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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[TD1]

Religion isn't corrupt. It is a personal faith.

A religious institute is as susceptible to corruption as any other. Money, young boys, stealing babies for adoption. You name it and some religious institution has done it.

[wierd]

Religion tends to be more favorable toward being coopted by a nefarious agenda than other things though.

1) It is based exclusively around concepts that are at best only tenuously connected to objective reality (meaning just about anything goes).
2) Due to the above, it is amazingly vulnerable to Voltaire's statement about absurdities. (Objectively false things can be axiomatically true within the context of a religious dogma, and thus, can be used as the tool to make people believe absurdities, and thus to commit atrocities.)


Religions (The sets of ideals or precepts that are held in this special class of axioms as being truths, regardless of physical reality) are not in and of themselves things that are nefarious. But they sure do function super-duper-good as tools for nefarious people and nefarious agendas.

[TD1]

Likewise in the other direction, of course, when the absurdity is of societal benefit.

[Trekkin]

Likewise in the other direction, of course, when the absurdity is of societal benefit.

That's not entirely equivalent, though. What all society needs from any given person at any given time is necessarily variable, and dogma is by nature fixed. Certainly we can both point to any number of precepts in the Bible that rest on outdated understandings of disease and so forth as examples of the dangers inherent in relying on any fixed doctrine in navigating the changing demands of modernity, but we can also look at even the most apparently enduring moral lessons contained therein and find cases where they do not apply. "Thou shalt not kill", for example, precludes lethal violence in self-defense (admittedly due to a loss of specificity in translation, but still) that modern society finds acceptable in extreme cases. If you'd like a non-Christian example, there's a proscription against a specific millennia-old ritual involving blood and milk behind why Jews can't eat cheeseburgers, which most people in modern society would agree is not an inherently less moral act than eating meat and cheese separately.

There's a certain amount of einheit required for society to work smoothly, and axiomatic dogma discourages the understanding of the reasoning behind the rules necessary to develop it.

[wierd]

It should also be stated that a demarcation should be made within the set of religions--

Ones that have come about because of "organic evolution" of a society's views or culture, and ones that were synthetically engineered.

For an example of the latter, I present Scientology.  It was literally created by Hubbard, and is literally designed to be nefarious. (It purposefully incorporates the sunk cost fallacy to entrap its members, among a host of other features, specifically for the purposes of locking them into a cycle of eternal payment to the organization. See also, the kinds of onerous "contracts" the central organization of that religion has instituted in its subordinate org, Sea.org.  The religion is designed, from the ground-up, to be nefarious.)


This distinction is very important if there is to be coherent discussion about how, if, and when a religion is in and of itself nefarious. (Such as scientology-- With apologies to earnest scientologists. There *IS* a movement to make that religion, and pull it away from its engineered condition, and make it into an organically practiced one-- but the official organization behind Scientology (and its originating structure) is staunchly against such practices.)

Engineered religions were/are engineered with specific objectives and goals in mind.  If those goals or objectives are nefarious, then the resulting religion is inherently nefarious.

[smjjames]

TTTTATAAAAAAAANNNNNNGGGGGGEEEEEEENENNNNNNNTTT TELEPORT! (being ultra silly)

Also, why is Cain paranoid of being murdered out there, IF NOBODY LIVES THERE?!

Well, animals are a thing, and many have big teeth and claws

Also, why is Cain paranoid of being murdered out there, IF NOBODY LIVES THERE?!

Well, animals are a thing, and many have big teeth and claws

IIRC, Cain specifically mentioned people.

Also: PAGING DUNAMISDEOS

[Rolan7]

I've got a tangent teleport too actually... though in this case I was just going to post about Stellaris, a 4X sci-fi strategy game, and went a bit far with it.  It's technically still Stellaris content but I think maybe it belongs here?  I'm actually curious about what people think, even about a fantasy spirituality and its interaction with, eh, skeptics/objectors.
Spiritualist/Materialist is interesting because it's not just a religion thing, or doesn't have to be.  I'd argue it's more generally a question of arts versus hard sciences.  Respecting feelings or only hard facts.  A Spiritualist society excels in building culture, sharing ideas about the future and making them happen through group dynamics.  Materialists... well, feel pretty materialistic, with an appreciation for what the individual is able to produce.  In hard materials OR reliable (testable) truths, maybe even useful ones.

