cyb - cyberpunk

Snow Crash

>>19907
I think most of the intolerances usually linked to religion will fade away for the majority of the religious people, but a small minority will oppose this trend and reinforce and strengthen their bigotted opinions, basicly pulling the religious world apart.
This does not only apply to the religious people, but to humanity in general.
Once a community starts interacting with other communitys and other people in general, racist and discriminating opinions will become more of a point, because some of the original people accept the newlings as their equals, and some strongly refute seeing them as such.

This means that any sort of opinion-system will be pulled apart more and more through globalisation and through cyber-isation (since most cyber-nations seem to be quite globalized). This will first result in several black-and-white camps, but after a couple of opinion wars are fought out(physically or verbally), it will result in a diverse world of mostly unique opinions, that will accept other similar and non-similar opinions as equivalent, simply because there are so many of them.

In a cyberpunk society it would work to keep the masses down. There also could be a militant religious group dedicated to doing the opposite.

>>19913
>This will first result in several black-and-white camps, but after a couple of opinion wars are fought out(physically or verbally), it will result in a diverse world of mostly unique opinions, that will accept other similar and non-similar opinions as equivalent, simply because there are so many of them.
...and then there will only be one culture and diversity will be dead.

Atheism has grown in many western nations for the last number of decades but I think there will at some point come a levelling off point. You'll hit a base line of religious people.

Also, I find many polls about religion are slightly manipulative: The question "Are you religious" to many people is not the same as "Are you spiritual" and is CERTAINLY not the same question as "Do you believe in God".

There are slews of people who might not feel affiliated with a faith/church, but actual do believe in the tenets of the faith.

There's numerous ex-Catholics who still believe in Catholic understanding of God, but don't what to be affiliated with the Church currently because of paedophile priests being uncoverd.

I'm sure there's numerous ex-Muslims, Shia and Sunni, or I guess lax-Muslims or whatever term you want to use, who still believe in the fundamental theology of Islam, but have cast off the term "Muslim" due to Global-Political events of our era.

Religion and theology has been a fundamental facet of the human existence for all of recorded history and I expect it to remain with us for a long time yet, if not infinitely.

The concept of God, an entity beyond us all, I think will always remain with us, and the need for thoughts/beliefs that transcend our material world I think is something we all need. In fact the modern world, which is becoming so distant from nature, arguably increases our need to find something spiritual.

I'm religious and consider myself sort of a Cyberpunk, or a Proto-Cyberpunk anyway, for what's it worth. I don't believe in the "conflict theory" which says there's a zero sum game between science/progress and religion. I think both can and have many times existed together just find. The march of progress does not in fact mean the end of Religion, and I think both the enlightenment and Industrial Revolution showed us that.

Religion will twist and turn and adapt, as it always has. The concept of God is forever-enduring, whether you agree with it or not.

Yeah religion is going to be effectively dead in the west in about a generation.

It'll take longer for the middle East and soykaf tier countries but in general religion is going to be an indicator of backwardness and low status.

>>19933
in the uk there is kind of an uncanny valley effect like the pic but on the y axis it's "religiousness" and on the x axis it's "class" at x=0 you have poor people who follow any superstition and genuinely believe they have a chance at winning the lotery, they might not go to church but strongly identify as either catholic or protestant depending on where you happen to be. as x>inf the number of that drops off and by the time you get to middle/upper middle class churches are just nice things to look at on your holiday to Kent or where ever. Then you hit upper class and it sky-rockets again, their are two reasons for this:
one, these people hold traditions very close, the kind of people who still have their great great grandfathers tweed jacket in the drawer, so they are not going to be dropping something as momentous as the family religion at the drop of a hat.
secondly as x tends towards queen, their their entire status becomes more and more reliant on religious institution and even if they think it is total rubbish they can't ever express it because the whole stack of cards that holds them up starts to crumble.

what is also kind of interesting as you look at religious people going up in class the ratio believers:practicers swings from mostly believes it but doesn't practice to mostly practices but doesn't believe (obviously this is a relative definition "not believing")

Not really a note about "religiousness" but more of a side not, or anecdote about religion in a cyberpunk universe.

