Ian calls his post “The church of FTB“, but he goes beyond that to point out that this isn’t a church, it doesn’t aim to be a church, and what we do is explore alternative methods of building community. And it’s effective — I think that what humanity needs to do to get its collective head out of its humongous ass is to repurpose all that wasted effort spent on the frills and nonsense and trappings of religion on more human needs. At my talk here in South Dakota last night, one of the things I said in the Q&A was we’d do a greater service to humanity if we all spent Sunday trying to write poetry*, rather than praying in a church.
So I go a little further than Ian, but I don’t disagree with him. I just resent that part of the movement that wants to regress and build a church of humanism, with all the same titles and geegaws and practices. Humanity deserves and needs something new and better and greater, that breaks the old shackles and doesn’t try to dress us up in shinier shackles with a different manufacturer’s label on them.
We need communities. We need a non-religious ecumene that wraps around the whole world and includes diverse points of view…but we don’t need churches and temples and hierarchies and priests and chaplains. Can we please all grow up and be free?
Actually, my ideal community is The Culture. Spaceships optional.
*I’m well aware that most of that poetry would be mind-gnawingly awful. The virtue lies in the effort, the attempt to do something novel and think in different ways. (So, obviously, the Cuttlefish has to sit at home on Sundays and force himself to think in prose.)
I’m still waiting for a drone to show up and recruit me for Special Circumstances. However, it would probably be a bad sign if I start trying to initiate conversations with metal boxes.
(My favorite Culture novel is The Player of Games, one of the few books I’ve read several times, just for the sheer fun of it.)
Dan and readers were sort of talking about this same thing the other day, in reference to de Botton’s book.
(Now off to read Crommunist.)
Its a little known fact the Culture is Trotskyist. At least it was till Iain Banks started making bucketloads of money, albeit deservedly.
It’s a classic equivocation fallacy.
If you compare squirrels and cars, you’ll find a lot of overlap:
* Both need fuel to continue to run.
* Both are mobile.
* Both are made of matter.
* Both have iron in them.
* Both have oils in them.
* Both fail to operate when submerged in water.
When comparing two things, one needs to compare distinguishing unique characteristics.
FTB being a community makes it no more a church/religion than the fact that a squirrel dies in water means that it’s a car.
Epicurus had a garden as a meeting place and the bond was friendship. Is anything more needed?
JT (Generic)
Instant threadwin
Poor squirrel
Culture fans, unite! Unless you feel like doing something else, then, by all means, do so.
You raise some good points and I completely agree with you about the problems with trying to create a humanist church and given that, and the fact that I suspect most of your fans and readers who read this blog also agree, I am just going to go ahead and geek out about the culture a bit… hope you don’t mind.
The culture is the first and only ‘utopian’ society I have come across that I would not only like to be in, but that I can’t actually think of any way I would change it to make it better.
I sometimes think that anyone who wouldn’t want to live in the culture probably has something wrong with them.
It’s a society that within the broadest possible limits allows you to be whoever you want to be without judgement while preventing you from preventing anyone else from being who they want to be.
And the cool thing is that in broad terms its a realisable society to aim for. (and no I don’t mean all the tech because most of it runs on Ian M. Banks’ fictional laws of physics but all the things needed to make the society possible are allowable under the laws of physics as we know them today.)
Thinking of the culture has brought to mind a good response to all of the nonsense that various theists and other irrational thinkers come up with…
it is simply this…I am simply
“Ravished By The Sheer Implausibility Of That Last Statement”
But if most people were zombies, mind-gnawingfulness wouldn’t really be a problem, now would it?
JT Generic, this is excellent. QFT!
Agree, PZ. So does anyone have any great ideas on how to do it?
One of my younger sons once said the naked truth and I think it applies to this situation: I walked into the family room and saw that he was watching a very violent movie on cable (He was about 7 years old). I told him sorry and switched the channel. As usual, he wanted a reason why and I told him the movie was too violent. His reply: “But I like violence!” seems apt here.
People seem to LIKE hierarchies, rituals and the other trappings of churches. :( How do we address that, I wonder?
consciousness razor says:
A bit tangential, but,
if I am bitten by a philosopher, will I become a philosophical zombie?
