We need a new religion
So, one of the things I’ve talked about a number of times is that we need a new neurological operating system, a new way of seeing the world. I’ve talked about how possessions and experiences could be created out of connections between neurons instead of physical objects, vastly reducing our load on the planet. We certainly could experience lucid dreaming to reality levels of realism, and thusly at least have some portion of time in which we all lived like kings. And one would hope that we could build neurological structures that were such that we did not behave horribly.
Simply put, my experience with a lot of religious people is that they can not practice what they preach. This demonstrates that our current religions are a failure insofar as changing people’s behaviors – they enable people to make lofty pronouncements – and they bend people’s minds such that they feel they should be allowed to make laws and rules controlling the behavior of others – but they don’t stop people from being awful.
This is probably because the religious structures live in the “storyteller” part of our minds, not the “decision tree” part of our minds. Most compiled decision trees are made out of actions, not out of words.
I do not, as of yet, know how we’re going to create this new religion. I suspect what we need is a singularity – which in this case (and yes I know there are many uses for the word) I use to mean a neural network smarter than human. A artificially created God, because there does not appear to be any natural God I would trust available to us.
It’s also possible we will achieve said singularity naturally by developing the technology that enables us to network human minds together to make something larger than a single mind.
One thing I do keep in mind is pastors of the current religions exist to continue keeping the donation buckets full, not to lead us to spiritual enlightenment – just as politicians exist to continue getting money and power, not to lead us to political utopia. This may illustrate that when money gets involved subconscious motives change. I think almost all of the religious people I know who I felt were true to their faith were not paid to be religious – even though one of them was a pastor I believe he was a volunteer.