Re: Immortality

From: Wei Dai <weidai.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2001 17:40:46 -0700

On Fri, Sep 28, 2001 at 03:15:45PM +0000, K. S. Ryan wrote:
> Old school religions are losing market share to the modern world.
> But the modern world does not offer a unified system of beleif describing
> our place in the universe. Contemporary truths are not packaged as a whole,
> as a spiritual intellectual-emotional raison d'etre. Thus, while educated
> modern worlders may not be convinced by old school religious beliefs, there
> is not a modern unified system to replace them. Because we are human, we
> think a lot, and need to know what the individual means to the whole. What
> is our place in the cosmos? That is the question. And there is turbulance.

Our raison d'etre is that we have low algorithmic complexity. Not very
spiritual or emotional is it? That may not be the right answer, but
whatever answer science eventually arrives at is unlikely to be
emotionally satisfying. Trying to compete with established religions on an
emotional basis is completely hopeless. Of course on an intellectual basis
it'll be very sucessful, but only among a small group of people who are
capable of understanding it.

Old school religions are not losing market share to the modern world,
they're losing market share to new school religions that are better
adapted in the new environment. I was watching the PBS program "Evolution"
a few weeks ago. One of the interesting things I learned was that the
reason many Christians can't accept the theory of evolution is that they
have to believe all of mankind descended from Adam and Eve, because
that's why we share in the original sin, which explains why Jesus had to
sacrifice himself for us. Yet there are also Christians who do accept the
theory of evolution (the program didn't explain how they got around this
problem) so clearly Christianity is changing and adapting.
Received on Sun Oct 07 2001 - 17:44:01 PDT