JT: brilliant!
demonax, sounds good.
I had an idea to start a “religion” with strict physicalism and metaphysical naturalism, and a complete rejection of any notion of supernaturalism as tenets. I figured it could emphasize personal responsibility and a sense of community, equality, and the utmost importance of truth. Personal testimony could be shared between members with experiences of awe, with our reverence for nature and humanity as “sacred”.
I figured words like “religion” “church” and “sacred” would always be written in quotes, to convey the non-conventional usage.
My motivation was to attract the large number of people who appear (incorrectly) turned off to atheism because of misguided notions of the importance of church/faith/religion. In much the same way that other words are hijacked for a cause, we could attempt to hijack these words. This is also what led to my dropping the whole idea: I cannot, in good conscious, distort the most useful and acceptable meaning of a word for my own gain—it’s too much like lying.
Sean Carroll had written,
and so I figured I’d preserve a good definition of science, (I prefer Richard Feynman’s best definition), and then just bend the definition of “religion” into something compatible.
I guess I don’t mention it in that post but shortly after discussing the idea with my roommate I had to abandon it for the aforementioned reasons. Still, I wouldn’t be entirely against it if someone else tried (though I don’t like de Botton), especially if it successfully avoided all the priestly and ritualistic (i.e. religious) aspects of religion.
JT, loved your “squirrel” analogy, but did you mean equalibration instead of equivocation?
Cuttlefish is a “him”?
I agree that there is no need for a church, and there are plenty of reasons for communities to gather to provide support. I just finished a 2 1/2 year stint as an officer helping my local high school’s band boosters program grow and expand. In this way, I supported my local community and bonded with many others that had a common interest.
I’ve been involved with my local community helping work with the county school board to make sure our local interests were respected. I will likely start working with the local high school athletic boosters to help it continue (it is on much firmer ground than the band boosters was).
Want something more generic? Plenty of opportunities to meet your local community at book clubs, bunco, HOA meetings, school board meetings, etc, etc. Absolutely zero need for the churches at all, much less any need to replicate their clubhouse mentality.
Crommunist’s point that FTB is actually a community is a good one, too. And seriously, the internet seems to be tailor-made for exactly the purpose of
Maybe we already have our communities, and now the job is to build and strengthen them – and maybe find ways to reduce the perception that an online community is somehow totally “pretend”.
JESUS FUCK, is this conceit STILL around?
@esmith4102
I’m not sure I’ve even seen the word “equalibration” before.
If we look at those parts of Europe in which religion is fast disappearing, and is now largely an irrelevance to most people, I am not sure why we need to build humanist communities. I certainly see no need to build such communities as a replacement for church-going.
People in Europe are no less involved in their local communities than people in the US seem to be. What I do think exists more in Europe than in the US are groups in which people in a locality get together to explore a shared interest, be it playing sport, gardening, walking, music and so on. The US seems to be especially week on adult participation in sport. It this thse activities that seem to have replaced church.
Totally OT, but damn. PZ’s mention of The Culture as his preferred mode now has me wanting to rip our latest Iain M. Banks book out of my husband’s hands so I can read it.
Also, @#1 Zeno: The Player of Games was /awesome/.
Further, I loved Inversions because it was told from a skewed viewpoint.
JT: Whoops, I meant equilibration.
I was thinking for a moment that it was some obscure British term or something.
But to answer the question, I’m pretty sure it’s equivocation.
In “50 voices of Disbelief” Freider Otto Wolf speaks about what’s next, after religion. He suggests not building permanent institutions, but temporary solutions to real problems. They would be dismantled when no longer needed. Rather than being a power structure that has to create a need to justify it’s continued existence.
One of the more perplexing is the need for comfort to the lonely and infirmed. Churches fail at that too, but I don’t see many secular organizations really filling that role. Community organizations usually require that you come to them.
Matt Penfold,
it’s been a hobby horse of mine, but
In western Europe, large-scale secularisation of society usually entailed a privileged position of the official churches, despite the falling societal relevance of organised religion.
With the result that nowadays, in many European countries there is not much political will to get rid of the remaining privileges.
Strong humanist communities would certainly help.
