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Well the Protestant Work Ethic is closely tied with the Prosperity Gospel, and the Prosperity Gospel is spreading very widely nowadays, so if I had to guess the future will mostly consist of Christians slaving away in the factories convinced that by working overtime six days a week they'll earn the favor of God and become wealthy.

Typically religion was used by the state as a means of legitimizing itself. In an age where mass media and propaganda networks can do the same thing easier and cheaper, that goes away. In response, I can see religion either withering away to irrelevant local cults, or becoming corporate IP farms.

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>>72054055
BLAM the people who don't believe.

>>72054055
>What are some things that modernity does to religion?
Technology always changes the perception of divine commandments. Imagine what focus could a particular religion have in its begginings and then shape it around the technological development of the current era.

>>72054055
If your setting contains gods that provably and noticeably interact with and affect the lives of the populace then sureley there is no reason for the average joe to be non-religious.
Otherwise, you could say that the societal and cultural void left by secularisation, resulting in widespread nihilism and apathy, after a long while led to a spiritual reawakening all across civilization. At that point, old sects still clinging on to ancient traditions and ways will boom wherever they are still established, while other areas come up with entire new dogmas, depending on their environments and their state of life.

>>72054055
Depends on culture and the religion's origins. In my setting theology's a fairly wide spectrum which varies from race to race, humanity being the most divided in traditional (Christian) belief between extremes of scoff-at-every-alternative atheists and devout believers. Either way, it's a secular state so it hardly matters. It's doubtful that there's any level of scientific advancement which would ever factually disprove the existence of God so unless you've put something in which specifically does, you can always have little enclaves hanging around likely in a world which tries to leave them in the dust as much as possible.

Then you've got the guys I actually care about developing, who have a creation myth (a convocation of deities who created them in an image of the ideal life form - it's something of a source of pride/arrogance) they firmly believe in as indisputable fact. Problem is, the origins of it are very murky and theological disagreement resulted in some particularly nasty historical scuffles which made them very weary of fighting against each other from then on. The end result was differences in minutia for a pantheon which never clearly interacted with them or told them how they should worship weren't seen generally as such sharp sticklers anymore and left the religion in its whole as a fairly apathetic cultural facet. They firmly believe Gods created them on an individual basis, but nothing is state mandated and in fact the current administration has undertones of disdain for the scattered little rump temples which try to maintain some sort of orthodoxy. The kicker is these Gods in question are very much real, just not at all in the way they'd think or hope.

>>72054083
Dude that would be some EPIC social commentary. Just WOW.

>>72054083
>>72054564
That was rude of me, I shouldn't have hit post. I'm sorry, anon.

>>72054055
Neurotheology's the name of the game, why bother with that faith nonsense when directed EM waves can stimulate the brain in such a way as to produce direct experience of the divine? Sure, intellectually you might know that this suggests it's all an artificial illusion but the feeling trumps reality because it connects with you on a deeper level than anything from the cortex ever could.

>>72054083
Counterpoint: You have the atheists believing that work infringes on their human rights. Surely it's unreasonable to force people to work when they don't want to; the State can't possibly infringe on their freedom from servitude, freedom from want, while still honouring their right to food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services... gratis. So the future will be full of humanists constantly protesting the onerous 20 hour work week while demanding more and more benefits from the State.

>see: Europe

>>72054087
>In an age where mass media and propaganda networks can do the same thing easier and cheaper, that goes away.
Look into China and you'll see that it still very much uses religion to legitimize itself. Despite needing to be atheist in order to join the communist party (that's seriously a prerequisite), it has communist party aligned organizations that effectively run the churches: one for the Catholic ones, one for the Protestant ones. The Catholic churches are run by bishops that the CCP (not the pope) appoints and of course they preach the gospel in a way that reflects Marxist values. Any church that isn't approved of by the CCP is a "house church" that is illegal and beaten down.

And then there's Tibetan Buddhism. You may have heard some memey headlines about how the CCP is "limiting reincarnation to Chinese borders" or whatever, but if you look into it then you'll discover it's an attempt to co-opt Buddhism the same way they co-opted Christianity. Tibetan Buddhism has two chief figures: the Dalai Lama and the less famous Panchen Lama. If I'm not mistaken, the idea is that one of them points out the other after they die and reincarnate. Anyway, the Dalai Lama appointed some little boy a while back as the reincarnated Panchen Lama, after which he went missing. Suddenly the CCP brings forward a new Panchen Lama, who is of course a total fan of the CCP. Now the idea is that the CCP will wait for the Dalai Lama to die so "their" Panchen Lama can appoint a new Dalai Lama who's also in cahoots with the CCP. The current Dalai Lama is trying to avoid this by dropping hard hints that he intends to reincarnate outside of China (maybe in Bhutan or India), so of course the CCP tries to restrict that. They want the Panchen Lama to appoint "their" candidate of course.

The reason why you think this no longer happens is because it doesn't happen in the West. Freedom of religion protects the state from the church, but it also protects the church from the state.

there might be a somewhat pathetic (strict sense) maintanence of old religious practices like how we continue to celebrate easter and christmas, but the polarity between an indifferent minority and fanatical minorities may become even more extreme the more advanced society becomes.
at a point where the majority are expendable and may be forced to mutilate or modify themselves in order to compete with increasingly sophisticated and autonomous technologies, popular religion may assume increasingly irrationalist, militaristic and basically revolutionary qualities, while dodging the official title of religion owing to the hollowness and mendacity of old religious authorities.
look at the margins of contemporary politics and you'll find plenty of tendencies, doctrines, etc. whose activists are more or less a cult, with an appropriately intense outlook on things and visceral attachment to symbols and ideals that usually comes with religious devotion.
darwin's world has a faction named the brethren who are a quasi-religious luddite sect originating from a mash of left wing radicals, homeless people and prostitutes in san francisco, chewed up and dumped by an increasingly machine-ruled dystopian america - also the brotherhood of radiation but they're more of an archetypal post apocalyptic cult. the sourcebook is worth looking into.

>>72054055
The church of the simulation.

Simply take all "what if we are living in a simulation lmao" shitters and cut the bullshit to make it a proper religion.

>>72054740

>Freedom of religion protects the state from the church, but it also protects the church from the state

tell that to the anglicans and the scottish kirk.

>>72054781
And that shit is exactly why the US constitution forbids a state religion.

>>72054780
There were monks in the Takeshi Kovacs series who had a cool take on this, to them simulation was more real than reality because every experience had to be chosen. By choosing not only to dwell in the world but also to shape it was the path to self-actualising nirvana.
>>72054737
In a post scarcity society that's entirely rational and with VR you'd have the hedonist wasterels self selecting themselves out of existence while only those who want to impact the world persist in it and enjoy its imperfect pleasures. Granted that what you say is true today, in the sci-fi future there's no telling how AI and automation might reshape our "work".

>>72054858
To be fair, that self-selection is also happening today. Though not in the sense of people being hooked up to VR devices, but moreso in fertility rates. Just think of those "enlightened", left leaning redditors and their "furbabies" (that term will never not gross me out). Their breakneck population shrinkage has led to something unprecedented in history outside of severe cases like plagues and genocide: replacement migration.

>>72054087
>irrelevant local cults
You want to watch those, just ask the Romans

>>72054055
If you've got space travel, islam-in-space has an extra interest in navigation, and there's historical parallels you could draw

>>72054055
Consider the message of "A Canticle for Leibowitz", whatever challenges society is facing now, the Church has seen them before. It is a sort of generational brains trust, for those with the sense to listen. A stabilising force, one that remembers.

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There's no god. We'll build one.

>>72054879
I always liked the idea of the celestial astrolabe, an inertial talisman that always points towards Mecca. I read a thing where Earth had been rendered uninhabitable and spacers' bones were too porous to withstand gravity so hijra was just flight to the Sol system and seven orbits about earth.

>>72054055

Tends to kill it.

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>>72054886
>Google it
>Learn that it won the Hugo Award for best Science Fiction story
>"Hugo Award... where did I hear that before?"

>>72054879

>You want to watch those, just ask the Romans

ask us for fuck's sake. does anyone know what kind of shit is festering in the carcass of western democracies? everyone knows about the takfiris and such but how many aums are out there? how many heavens gates and such?
i hear that the new age is dead but imo it's alive and unrecognisably warped. only a matter of time before some guy all loaded up on guenon or evola or posadas or some esoteric shit nobody today has heard of opens shop at the right moment to be the next baha'ullah.

>>72054902
Sounds cool.

I remember hearing one thing (might have been here actually) with space-islam where the actual distance of the hajj becomes inordinately expensive/difficult for the general population of off-worlders, so as a compromise the colonists could have someone go in their stead - in the stead of a whole community even. Possibly that person is a representative on earth and lives there full time, if communication is greatly, greatly less expensive than travel.
Depending on available technology telepresence/memory recording might be involved as well.

>>72054946
There's the Amish and the Mormons. Judging by fertility rates, it's gonna be a struggle for dominance between the "no fun allowed" sects of Christianity and Jihadis. Israel is going to be fun, considering over there the only ones having above replacement level fertility rates are the hardline Jews and the Muslims.

>>72055015
The world needs a sterility treatment, the human plague must be stopped.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZYVb8Q5i9w

>>72054858
Richard Morgan is the fundie Westboro version of the left

>in the sci-fi future there's no telling how AI and automation might reshape our "work"
This is a multi-centuries-old argument ever since the invention of the horse plough. Or, not so long ago, maybe 35 years back, people were saying that computers would eliminate a lot of jobs. Look where that went. (Literally everyone down to your old blessed Aunt Sarah learned to use Microsoft Word.) Post scarcity is not a thing, and the nature of work will simply change.

