dalec@socrates.Berkeley.EDU wrote:
The key is to recognize that our allies are not only atheists,
> agnostics, and scientific rationalists -- in the strategic sense we can
> make common cause with anybody open to the championing of secular society,
> including *many* religious people who can see the value of a society that
> protects their right to practice spirituality as they please against some
> other more orthodox or popular practice. I understand the contempt many
> of us feel for mysticism (I'll admit I feel it myself), but it pointlessly
> alienates allies in a moment when allies are needed to lodge our argument
> in the hopelessly division metaphysical question of the evil/irrationality
> of religion *as such*. Plus, it just makes you feel crazy and miserable
> and hopeless.
>
I am a mystic. I am also utterly devoted to humanity
transcending its various limitations, including the physical
ones such as all diseases, aging and mandatory decay and death.
I am all for humans becoming as gods. Where I have some
disagreement with my rationalistic siblings is that I believe
that becoming as gods very much includes moral and spiritual
development. Otherwise our advancing technology will lead to
more and more powerful beings who are more justiably considered
demons than gods. I believe our consciousness must develop
rapidly along with our technology if we are to avoid using
technology to feed our fears and destroy one another and all
freedom more efficiently.
>>If you believe God forbids indefinitely extending human lifespan and
>>that it is your responsibility to enforce God's will, your view is
>>wrong. And it is not just incorrect, it is harmful, as it will
>>needlessly condemn people to death, a moral evil in any appealing
>>system of ethics I can imagine.
>
God is perfectly happy imho if we can increase human lifespan
indefinitely IF we also continue to grow in consciousness, in
wisdom to cope with these very changed abilities.
>
> This is what I mean. I agree with you that religion has blood on its
> hands, that there is no rational reason to affirm it (in most of its
> construals), that it contributes to psychic distress and unreasonable
> behavior in many many individual people to the cost of us all -- however,
> if the strategic question at hand here is how to organize in the face of
> growing bio-conservative hostility to powerfully beneficial genetic
> medicine and longevity techniques and to cultural and legal support for
> morphological freedom -- then it is vital to make common cause with those
> (including many putatively spiritual and religious people) who see or can
> be educated to see the value of the technologies that interest us.
>
There is nothing "putative" about it. Luddism is not a built-in
feature of spirituality and religion. Ending suffering and
increasing happiness and well-being of all beings very much is a
built-in feature. This is not at all incompatible. Psychic
distress? You mean like the manic terrorism paranoia that has
many otherwise rational and wonderful people in its grip? You
mean like the tendency seen even among "us here" to all too
easily dismiss those we see as different and exclude them from
the "saved" at the drop of a hat? Unreasonable behavior and
psychic distress are a feature of people. The are certainly not
exclusive to or even abnormally concentrated in
religious/spiritual people.
> The key problem we face is political, not theological.
>
The key problem is the same old intolerance and small-mindedness
that has worked against human progress and well-being forever.
- samantha
Received on Wed Feb 26 18:25:04 2003
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