“Humanity deserves and needs something new and better and greater, that breaks the old shackles and doesn’t try to dress us up in shinier shackles with a different manufacturer’s label on them.”
This is exactly how I feel about the environmental movement…we don’t need (in the long run) new cars with better fuel efficiency, or new, “greener” ways to extract non-renewable resources from the earth; we need a complete shift in how we function in the world. And I think the link between religion’s “God given” right to be masters of the earth and our mostly atrocious behavior towards non-human life is not coincidental. Get rid of religion and we have much more freedom to be better stewards.
lol sorry about that! But you know, I think it IS still around for some people in my age group (50s) who did not grow up with the internet or even computers!
I think there may be quite a large number of closeted atheists a lot like me – women who are contributing to their communities, sometimes even through church communities – who just don’t realise that the internet can provide a viable and vibrant community, too or who are uneasy with the idea of online friends.
Some of us came to maturity before the internet age, and also before feminist ideas had really made a dent in our societies; I imagine that I may not be the only woman who accepted her husband’s assertion that online communities could be dangerous places full of kooks and crackpots. LOL Luckily, I’ve never been a completely compliant wife, so I stuck my toe in some years ago anyway… but the hangover of caution and doubts is hard to shake off. I imagine for some people – especially older women – this perception of the internet is probably still a deterrent to participation.
Spaceships optional?
Fuck off!
I demand spaceships.
We don’t need religious ritual either (yuck!) – many years ago after my brother died, I called together his widow, my other brother, etc, and did my own ritual: put his ashes in a silver bowl, lit a candle in them there, then recited a poem I had written to him…folks said whatever they needed to (my sister said a prayer, ’cause she does that), then dumped his ashes where we thought he’d want to be.
See? With imagination, we can do that stuff.
OT but how does this article grab Prof. PZ?
http://www.jpost.com/Health/Article.aspx?id=261637
@esmith4102
Thought about it some more – definitely not equivocation – maybe your weird british term.
Not sure this is such a great idea. I’m pretty sure that’s how the Vogons got started.
Speaking of which, Happy Birthday (the late great) Douglas Adams!
May I ask something completely off-topic here ? What do you think of this Robert A. Emmons and his science of gratitude ? It immediately sets off alarm bells in my head, and a quick google shows he’s heavily into connecting religion and happiness, but I can’t quite put it into words. Someone linked this article on a forum, which set this off. http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/09/practicing-gratitude-can-increase.php
This debate over the need for atheists to establish church-like organizations strikes me as similar to the impulse people had at the end of the American Revolution to declare George Washington king. I’m sure large numbers of people in the day couldn’t imagine how to live without some absolute dictator ruling their world and so they sought a king or king-like role. Fortunately, for this country and the world, Washington demurred, more or less, and a new thing came about.
And before someone points at the presidency, keep in mind that until the end of the 19th century, the President wasn’t consider that important.
The world changes in many ways and at varying rates, so sometimes it’s difficult to see the direction, but re-instituting old ways because we assume they are necessary is an unfounded belief. What might be necessary just might need some room to bloom.
@robro .33
This debate over the need for atheists to establish church-like organizations
Not to hijack your post with more analogies than needed…
It’s like saying that because people in churches tend to be friends, that if atheists try to have friends, it’s because they’re trying to create an atheist church.
Religious communities? Humanist communities? That’s a narrow perspective, and neither one is all that rational.
The only community that makes any sense to ‘belong to’ is the one you already do, by default – the biosphere. Plays important roles in supplying you with air, water, food, shelter, clothing as well as the company of bioluminescent squid. That’s also where all the coal and oil came from, too.
While ‘humanism’ as a philosophy might be less damaging than religious authoritarian systems, it’s still rather irrational in this regard.
Good luck with those spaceship habitats, though – it might be a possibility some century.
I go to at least one activity of our local CFI (and associated Skeptics) group every week, and by no means am I attending every available meeting — speaker series, Skeptics In The Pub, book club, Living Without Religion, Unsermon discussion brunch, Secular Sobriety. A bunch of familiar faces whom I like and respect, and whose company I enjoy. That’s a community. Plays to some extent in the same “space” as religion, ie. philosophical/ethical concerns, only with out the rituals (also, without the bullshit).