As soul-crushing as capitalist-materialism can be, I'm somewhat more horrified by the idea of being in a chorus of minds (metaphorically or psionically).  I mean, that's arguably the wonder and horror of our current information age.  At least in reality I can retract myself, at least for a little bit... and also have a technical understanding of the architecture making all that possible.

where was I

Obviously both those functions have trump cards: Psionics for Spiritualists, and tolerance of synthetic life for Materialists.  You could say that they're each objectively wrong in regard to one of those concepts.  Materialists (I picture) can't let their guard down enough to access that shared subconscious space, the Shroud... without a very special guide at least, in current patch.  Whereas Spiritualists can't accept... hm.

Sorry, AI rights are something I care about a lot.  In a sci-fi sense of course, we're far from "there", though I think animal rights are similar.  The thing is, Spiritualists might technically have a point.  The synthetics they so abhor do objectively lack that Shroud connection shared by all... "real" species, as they would say.

The question is whether that connection is necessary for someone to be "a person".  If some cyborg makes that final step into digital existence, they definitely stop existing in the Shroud.  But was that a deletion, or a mere disconnection?  Does the Shroud host the very souls of organics, or does their existence merely echo in it?

Spiritualists see the Shroud-less as anathemas.  Potentially tolerated, but inherently wrong.  I think a person should be allowed to exist by themself.  Perhaps the Shroud disagrees.

[Naturegirl1999]

I haven’t played Stellaris, and I don’t know what the Shroud is, but I watched Animatrix yesterday and it got me thinking about AI rights, and what an AI would need to be able to do to get humans to consider them worthy of rights. Similar with nonhuman animals. What would be required for them to have the rights humans have?

[Rolan7]

I saw the Animatrix a long time ago, but it went a long way to humanizing (...) the AI slaves.  Yes it turned into a brutal conflict, but it started with the idea of engineering an impossible ideal of a slave - one with true cognition but no rights.
*cough* androsynth *cough*

The fact that that attempt led to brutal warfare and mass death (human nukes, and synthetic farming) doesn't change the original calculus.  What humanity... human governments tried to do was wrong.

There's something horrible about acknowledging the suffering of other beings.  It makes the world a distractingly bleak place if you overthink it.  "I don't like to be hurt" "It's wrong to hurt people like me" "Is that entity like me?"

[Naturegirl1999]

I know what the humans did was wrong. I didn’t say anything about humanizing them. They simply wanted the rights humans are born with. It shouldn’t matter whether you are born of flesh or of metal, if you can think, you should have rights. The humans responded violently to peaceful protesting, forcing the machines to run, to create a nation of their own, 01. When 01 wished to join the UN and trade with the various human nations, the 2 ambassadors they sent were shoved out of the building. The humans planned to block the sun over 01 with smoke, the smoke spread, blocking out the sun everywhere. The humans tried to kill them, they had to fight to live.

[Telgin]

I wonder a lot about how AI rights will unfold in the future, but I can't really decide how I expect it to be handled.  About the only thing I'm confident of is that if we do develop sapient AIs that have any individuality or personality to them that we'll eventually give them similar rights to humans.  It's probably a foregone conclusion that if technology gets to that point that someone will eventually create such an AI instead of exclusively relegating intelligent computers to the same drudgery we use them for now.

That said, I'm not sure we'll see androids or robots like them become super common, since it's an unnecessary design feature for such robots to have a humanoid appearance.  I'm expecting a lot of AIs to be entirely virtual.  Those will probably end up with the same rights, but it's hard to imagine how they'll really fit into our societies right now.

[scourge728]

That's exactly why they'd have android bodies, so they could better fit into our society

[Naturegirl1999]

Yes, no doubt an AI will figure out that humans interact with humans and will seek to emulate this so thst humans treat them more favorably, I wonder what they would think about us given how we portray them in movies.

[Telgin]

I'm more thinking that a humanoid body will be expensive and prone to needing repairs, while a virtual existence won't.  I'm sure that most virtual AIs will still have human avatars in whatever environment they prefer to exist in, but honestly, by that point humans may start to do the same thing and spend increasing amounts of time in virtual worlds.  I'm not sure we'll see something like QuestWorld or completely immersive artificial worlds for a very long time, but it's at least conceivable that humans and virtual AIs could interact in a shared environment without it being physical.

[thompson]

If an AI were a purely virtual being that exists solely on a server somewhere, what could a human possibly give them that they would want? Presumably you'd design the AI to get a hit of virtual dopamine every time they do what you want them to do, so the AI would probably want to be a slave. It's not as if we have to make them want wealth and power.