can back up minds in computers,  share memories and
experiences directly through technology,  and can achieve all the miracles
of the religions through science,  whither the God of the gaps?  Immaterial
souls are an untenable proposition in a world of uploads,  brain-machine
interfaces,  and artificial persons.

Religion is born from terror at the prospect of Death (and through it the
unknown).  When death is gone and and science has explained the mystery of
the functioning of life and mind,  there won't be anything left to drive
it. We will no longer fear the unknown,  and so rather than invent
explanations,  we'll search for them.  We will still have feelings of awe
and reverence at the Universe,  but we won't cower or beg for help from
more powerful beings.  We'll be the gods we used to pray to, and will have
grown fully confident in our ability to understand reality and bend it to
suit us.

I don't see any other way to explain the psychological root of belief in
the supernatural,  and I think I'm backed up by the drop in religiosity
with rising wealth and health.
--Joshua Job.
On Sep 24, 2012 4:44 PM, "Omar Rahman" <rahmans at me.com> wrote:

>
> After reading the most recent tirades about religion here complete with
> the always insightful Hitler comparisons and rape metaphors etc. I am
> minded to direct your collective attention to:
>
> http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/home
>
> For your amusement I urge you to keep score as the signal to noise ratio
> seems to be too far into noise's favor for effective communication.
>
> What might be interesting discuss is; will religion itself, or at least
> the religious impulse in transhuman people, survive?
>
> My thinking is that to have an individual identity we must draw some line
> around ourselves and to have a meaningful (to us) existence we must draw a
> line somewhere outside of ourselves to give a context. Religion will
> forever be in that space outside of our context line, outside the knowable.
> The interesting things are what we do in the space between our two lines
> and the fact that no two individuals draw their lines in quite the same way.
>
> What do others think? Will religion become obsolete as we upgrade and
> expand our thought? Will our thinking change qualitatively if we upgrade
> our SocialUintSize number from the present less than 8 bit number to a 1024
> bit number? Will we find an acceptable way to 'be ourselves' without
> simulating adrenaline/testosterone/etc. or pain. What would things be like
> if love and hate were platonic?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Omar Rahman
> _______________________________________________
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>
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