Name: Religion of the Future
ISBN: 9781784787301

Religion of the Future

"A book about religion and a religious work in its own right, it proposes the content of a religion that can survive faith in a transcendent God and in life after death. According to this religion - the religion of the future - human beings can be more human by becoming more godlike, not just later, in another life or another time, but right now, on Earth and in their own lives."--Publishers website

What Hacker News says

rriversNov 2020

I think his most approachable book is his newest "The Knowledge Economy". I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a macro perspective of our economic transition as it stands now and where it can go.

If you prefer more academic texts my favorite work of his is "The Religion of the Future" and I also enjoyed "The Singular Universe & the Reality of Time" that he co-wrote with the physicist Lee Smolin. His earlier works are good but less digestible and can be picked up from his lectures.

About 4 years I founded a 501c3 non-profit that built a free election campaign platform for local candidates - the idea was to solve the problem of $20k campaigns for town council. Our beta went well, citizens loved it - but it was a bad product market fit. I have a rudimentary technical knowledge but if anyone is interested the git is here: https://github.com/OurSociety/OurSociety---Free-Local-Campai...

During that time my wife introduce my to him haphazardly and he just sucked me in. I started by listening to his lectures and have since "taken" all of his courses at least twice.

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byproxyFeb 2018

You may want to give "The Religion of the Future" by Roberto Mangabeira Unger a read. I'm nearly through with it, myself, and he lays forth many of the same thoughts present in this post while attempting to describe a new spirituality.

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AmezarakJun 2023

> Nobody with a dose of common sense about the prevailing attitudes in monotheistic religions would say detection of non-earth based life changes nothing.

I like Camus, and most would categorize my philosophical beliefs as some breed of Nietzschean, but I think it's very important to develop a deep an understanding of other attitudes as possible, and I don't think this is generally true. For example, CS Lewis is widely loved by evangelicals [1] and he literally wrote fiction laying out how he thought aliens would fit within that cosmology[2]. There is really nothing in particular that would change theologically. Of course it may change things culturally.

More interesting to me, and what I was referencing, is that many evangelicals (and others, famously the orthodox Seraphim Rose) interpret UFO activity as spiritual phenomena, and attribute it to demons. Some of these works are certainly thought-provoking, if you can suspend your preconceptions going into them. [3] Certainly if I am to believe in the reality of the underlying incidents and were forced at gunpoint to attribute it to intelligent entities, I actually find the idea of "demons messing with people because they hate us" more persuasive than the absurd utopian idea that aliens are using their magic tech to fly across the galaxy so they can "uplift" us or any of the other nonsensical motivations usually given.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-man-thinking-cs-lewis_b_8...

[2] His space trilogy.

[3] Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future in particular has an interesting chapter or two about this. What I found particularly intriguing is the idea that the actual incidents are not actually new, with descriptions of historical parallels, and we're simply interpreting ancient phenomena in a different way due to cultural changes, and the brief analysis of the psychological impact of UFOs, which is almost uniformly very negative to witnesses.

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byproxySep 2018

So, kinda going back to what I initially said, an ideal anarchistic state would require the hindsight of government gone awry, which means that enforcing government at some point would be a necessary step towards ideal anarchy? I wonder how long the lessons of past mistakes would stick before they start being forgotten and start to be made once more. Maybe something like Roberto Unger's "religion of the future" (which also relies on automation to enable 'deep freedom') would have to spring up to soft-enforce a global set of values that would quell the rise of any oppressive government thinkers. Not sure, just spitballing.

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