Found myself in a UU service a couple of months ago, ie. people I probably mostly agree with on the major questions, but geez I’m massively uninterested in being part of anything like that. The service leader talked about them being “liberal religious”, and I realized that, no, I’m just not religious, period. I have a moderate appreciation for ceremonies to mark major life events, but on a regular basis, no. Besides, the choir was mediocre, and secular “hymns” like the ones in the UU songbook sound trite to my ears (as a former church chorister, I *care* about the music damnit).
I think this is a great analogy, robro. I think people had that impulse because humans do have an impulse to create hierarchies (kings, popes and presidents are all examples of the top spots in human hierarchies).
In fact, I think your next sentence actually supports the observation that people prefer hierarchies; over time the pressure to do just that (create almost a kinglike president) seemed to overcome the founder’s attempts to overcome that impulse. (another example: gradual yet persistent erosion of the efforts by US founders to establish separation of church and state to avoid theocracy)
I think humanity can overcome the impulse, but it will take constant vigilance by people with enough power to prevent it, and at the moment, there does not seem to be a large number of people in positions of power who wish to prevent it. Hierarchies benefit people in power and powerful people will support or create hierarchies to consolidate their power.
I think hierarchies will always appeal to humans beings in the same way as the “American dream” continues to appeal to millions of struggling Americans: everyone expects/hopes s/he will be in the top tiers, so continue to support it.
Anyone using this straw vulcan?
Actually, my ideal community is The Culture.
In the short story where they visit Earth, they eat people and declare us tasty. I’m personally hoping for something a little less libertine than space cannibals.
(Technical note; they produce and eat clones of people, so no actual sentient being is killed for food. And yeah, its not technically cannibalism if they’re aliens – but you get my drift.)
Ing
It’s all about becoming one with the Universe, man.
Like, y’know.
Although, I don’t dig why ikesolem is so earth-centrist.
What about the sun and the moon?
Man.
It’s such a marvelous mix of hippy bullshit and the “more rational than thou” bullshit we see from JM and others.
Remember everyone. Emotions are for the lesser people!
As I see it, an organization already exists that is on that order and I have studiously avoided it because I can no longer tolerate even the idea of a church and me being part of it.
I’m speaking of the Unitarian Universalists. Several of the originators of our new secular freethout group here in Sedona and the Verde Valley were long time associates with that organization. The group we have started has no connection with them, being instead aligned with the Secular Coalition For Arizona.
I’m not denouncing the Unitarian Universalists. I’m just alergic to religious overtones after my experiences. Why go to weekly meetings and support a church when I have limited time and resources to commit to secular freethought efforts?
@niftyatheist #37 — In principle I agree that the human impulse to establish hierarchical, authoritarian regimes is deeply ingrained in our behavior and difficult to change. So, difficult in fact, that it has reinvented itself often and in various guises. As far as I know, there are no truly anarchic societies. That said, some change has occurred. No one considers the President, even in his modern form, to serve by divine right capable of healing by his mere passage, at least not until someone like Rick Santorum gets elected…gawd, what an awful thought! Now I must go retch.
sumdum,
Well, the one article by him that they cite is published in a well-respected journal, and the premise is entirely plausible.
But I do wonder if he’s being just a little more specific than necessary. I’d like to run those experiments again while having people focus on things they’re “very glad” for, instead of “grateful” for.
I, for one, have a hard time feeling grateful unless I know who to direct it toward. And a lot of things in my life I can just be grateful to society for. But I can’t be grateful for elegance in the natural world, though I can be very glad of it. And I’m willing to bet that experimentally there’s no real difference.
I’m pretty sure that’s how the Vogons got started.
This is now canon in my personal reading of HGTG.
Also, life is worth living because I have seen the nym “life is like a pit bull with lipstick.”
QFT and this is the kind of progress that lets me continue to get up in the mornings! Good point!
We certainly don’t need to copy religion. Religion has apointed leaders and as liberal and godless as we’d like to be, a cult of personality would give corrupting power to those who would lead.
As freethinkers, we need the openness of science to adjust ideas on the go and evolve constantly.
