No. God will continue reaching out to people everywhere, just as he always has.
(In any case, space is filled with lethal ambient radiation, so colonization can’t happen absent a technological advance that’s not even imaginable at this time.)
Wouldn’t it imply a lack of free will if we consider it certain that some people will recognise and accept that reaching out?
No, not at all. I was thinking about that other modern European anti-religious movement. The ones who dressed in snappy uniforms.
And yet when we discussed the Christian charity World Vision you saw the good at least some religious people do.
Further, is humanity being held back by diabetes? Would you kick those with genetic disabilities off the spaceship? Why? Who gets to decide? Death to Male-Pattern Baldness! While going for social hygiene we could go all the way!
There is a way humans are meant to live and co-exist, this way IMHO is not meant to be hard coded into a religion, but people seem to want rules, regulations, rituals and the like, so religions will form, unless the person sees that they are not suppose to follow hard coded rules and be spiritually guided. So in the Kingdom of God there will be no religion, as everyone will have God’s Spirit, so if that’s the place then it would work. But elsewhere no, religions will always develop IMHO.
Wait, you are talking then about the Nazis?
They loved to dress snappy when going to church:
http://www.nobeliefs.com/nazis.htm
German Soldier’s Oath:
Even religions that do not use Jesus or the Bible god.
Mentioning that because I see no logical way to prevent an eventual replacement of the old time faiths (IMHO most of the Christians of today would be expelled from the early Christian communities), unless the organized religions of today force the state to deal with infidels before going to space.
As I see that the more scientific training one gets, the less religious one is, I have hope for the future.
This is one reason why I believe our descendants will be more electronic than biological. What could old time religion say if it turns out that in reality we are not the rulers of creation but just a middle man?
It’s funny how closely this so-called “debate” matches the ancient aphorism: “The future belongs to our tribe, not those monkeys across the river!”
While I share your disdain for religion, organized or not, I believe the scenarios given above are just too far removed from anything that’s likely to happen in the future. It’s too simplistic. First of all, the propensity for religion—to believe in something unseen and acting on it—is held by most to be a fundamental trait of humanity. If this is the case, it might not be as simple as editing it out from our genetic code. As wayward points out, it might be that this same function within some of us might express itself as religion, philosophy, scientific curiosity, etc. If you were able to remove that, you might remove some vital aspect that makes us human to begin with. Furthermore, who would be doing such eugenic-like engineering? You’d have to do it on a global and immaculate basis, which seems practically impossible (given that the genetic trait even exists for it to be edited out in the first place).
On your other points, like self-annihilation and a theocratic dystopia, while not impossible, most religions are far too adaptive to self-annihilate. They’ll fudge their dogma or splinter into new factions. And a theocratic dystopia was close to reality in the dark ages, but looks so unlikely now as to be a non-issue. There’s simply too much religious diversity in the world. Looking forward, first-world government is mainly fixed on religious neutrality. If this trend continues, we’ll probably see religion decline in the face of continuing technological revolution and enlightenment, but it will never completely disappear so long as we remain Homo Sapien Sapien (which brings the argument full-circle… who will be allowed to tamper with our genetic code immaculately across all the human population? The only alternative is evolution itself, and this brings no guarantees when it comes to faith and religion).
In the end, most people want religion. It’ll take an actual all-out war to eradicate it. And I’m not down with anything of the sort. Count me out.
Well, I hate to bring up the N-word, due to Whatshisname’s Law. Still your obsession with advancing human progress by fighting religion does seem similar, or am I wrong?
Better idea; let people believe what they want to believe and judge them based on their actions.
Yes, you are. You must be confusing me with someone else.
After losing the power to take the infidel to the fire, religion lost its best argument. There is no need to fight religion in the way you are assuming I am.
I constantly do that, the results are not pretty, and that is why I’m a teapot agnostic.
BTW, that “modern European anti-religious movement” was anti-religious to specific faiths but did not shy away from religion.
(Please excuse me, it is bedtime here in The Holy Land.)
