Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Maybe better suited to the culture war thread, but I just had a long phone call with my friend from college, let's call her Caroline. Very atheistic, but fairly middle of the road politically. Went to Catholic School growing up, but was raised in a Jewish family (something to do with the school system in Phoenix. Recently has been getting more and more into Christianity both because she's dating a quite Christian man, and because she feels like we need God (and implicitly the Christian God is the only thing that works). I have a lot sympathy for this position, as I am a Catholic convert myself, although I haven't been to mass recently, as I no longer believe in many aspects of the faith. However this line of thinking, which is also espoused by many RETVRN posters on this forum, seems rather... myopic, both historically and just in general. Not only does 2/3 of the world's current population live without the Christian God, historically we have very successful nearly atheistic civil societies (Rome and Confucian China off the top of my head, although perhaps calling Republican Rome atheistic is a stretch). Perhaps you could argue that Christianity is better suited to the Western temperament, as it is the religion of our forefathers. This is what initially drew me into Catholicism, as Buddhism, despite being more intellectually appealing, couldn't connect with me on a cultural/spiritual level. Yet as @Hoffmeister25 has argued before, so is Germanic and Hellenic paganism, and those were violently destroyed nearly 1500 years ago.
So my question for all the RETVRN posters on this form (and also for those who agree more closely with myself) is thus. What is your best argument for why we need God as a society, and why the Christian God in particular? What were/are the flaws in previous/current societies that had at least surface level success (outside of the Modern West) that could be remedied with Christianity? For those of you who aren't Christian, I'd like to hear more about what your own spiritual/moral system looks like, and what your own vision of the future of society going forward is.
There's something to be said for the clarity of childhood skepticism. At five years old, watching my deeply religious grandparents prescribe antibiotics instead of prayer to their patients, I experienced what some might call an epistemic crisis but what felt more like noticing that the emperor had no clothes. The world simply didn't behave as if gods were running the show.
This wasn't the dramatic deconversion narrative you sometimes read about. No crisis of faith, no dark night of the soul, no angry rejection of divine authority. Just a quiet observation that the people who claimed to believe most fervently in divine intervention were the same ones who reached for medical textbooks when someone's life was actually on the line. Even at five, this struck me as a pretty significant tell about what people actually believed versus what they claimed to believe.
I have prayed precisely once in my life with any degree of earnestness: My mom was pregnant, and wanted me to wish for a sibling. I asked for a baby brother, and look at how that turned out!
(I love my brother, even if he's also a flawed individual, but I don't think Ganesh had much hand in things by that point. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy most five-year-olds haven't learned the Latin name for, but many seem to understand intuitively. The universe appeared to be running on autopilot, following comprehensible patterns that had nothing to do with cosmic intervention.)
So there I was, barely 5 years old, and ever since, I began to claim I was an atheist. My family was rather confused, since they couldn't see why I'd say such a thing.
I was expected to study, instead of hoping that prayer to the relevant goddess would get me better grades. Religion didn't seem to add very much.
Fortunately, my family, despite being somewhat religious, were a very understanding and open-minded sort. They never pressured me to actually believe, nor punished me for my clear atheism.
I went to a Christian missionary school (Anglican? Protestant? Didn't hear any Latin), so I am eminently familiar with Christian doctrine and found no factual merit in it. Even the teachers didn't seem to hold high hopes: Christian religious indoctrination was just what the system did, I do not recall a single person at school who gave up their existing religious framework in its favor. Parents fought to send their kids here because it was supposedly a good school, with strict discipline and high standards. They'd have been flummoxed if it actually made anyone into a Christian.
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If I had to summarize, and there's a lot of lossy compression involved:
I'm a transhumanist classical liberal with libertarian tendencies. I have my own idiosyncratic moral code, which collapses to normality in most circumstances.
Each piece serves a specific function in addressing questions that religious systems typically handle: What are humans? What should we become? How should we organize society? What do we owe each other?
Transhumanism provides the anthropological foundation. Humans are not fallen angels or made in God's image or inherently sinful creatures in need of redemption. We're the current iteration of an evolutionary process that has been running for billions of years, remarkable in our capacity for reason, creativity, and moral reflection, but still fundamentally biological machines with significant room for improvement. More importantly, we have both the ability and, I'd argue, the obligation to direct our own continued evolution rather than leaving it to the blind processes that got us this far.
My work (which pays the bills) is to act as a mechanic for a machine which didn't come with an instruction manual. It's little surprise that we could trace the orbits of the spheres centuries before we could reliably treat most disease.