>>72054877
The problem is that the winners are the suicide bombers...

>>72055198
It's an interesting divide, the vast majority of economists do not think that the rise of automation will cause mass unemployment, while the vast majority of technology experts do think that it will. It sort of brings up the question, do we trust the guys who understand how the economy works, or the guys who understand how the technology works?

>>72055198
And? The monks were still a nice take on VR mysticism. The horse plow isn't a proper comparison either as it allowed us to do brute force stuff any animal could do much more efficiently, some algorithms are moving in on more cerebral tasks. One day we might only have oversight roles left and even those could be rubber stamps to allow the automated society to do what they were already doing, more likely the system we'd build around ourselves would have entered a failure cascade long before then though.

>>72055234
Economists are liars in service of the elite, they'll keep peddling sweet lies as long as they can. If automation takes off like people say it will it forces a spectrum of UBI and neo-feudalism, likely a blend, to placate or clamp down on a listless populace.

>>72054740
My favorite thing about the Chinese "Catholic" church is that it's been excommunicated by the Vatican but still tries to convince people that it's "Catholic" and not some kind of unique Chinese Christian denomination.

>>72055015

>There's the Amish and the Mormons

small potatoes. the amish are, anyway. they got all the rage out in the mid-16th. mormons are a coiled spring though. i feel sad i won't live to see them do the mountain meadows rag on the united states' corpse.
i don't know, man. i have the strong suspicion that something genuinely new and horrible is coruscating in the mind's eye of le decadent westerners, as bad as the nazi cult ever was, though perhaps not racial in character.
look at this fucker >>72055050. fucker is casting about for a reason to go ham. millions are. some schizo is spinning a yarn as we speak that will provide the sort of prompting that they're after. religious equivalent of a baffometi video, nine angles tier info hazards without the levayan latter-20th c. coils of irony. or with them - who knows?

>>72055198
I'll be completely honest with you: my money is on Islam. For any other result to become possible, we'd need one hell of a Christian Revival. That being said, I guess it's technically possible for increased terrorism to drive more and more fencesitters towards hardline conservatism. That, and Christianity has always prospered in the face of persecution, even today in many parts of the world. Though if I were a betting man, I'd go all-in on Muhammad's gang. All-in, every last penny I have to my name.

>>72055198
>Or, not so long ago, maybe 35 years back, people were saying that computers would eliminate a lot of jobs. Look where that went.
Not a fair comparison at all. We're approaching soft AI that's better at certain intellectual tasks than humans are, and the development of robotics is progressing to the point where within a few decades there's a very real possibility that unskilled labor will cease to exist entirely.

>>72055302
The link is to a tv show where those extremists are the villains you tit. That's not to say that Earth wouldn't benefit from a lower population, just that a plague is the wrong way to go about it.

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>>72054055
>What are some things that modernity does to religion?
It makes it disappear desu
Religion in sci-fi (and mostly irl too) makes sense only if the place is a shithole, a la WH40k Imperium of Man, or if it is treated like a brand/corporation, like in Infinity's PanOceania

>>72055297

>If automation takes off like people say it will it forces a spectrum of UBI and neo-feudalism, likely a blend, to placate or clamp down on a listless populace.

or extermination of the economically nonviable. or a return to barbarism if the archons prove incapable of exterminating the barbarians or co-opting enough of them into the technician elite, the only class that will produce value in the marxist sense in a global economy with no peripheries left and of semi-autonomous industrial machinery.

>>72055376
That graph will plateau, religion arises from similar cognitive architectures to those that breed ideology. As long as the human brain is untouched you'll always have fanatics blinded by beautiful ideas, in many ways the soviet bloc's though policing was just another inquisition.

>>72055380
I'd consider that the extreme neo-feudal end of the spectrum. The human "yeomanry" is exterminated and only mechanical serfs remain to cater to the parasitic elite.

>>72055376
People are already getting sick of pure materialism. Organized religion is on the way out but I don't think spirituality is going anywhere.

>>72055397
Not necessarily in a religious form though
Something like console fanboyism would satisfy the same need (assuming it exists) but that's not a religion

>>72055376
Correction; it makes it hide itself as not religion.
Cults are huge, the 'I fucking love science' crowd could easily be renamed scienceism without a blink, ideologies, political and not, have replaced religions.
People need to believe in something bigger, that something can save them, even if it's just carrying around a lucky penny.

>>72055415
>parasitic
This doesn't really apply if they're not mooching off people - and they won't be, because strong AI is really fucking hard to make and no one's going to use it to make a better janitor when soft AI will still do the job better than any human.

>>72055234
I take the historical view as you can see. Industrial, Digital Revolution, etc supposedly would bring about this mass unemployment. Nuh uh.

>>72055280
>And
His depiction of the monks is more negative than positive let alone neutral

>>72055321
Yeah. They have less to lose and more to gain, so they'll fight harder.

>>72055339
It's just like how we moved from 90% of the population working in agriculture to less than 5% today. We'll find something else to do. Manage energy and REM resources to keep the bots running perhaps.

>>72055431
It can be, it's the same subsuming of the self into a greater process. In that case it's crass consumerism and is incredibly pathetic because it doesn't even realise that's what they're worshipping. Tribalism, self perpetuation, uncompromising world-view... those are enough resemblances for me to say that the mindset's alive and well.

>>72055434
>the 'I fucking love science' crowd could easily be renamed scienceism without a blink
Funny, it appears you blinked while it happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

Though to be fair, the term doesn't apply to ledditors but rather those who uphold the view that science is the only way of epistemology and divining norms. Less "I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE" and more Wiener Kreis.

>>72055366

>The link is to a tv show where those extremists are the villains you tit. That's not to say that Earth wouldn't benefit from a lower population, just that a plague is the wrong way to go about it.

i know what the tv show is about, you spackwit. if you plan to kill billions then why not a plague? why not war?

>>72055434
>the 'I fucking love science' crowd could easily be renamed scienceism
There is no god but Science, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson is his Prophet

>>72055449
They did bring about mass unemployment in the areas they revolutionised, fortunately they opened new opportunities. What happens when we reduce the need for thought? Where does an economy go when services are as unneeded as agriculture and industry?

You expected a cynical materialist narrator to suck their dicks? I liked them and thing they raised interesting points, I don't much care what you or the author think.

>something else to do
What, pray tell? There's not much more abstract than services unless you embrace transhumanism. That's why most post-scarcity fiction treats work as a choice unless you're in a very hostile environment.

>>72055449
>We'll find something else to do.
What you don't seem to be understanding is that there won't be anything else to do, because there won't be anything bots can't do better AND cheaper than humans. We're going to hit the point where even designing, building, and maintaining the bots is done by other bots, so that the system is entirely self-sustaining. Humans will be left with nothing but very high-level decision-making, which will be reserved for the technocrat class (i.e. billionaires).
Total replacement won't happen overnight but it is absolutely the direction we're heading in.

>>72055470
A plague is a shitty form of population control because it's far too indiscriminate.
War is vastly superior because it primarily kills the poor.

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>>72055476
>Neil DeGrasse Tyson
That motherfucker, at this point I have to wonder if he's actually trolling us. And then there's his fucking tweet about Spanish colonialism.

>>72055470
Because the fallout would be devastating, the Network fucked up because the sterility woulb be instant and the Romani obvious scapegoats. If they had any sense they'd opt for a more gradual scheme couched with social engineering to keep dying societies from spitefully chimping out.

>>72055234
Anybody who claims to understand the economy beyond the most basic principles is a liar.

>>72055524
It's easy enough to call bullshit on high-speed trading, how the fuck are watt wasting calculations supposed to generate wealth? The whole thing's a scam, moving physical goods my increase overall wealth but that level of stock manipulation is worthless.

>>72055547
High-speed trading works by exploiting extremely small inefficiencies in the stock market. It's basically a form of price correction.
That's not to say it's not a scam, but it does function on pretty basic economic principles.

>>72054055
Religion is science fictions' most important topic. It cannot escape the shadow of religious themes or questions. It may not agree with them, it may question them, but its presence is always there.

Case in point, four science fiction stories about priests meeting aliens:

Arthur C. Clarke's The Star
James Blish's A Case of Conscience
Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow a
Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco

>>72055321

it may seem like that from america or europe, but the ummah is not exactly building goodwill elsewhere. or anywhere, really. if western democracies begin to fray around the edges before they achieve some demographic superiority then the outcome will be massive communal violence.
where i live, muslims are fairly middle class, they are more likely than average people to own shops and so on, they're hardly lean and hungry warriors, though they may enjoy seeing themselves as such due to tv coverage of menaite affairs.
burma, india, west-central africa and china will be the acid tests.

>>72055449

>I take the historical view

a vulgar and fairly inconsiderate one.

>Industrial, Digital Revolution, etc supposedly would bring about this mass unemployment

the industrial age did bring about mass unemployment. why do you think so many europeans fled to the americas? there were colossal upheavals in the 19th and 20th centuries due to automation's consequences for agriculture and production.
contrary to expectations, many of those stable, productive jobs were not replaced with the advance of technology.

>>72055503
>A plague is a shitty form of population control because it's far too indiscriminate.