In the futurist (2085) campaign setting my friends and I homebrewed we have the catholic church as a pretty powerful political entity again, basically having them stay the course with the (kinda sorta) progressive beliefs they're sponsoring now, and getting even more popular in south America and southern Europe as those countries have generally been trod upon by the modern (mostly protestant) rich nations. So when North Africa and South America become more powerful and start to rebel against the more northern powers it has a lot to do with the teachings of the modern papacy.

Not that it's something I believe can happen, but it is fun having swaths of the poor and down trodden run to the church to escape oppressive governments and megacorps.

>>19929
I'm roughly in the same boat. I'm a Christian since I hold many of the views associated with Christianity. But even if you don't believe in a personal God, there's no denying that the forces involved in bringing the universe into being are much bigger and much more significant than us.

I think the biggest difference between most Christians and myself is that I know my worldview could be completely wrong, and that's fine. I think reason and faith are different things. I use reason to handle the majority of my thinking; I use faith to handle concepts that are beyond my abilithaty to reason. Whenever I find reason can sufficiently explain something, I no longer handle that concept with faith.

I'm not pretentious enough to think that I alone can understand the human psyche, or how the entire universe expanded from a single point, or any forces could exist outside our universe to make that happen. So I use my faith to give meaning to those concepts and to make them worthwhile to pursue.

>>19974
>abilithaty
I must be tired.

>>19974
if you don't believe in a god you don't believe in significance either though. how can something have value in anything but your own eyes, there is no higher power to assign that significance or value.

>>19993
>how can something have value in anything but your own eyes?
is this a bad thing?
does anything ever have value beyond them?

>>19995
if you believe in god things have value beyond your own eyes. which is what i just said

its not a good or bad thing.

>>19996
sorry, meant if you believe in god than you also believe things have value beyond your own eyes.

Regardless of whether or not a "belief in God" remains a majority opinion, the religious sense will still prevail. I think religion, in the traditional sense, will remain for some time. People that are marginalized, will turn to it, as will people who are prosperous. However, if you look at religion as an aspect of the zeitgeist, I think that, although its fundamental views and tenets have dramatically shifted, its overarching, unifying function persists. To look at a culture's religion, one must look at the core beliefs held by a society. In the current case, the underlying, unifying principle is the technological. Devout members of all major religions, as well as the non-religious, embrace the technological. The technological has transfused and transubstantiated all major religions. Even radical groups that oppose it grapple with it, and, according to the Nietzschean mantra, they will become the monster they are fighting.

One shouldn't underestimate the significance of the technological in modern religious belief. In fact, such a belief is paramount to our contemporary belief system. To see this, at least in first world countries, just look at spending habits. The tacit assumption that underpins most people's lives, even people of conflicting religious views, is that technology tends to, ultimately, resolve problems (which is contrary, at the very least, to the cyberpunk view, (incidentally, it is also contrary to the ancient Christian view. In fact, since the scientific revolution, the church has increasingly donned the skeptical, progressive, evolutionary, in short the technological, belief system of science)). A good example of the religious instinct being grafted onto the technological can be found in E.M. Forster's story "The Machine Stops".

Ultimately, regardless of whether or not most people answer yes to "Do you believe in a higher power?" (and I believe most will answer yes for quite some time), such a belief will persist, in some form (increasingly tied to the technological) and that will be the unifying, guiding principle of whatever shape civilization has taken.

I'm a citizen of the world. I went to film camp. I've read Sartre, I've read Thomas Pynchon, I've read Ayn Rand. I've been to Italy, I've been to France, I speak French. I've been to Spain, I've been to South America, I've been to Kenya, I've been to China. I've backpacked across Europe. I prefer tea to coffee. I've been to Greece, I love Greek food. I'm a foodie. I'm always on the lookout for a great little place to get breakfast. Sometimes I go to Barnes and Noble and lose track of the time. The black people that I've met said I have a lot of flavor. I love my Mac Book but I also love my Mac Book Pro. Because it has the word "pro" on it... Short for "prolapse". I drive an ancient Volvo that barely starts. The Matrix and Inception are the first movies in the last ten years that made me really think. And yeah I paint, no big deal. I think conventional painting rules are stodgy, archaic. To bend the spoon you have to realize there is no spoon, think outside the box and coexist. Coexist! And one more thing, if you don't know the difference between "your" and "you're", your, you're. You're a fuarrrking idiot. Get the fuarrrk off my Facebook wall.