3 hundred years ago Freemasonry used temples and ritual to develop a community of freethinkers that would benefit from a symbolyc/ritual based education that oppened their minds to reason. I know it may sound dated to some in the XXI century, but the idea was the same.
If we, as freethinkers are meant to be realy free, we must do away with structures impossed by religious culture. So forget about temples, chaplains and sunday! We have this blogs and forums! This is our temple!
Socrates, Pitagoras, Epicurus would love this oportunity to be so conected! And we are not facing persecution (at least just now).
I know, as humans, we do need to meet in person, we need ritual in our life, specially to celebrate or grief, but we can make our own in ouf family or our communities as we see fit. But let’s do away with patriarcal structures for once and for all!
I always found the idea of doing a social experiment interesting, if it could be done on a large enough scale, and then compare results to the greater society after a number of years.
Build such a community and compare its general,long-term societal results against the present lackluster, theologically-drenched and corporate-dominated society we live in now.
Not sure about that; to make the social workings of the Culture happen you need to get to a point where capitalism is simply irrelevant because there are no shortages for it to ‘optimise the market for’. We’re closer in some senses than at any time past but it’s still a bit tricky to get infinite energy for free and not at all easy to produce any wished for item for no effort beyond asking for it.
I’m not sure how the Culture would suit science/inquiring/researchy types such as PZ though; you’d be competing with Minds, which seems like so out of the realms of possibility that it isn’t even stupid. Unless they simply kept it to themselves to leave something for humanoids to play with. How would one arrange things to at least reduce the likelihood of a retreat to lotus eating?
PZ:
I’m reminded of this segment of Catholic answers live a few days ago where a caller asked whether or not the laity was supposed to imitate the hand movements of the priests (something to do with outstretched hands with the palms facing upwards). The catholic “official” answering questions informed the caller that the laity were not supposed to mimic the priests movements since they weren’t ordained. Only he-through his ordination-had the power to turn bread and wine into the body and blood of christ. Even aside from the general nonsense of pseudo-spiritual cannibalism, I was struck at how classist the catholic hierarchy is. The priest is better than a lay person because he went through a bunch of nonsense rituals?
@tim rowledge, Ersatz Haderach…
niftyatheist @10
I wonder if maybe the hierarchies, rituals, and other trappings are such an ingrained aspect of religion that it’s not so much a question of believers liking them, so much as they accept that that’s just the way things have always been. Given that religious belief perpetuates itself on the back of unreason, irrationality, and uncritical thinking, perhaps many believers simply never think to question the hierarchical structure, magical underwear, or Xenu. If they did, perhaps they would find a lot of stuff to not like/accept.
ikesolem @#35
Just stating that they’re not rational doesn’t make it so. You’re making an argument but not supporting it. Looking at 2 definitions of Community (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community) we see:
Community can thus be applied to religious people and humanists in a completely rational way. Whether that’s a narrow view is questionable.
Why does it not make sense to belong to a community made up of individuals with common interests? One of the few redeeming characteristics of religion is the development of communities. Given that many of us on the planet are social creatures, developing close knit groups based in part on common ground allows us to fill that need to be social. I see nothing irrational about this. It also makes perfect sense. Why do you feel it doesn’t make sense?
I can’t presume to know what you’re thinking, but the above implies-to me-that you believe a humanist community would take on the negative aspects of religious communities. That need not be the case (heck, it might be hard pressed to be the case, given that humanism doesn’t have any central leaders the way religious organizations do).
eric @39:
So they’re cosmic zombies? Are they related to Jesus?
allencdexter @42:
The Unitarian Universalist Church doesn’t seem to be the equivalent of what PZ is talking about though:
I can get behind the concept of an organization/community to belong to that includes a diverse array of individuals and viewpoints that come together through commonalities. I don’t want any other trappings of church with that though. Not even the name.
Apparently I don’t know how block quote works… sorry about that.
@tim rowledge, Ersatz Haderach…
I have enjoyed Iain Banks ever since The Wasp Factory. With respect to the link to The Culture, I noted the following:
“Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive – and more morally desirable – than one left to market forces.”