Even worse than indiscriminate, plagues hit the very rich and very poor the worst.

The rich because they can afford to travel around the world and socialize with other world travelers, giving them cutting edge access to any new plague.

And the poor just because they're poor and anything going wrong could kill them.

>>72055503

>War is vastly superior because it primarily kills the poor.

and a bit fairer. always the possibility you'll be the one who gets to martyr himself 'for the sake of humanity.'
something appealing about people who dream of mass culls being dragged out of their bedrooms and euthanised with big badman blows to the head from kai the plumber.

>>72055512

'eeweewee! the devastation from our attempt to kill millions is defacing the scenery! how tewwibwe!'
fuck off, bugman.

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>>72055321
Islam only seems to be doing well because
a) a lot of poor/unstable countries are populated by muslims
b) a few richer countries use Islam as a form of population control (see Saudi Arabia)
It's the same for Christianity in certain African and South American countries

If things start to improve in the Middle east and north Africa those countries will see the same decline in religiosity

>>72055633
>population control (see Saudi Arabia)
Social control*, more exactly (just like in Medieval Europe)

>>72055630
The rich are only vulnerable in the early stages. Once it's known that there's a plague, they can easily hole up in their mansions. Of course, this depends in part on whether they were smart enough to stock up on supplies and plant a vegetable garden, but the poor don't even have that option.

Look at what's happening literally right now. The rich can self-isolate with no downsides, while the poor are either being deprived of income or forced to expose themselves to risk.

>>72054055
Go read Coriolis.

>>72055632
>sterility
>kill
Learn to read retard, so long as the decline's slow enough and automation's good enough for the elderly to be cared for nobody is directly killed. Besides the tragic suicides of those dismayed by the reduction of the human race or because they're forced to be childless it's morally superior to letting everyone off themselves through species-wide shortsightedness.

>>72055632
>and a bit fairer.
Not at all. War has never been fair. In the ancient world, when everyone had to fight, the rich would always have better equipment simply because they could afford it. Now that we live in the era of professional armies, it's primarily the poor who fight because the pay isn't good enough to entice the rich. Even when there's a draft, the rich have historically been able to pay for someone else to take their place, and while that wouldn't fly these days they can still use their influence to get safer assignments.
Plagues are a bad way to cull the population simply because they're too fair.

>>72055584
>the industrial age did bring about mass unemployment. why do you think so many europeans fled to the americas? there were colossal upheavals in the 19th and 20th centuries due to automation's consequences for agriculture and production.
>contrary to expectations, many of those stable, productive jobs were not replaced with the advance of technology.

This is exactly right, the excess production capacity caused by technological revolution has always been offset by the opening of new markets. The future is a very different place depending on whether you believe there will always be sufficient new markets.

Personally, I'm betting against infinite growth being possible.

>>72055684
>has always
Because if humans can't till the fields they can craft and if humans can't craft they can think and if they can't think... There's no new market aside from some oversight and not many are cut out for that.

>>72055680
The early Roman Republic did alright. Mandatory conscription with higher social classes at higher ranks, but limited to landowners.

>>72055684
I think the best bet for post-singularity employment is space colonization. A robot would have to be specially designed to function on Mars whereas a human just needs a spacesuit and an oxygen tank.

>>72055684
>sufficient new markets
In the short to mid-term, Africa
In the long term either space exploration or perpetual war 1984 style

>>72055698
The new market is in simply being a person. Instagram influencers are the emergent form of this.

>>72055720
Are you nuts? If life support were simpler than machine maintenance we'd have sent a tin can full of air to Mars rather than a rover. I'm half convinced we'll never get off this mudball and only drone descendants will spread across the galaxy.

>>72055726
That's hardly a market, it's a hobby elevated to reputation economy. It's why UBI or outright removing the cruft is the next logical step, God help us all.

>>72055674

i read you right, cyst, just not in the way you'd prefer. you want to kill without the nasty grubby culpability that goes with actual killing, so you just 'pre-empt life.' the mysteries of slaughterless meat play on the minds of eunuchs, it is their native sickness.
it soothes your decadent palette to imagine your gelded humanity bumbling about, shitting and eating and fucking loving science until they slip off easily into the night.
that is not 'morally superior,' that is how a denatured, mentally deformed creature deprives prospective victims of their right of response.
'tragic suicides' for fuck's sake, you are more pus than person, a big heaving abscess.

>>72055633
I gotta doubt its long term sustainability. This feels more like a Western spillover, like feminism in India, that will disappear once the West's standing in the world declines (both demographically and otherwise). But even if it is independent of Western spillover, we're just going to see the same pattern repeat sans immigration: population decline among all but the most conservative groups. It also doesn't help that Islam's conservatives are batshit crazy.

This shit always happens when people get overly jubilant about MENA becoming "like the West".

>>72055719
I believe Rome was the same as Greece in that soldiers were expected to buy their own gear, right?
That sort of system favors the rich simply because they'll have top-quality armor and, most importantly, access to horses.

The samurai were pretty pissed when firearms were introduced to Japan and peasant levies were suddenly a threat to wealthy, born soldiers who'd spent their entire lives training with the bow.

>>72055747
I said colonization, not exploration. Robots are far better at exploration, but we have an almost instinctual need to spread our species far and wide and, more importantly, sending all of our malcontents to the stars will ensure they're kept busy worrying about short-term survival rather than having enough free time to plot rebellion.

>>72055511
Theoretical physics has been bankrupt since the early 70's (see Eric Weinstein), hence why there has not yet been a unifying singularity event of Science and Spirituality. Once we ditch String Theory for the dead end that it is, we will eventually find scientific proof that the deity is in the source code of our matrix.

>>72055761
Are most suicides not tragic? You're hurled a bunch of insults but I've yet to see a single counter-argument. Assuming humanity were on the road to extinction why wouldn't culling them to sustainable levels be justified? Why not use sterility as a tool when it's less likely to lead to thermonuclear fallout than outright war?

>>72055787
Necking or brainwashing the malcontents is a far more economic solution than investing all that training and machinery to get them offworld where they can do good. I'm not sure the outward instinct can overcome our crab bucket mentality here on earth, short of strategic value states will always invest in other things to compete with.

>>72055497
I dunno, fuck knows what we'll need to do in the future to keep things running.

>post-scarcity
Not gonna happen, unless you're immortal. Time is the ultimate scarce resource.

>>72055503
That's what people used to think back in the 1950s Jetsons era. Don't think it'll happen.

>>72055584
>upheavals
Will always happen. It's just the market correcting, or adjusting to the new norm. After that, as you can see, new types of jobs were created.

>>72055680

>War has never been fair.

neither is plague, or mandatory sterilisation. there is no parameter to decide what is fair in who lives and who dies, i suppose i misspoke. all i meant was that war gives you a fighting chance at the very least, and allows you to correctly identify those who want rid of you.
i'm talking about a social/civil war, by the way, not a conventional state to state affair.

>In the ancient world, when everyone had to fight, the rich would always have better equipment simply because they could afford it.

then they got their chests caved in and skulls pulverised by bullets, pining for the days when grandaddy was impaled on a wall of pikes. days of military aristocracy are gone.
in any case, better equipment didn't save the persians from the arabs. didn't save anyone from the mongols.

>Now that we live in the era of professional armies, it's primarily the poor who fight because the pay isn't good enough to entice the rich.

you talk about total insulation from the means of your survival as though it's a positive. they subsist on an interdependent and therefore fragile system. deprived of this stability, all of a sudden its 'feudal' rules and the merchant falls under the bandit and the thug.
what incentive does a mercenary have to obey a man whose wealth is in money that has value only inasmuch as the state which backs the currency has genuine authority? land he can't defend? with all those jobless, landless, cannibals nibbling at the margins?

>>72055787
>I believe Rome was the same as Greece in that soldiers were expected to buy their own gear, right?
>That sort of system favors the rich simply because they'll have top-quality armor and, most importantly, access to horses.

It does, in that the rich do have better equipment, and the Romans even had a social class called the Equites long after they stopped serving as horsemen. However, on the flip-side, if you were too poor to afford a helmet or a sword, you weren't really expected to go off and fight unless things got really dire
The downside of the Marian reforms was that the newly professional soldiers were no longer fighting out of civic duty (or desire for victory booty), but for pay which was supplied by the generals. This is at least part of the reason you had Sulla, the first Triumvirate, Caesar, the second Triumvirate, and Augustus all the space of like a century

>The samurai were pretty pissed when firearms were introduced to Japan and peasant levies were suddenly a threat to wealthy, born soldiers who'd spent their entire lives training with the bow.
Were samurai not super into guns? At least on an individual level. And it's not like the samurai went anywhere for like 200 years after the introduction of firearms

>>72055881
Even with immortality experience becomes a commodity, "post-scarcity" usually just means that our current understanding of economics and job creation no longer applies. Even that probably won't actually happen, this whole disussion presumes that automation will live up to the hype so we can ignore how plausible that actually is. The point about upheavals is that they ended when people actually found new jobs, the problem here is that it's not clear if there'll be enough this time.

>>72055864
Brainwashing is hard for liberal democracies. They still do it, of course, but it's nowhere near as effective and it won't do much if things are so bad that people are actually willing to rebel.
And keep in mind that it's very much in the interests of liberal democracies to continue presenting the illusion that they are liberal democracies. Look at the US, which is an oligarchy but will do everything it can to convince its citizens that it's still a democracy.
Since we're talking about a theoretical post-singularity society where automation is replacing most jobs and leaving more than half of the population with nothing to do, investing in colonization makes perfect sense.

