Alex,
> Besides, this will also really confuse the liberals-- "What? Those
> Techno-Libertarians are *helping* people? How low can they sink?"
Yes, exactly!
Which would you rather have: a bit ear-liar chance to go to
and Terra-form mars, up-load to a million times more
intelligent/conscious and growing platform, and so on and so forth
alone, having many of your loved ones information theoretically dead
and gone, or would we be much happier if they too, or at least as many
as possible, were first saved before we went off and did some of this
fun stuff all alone? People and all loved ones are more important
than anything else if you ask me. Doing anything to loose as few as
possible, to as you say: "help" should be priority #1 for everyone I
think. The transition from a society full of death, and all the work
required to achieve a society with no more death is going to be a gut
wrenching difficult process. Many people are already lost and are not
going to make it, at least in the near term (the most difficult part),
and none of us will make it alone.
> Yes, it may make an impact on their lives five or ten years from
> now, but you can't eat that, and you can't use that to pay the rent.
I think your completely wrong here. Look at all the major
world religions of today that control 90% of the people! How much
money do they give so they can build their "large and spacious"
buildings of "worship"? Can you eat a huge exotic expensive temple
with expensive stained glass windows? Do their supposed God's ever
"pay the rent"? No! All there is is some promise for which there is
some miserable hope and absolutely no credible evidence that it is
true, that if you starve, and go without paying rent, yet pay all your
"tithing", get "baptized", sacrifice your life and die, you'll go to
some unimaginable neither world heaven, separated from those that
remain here, and supposedly be happy sitting on a cloud playing a harp
for eternity.
What Jane blue-collar and Joe six-pack (and frankly, me too)
need is some organization that tells us, or at least helps us know
what it is we should be doing in order to be good and have a shot at
achieving salvation and exaltation. A completely volunteer
organization that has a simple, easy to understand party line that can
be indoctrinated into us when we are toddlers in Sunday School. Not
some allegedly absolute infallible never changing dogma that no member
has any influence on, but something dynamic that is always improving,
improving because of our efforts if we are so inclined to get involved
in and contribute to the improvement of the "party line" and make it
better for everyone. A party line like: always chose life over death
or happiness and joy over misery; never give up; enough correct,
rational, scientific... (including spiritual if you must) works can
accomplishing anything; you don't die to get to haven and help your
loved ones, you live and serve...
Since Jane and Joe (we) sometimes initially don't have what it
takes to be motivated to seek after and find which religion might
truly have a much better chance at giving us exaltation than the one
we're stuck because it is falsely promising us a similar thing, there
must be an unconditional loving "missionary effort" to help us all.
The primary goal is to bring "salvation and exaltation" to as many
people as possible via any rational and reliable mechanism that might
help accomplish these goals.
Once someone joins, or perhaps is "baptized" or something
symbolic like this, they receive the 'right' to gain cryonic
preservation, whether they can afford it or not, whether they are a
"sinner" or not. An all inclusive organization that has a goal of
being all things to everyone, at least as much as is possible. Of
course, everyone is expected to volunteer to give up a bit of their
"rent", free time, and such, to help be a missionary and so on and so
forth, and contribute to the fund to help make cryonic preservation
available to all that want it whether they can afford it or not.
Instead of building large and spacious buildings and meaningless
worshiping busy work and begging for some God to do everything for us,
the goal is always to do all and anything we can to contribute to any
such effort, and to save as many loved ones as is possible in the
fastest most rational, reliable, and hopeful way.
One of the reasons the "religions" of the world are so
successful is because they catch Joe and Jane (us) when we are young
and they hit us with a large, nurturing, well organized, very
supportive, active group, at least once a week, and hopefully every
day, (at least until they receive some intelligence/consciousness
amplification which get's them beyond such needs) over and over with
the same old party line of what is really required to gain salvation
and exaltation, and to create a true heaven absent of evils like
separation, suffering, death....
All of us don't yet have the money, intelligence and so on
that is required to truly be Extropian. Yet we can't do it all
without everyone and even true Extropians can't successfully do
anything alone. So we all need everyone and some well organized and
active "religion" to help us all know what it is we are striving for
and that constantly helps us to have the faith and hope that long
before there is anything "all powerful", evils like separation,
suffering, death... might be completely overcome for all that want it
and are willing to never give up until we get it.
What do you think? To date, most Extropians seem bent on
fighting against organized religion? Is this our biggest problem?
Might we be more successful if we instead learn from them and all
they've succeeded at doing despite themselves? Imagine what Joe and
Jane could do given a real shot at real exaltation, something we,
ourselves, can chose and eventually determine exactly what we want it
to be.
Once we've saved everyone possible, then we can go off and do
fun things like tera-form Mars, create Dyson spheres, super brains...
and anything else we might want to do with our immortal lives
including maybe and hopefully eventually achieving enough omnipotence
to be able to resurrect and pay back our dead and gone ancestors that
would have given anything to be a part of such a heaven, but instead
settled with living to create and give us, their children, everything
we now have. All this for the selfish hope that we might no longer be
alone without them and eternally in their debt for what they all
successfully gave to all of us.
Brent Allsop
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:14:38 MDT