singularity snapshots ... hooray for religion!

So there have been an enormous number of things happening in transhumanism lately, including more press for Kurzweil (obviously), more voices on H+ as a religion, and--most awesomely--an evangelical Christian who claims that Jesus predicted the Singularity.

I'm short on time so I'm skipping the Kurzweil press. After all, he gets plenty.

Giulio Prisco recently revamped his 2004 essay on how transhumanism is religious, leading to the usual chorus of "ain't no way my beliefs about stuff that hasn't happened yet and cannot be confirmed in the immediate future are religious!" You can see Giulio's essay here. As I keep claiming, transhumanism is, indeed, a religion. It's nice that a growing number of transhumanists are coming on board with Prisco; publication with H+ Magazine is a sign of some respectability in the community. And it's not as though this is some sort of problem. After all, as I commented on his post, religion is a tool and, like other tools, it is not inherently evil. Moreover, the guy who coined the term transhumanism to refer to this movement (Julian Huxley) actually saw it as religious. I've got an article dealing with that issue (and others) coming out this summer.

Also, BoingBoing recently featured a brief spot on how transhumanism has connections to a 19th century Russian Orthodox thinker.

Someone new is talking about the folks that I lump into the Apocalyptic AI, category, calling them "informatic futurists," which is probably even more awkward than my term. The author, Abou Farman of CUNY, evidently used the term at a conference in May. Can't we get something short and sweet? I'm still dreaming of being the one who gets a catchy term going.

Finally, for now, and best of all...my friend Eric Steinhart notified me that the folks at RaptureReady, whose Rapture Index I've shown to students for years, have now decided that Jesus predicted the Singularity. Obviously, I look forward to the transhumanists' response to being enfolded within the Christian evangelical community.

twittering christianity

so a friend of mine was recently invited to spread a christian message through the "first church of twitter."

i have no idea how many people received this rather unconventional worship but certainly there were some who shared their concerns during the open prayers section, as is apparent from the blog link.

conveniently, this has happened just as i've spent the last 2 weeks reading essays on the nature of identity and community formation in online religion for my majors' seminar at manhattan college.

there's quite a debate over whether or not online communities are "real" communities and what, precisely, is necessary in order to define them so (steady membership, identity consistency, public forums, interactivity, etc.). some authors have, as yet, denied that online communities can be real and several of my students have voiced concern about whether or not the flexibility of identity online diminishes our ability to connect to one another and others are concerned that the elimination of physical contact does likewise. one person at a lecture i gave this past fall insisted that everyone involved in these kinds of communities is psychologically unbalanced, a position that i found patently silly.

for some folks, online religion provides communities that they simply cannot better in conventional religious practice. it seems to me that, yes, some folks online are unbalanced, but that many others are simply ordinary people who find that online religion meets profound human needs. for these folks, religious communities must be possible online...their claims and their actions repeat this daily.