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<h3 class="unnumbered" id="communities">Communities</h3>
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<p>I live in a little town up in the Cascades called Sultan. It’s one of a string of pass-through towns strung along highway 2 and the Skykomish river, little pearls of population separated by peaks and bends in the road.</p>
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<p>Lazy weekend drives up the road deeper into the mountains reveal a strange pattern, though. There’s the requisite church in each of those town, sometimes a few, but each town seems to have sprouted up from a separate denomination. Sultan is Baptist, Startup is Lutheran, with an LDS church on the eastern outskirts, Goldbar is Baptist again, and so on.</p>
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<p>That so many intentional communities spring up around spirituality isn’t terribly surprising. When one thinks of villages in the middle ages, one thinks about concentric rings of houses surrounding a central square and a church. When one thinks about small town America, one thinks of Main Street with its drug store and post office, and the church down at the end.</p>
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<p>Even in my own meeting — the Quaker term for a congregation — one of our professed testimonies is community, though this in a much looser sense of the word. Settled as it is in the south end of Seattle’s University District, one of the more densely populated areas of the city, there’s a distinct lack of that centrality that makes up communities in the sense above.</p>
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<p>This may also speak to the general shifts in attitudes towards and approach to religion and in Christianity in particular. There is a growing wariness around churches, whether they follow a mainline denomination model or a non-denominational evangelical one.</p>
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<p>That’s not to say that they’re not still integral to society; that I’ve heard evangelicalism described as ‘American civil religion’ should certainly speak towards that.</p>
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<p>However, in notably liberal and leftist circles, churches with any sense of power are viewed with distrust. That they they so easily close ranks around abusers, and that they so easily influence the politics of their members leaves a sour taste in people’s mouths.<sup id="fnref:left"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:left">1</a></sup></p>
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<p>We seem to have in-group mentality built into us, though, and even among those who don’t subscribe to any Christian faith and yet find themselves still leaning on spirituality, that community plays an important role. There is a neopagan community with ‘temples’<sup id="fnref:temples"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:temples">2</a></sup> in the area that is just as focused on community, activism, and political togetherness as any Christian church.</p>
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<p>While not strictly pertinent, it’s interesting to note that, as Brad Lee Onishi describes in “The Orange Wave”, prior to the seventies, one’s church was often further left than its membership, leading to organized letter-writing campaigns, donation drives, and political organization behind what are now considered strictly liberal points. It wasn’t until the rapid rise in evangelicalism that this began to change, with the neo-Calvinism core at many of their theologies professing an “if you’re poor/downtrodden/discriminated against, you likely deserve it”. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:left" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
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<p>‘Temples’ in the sense of a congregation, though neither the Chicago nor Seattle temple has location. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:temples" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
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<p>Page generated on 2022-03-30</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2022-04-03</p>
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<p>And, most critically for this exercise, what if I set up a fantastical world of uploaded consciousnesses? One where you could duplicate yourself as many as you want. Want to let that duplicate quit as soon as the task is finished? Fine! Want to let them stick around and diverge into someone new and yet also still you? Great! And hey, as long as anything can be consensually imagined, it’s possible; what does that do for miracles? Does functional immortality change one’s thoughts on the afterlife?</p>
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<p>I imagine so.</p>
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<p>The world itself becomes a frame in which the art is hung, it becomes that lynchpin. The ‘post-self age’, one of the characters calls it, asking all sorts of similar questions: <em>“What happens when you can no longer call yourself an individual, when you have split your sense of self among several instances? How do you react? Do you withdraw into yourself, become a hermit? Do you expand until you lose all sense of identity? Do you fragment? Do you go about it deliberately, or do you let nature and chance take their course?”</em></p>
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<p>So, here is our framing device: founded in 2115 CE, the construct containing uploaded personalities commonly known as the System has exploded in population to an estimated twenty-seven billion individuals with countless more instances forked from those core identities. A world that is stable, beyond scarcity, and beyond even death, appeals to a great many people, and through incentives provided by political entities phys-side, transition from physical to uploaded life has been made as smooth as possible. </p>
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<p>So, here is our framing device: founded in 2115 CE, the construct containing uploaded personalities commonly known as the Lagrange System (or just Lagrange) has exploded in population to an estimated twenty-seven billion individuals with countless more instances forked from those core identities. A world that is stable, beyond scarcity, and beyond even death, appeals to a great many people, and through incentives provided by political entities phys-side, transition from physical to uploaded life has been made as smooth as possible. </p>
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<p>Now that I’ve approached this topic sidelong and crablike, I have a few questions about religion.</p>
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<p>There is a difference between the sense of the numinous that so many of us hold within ourselves and the gnostic idea that there is a spiritual world separate from the physical, that the spiritual world is one purer than the physical.</p>
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<p>It is alluring though, isn’t it? We have these imperfect bodies bound by the rigidity of the laws of physics, and yet our minds are free to fly to wherever we like. We can imagine walking on water. We can imagine feeling the suffering of the world falling away. We can imagine a mind that is all sky. Those things all exist on some higher, purer plane than our crude matter. They must be better, right?</p>
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@ -53,7 +53,7 @@ voices)all</p>
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<p>Framing device, meet topic.</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2022-03-30</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2022-04-03</p>
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