X-Message-Number: 19633
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: Re: Reality
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 09:09:34 -0700

In Message #19626, Basie wrote:

>Whether one likes it or not for what ever reason religion is always going 
>to be there. Cryonauts make a big mistake if they think they are going to 
>wake up in a world with no religion. They need to prepare now to handle 
>that in the future. Stomping on the toes of religious people that can vote 
>them out of existence is plain stupid.

Empirical social trends, even in the U.S., point towards a future  society 
compatible with a Secular Humanist outlook.  Humanist guru Paul Kurtz seems 
practically ecstatic about the prospect:

http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/kurtz_22_3.htm

Christianity in the U.S. is facing long-term trouble in any event.  The 
Catholic Church has seriously damaged its moral authority because of 
priestly scandals.  Bible publishers have to come out with increasingly 
dumbed-down translations because of the growing "aliteracy."  (Children who 
do like reading would much rather read a new "Harry Potter" novel than any 
collection of Bible stories.  Christianity could lose out in competition 
with someone providing a better narrative explaining the meaning of life 
than the confused and cryptic mess in the Bible, even a novelist. Ayn Rand 
tried her hand at that, but with indifferent success.)  And Christian 
churches have to find their leaders among a second-rate class of men, 
because the more energetic and intelligent ones have better things to do 
with their lives than becoming priests or pastors.  (This wasn't true before 
the Industrial Revolution.  That's why so many intellectuals and community 
leaders until historically recently were trained as clergymen.)

As for the whole "Left Behind" phenomenon, I don't see how anyone can read 
Revelation and think it describes our world.  With all the stuff in 
Revelation about kings, horses, scrolls, swords, mythological creatures and 
such, it sounds more like the world of Xena the Warrior Princess than the 
kind of world we live in.

I could see Buddhism having a future in the U.S., however, even while it has 
recently declined in Asian countries under various Communist regimes.  
Buddhism anticipated modern theories about the illusory nature of 
consciousness, and it seems more like a system of psychotherapy than a 
religion in the Western sense, so it could be  compatible with the 
scientific outlook of some conjectural Transhuman society.

Mark Plus

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