Sufficiently Advanced Religion

Summary:

... is indistinguishable from every other religion, but with more spiritual dilemmas to answer for!

Sufficiently Advanced Religion

AidenWIP 28 Jun 2016 03:13

Nope, religion still exists in the future. It's not going anyway until we rewire our neural pathways to stop giving people feelings of religiosity. For now I'm going to start with the one I have the most familiarity with. Maybe someone with more exposure to others could pitch in? You know, if this forum isn't dead. :P

Christianity

Neo-Christianity has its roots in Christian reform movements in the Association of Stored Humans, the Nanori, and the League of Independent Worlds. These movements sought to reinterpret the doctrines of the Churches in Exile to accommodate the existence of digital intelligence. A great deal of this debate was rooted in the question of the soul, and whether or not digital intelligences possessed one. This question was of particular importance among Stored Christians whose culture emphasized what they spoke of as the "inherently suicidal nature of brain uploading."

Interpetations still vary, and fundamentalist strains of Christian thinking persist in habitats among the Independents and in the United Planets of Mechanica. However, reformists have managed to put together a set of generally agreed upon interpretations that they feel provide spiritually genuine accomodations for digital intelligence. According to Neo-Christian thinking a DI created by mankind begins without a soul. However, a DI may acquire a soul at the behest of God by undergoing baptism and taking on a designation which ties them to Christian life and culture. In the event of the total destruction of the DI's code due to hardware failure or erasure the baptized DI will go on to judgement as any other Christian would.

However, actively seeking to become a digital intelligence is generally considered to be a form of suicide except among the most liberal interpretations of Neo-Christian doctrine. The soul of the uploaded human goes on to judgment, and the DI created in their image by the process is considered a spiritual blank slate. It is without sin, but lacks a soul until baptism.

Christians from the Association of Eternal Life experienced further upheaval compared to others due to the metaphysical dilemma created by existing as many selves at once. This has resulted in the founding of the Church of the Manifold Spirit, who hold that the soul is a numinous thing unbound by flesh which extends itself into any and all instances of a person present in God's creation. It is only when no version of the self exists in the universe that the soul is subjected to judgement.

Neo-Christianity still struggles to accomodate group mind configurations into its doctrines, and psychohistorians are predicting a crisis point for the religion coming from this issue in the near future.

Last edited on 28 Jun 2016 03:25 by AidenWIP Show more

Re: Sufficiently Advanced Religion

TauCeti 05 Jul 2016 12:03

Excellent. I've been looking forward to a study on religion in SA. (I was brought up atheist and still am, so I lack the background to write on religion - I'd rather say nothing than risk offending anyone through vast misunderstandings).

I like the implication that the League's Christianity is rather diverse - as both sides of the DI-soul dilemma are well represented there.
I suspect that Christianity is still alive even in extreme civilizations like the Stardwellers, albeit as a minority religion and much distorted by their culture. I imagine their religions as being as diverse as everything else.
I'm guessing that the Masquerader's concept of the "true self" would play very well with questions regarding one's soul?
Replicants can, in theory, be reduced to backups - inactive digital data that can be used to create new copies later. It probably happens extremely rarely, so resolving what happens to a backup's soul while they are inactive probably isn't a pressing matter for most Replicants.

What of the Transcendentals? It feels like their ability to think across time has shades of omniscience. They aren't divine (except to a Transcendental Worshiper, which is clearly not Christian). That said, God's omniscience implies that He knows what the Transcendentals will/have done, across all possible time - which implies that God is at minimum Transcendental, and likely at least Meta-Transcendental. Is this line of thought even useful?

Re: Sufficiently Advanced Religion

AidenWIP 06 Jul 2016 02:55

I tend not to focus on the Universes where the Transcendentals and Chronotech are important (I'm more a The Divide and Sublight fan than I am for To the Stars and the Patent Office), so I admit I overlooked that!

I imagine the Christians who have the easiest time of things just call the Transcendentals another kind of DI, just with unique capabilities. They are utilizing aspects of God's creation that most have not figured out how to. Importantly, though, they do so as the result of human effort. I say importantly because I imagine for many branches of Christianity in SA I imagine there's a hilarious strain of humanocentricism involved.

Which actually reminds me that I forgot to mention what they think of aliens! Crap.

Did Jesus die to save everyone, or just humans? Do Coldworlders and the Skotadi need to undergo baptism to be saved from sin? How would you even translate the Bible for them?

Re: Sufficiently Advanced Religion

The Phantom Squee 23 Jul 2016 10:26

Well, we do have some real-world precedent to draw on regarding the question of alien baptism, thanks to our buddy Pope Francis. But I feel like, as with all things, it's an issue that would have lots of sides. Maybe the "Neo-Franciscans" are in favor of freely baptising aliens, while others strictly oppose it, and of course there are one or two groups falling somewhere in between.

How do you see the Disciples of the Void fitting into this? I always read them as being nominally Christian, though I don't recall it ever being explicitly stated in the text, unless you count their using the name God instead of, say, G-d or Allah.

Re: Sufficiently Advanced Religion

AidenWIP 23 Jul 2016 20:13

I imagine they're at least nominally Christian, since Islam has some more pro-social obligations built into the religion in the form of the Pillars. It somewhat precludes, to my understanding, the kind of isolated monasticism that we see in various Christian sects. I could be wrong on this point.

So yeah, I imagine they're patterned after old style monasticism, though obviously without rules against reproduction - some of the description and fiction suggests there are people born into their ranks with no experience of the outside world. Whether they have rules about celibacy, since sex is no longer tied to reproduction, that's probably up to the individual Anchorage.