Now THESE people have the right idea!

[oneirophrenia]

Atheist Agenda, a student organization at the University of Texas at San Antonio, has a truly great idea: PORNO FOR BIBLES!

Trade in your religious scriptures for pornography. Yes, you heard me.

WHAT A BARGAIN!

Comments

[rapier1.livejournal.com]

Does it ever strike you as ironic that your faith in Singularism is essentially the same as a religious faith? IN a lot fo ways it has all the hallmarks of a religion. A method to explain the progress of history (moore's law), a fantastic payoff that comes at some unspecified time if everyone does their part, is internally but not externally consistant, etc etc etc...

[oneirophrenia.livejournal.com]

Oh, certainly. However, the depth of my "belief" is fairly shallow--I view the whole Singularitarian thing more as a organizational method for understanding certain trends of development in human civilization and technology. There are truly hard-core Sinularitarians who are setting dates for the birth of the first trans-sapient AI and the technological Spike that'll redefine everything: that's just as ludicrous as Christian fundamentalists pinning down specific dates for the Rapture. (As a matter of fact, Charles Stross (http://www.antipope.org), one of my alltime favorite transhumanist science-fiction writers, specifically calls the Singularity "the Rapture of the Nerds".) I find these folks just as ludicrous as I do Rapture-ready Christians--but I find them a million times less objectionable than I do those particular Christians, because transhumanists manifestly do not hold their views to be The One True Way and do everything they can to convert others. They will gladly talk about their views, and provide evidence to convince others that they're right, but theirs is not a Crusade the Save the World.

Just as you indicate, religions are built around a philosophical core that helps adherents understand the past and, to some degree, predict or at least anticipate the future. But all philosophies or attitudes toward life, the universe, and everything do that--it's what they're for: to provide people with a means of understanding their place in the world. But religions take this a step further by invoking transcendant supernatural beings with all-powerful control over the mundane world in order to justify or realize those core philosophies. Creationists often say that "evolution" is just as much a religion as Christianity--but evolutionists adhere to that particular paradigm only because it explains the existing data the best and allows them to make certain predictions about the future (or, at least, future experiments): there is no need to invoke any transcendental forces to explain evolution. Or Moore's Law.

Nonetheless, I dislike zealots regardless of what fills them with missionary zeal. I've yet to run into missionary transhumanists or Singularitarians...but I'm sure there must be at least one of them out there! There's always a few over-eager bad eggs in every clutch. Fortunately, since transhumanism is obviously derived from humanism, a philosophy that greatly emphasizes a live-and-let-live relativism of morals and worldviews, there is inherently a much smaller chance that transhumanism will produce crazy, wild-eyed, AI-worshipping maniacs.