Classical liberalism handles the political framework. Individuals are the fundamental unit of moral consideration, possessed of certain basic rights that create obligations for others and for institutions. Markets are generally excellent at coordinating human activity and generating prosperity, but they're tools, not gods themselves, and sometimes they fail in predictable ways that justify intervention. (Hence why I have libertarian tendencies instead of being a card-carrying member)
The libertarian tendencies emerge from deep skepticism about concentrated power, whether governmental, corporate, or social. Most problems that can be solved by force probably shouldn't be, and most things that people want to do to each other are none of my business as long as they're not violating anyone else's rights. If you want to be deeply stupid, then that's your perogative, as long as you leave me and mine alone.
I've noticed that most functional moral systems are actually quite similar in their practical prescriptions. Don't kill people, don't steal their stuff, don't lie to them, help when you can, be fair in your dealings, honor your commitments. The differences emerge in edge cases and in the theoretical justifications for these shared norms. I expect these edge cases to become increasingly relevant as time goes on. We will litigate this as we always litigate such things, with a lot of shouting, swearing, and on some occasions, violence. I would prefer as little of the latter as we can get away with. But I'm not a committed pacifist, there are hills I will die on, though I hope to get the other bastard first.
In the meantime, I'm here for the ride. I am profoundly grateful that I don't have a God-shaped hole in my heart (or any holes beyond the ideal number and arrangement). Poor bastards, hopefully we can find a cure one day. In the meantime, I hope to serve as an existence proof that committed materialism is workable, and that I have plenty of meaning in my life without having to force myself to believe in falsities.
What do I hope for from the future?
In short: Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism (the homosexuality is optional).
We will, either in a decade, or over the long term, solve most of our problems. From the perspective of most of our ancestors, we already have it made.
But let's be more specific about what "solved" looks like, because I suspect most people's intuitions about post-Singularity life are either wildly optimistic in boring ways or pessimistic in ways that miss the point entirely.
The boring optimistic version goes something like: "We'll all have flying cars and live forever and never have to work!" This isn't wrong exactly, but it's like describing the internet as "a really good library." Technically accurate, completely missing the transformative implications.
The pessimistic version usually involves either paperclip maximizers turning us all into computronium, or some version of "but what will give life meaning if we don't have to struggle?" The first concern is real but solvable (I am not an AI Doomer, but I am Seriously Concerned). The second reveals a failure of imagination that would have been familiar to every generation of humans who worried that their children wouldn't develop proper character without smallpox and subsistence farming.
I genuinely believe with >70% confidence that we will have ASI by 2035. All bets are off the table then. But if it works out for the better, then I look forward to a life spent without the fear of death, disease, or hunger.
I know I would be happy in such a world. I do not need struggle or suffering to give my life meaning. I'd find something or the other to keep myself busy, until the stars burn out and then eons after. Should that somehow not turn out to be the case, then I am open to the idea of reworking my reward circuitry. That is a last resort, but I do not wish to be be both alive and bored.
In the short term ~10 years:
Little changes. We might lose our jobs, we might get Super-TikTok. We will certainly get some sick video games. Mortality rates will plummet, even if we haven't strictly invented immortality or cured all disease. Robot cars and butlers will make life much easier.
Artificial General Intelligence doesn't arrive like a bolt from the blue. By the time we have true AGI, we'll already have systems doing 90% of what humans currently consider "knowledge work." The transition will feel less like a sudden singularity and more like stepping from a fast-moving escalator onto an even faster one. Of course, Gary Marcus and Hlynka will continue being their usual selves as the AI wins Nobel Prizes.
In the longer term?
Eventually we stop being recognizably human in any biological sense, though we'll probably retain enough continuity that we still recognize ourselves as the same people who once worried about mortgage payments and whether to have children. Physical bodies become optional. Some people will keep them for sentimental reasons or because they enjoy the constraint. Others will exist as pure information, perhaps experiencing thousands of simultaneous virtual lives or extending themselves across interstellar distances at light speed. Still others will adopt bodies suited for specific purposes: aquatic forms for exploring Europa's oceans, radiation-hardened versions for stellar engineering, macro-scale versions for building Dyson spheres by hand.
I'm going to be having a grand old time, but I have the epistemic humility to not speculate too much on what entities that much smarter and more capable than me do for work or leisure. I hope to look back at the writings and dreams of the present me, and feel that I have always been the same, in the manner I can recall my attitudes and actions at the age of five and understand how that built the person I am today.
Even if I don't make it, I hope that the people of the future recognize that I was doing the best I could with what I have. I hope they feel a pang of sorrow for someone who wanted to be where they are, but was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. I hope this essay finds them, well.
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