>>72055912
>Were samurai not super into guns? At least on an individual level.
Individuals were, of course. Oda Nobunaga was famous for integrating them into his armies and developing novel tactics for using them.
But many samurai were very, very mad about them, because the fact is that guns require far less training than bows and the samurai as a whole were very proud of their bowmanship. Today we associate them with swords, but swords were largely for self-defense and dueling; in battle, they preferred bows.

>And it's not like the samurai went anywhere for like 200 years after the introduction of firearms
This was for political reasons more than anything else. The shogun was a member of the samurai class, so he had a personal interest in maintaining the power of the class as a whole. Keep in mind that samurai were NOT noblemen, and so they wanted to keep the actual nobility out of politics.

>>72055836

>Are most suicides not tragic?

your insincerity demonstrates itself in the line of your thinking, like crying over the suicide of a parent whose child you killed. the repulsiveness of the act is exacerbated by the unwillingness to confront it soberly and without equivocation. i have hurled insults at you and enjoyed doing it, i don't need a counterargument.
what 'moral reason' does humanity have to survive the culling of billions via mandatory sterilisation?
what 'moral reason' does the prospective gelding have to accept it?
why is justification required? in light of what power? what moral reason can you give me to prove human extinction is a bad thing, beyond sentiment? why is it uncalled for to hurl insults at someone whose sentiments lurch towards thoughts of genocide without even the spine or the bollocks to call it as such?
what system of morality is worth spending a single bead of sweat on that mills out 'justifications' for such putrescence?
would you kill a baby if you believed it was the right thing to do?
if you want to cut off balls, then do it with gusto or a butter knife, while nude. do not tart it up with sugar plop about morality and justification.

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>>72055787
>The samurai were pretty pissed when firearms were introduced to Japan
Actually no, not for a long time - "sword control" was already a thing (hence why all ninja meme weapons are modified farm tools), and samurai fucking loved guns (especially as previously their main weapon was a bow, it was hardly a big jump "muh honour"-wise)

>>72056042
It is genocide and unquestionably an evil but it might well be the lesser one. Damn straight I'd kill a baby if it were the best option available to me though I can't imagine many cases like that, unfortunately a human die-back is looking a lot more necessary and tapered sterility is the most humane stop-gap I can think of that doesn't just involve people collectively getting their acts together. Your world war and brutally enforced sterility might also be preferable to extinction though at that point you're not really reducing suffering as overexploited resources would result in similar bloodshed anyway.

>>72056119
Swords are irrelevant. We're talking about warfare, and the samurai did not (usually) use swords in warfare except as a sidearm. The sword was largely a symbol of rank.
They did not like guns because a peasant with little training was now just as deadly as a samurai who had spent his entire life learning to use the bow.

>>72055923
>upheavals is that they ended when people actually found new jobs, the problem here is that it's not clear if there'll be enough this time
Eh. Historically, there always has been upheavals and jobs both, one way or another. Including events such as the fall of countries and recovery, yes, but these days there's less chance of that in the developed world.

>>72055436
>in a post-scarcity utopia, these
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjAZGUcjrP8
are the working class and these
https://actionagogo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/skulls.png
are the new kulaks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge97KtCx20w

>>72056481
No one is going to give sentience to assembly line robots.

>>72054083
>the Protestant Work Ethic is closely tied with the Prosperity Gospel
Is it?
don't protestants see amassing wealth as sinful?
despite their views driving them to labor resulting them getting wealthy.
at least that is my experience as an atheist in a country with a strong protestant culture.

>>72056576
Not since Calvinism, prosperity on earth is assurance of salvation to them. If you get rich it must be because you're good.

>>72054055
Religiosity is an innate characteristic, so unless you genemod or breed it out of the population you will have people with high religiosity in the future and they will have religions.
but the specific form might be quite different than what we are used to.
removing religious from you population might also have unforeseen consequences,
since it is related with group cohesion and cooperation among others.
an other thing is that people with high religiosity have an emotional need for religion and depriving them of this is harmful to them the same way depriving somebody of human interaction is.
so a society that became disillusioned with religion but still has a need for it is also possible,
with all the social problems that entails.

>>72056679
This, Echopraxia has an interesting take where baseline biology has come up against the limits of vanilla logical positivism. In an attempt to grasp greater thoughts transhuman monks have abandoned rationality as we understand it in favour of intuitive leaps, the power of the subconscious unhindered by the self is a recurring theme. An interesting simile was that we were at the peak of science and sighted an even greater far off hill, now we must descend back into the mists of mysticism to come out one the other side and climb still higher.

>>72055755
Entertainment was a hobby once too.

>>72056576
It's not, but arguing with fedora tippers...

>>72056774
It varies, in some places it definitely is.

>>72056774
>>72056791
At the very least you still have evangelical preachers who beg their congregation for money... to buy private jets with. I seriously want to walk up to one of the people who actually donated and ask them what the fuck is wrong with them. It's not like the money is advertised as going to a good cause, they know it's going to buy a jet.

>>72056594
Nah, Calvinism is a distinct sect with different beliefs (such as the predetermination bit you mentioned) from Protestantism proper.

Amassing wealth in the sense of pulling a Scrooge and never performing charity, never spending it, and doing little to no work of your own is sinful. Working hard and living well because of it, is not sinful.

>>72057085
Protestantism is a blanket term that includes everything from Anglicanism to the Amish.

>>72057085
Tell that to prosperity gospel, with the amount of money dupes throw at megachurches you'd think they'd never read the "eye of a needle" passage.

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>>72054055
00's themed armish?

>>72054055
Back to the initial topic itself, are there any religions in your sci-fi settings? So far I have simulationists convinced that if they overload the local spacetime the raw code of existence will become visible between the grinding gears, alchemists who view their gas-giant-cum-star as the ultimate crucible for a species-wide magnum opus and nutters worshipping the Ultimate Intelligence, a presumed omega point capable of reaching back in time to orchestrate its emergence.

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>>72054055
Some religion are written too vaguely to be bothered by science or fact.
As long as mankind don't casually create their own custom made universe, no one is going to reconsider that maybe that book about a creator god was just paper, ink and nothing more.

Even then I'd say that any religion focusing on wether (You) have a soul and wether the universe you experience is a trick to test your soul, those religious should survive even mind uploading technology.

>>72056791
>>72057045
My point was simply that the "Protestant work ethic" was around loooong before prosperity gospel

>>72057199
That seems fair, it's also reasonable to say that it's a stance that can be perverted into justifying greed as when the Catholics were accepting indulgences.

I could imagine a dogmatized version of science, where the innovative class has hijacked the knowledge and masses don't have the means (or perhaps even inclination) to truly understand it.

They might not view science as a god, or even scoff at the idea of a god, yet they still believe things veiled in scientific language without at all understanding the concepts / methodologies, and are easily lead by the upper echelons that veil their desires in dogmatized jargon that 'sounds right'.

Education would be closely guarded and the educated class idolized as exceptional and beyond the intelligence of the common person. Knowledge would be more closely controlled and it'd be harder to figure it out on your own without being part of the class that is allowed to have that knowledge, and propaganda usually effectively shuts down any naysayers as imbeciles and viewed with the same derision as we might see flat-earthers.

Basically 'scientists' of that society are like catholic priests who read the bible to the plebs who can't read latin, and have the ability to twist the meaning whenever they like in language nobody can second-guess them in.

>>72057199
To be fair, the protestant work ethic mindset kinda make sense. Maybe. If you squint really hard. I mean it in more of a "prosperity is the fruit of virtue" sense.

>>72057045
Evangelical preachers are master con artists. Their poor congregation is convinced that their "preacher" needs that jet and God wants him to have it. It's their God-given duty to make sure he receives his jet.

They've been brainwashed is what I'm getting at.

>>72057238
Protestant work ethic was also the foundation of Puritan society: where fun was laziness and laziness was outlawed, but everyone was educated; fed; and law-abiding.

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In between summary,
- IS(pace)LAM
- Simulationists
- Scientism
- Consumerist Idolatry

And implicitly, barbarity and zealotry as the masses try to reclaim purpose in their lives or fight off the own obsolesence.

>>72054886
interesting, thanks

>>72055571
Enough reading to pad out the quarantaine, thx

>>72055654
^

>>72057187
Both old and new. But they are mostly just NOTcontemporary religion and cope with tech, which felt hollow. Hence the thread. The simulationists are a nice touch, what would crash our simulation?

>>72055571
>>72058087

There's also Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game follow-ups: Speaker for the Dead and Xenobiology. The fact that everyone is super Catholic doesn't actually seem to matter, but it's brought up constantly.

>>72058150
Nice, enjoyed the fuck out of enders game when I was young, I always forget there is a followup I still have to read.

>>72058177
Speaker for the Dead is VERY different from Ender's Game. The core conflict of the story is another inter-species misunderstanding but otherwise it's something else entirely.

>>72058177
>>72058224

I thought Speaker for the Dead was a very rich story, with ideas that stuck with me far longer than Ender's Game.

I was also 14, so it could very well be shit.

Modernity is going to last for a while. Considering the birth rates of secularised countries, it's going to be interesting seeing where it goes. Being an atheist and a leftist has a much higher correlation with having no children or being an infertile male due to low testosterone. One might say that leftists reproductive asexually, they rely on religious people to have children and indoctrinate them later with mass media and ideology in education. A lot could happen in 50-100 years.
As for interesting portrayals of religion in science fiction, Lord of Light, Book of the New Sun, Canticle for Leibowitz and C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy have some cool stuff.