Presumably written to avoid offending Americans, given that it is a statement of the obvious. While we are dreaming up idealistic societies, any votes for the anarchists in Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Disposessed”? I rather liked the look of that place.
cultureclash:
Apparently I don’t know how block quote works… sorry about that
This may help:
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_blockquote.asp
No argument there but I don’t see how scientific research where you expect to make an original contribution could be one of them. And that’s at least partially to do with my opinion that you do, in fact, need the strong AI in order to make the planning possible so that scarcity can be eradicated. So whilst I very much want to see humans getting off the rock in large numbers, spreading around as much of the universe as possible, and having a generally god time about it, that isn’t enough to make the Culture. A good culture, I suspect but not ‘the Culture’. I’m not as optimistic as you about any of it coming to pass, though.
@ Tony
Thanks.
@ tim rowledge, Ersatz Haderach
Well I suspect you would be right with regards to the fundamental laws of physics.
As in the culture as described the laws of physics comprehensible to anything of human grade intellect have long been pinned down.
But that doesn’t mean that science would be finished or that there would be no room for human scientists.
Assuming that there are other worlds with life on them biologists would I am sure be able to occupy themselves happily for an aeon or two cataloguing and investigating all the different life forms in the galaxy simply by putting a xeno- or exo- in front of their title…
If there isn’t any other life in the galaxy/universe… then they can have fun making some.
Ooh, I wouldn’t want you to start reducing biology to stamp-collecting or philately (as opposed to philatio, the obtaining of sexual pleasure from licking stamps). Gathering data is an important part of science but far from the only part.
@ tim rowledge, Ersatz Haderach
Of that I am fully aware.
Which is why my full quote is “…cataloguing and investigating…”
The ‘investigating’ covering the array of things science and scientists do other than cataloguing new finds.
Whether due to ingrained habit or evolved impulse, I think there is something soothing to people in general about the idea of hierarchy, we just want to make sure it’s a hierarchy that runs the way we think it should.
As my rather-than-church, I post a little fiction excerpt to my blog every Sunday afternoon; I call it Sunday Storytime. (I know Stephanie does Saturday Storytime at hers, though I assure you I came up with the name independently.) I like afternoons because I prefer to sleep in on Sundays. :p
Wait . . . Church of FTB ? I’m not much of a joiner.
Unless there’s going to be like, a beer fountain instead of a holy water font. and could we have pretzels instead of holy crackers ? I mean really, the Catholics just don’t know how to throw a feed.
To be fair, humanism really CAN’T be expressed as one integer divided by another…
I don’t belong to a community. I belong to many communities. I have many diverse interests, and belong to various communities where people share some of those interests.
Most of the time these are diverse enough that there is no conflict in between my communities so there isn’t a melant’i problem. I’m not sure if it is possible to have a single community of which all humankind is all part, except by saying, “I am human” But we should attempt, wherever possible, to not do things that would have profoundly bad effects on that meta community. Such as restricting the rights of other members of that meta-community. With the proviso that it would be nice should we meet any other sentient creatures in this universe that the meta community should then be extended to “I am sentient”.
I’m not sure how coherent that was. I think I need lunch.
@cultureclash:
I don’t really see that it’s at all obvious that a society like the Culture (politically, not technically) can exist without Strong AI.
That’s not really to say that the ideals of the Culture, in general, aren’t something we can strive for. Personal freedom, radical egalitarianism, non-violence, rationality, and outrageous hedonism are all great moral goals in and of themselves. So in some general sense, sure, a society can exist that holds those ideals as its sort of identity.
What I mean, though, is that the Culture of the novels as a society essentially operates on a sort of benevolent caste system. Worse, the castes are essentially “regular folks” and gods. The gods, of course, being the Minds — superhuman strong AI.
Politically, the Culture has the trappings of a democracy, in the sense that there are elections around important decisions, people vote, and so on. But at a fundamental level, the actual running of each of their city-states is done by a friendly god.
Trying to translate that into the real world, it’s sort of like saying that a daycare is a nice place for kids, as long as some adults are around. Sure, but in a real society of regular folks, everyone has to make do without some sort of superhuman entity to fix things if something goes really wrong. If the theocrats try to turn society into a dystopian nightmare for everyone, they could win. In the Culture, you could just laugh and ask the local god to keep them out of your hair.