What you could do is fire all the religious and faithful to another planet, and let the agnostics and atheists inherit the earth. Oh, the irony. 
I forgot the single most awesome space and religion short story out there: The Star, by Arthur C. Clarke. The link goes to the full text.
Claude, in all seriousness, I think this speaks to your question, and you should read it.
Cant believe I’ve never read that before. Thanks Tom.
The Nazis were quite pro-religious, and had a lot of support from religions because they opposed the ultimate evil of Godless Communism.
No, I condemned them as irrational people who might do good at the moment, but who would just as easily murder the people they were helping if their dogma said so.
Ever hear of the concept of a “cure”? :rolleyes:
I regard religion as a defect, one that should be cured not eliminated by killing those inflicted with it. And I’m reasonably sure that enhancing human rationality and intelligence will do that all by itself, even if the intent has nothing to do with curing religion. To exist at all, religion depends on humans being stupid or irrational. Of course, if we can do that, we can hardwire people to be religious no matter how obvious it is to their enhanced intelligence that they shouldn’t be; something I expect to be overwhelmingly popular. Can’t risk your kids growing up as filthy atheists, after all.
No, religion is the opposite. Religion is about people who don’t want to know how the world works or what’s over the next hill; they want to make up lies about it and force everyone else to go along.
No you wouldn’t; my premise is that the religious are too collectively insane to survive in the long run as a high technology civilization. Rather than everyone engineering themselves to be rational non-believers, I consider it a more likely scenario that some colony of people engineered for higher rationality would survive somewhere ( probably off in space ) while the believers kill themselves off, or at the least destroy their own civilization.
Especially since once the technology arrives to genetically engineer people, I expect most of the population of the planet will engineer their children to be compulsively religious; fanatics. Which is one reason that the rationalists would probably have to be off in space; otherwise they’d either be killed or their children forcibly engineered to be good Believers.
Which is why a mutual war to annihilation is probably more likely, as each religion tries to convert or destroy the other.
Once technology arrives that allows religions to force people to believe directly, I expect the civilized facade to collapse; they won’t have to worry about alienating potential converts by killing off friends and family anymore, they’ll be able to make you believe.
I’m not looking forward to it either. But given the insane, malignant nature of religion I consider it inevitable. And I consider the mind controlled theocracy or the annihilation of civilization to be the most likely results, by the way. The majority of humanity is religious, which is another way of saying the majority of humanity is insane; I don’t see that as being conducive to species survival.
Actually they do want to know how the world works - they just don’t want to find out how the world works. They have a preconceived notion of how things work, they know that’s how things work, and they like having that knowledge of how things work. If you (or reality) try and tell them their knowledge is wrong and things work differently than they think, then they don’t like that at all.
That said, Der, you seem to have a real blind spot regarding this little thing called “compartmentalization”. Most religious people draw a fairly sharp line between things that they’re perfectly rational about, and things they’re perfectly dogmatically inflexible about, and the fact that they engage in the latter has little to no effect on the former. Most religious people don’t insist that demons power cars or anything of the sort; rationality is allowed to operate unimpeded as long as it doesn’t step on religion’s toes. Which results in the observable result that most religious people perfectly competent and rational and intelligent and even sometimes cynical - until you start talking about that.
Which is the long way of saying, unless their religion is invested in the belief that flying a spaceship is evil or impossible, the pious could get along in space just fine. Particularly if they don’t have to put up with anybody with differing belief systems in the process.
Another religion vs. atheism debate with Der Trihs as usual speaking of the great evils of religion be it fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam or Unitarian Universalism. :rolleyes:
And he as I said upthread should write books for children on the subject. I admire his outspoken and eloquent views. If only more kids could be saved from the clutches of social pressure. If parents could be charged with child neglect and or endangerment for forcing this delusional outlook upon kids, It would be a better day for this planet. Seeing little kids dress up and go through the motions of this garbage with no clue about what is really being put upon them makes me ill.
… Sorry, house full of people. That rant was brought to you by my dream to see religion stay on this planet and not go with the Future generations of kids who will eventually depart.
Only a sane human. So not much risk of that.