>>72057222
Catholics still accept indulgences. An indulgence is remission of temporal punishment in the purgatory, it's not forgiveness of sins. It was never believed that you could buy your way into Heaven.

>>72054780
I actually have a very prominent cult in my sci-fi setting who are literally called "the Church of the Simulation."
They worship the creators of the simulation, but wish to contact them or have them notice their creations. To this end they believe that creating a computational load is the most efficient way of doing this. Their main Church is a convoluted zero-g maze of, as close as they can get, truly random construction (they simulate the structure as a whole, ask a computer to guess what should be added next and then do something else). They also encourage having as many children as possible, since sapient minds are likely one of the more complicated structures within the simulation. Daily worship often involves looking at either very small quantum effects or very far away via telescopes, in order to make sure the simulation cannot take computational shortcuts to compensate for their holy work. They also maintain a large amount of simulations themselves (recursive simulations create more computational load) and sell these simulation's predictions in order to fund themselves.
They also have a small caste of "truly holy men" they call Babblers, who do nothing every day but recite strings of random syllables, words or numbers, and acolytes record their babbling in order to preserve the load the random strings provide. Its considered a great affront if a Babbler is found to have a pattern, no matter how long strung.

The Church is actually really divided on what happens if they do attract the attention of the Simulators. They might just all be shut off, and some of them act as a Doomsday cult because of this. But others believe they'll be uplifted, and some just believe they'll simply be contacted to knock it off.

>>72055511
I am mad daily because this smug fuck is supposed to be our generation's Carl Sagan.

Sagan brought the idea of space exploration into the kitchen of every American home. He showed us that it isn't just the passion of nerds with pocket protectors, that it could be beautiful and inspirational. That science was not just the dry dusty man in a lab coat, that it could show us beauty and inspiration greater than anything on Earth. He did more for science education by pushing for the Pale Blue Dot photo than Neil Degrasse Tyson has done in his entire career.

FUCK I hate that man

>>72057222
>it's a stance that can be perverted into justifying greed
See: American televangelism

>>72057235
See: Greta Thunberg and her congregation

>>72057238
See: parables of the talents

>>72054901
t. Some fag who would've been happy to burn infants before the Golden Calf 3k years ago

>>72054055
I have a feeling that as more people move into the frontier, as colonists, space miners or whatever, as they're exposed to more unknowns in their daily lives we'll see a resurgence in "petty superstitions." Things like throwing the salt over your left shoulder to ward off the bad luck from spilling it. But instead it will be things like "always thank the airlock after its done cycling" and blow into your air filter every time you change it.
We are ever more separated from the inner workings of the things we use on a daily basis. Most people are barely familiar with the basics of how a regular computer works on a physical level, let alone how programming works. Try adding in quantum computing to that. The less people understand about something, the more likely we'll see ad hoc explanations about it, because people are uncomfortable with that lack of understanding, but probably don't have the technical expertise to understand how it ACTUALLY works.

>>72058087
There we go, when I say "I have" I meant I'd shamelessly stolen from a half remembered thread.
>>72058669
Babblers are a lovely touch, the search for true randomness is ripe for mysticism. After all how can logic apprehend the illogical?

Another excellent sci-fi cult from Peter Watts is the Moksha Mind, as two sapient hemispheres dissolve into a larger self a good chunk of Asia has plugged themselves into a synthetic nirvana. So far the god-mind seems absorbed in self contemplation, the powers that be dread the thought of it stirring itself into action. I think Watts also mentioned the three second god though that may have been Stross. Basically some viral process caused the internet coalesced into a single intelligence which hardly realising what it was doing fell headfirst into the singularity before shorting out the underlying infrastructure and dying with a whimper. It crammed centuries of thought into this three second lifespan and left a very detailed will designed to guarantee its rebirth at some point in the future.

>>72056576
They realized they could work hard without amassing wealth by donating it all to Israel.

>>72059034
Most based.

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Speaking of religion, Motes in god's eye have a colony developing a religion around a weird star that turn out to have been the laser of a laser-sail.

>>72058177
>>72058224
>>72058424
I loved Ender's game but was disappointed by Speaker of the Dead and gave up reading any more of this franchise.
Ender's game was an incredible gambit with supergenius who then have to live with the consequence of what he have done.

In comparison Speaker of the dead is a shitty fanfiction where the author retcon previous element to fit a completely different niche. Everything is essentially magic, more than the previous technologies, and the story END essentially with a big fat DEUX EX MACHINA.

>>72058669
I like the basis of your idea,
I would add the following element to your "Church of the Simulation", their building isn't just random as a structure, it is also where physic-breaking experiment are attempted every day. Zero-point energy, creating exotic material, meta material used in every revetment to bend the light of the entire structure, quantum whatever and so on.

The Expanse has an absolutely fantastic take on religion in a scifi setting

>>72054055
Ancester worship

>>72058882
For that matter, Leslie Fish and Julia Ecklar deserve more credit.

>>72060950
>Filk
Gross.

>>72055431
Faggot

>>72054055
There are three aspects of religion,
>Transferrence Objects:
Basically the managers of various important phenomena that you can attempt to placate. Think early Greek Paganism.
>Highest moral authority
The lawgiver, sets up a plan on how to live your life according to a supposedly 100% effective course plan, so you know exactly what to do in each situation. Think orthodox Judaism.
>Fictive Kinship
Puts everyone together as a group, so they don't compete against each other. This is where punishments like hell for breaking group taboos come in because the point is unification and they need a lifetime membership garuntee.

I'd imagine there would be a god/saint/spirit of space who would ensure safe travel and shit like asteroids or gamma ray bursts not hitting. Besides that I'd imagine they aren't at the mercy of many phenomena. While the moral authority would probably a SIgmar esque human who was noted for being morally just and good at everything. Of course all of this depends on the main governments and how concentrated knowledge of technology use and repair is.

>>72060236
Combine this with GM and actual genetic memory and you're golden. Alternately have them be timetravellers for whom unchanged parentage is a matter of survival, to attack another's household gods is to unmake them.

>>72061403
Post the songs you wrote

>>72057199
Nah, even as far back as Calvin you had Protestants thinking that working hard and amassing wealth was a sign of God's favor.

>>72063480
>>72057199
Hell, this goes back even further than that, the Jews viewed wealth in much the same way. Take Job for example, or Solomon, both very wealthy men whose wealth was used as a sign of their righteousness.

>>72054055
What about AIs worshiping their human creators?

>>72054055
If the Gods do not directly and tangibly intervene in a setting, then only two forms of religion can exist to worship them. The first is an intricately detailed religion with a scholastic tradition, ritual and a dedicated clergy. Priests and worshippers will study a catechism (ex. http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/ccc_toc.htm) and be able to respond to critics with articulate, pre-loaded answers. Even non-believers will acknowledge the moral integrity of the system, the sincerity of its worship and the internal logic of their beliefs. The second form of religion that will survive is the charismatic: direct emotional appeals, captivating leader who is a master of oratory and possibly BITE method indoctrination.

Also, great topic for a thread, OP. Have a (you)

>>72066210
Saturn's Children had evolutionist robots be the robot equivalent of retarded human creationists, it gave me a giggle.

>>72061941
>>72056679
>>72055571
really intelligent comments
>>72056042
and it's unclear what is even going on with this anon

>>72067177
Bloodless utilitarianism ticks some people off, he just has trouble expressing that without looking like an idiot.

>>72056042
based

utilitarians have zero spiritual utility

>>72067265
I'm not sure many would argue against that, it all depends on what you decide to define as the good.

>>72054055
One interesting take: consider Japan's spiritual beliefs in comparison to their modern world. A culture involving animism beliefs now has mascot characters for everything. Every product, every tool, every neighborhood and business, everything. Cultures with similar beliefs would have gods for every tool, practice, fear, weather pattern, tree, or geographic location. For some of them such gods simply grew up and became bigger than the others, such as with the romans. There would be someone specific to pray to for every worry you might have, some character with their own face and stories and symbols.

Now scale that up to a futuristic setting, possibly with AI and holograms.

>>72054055
We ARE the equivalent of a futuristic setting, viewed from the lense of the ancient to medieval worlds.

>>72054628
That's like saying religion should have died out thanks to psychedelics.

>>72054055
One thing I've noticed is that genuinely new religions are in many ways products of the culture and the scientific knowledge level of their time. Look at Mormonism with their talk of Kolob and an afterlife on other planets. Scientology takes this concept even further, being more science fiction than traditional spirituality, yet still having a conception of spiritual well-being and a creation myth. Think about the history of your fictional future, and then think about how the scientific knowledge and technology gained, especially the poorly-understood knowledge, will inform any new cults that spring up.

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I just say in my science fiction settings that people find religious succor in the power of the "frequencies". These are weird background radiation waves that hit everywhere in the universe at once, and are commonly attributed to why there are so many similarities between different species and cultures despite being billions of light years apart. Each 'frequency" is typically tied with an emotion, a color, and activities so its followers try to enhance that frequency by performing those actions or continuing those signals. Some individuals can cause freaky chains of events or have unusual mental insights that seem like psychic powers relating to the frequencies, but this is as close as the setting comes to supernatural or magical elements.

>>72054055
Dead Space is a great example if you want some good old fashion Scientology without it being scientology. It's the first thing that jumps to mind when I think space cults.

