Religion is symbiotic to humans—that’s how it has persisted for millennia, despite being factually mistaken about many important things. Some of us get along fine without it, but we seem to be a minority.
It would be great to have something honest to fill the niche taken by religion, including community, moral guidance, and making people feel better about their lives. I would be willing to donate some money toward the project.
Most religions involve an afterlife—without that the “religion niche” may not be filled. One truthful way to offer this might be to talk about quantum immortality—if the MWI is correct and we can only experience worlds in which we survive, then subjectively (only!) we may each perceive ourselves to be immortal. Cryonics is another option here.
Ideas about destiny and duty seem to play important roles in religions. I suggest something along the lines of “spreading the light of life and intelligence thruout the universe”. Frank Tipler has written a lot about this—mostly nonsense in my opinion, but we could take his vision of the Omega Point not as inevitable, but as a goal we (intelligence in the universe) have a duty to accomplish.
That seems to fit pretty well with long-termism, however defined. We could take it as our project realize Tipler’s dream—to colonize the universe with intelligence, to make the universe an ever-better place to live.
Religion is symbiotic to humans—that’s how it has persisted for millennia, despite being factually mistaken about many important things. Some of us get along fine without it, but we seem to be a minority.
It would be great to have something honest to fill the niche taken by religion, including community, moral guidance, and making people feel better about their lives. I would be willing to donate some money toward the project.
Most religions involve an afterlife—without that the “religion niche” may not be filled. One truthful way to offer this might be to talk about quantum immortality—if the MWI is correct and we can only experience worlds in which we survive, then subjectively (only!) we may each perceive ourselves to be immortal. Cryonics is another option here.
Ideas about destiny and duty seem to play important roles in religions. I suggest something along the lines of “spreading the light of life and intelligence thruout the universe”. Frank Tipler has written a lot about this—mostly nonsense in my opinion, but we could take his vision of the Omega Point not as inevitable, but as a goal we (intelligence in the universe) have a duty to accomplish.
That seems to fit pretty well with long-termism, however defined. We could take it as our project realize Tipler’s dream—to colonize the universe with intelligence, to make the universe an ever-better place to live.