Plus, I have to ask: Would you really want to live under a god?
[OT]
Elladan:
First, Minds ain’t gods, and second, if they existed, it’d be futile to deny them.
(Mind you, I’m not too sure I’d be all that happy living in the GCU Grey Area)
John Morales:
Aside from perhaps lacking any petty desire to be pathetically showered with faux adoration by millions of simultaneously terrified and greedy fans, they have essentially all the functional trappings of gods.
They’re immortal, have wildly superhuman powers and intelligence, power over life and death, near total dominion over the physical world within their domain, and are looked upon to be the final arbiter over sundry and petty disputes, solver of problems, and bestower of graces.
If they existed, then of course, denying their existence would be absurd. But you might question whether they are the most competent to represent you in government, or perhaps ask whether an upgrade is available so they aren’t alone at the top.
[OT]
Elladan, what is this ‘government’ of which you speak?
(Gland some calm, willya?)
@0, PZ Myers:
First: no, probably not all. The association of Altemeyer’s RWA construct with fundamentalism and the data suggesting a ~50% genetic component to RWA makes it seem likely there are people who will die of old age long before they grow up the way you’d wish. I’d further peripherally suggest that what you dismiss in entirety as “frills and nonsense and trappings of religion” may have some function toward keeping society working — IE, costly social signalling. I’d expect almost certainly efficiencies that can be found, but I’d also expect there to be a limit to efficiency where decreasing costs are outweighed by decreasing benefits.
Centrally….
I look at this as a problem of evolutionary design. You’re looking to explore some of the more radical areas of the design space; those (that I will dub) Rearchitects you’re criticizing are instead trying to repurpose parts of an existing design that has over the last couple thousand years proven so evolutionary successful as to be nigh-universal in the human social ecology, despite its obvious drawbacks. The incremental approach of the Rearchitects would tend to lead to smaller benefits with a higher probability of finding a stable social attractor. More radical social redesigns are less likely to find long-term stable attractors (eg: American history includes many such experiments on small-scale, mostly failing within a decade, and very few growing large enough to be influential), but have more potential for finding larger benefits — allowing a punctuation transition in the social equilibrium. Incremental change of the Rearchitect sort is more common.
Crude analogy: religion is a 1900-vintage coal fired plant; Rearchitects are trying to improve the heat exchangers, turbines, stage transformers, and maybe add CO2 sequestration, while you’re hoping to make the shift to nuclear power.
Intuitively, the space that the Rearchitects explore is between the existing world of religion and the more distant attractor you’re hoping for. If they find a quasi-stable attractor in that range, it would seem likely to catalyze transition rates between conventional religiosity and the more distant one. (I conjecture liberal churches may already serve such a role.) Of course, there’s always the possibility that they’ll find something more stable than what you stumble across… which will boil down to being beaten fair and square in the marketplace of ideas.
Which is no reason to stop trying to prod Rearchitects like Scofield when they say stupid things, of course. Contrariwise, I think you’re mistaken to dismiss the Rearchitect approach categorically. Nohow, the proof that the Rearchitect approach is practical will be when one of them starts a para-church that can start making converts rapidly — and converts from the nominally religious, as well as among the Nothingarian “Nones”.
Culture FTW.
I’d employ the Rapid Offensive Unit ‘Killing Time’ as a guard-Mind to keep Jehovah’s Witless away from my fucking Orbital.
Hey if you really want to scare people off I would pick either the “Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints” or “grey area”.
Grey area in particular hanging around is likely to drive down tourism.
However your chances of talking a ship of any kind to hang around an orbital making sure that a pathetically small bunch of theists don’t turn up and start knocking on doors is slim to none.
Plus think of all the fun you would be missing out on given access to the Cultures technology if you did have JW’s coming to visit.
For example the total lack of anything resembling laws means that it would be perfectly ok to fit a trapdoor in your porch that drops any JW’s down a chute strait through the base plate and out through the bottom of the orbital into space (instantly enveloped in an atmosphere containing field of course).
They then get picked up by a drone and ferried to the nearest sub-plate access port (other than yours of course)
Practical joking Culture style :-)
We don’t need to replace churches, but I do love the holy awesomeness of museums, coral reefs and Disney World.