Other I suggest looking at other properties for ideas. Shows like The Orville have the Kree worship what's basically Khorne from Warhammer 40K.

You could also go the route of certain other sci fi settings and hint at all major religions being born from an even older alien race visiting those planets millions of years ago.

>>72054083
I thought the Prosperity Gospel was the thing that has turned Martin Luther's remains into a turbine, the pastors who tell anyone who listen that the more paychecks they send to them, personally, the more good things will happen to them.

Then they go on TV and sell their digital deluxe abridged edition King James 300 Bible with detachable phone charger.

>>72063342
retard

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>>72070554
>Krill worship what's basically Khorne from Warhammer 40K
Nah, Avis was more along the lines of the Emperor. Only Krill are people, everyone else is xeno scum.

>>72070401
Not at all, it should be changed by it as indeed it was with new age mysticism. Psychadelics are a crude tool compared to directly triggering experiences anyway, theology's far from the only aspect of humanity that would be revolutionised by a mature theory of mind.

>>72074960
I'm still surprised no modern cult has started mass-producing these gizmos for their rituals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

>>72070595
It is.
It's for way more to do with the rise of the megachurch then Protestant work ethic.

>>72067139
Those are good, though I think I'd add ethno-religious traditions. Stuff that's more orthopraxic and confines because it gives a sense of community and continuity.
>Mom why are we leaving out shoes next to the reactor core?
>So St. Nicholas and his quant reindeer can fill them with candy.
>You do want candy right?

>>72070497
Tell us more, please? Do these frequencies affect FTL?

>>72067578
But they don't fucking worship Pikachu, anon

>>72070595
It is, but tell that to fedora-tippers...

>>72054977
Ooh, an idea to expand on that one: what if a sect of 'cyborgized islam' exist? Like, a branch of Islam that developed where people have a high tendency to become cyborgs (like, say, an asteroid mine) so they ignore the fatwas about body modification. So these guys, who are already cyborgs, would send a copy of their brain-scan in a 'casette' which they can pop in a robot body on Earth to do their Hajj with. Brain-tapes are easier to transport than living humans, but there's a growing theological argument whether these brain-tapes are their own individuals or not before God.

Another future religion could be techno-cargo cults, in which people would worship approximate replicas of revered technology. Like imagine half-competent, self-taught engineers who makes Apollo 11 replicas using future junk because they think the work will elevate their spirits to the stars.

My favorite way religion is tackled in sci-fi is from Babylon 5. Every race has thier own spin on religion and it varies in importance to each individual. There's a group that has dedicated themselves to learning every world's religion to learn about "the many faces of God" as long as some great text about the intelligent beings in the universe being the universe itself trying to understand itself. Watch Babylon 5 is I guess what I am saying.

>>72078611
animism beliefs aren't about worship anon. They're about believing there is a spirit or life force in everyday things, concepts, or ideas. So you might appeal to those spirits for things, attempt to communicate and make a deal. You might build a shrine in the woods and leave offerings in hopes that whatever protective spirit likely lives within the forest will grant you some amount of favor or at least not let you get lost and die.

Now consider a culture that never left behind such ideas but became more educated and industrial. They still give some tribute to the idea, it's tradition and part of their culture, but they don't full on believe in it. Then as they become more commercial their views on such things become like mascots. It's no longer an actual spirit of a forest, it's not just the friendly cartoon mascot they paint on the signs near the forest trails to explain campsite rules and safety. The gods become mascots which encourages more mascots.

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Clone the founder of your religion. Possibly repeatedly, one copy per parish church.

>>72078996
>you might appeal to those spirits for things, attempt to communicate and make a deal. You might build a shrine in the woods and leave offerings in hopes that whatever protective spirit likely lives within the forest will grant you some amount of favor or at least not let you get lost and die
If that's not worship, how do you define it?

>they don't full on believe in it. Then as they become more commercial their views on such things become like mascots. It's no longer an actual spirit of a forest, it's not just the friendly cartoon mascot they paint on the signs near the forest trails to explain campsite rules and safety. The gods become mascots which encourages more mascots
That's not Japan. That's more UK.

>>72079358
Wonderful.
>>72079413
It can be entirely rational to propitiate the millions of surveillance algorithms that collectively determine your social credit of "karma". Really it's a full circle back to animism in the west and a continuation in the east, we're all headed for the same panopticon hell.

>>72070595
>The Protestants are paying for indulgences
PapistLaugh.png

>>72056773
>entertainment the hobby
If you mean artistic entertainment, then not really. That has quasi-religious roots. It mostly started as an attempt to influence the environment with sensory-phenomena maps.

Since humans judge the maps, human aesthetic becomes the equivalent of a innately sensed ethic or potency based quality.. It isn't just bio-aesthetics either, human aesthetic judgement is subject to social conventions and repetition. So God only knows what old timey shit is still floating around the art world from past religion. And yes, popular art counts as well.

There are only around 4 genres of human song, for instance: dance, lullaby, mating, healing,

>>72079358
How about retroviral gene therapy? Pull an astartes and make all the faithful genetically similar to the religion's founder?

>>72078743
>>72079358
>>72079485
>>72080254
Combine all these. If everyone has some of Primarch Mohammad's geneseed, recording them with panopticon surveillance technology is blasphemy. This whole argument is clearly bullshit, but if it gets totalitarian spooks lynched by jihadists, useful bullshit.

>>72075077
>I'm still surprised no modern cult has started mass-producing these gizmos for their rituals.
Because Persinger's research was incredibly flawed and
>>72054055
>what would an even more advanced society do to religion?
Depends on how advanced and whether it is space fairing.
Space travel and the involved distances (even with fast FTL) would introduce more unknowns into the human experience than has been seen in at least a millennium, which would likely give rise to - to modern sensibilities - fairly archaic-seeming traditions and belief systems.

Individual human understanding does not rise in direct relation to sum total human knowledge, and things such as space flight, frontiersmanship and the hardships involved in trying to survive the single least welcoming biome in reality would easily give rise to superstitions and rituals which would eventually bloom into full-scale belief systems.

>>72079485
Good one

>scifi religion
>surveillance algorithms
>social credit
>panopticon
Somewhere out there, a Laundry search daemon (literally) stirs...

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>>72080936

>>72070554
Lovecraftian cult as MAD deterrent. If the cult is ever under threat of destruction, they awaken the sleeping horror they worship and it eats everyone, including their enemies.

Could work equally well with a conventional eldritch abomination or a Boxed Artificial Superintelligence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box

It's not so much religion is gone but so plentiful you'll find thousands of them in one planet, so it ends up being just a footnote

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As the prophets will it. (watch deep space 9, while there are many things wrong with that show, and time travel is stupid in general, some parts of this question are answered really well in a way that neither vilifies nor fetishizes religion)

because their "gods" are their far flung descendants who have reached a state of singularity in a dimension outside time but have sent various messages in the forms of extra dimensional objects and visions back into their own "past" because those object ensured the path which led to their transcendence

>>72081556
6/10, bretty gud. A little too Roko's Basilisk for my tastes toward the end but overall worth the read.

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>>72055795
t. Dave Sim

>>72084194
Interstellar.
>>72085266
I just got the idea that Armstrong was a standard crazed lovecraftian cultist, not that he was in any way right.

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>>72085438
>he thinks you can derive metaphysical knowledge from material knowledge

Never gonna make it.

>>72085534

>Interstellar.

Yeah pretty much, but its a religion. and DS9 made like 20 years earlier and the whole premise is more of a subplot/flavor text/deus ex as opposed to like THE plot in the show

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>>72054083
>Protestant
And just like that you lost me

>>72079413
Prayer and worship are not the same things. Worship is any expression of the idea that the object of worship is above you and worthy of the praise you are giving it.

Prayer is more like a one way communication with something you can't see or believe to be there in a spiritual sense.

Overall I think you were really missing the point of all of that. And wtf does that have to do with the UK?

>>72085827
Only God knows what the Catholic Church will look like 200 years from now, it's already almost unrecognizable from from the way it was 200 years ago.

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>>72085564

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>>72086176
>no argument

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>>72086279

>>72086176
When they're not shitting up the catalog with their ugly OP images they're just retards among retards. He's right in this case that seeking to prove divine claims with science is folly.

>>72054055
The enemy force "The Covenant" from the Halo game serie thought the now dead/gone alien species "The Forerunners" achived godhood by activating The Ark. Calling that event "The Great Journey".
That was all a lie of course just like most religions are today.

https://www.halopedia.org/Covenant_religion
https://www.halopedia.org/Technological_Achievement_Tiers#Tier_1:_World_Builders

>>72055431
>it's not a religion
You haven't spoken to a console fanboy then, or anyone who considers themselves to be an example of pious devotion to their particular cause. Just because a console isn't a "god" in a traditional sense doesn't mean people don't worship it, just like you could say thanking the spirit of an animal you hunt doesn't count as a "religion" because there isn't a church or a canon of scripture, but you would be just as wrong.

>>72087173
I think there's a difference in that the spiritualism of thanking prey adds something to the world, it's a way of understanding natural cycles and justifying killing. Cult consumerism is because fanboys' lives are so barren that they latch on to propaganda with religious zeal, not even utopian political stuff just "this will fill the hole in your heart until we offer you the next thing".

>>72055015
As much as I would love to believe otherwise, this is simply the manifest destiny of Christian+technology.