>>20001
what do these two symbols mean? The second one looks like a Satanist pentagram.

>>20000
agree with a lot of what you are saying but this rant has nothing to do with this thread aside from the OP picture and im pretty sure you were that guy who got triggered in that thread about the dude who programs as he travels the world on his bike.

you probably know someone like you are describing and just assume anyone who fits one of the categories fits all of them.

>>20001
mars ♂ = man. venus ♀ = woman.
>>20002
Modern pagan movements probably. the pentagram itself has esoteric roots which were picked up again by modern occultists (esp. Anton LeVay) for Satanism.

>>20001
Holy Church of the Big Blue E

>>20008
Oh, I get it. So it's some sort of gender equality thing.

>>19927
>and diversity will be dead

This is something that I fear, anon.

Recently I virtually moved to the other side of the world. If I want to go back in any reasonable way I will have an entire 24 or more hours of travelling to get back, just for perspective. And you know what I find where I am now? In many ways it is the same stuff here as it was at home. Sure there are some differences, people speak a different language and shake hands a lot more. But overall, when I just walk around, I feel like I could have moved like four hours away and gotten a similar sort of foreign ness.

>>19974
You remind me of a fellow whose hands I can see moving in front of me.

I do not really beleive in religion. But I do not really beleive in something else clearly either. Mainly my view is that we can understand some things, and that number of things is growing. We cannot at present understand everything and we probably never will. That is fine. I do not really mind if there is something that I do not understand, and wehn I do not understand it I sort of patch over it with trust and beleif.

The first question that I get when it someone learns that I do not beleive in God is often "so you beleive in Evolution?" or "so you beleive in the Big Bang?". I usually answer these questions wil "no". Partly this is to cause interest so we can talk, but this generally reflects my view. In order to understand anything I must beleive in something, and the main thing I beleive in is science. That through investigation, orbservation, and experimentation, we can understand truths from the universe. Therefore, I do not beleive in evolution; as far as I care evolution could be proven to be nonesense and flawed tomorow. What I beleive in is that we can get evidence and build understanding.

>>20016
Or ancient Roman/Greek Religions. But probably the gender thing was not an accident.

If we want to look at modern religion, two forms of it stand out as particularly "technologic":

1. Modern Religious Liberalism--a form of religion that tries to be embracing of a wide variety of different lifestyles and by and large encourages the adoption of modern technology as part of a progressive agenda. Modern liberals who consider themselves Christians in America, for instance, being progressives, have no qualm with modern technology which is one of the greatest signs of progress and they support the full enjoyment of this technology for any purpose they wish provided it doesn't "hurt anybody". Liberal leaning Christians in America for instance, are far more willing to accept something like cloning than many of their conservative counterparts.

2. Technocratic/Utilitarian Fundamentalism-- We see this in the Middle East quite a lot, but also in America. These sorts of fundamentalists are mainly concerned with technology's impact on social ethics, but they don't really have any problem with the technology itself and are often the ones championing technological progress until it oversteps a certain moral boundary. Contrary to what some people might like to think, the conservatives in America who oppose stem cell research are not against progress or technology at all. The fact that many of them buy up so much of our modern gadgets, the fact that there are so many hundreds of cell phone apps catering to that demographic of American society, and just how many modern businesses are owned or partially owned by them disproves this. Many Islamic fundamentalists too are not poor Bedouins and farmers who rant about modern technology's effects like Ted Kaczynski, but people with engineering degrees from modern universities. The use of the internet to spread radical jihadism or even to wage cyber-war is well known to many terrorism experts. Iran is also a very fast developing country as far as science/technology goes and this has happened under the direction of the fundamentalist government, it also has some of the most technological surveillance of its citizens of any country.

If one group wishes to pursue the liberating aspects of modern technology to the highest degree possible, the other wants to reap the reward of power and wealth the technology offers their countries while limiting many liberties it offers. However, both of these groups could probably be said to have been opposed to the traditional social order of each world religion which while not necessarily hostile to new technology being developed, DID NOT place technological "progress" very high on their ultimate agenda.

>>20002
>>20008

I know at one point the Pentagram was supposed to have been adopted from paganism as a Christian symbol symbolizing the five points of pain of Christ on the cross.