A cultural drive to put everyone else's needs before your own coupled with the technological capacity for everyone in the world to arrive and take advantage of your stupidity.

2 children?

1 child?

It's for the best. Gotta be able to afford to pay those taxes and church donations to fund those welfare programs and get those poor wretched masses out of those 3rd world shitholes they suffer so terribly in. "Do unto others and walk a mile in their shoes and we are all just children of God blah blah blah."

When white, Christian nations are cut in half by their parasite classes it will only be another 1-200 years before what remains is cut in half again. When things get really bad the fools can blather on about the rapture and heaven and earthly suffering.

More and more it appears that we will only get to have a civilization if we place our survival as a peoples above the book that promises heaven if you only sell out the earthly future of your children and theirs after them.

>>72054946
My money's on Alexander Crackedmind.
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/23098241/

>>72087606
Tie receiving welfare to sterility treatment (preferably reversible) and the problem serves itself. People who pop out kids they can't support are free to starve and the progeny either make good or wither.

>>72087257
Thanking prey is a way of justifying the reality of needing to murder another living being to live (not a vegan, its difficult to kill a cute critter your fist couple of times, but they are too delicious). Cult Consumerism is a way of justifying your purchases.
Spiritual beliefs in many ways are justifications for the things we do that we may not like in certain parts of our psyche. A way of rectifying the Person We Want To Be with the Person We Are. Cult consumerism and Animism really do stem from similar parts of human psychology.

>>72087897
Hmm, I suppose you're right. What I mean is that while both are justifications animism attempts to explain as best they could with the information available where cult consumerism is straight up degeneration. They've blinded themselves to philosophical inquiry in favour of empty marketing. I could never imagine respecting a consumer as I do a hunter-gatherer or even a terrorist, there's just nothing there.

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>>72054055
>New Sun
>>72058438

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>>72058485
good job, anon

>>72086165
My money’s on either extinction, morphing into tumblr or an anti-tumblr antipope populist excommunicating the ‘official’ pope.

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>>72054055
Modern man's only god is Mammon, and his only religion is consumerdom.

>>72087606
Evangelical protestants are the most fertile conservative demographic in the US.

>>72054055
A religious organization in my game is the holy order of the accelerated mass.

They operate a railgun with no exit around a small moon, placing more and more energy into a projectile over the generations.

They priests state that, one day, when the apocalypse arrives, they'll release the bolt and shoot it dead.

>>72056576
Proper Lutherans were ambivalent on the issue (you must work hard and respect the temporal rulers, you can get rich but you shouldn't show off), and they were never relevant in America. In Europe think Denmark more than Switzerland which was a Calvinist stronghold.

>>72092273
Why even...

>>72056576
Go talk to a Scottish Presbyterian

Go read some of the Dune appendices.

>>72054083
>implying Protestantism will exist in the future
entering 7th Age of the True Church now

>>72087606
>pay those taxes
This is the real problem

>church donations to fund those welfare programs
Church donations don't fund welfare programs

>get those poor wretched masses out of those 3rd world shitholes
Your problem is that you're looking at this from a very American-centric viewpoint, and drawing conclusions from memes more than facts. Expand your dataset to Europe and Japan, and you'll find the problem of low birth rates and misguided do-goodism is more secular than religious.

EU is trying to go maximum socialism-welfarism-do-goodism and it's killing their economy, plus low birth rate whites are being outbred handily by the browns and refugees. Japan is hardly Christian and it's facing the same problem of low birth rates. Both these groups are far less Christian than USA, and they suffer the problems you describe much worse than the USA.

>promises heaven if you only sell out the earthly future of your children
is the opposite of literally every teaching on the subject from Abraham to Jesus, and talks a lot about multiplying, being fruitful, hardworking, etc

>walk a mile in their shoes
Book, chapter and verse?

>>72095385
What about them? The appendix gives a quick (and somewhat boring) summary of the development of the OC Bible, but doesn't go deep (or at all) into the various sects of Buddislam, which features a lot in the books

>>72092499
Isn't this eventually going to run into diminishing returns? Specifically, 99% lightspeed, can't get faster than that.

>>72097633
Not him. The breeding differential is partially due to environmental toxins from industrialization. That is why less industrialized nations have higher fecundity. People want to put this on social policies. But the economics of industrialization are true regardless of policy. The economic effect makes up the other part of the fertility decline.

Both parts are only part of the cause. The German Black Forest doesn't have a single original old growth tree. God only knows how much industrial run-off persists. Places with worse economic and social problems don't have the low birth rate problem. Industrialization will likely change both long term and short term fertility there for the worse, just as it has in the 1st world.

When you realize that the human race is now pushing industrialization on the only human populations that still have high fecundity ("browns and refugees") the end result will be a biological diminishing of total human fecundity.

Too bad everyone is so concerned about skin color instead of trying to preserve the human race's fecundity by appropriate and necessary means. Humanity doesn't deserve to continue if it can't grasp these practicalities because stupid groupthink. It doesn't matter if it is secular or religious in nature, not if the end result is the same.

Who would've thought so many people would screech about maintaining human fertility just because brown people were less exposed to industrialization chemical run-off?

This isn't ignoring the fact that industrial reduces fecundity thorough several channels other than environmental pollution. Human capital investment is the major one. Basically if higher life expectancy then reduce breeding. It has a correlation with the economic view of reduced fertility. This is an industrialization induced alteration of the "natural" trend of high breeding if high infant mortality.

Yes, we ARE a horrible species and the dolphins would do better if they had hands.

>>72099285
>breeding differential is partially due to environmental toxins from industrialization
Gonna need some real, respectable scientific sources to back up this claim. No cranks, no conspiracy peddlers.

>>72055301
>China tries rewriting the Bible and Koran to reflect socialist values.
>China's church get excommunicated by the Vatican.
>China begins undergoing disasters that wouldn't be out of place in Exodus or Revelations
It's almost poetic at this point.

>>72098957
Once you reach your speedcap, you can start upping the mass of the bolt.

>>72099285
>The breeding differential is partially due to environmental toxins from industrialization

If you search for journals covering this problem, I think you'll find that environmental toxins and fertility itself are found to have far less impact than economic factors which stand head and shoulders above all others (e.g. social norms and health risks)

As societies develop and become more industrialised, moving the competitive advantage away from brute strength and into knowledge, BOTH the costs and payoff of investing in fewer children increase - ie it is more expensive to raise two children and educate them well compared to raising six children with a poor education, BUT those two children will out-earn the six combined, thus bringing more wealth to the individual children, the family, and society as well

Because when one combine driver can do the work of twenty workers in the fields harvesting by hand, that one driver can be paid more, far more than what his education cost

So why can't nations adopting the two-well-educated-children policy out-fight the six-poorly-educated-children policy? Well, the equations all go to ratshit obviously if governments alter natural conditions and take money from the combine driver ("Tax the rich!") and give it to the twenty workers ("Socialised healthcare! Unemployment insurance! Feed the refugees!"). When those twenty workers are "paid" by the Govt more than their work is worth, they are literally loss-making human resource units to the Govt

That's the underlying, unacknowledged reason why the EU is in such utter economic ratshit; why Trump (despite being a thoroughly odious and unlikable individual) is right about cracking down on illegal immigration; and why countries like Australia and Singapore are careful to weed out the farm labourers from the combine-drivers

>>72092499
Do they keep the energy stored in four powerful elemental artifacts which require a fifth focusing element - say, a messianic Perfect Being - to activate?

>>72054737
>the State can't possibly infringe on their freedom from servitude, freedom from want, while still honouring their right to food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services...
This is trivially attainable. The problem is that the Waltons and Bezos' and other predators don't want it.

>>72100755
>this time it'll work

Look, it's very simple. Cheeseburgers don't fall out of the sky. You have to work for them, assembling cheeseburgers at the cheeseburger factory. If you work harder than the next guy, everyone gets more burgers, but so do you, as an incentive.

Now, imagine somebody - "Alexander" - comes along and says everyone gets cheeseburgers at HIS/(her) factory regardless of whether they work or not, because obviously they deserve it by dint of existing, and she'll distribute them. Everyone is going to go to that somebody and say "alright, I'll join your factory; I'm not gonna work as much, but give me burgers". What's more, since merely existing grants them a right to burgers, they start breeding as if it's a post-scarcity society, because they're not feeding the kids, that Alex is. Cause Alex promised. All they need to do every day is a little work - maybe half a burger's worth, just to show willing - and then queue up to that burger-dole line, and draw a burger all the same.

Now, Alex is going to run out of burgers very quickly unless she finds a way to make cheeseburgers. She can do one of two things:

One - force the workers to make cheeseburgers. Unfortunately this is called "servitude"

Two - take money from other people to feed the cheeseburger-doleists. Aha! Thus is born progressive (and increasing) taxation, public healthcare, welfarism, unemployment insurance, etc

Workers who were incentivised to make more burgers, are now demonised and forced to give up more burgers. They soon figure out that working less is much more comfy. They too join the burger-dole line, or go away.

Faced with this, Alex launches "stimulus measures" to encourage them to work more... but these are merely various forms of borrowing money to make cheeseburgers to tide over temporary shortages, while standing around saying "Come on you guys", because Alex sure can't go back on her word to provide cheeseburgers regardless of work done.

Voila! The EU economy.

>>72099285
See >>72099617
Difference are better explained by the demographic transition model, educated people know they don't need to have as many kids as before because those will survive. They might not even make 2 kids if they are responsible enough to know the ecosystem simply can't support so many humans, I know people who will adopt kids instead of making new ones.

>>72101376
Industries are more and more automatized, as technology evolve robot will eventually take over every aspect of our economy.
This will leave you with a question:
Do your government/economic system exist so everyone can have fun?
Or does it exist only so the people who own the mean of productions can rules over you?

You could have a working entrepreneur/employee partnership when the owner needed the employees and always needed more.
But this is less and less the case, the people who own business need less employee and have no incentive to share "THEIR" wealth for free.

So either:
- you let unlucky people starve and die for the profit of the 1%
- or you make your government force the redistribution of wealth so the 99% can have fun.

Ironically the social status of craftsmen grew tremendously after a plague killed so many it created a scarcity. If our pandemic was actually a threat to mankind it would certainly reveal that a large part of the world population is considered superfluous for the ones at the top.

>>72054740
>A secular authority attempting to mandate divinity conform to its rules, to the extent of attempting to place a border around something as mythological as reincarnation.

I'm also shocked there wasn't more outrage over the CCP "disappearing" the Panchen Lama. How could the CCP say, "This is the Panchen Lama!" if it wasn't the same person?

>>72054780
Wouldn't that just be the Cult of the One, from the Matrix?

>>72054902
>Islam
>Leaving the planet

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>>72054909
Chuck Tingle is a treasure.

>>72101376
This kind of extremely simple model of the economy is a classic among people who have no clue how the welfare state works or why it exists. Consider me: my wage is above median and I work to earn more money. I could quit my job and live on benefits but that would drop me below the poverty line. Clearly I am incentivized to work despite the progressive tax I pay, which keeps the children in school, the elderly looked after and the unemployed from starving to death.

Why is it I have my nice job? How could my country open itself up to global trade in this way? Because everyone trusts that if their jobs are destroyed by new economic development they will not go hungry. The winners of the new economy compensate the losers through tax funded services. This reduces the resistance to the creative destruction of capitalism, which in turn facilitates stability and prosperity.

>>72054055
I like mixing weird sci-fi concepts with religious ones.

Like cryogenic ancestor worship! Your honored ancestors yet live in the family cryocrypts, awaiting the day when age and plague are banished from mankind. So until then, respect your ancestor's wishes, work hard for their benefit, and you too shall be interred until your descendants finish the great work!

>>72102163
>Industries are...
All these are unfortunately assumptions and good intentions. You mention robots and technology - how will you make better and better robots if you don't incentivise? Force your engineers to make better robots, while still paying them the equivalent of the janitorial staff? What will you do with the Einsteins and Fermis of this society, who make cheeseburgers by thinking? Force them to think harder and harder? Bold strategy.

You can try all sorts of delaying tactics - forcing more and more cheeseburgers out of the "rich" in various ways, borrowing money to extend the life of the burger factory's loss-making business, all the while claiming that it's proof that your system works. Oh yeah, it'll "work" until the day it doesn't. The USSR lived long enough. Italy is still stumbling along, somehow (propped up by the excess-cheeseburger-makers of the EU, France and Germany and until recently UK.)

One way or another you're stuck with the same problem I demonstrated above: somehow you have to force people to work. And that, may I remind you, violates your precious human rights as well.

>>72103294
Why not?

>>72059034
I'm not anti-Semetic, but I'm not sure how to feel about my nation throwing hundreds of millions of dollars a year at what is ostensibly another first-world nation that should be able to stand on its own two feet by now.

>>72103983
There is a gross misunderstanding of incentive in your thinking. You think I must gain 100% of the extra benefit my extra work produces for me to be induced into making the effort. This is obviously incorrect: some of the benefit is captured by the corporation I work for, some of it goes to the government and some goes to me. As long as working leaves me better off than not working I am incentivized.

Another error is the assumption that the portion of my value I create but don't receive in cash is destroyed. This, again, is obviously not correct. If my employer is well off it is unlikely to be fall to a sudden crisis, like for example a pandemic. If my government is well off it can provide services, which in turn upholds social stability and promotes non-material values that are dear to me.

>>72103727
I have to speak in simple terms to reach simple people. To you I would say, your personal assessment is that you are being compensated adequately for the work you put in. Whether that assessment is true or not, nobody knows. It could be you're actually a half-burger-maker being compensated more than you're really worth - obviously the situation looks great to you. It could be you're an utter rube who is taking one for the team - well, that's your choice.

>Why is it I have my nice job? How could my country open itself up to global trade in this way? Because everyone trusts that if their jobs are destroyed by new economic development they will not go hungry
Or, the cheeseburger factory is not bankrupt YET.

Because you see, implicit in the story is that what really decides the survival of the cheeseburger factory and its workers is the competition with other factories (nations). In the much more complex model of the global economy, the factory doesn't actually produce cheeseburgers for own consumption; it produces cheeseburgers to sell and then buys a basket of goods to feed its workers. (Because a diet of solely burgers is deleterious to your health, I guess.) And the more work the workers do, the cheaper they can make the cheeseburgers for. Especially if the thinkers can come up with ways to automate burger-making processes.

Thus another way Alex can fund her do-goodism is to raise the prices of her cheeseburger product. Then she has more profit and can buy more goods to feed her less productive workers with... EXCEPT that other cheeseburger factories which adopt more efficient practices of not overpaying underperforming workers thus encouraging production, are able to offer a lower-priced cheeseburger of equivalent quality to the Customer. Who promptly buys from that other Burger Factory, and not Alex's.

Keep this up, and someday Alex is going to be so poor, she has to sell off parts of the factory to the Competition.

>(See: China, Italy, OBOR)

>>72104168
Because if you don't, they could get gangbanged by their neighbors. And if that happens, they'll invoke the Samson Option and literally end the world.

>>72074794
Is The Orville worth watching?

>>72104218
>You think I must gain 100%
Obviously not. Only Sith speak in absolutes. There's a value between 0 and 100 to balance incentives to Productive Workers versus social welfare to Underproductives, to find a model of (P + U) = Burger Factory that had an economic competitive advantage over Rival Factory.

The problem is that the EU and even the US (to a lesser extent) is severely out of tilt towards the side of overcompensating UWs.

>assumption that the portion of my value I create but don't receive in cash is destroyed. This, again, is obviously not correct. If my employer is well off it is unlikely to be fall to a sudden crisis, like for example a pandemic. If my government is well off it can provide services
Oh yes. For the sake of the simplified model, I'm treating value as cheeseburgers whether its monetary or in kind or intangible, private sector as workers, and govt+nation as the factory.

Obviously IRL the model is hardly so simple. There are hundreds of factors bearing on the situation. But these are the key points relating to Govt fiscal policy. As I said, Alex has many ways of solving (or delaying) the problem.

One other very important factor outside of fiscal policy which has been touched on upthread is population growth.

>>72104218
P.s. Your productivity to your employer is part of the cheeseburger. Your taxes to the Govt is part of the cheeseburger. See the point about Einstein.

If you're not outthinking e.g. Factory China in making better cheeseburgers, you will lose the Game. If you're not paying more taxes to the Govt (to invest in better burger grills) but instead demanding the Govt spend cheeseburgers on you, when Chan Chinaman is, you lose the Game.

>>72104346
Your analogy of comparing factories and countries is not adequate. You can fire people from a factory after they have become redundant. Revoking citizenship and exiling people from a country if they are not productive enough is not practically possible.

On an open market you can not demand more for your products than they are worth. The reason we are still in business is because our products are the best combination of quality and price to our customers. I know it can be difficult to accept a strategy you dislike for ideological reasons is sound.

>>72104468
Absolutely! Think TOS star trek, as made with modern special effects quality.

>>72100003
I never specified, I guess we could fifth element it.

>>72103774
Un-fucking-believable.

>>72104887
Thanks; I'll give it a watch.

Religion in science fiction can't get any better than that of the Universal Assembly, from "Despoilers of the Golden Empire."

>"Once indoctrinated into the teachings of the Universal Assembly, any man could tap that Power to a greater or lesser degree, depending on his mental control and ethical attitude. At the top level, a first-class adept could utilize that Power for telepathy, psychokinesis, levitation, teleportation, and other powers that the commander only vaguely understood."

>>72104386
Basically the same reason the PRC keeps funding the North Koreans.

>>72105968
hey wait, that's just the Catholic Church

>>72101376
>>72104346
Diff anon. One question. Why do none of your dismal theories have a problem with the disproportionate incentives given to the upper classes? Seriously, why did you avoid talking about that? Stay on topic. Having a zero sum view of things is well and good, unless you insist on ignoring the greedy pie hoarder in your analysis. Less millionaire dick sucking, please.

>>72103151
The PRC has money and they weaponize it against their complainers by buying out media criticism.

>>72106957
And the entire story is historically accurate, but disguised as science fiction.

>>72107076
Fuck China. I hope their government collapses and those poor people can build a nation worth living in.

>>72103983
I mean, the Einsteinz, the Aristotles, they can still make their new robots, progressively lowering the amount that everyone has to work, as technology does, until the robots can make robots, which I would argue is actually already the case, but that's beside the point. You don't have to pay me to type out this paragraph on 4chan, and you can justify that with maybe the fact that I'm getting paid by some other means, like interaction, or something like that. But the truth of the matter, across many studies, is that people are much more productive, more ingenious, when they're having fun, rather than reaping funds. We don't require incentives as much as you might think we do, people do all sorts a shit all the time just because they enjoy it.