I'm not religious, but from the perspective of someone who has to share a planet with these people, I actually think you're probably right. Religions can make people act crazy too, but a moderate mainline belief system would probably help them figure out which is the ass and which is the elbow. I mean, what are they looking for? (God) And what are they finding? (Void) And what are they trying to compensate with? ("debugging" themselves like they're meat machines) -- it's a nihilism spiral where nothing is true and everything is possible, and so there's no ground to stand on. They need ground to stand on -- so they can figure out who they really are is NOT who they are when they break their brains in two.
I kinda sympathise with what they're looking for. They want a practical religious path to enlightenment - and a way forward that will lead humanity away from its worst impulses. In that way, they remind me a lot of radical Christian movements from the 16th and 17th centuries, and of communist revolutionaries. They feel strongly that modern society keeps people locked in shallow, meaningless lives (which is teenage and based on a limited experience of life, but not entirely) unreasonable), and the way that knowledge and technology are accelerating mean that we're genuinely coming to a point where the definition of reality and consciousness will probably be redefined - as it has been in previous centuries. As far as I understand it (not much), physicists are telling us that a whole lot of very weird shit is possible. That's what makes the religious underpinnings of this so fascinating - these cults are factions and subsects of a priesthood who aren't engaged in astrological calculations or sacrifices to abstract gods - they've built actual new systems of information synthesis; they're playing with the frontiers of mathematics and physics, and consciousness. Is the singularity coming? I have no idea, but this century is shaping up to be the most condensed and batshit crazy epoch that humanity has yet to experience. It's no wonder that young people who in the past might have been drawn to millenial doomsday thinking or the perfect society of the enlightened proletariat, or the cosmic groove of the psychedelic awakening, are currently getting into the utopian promises of AGI.
I'd argue that it's a FEAR of nothing being real (because nothing is certain, and those minds tend to need certainty) that gets rationalised (lol, pun intended) into "everything is possible".
I'm not religious, but from the perspective of someone who has to share a planet with these people, I actually think you're probably right. Religions can make people act crazy too, but a moderate mainline belief system would probably help them figure out which is the ass and which is the elbow. I mean, what are they looking for? (God) And what are they finding? (Void) And what are they trying to compensate with? ("debugging" themselves like they're meat machines) -- it's a nihilism spiral where nothing is true and everything is possible, and so there's no ground to stand on. They need ground to stand on -- so they can figure out who they really are is NOT who they are when they break their brains in two.
I kinda sympathise with what they're looking for. They want a practical religious path to enlightenment - and a way forward that will lead humanity away from its worst impulses. In that way, they remind me a lot of radical Christian movements from the 16th and 17th centuries, and of communist revolutionaries. They feel strongly that modern society keeps people locked in shallow, meaningless lives (which is teenage and based on a limited experience of life, but not entirely) unreasonable), and the way that knowledge and technology are accelerating mean that we're genuinely coming to a point where the definition of reality and consciousness will probably be redefined - as it has been in previous centuries. As far as I understand it (not much), physicists are telling us that a whole lot of very weird shit is possible. That's what makes the religious underpinnings of this so fascinating - these cults are factions and subsects of a priesthood who aren't engaged in astrological calculations or sacrifices to abstract gods - they've built actual new systems of information synthesis; they're playing with the frontiers of mathematics and physics, and consciousness. Is the singularity coming? I have no idea, but this century is shaping up to be the most condensed and batshit crazy epoch that humanity has yet to experience. It's no wonder that young people who in the past might have been drawn to millenial doomsday thinking or the perfect society of the enlightened proletariat, or the cosmic groove of the psychedelic awakening, are currently getting into the utopian promises of AGI.
I'd argue that it's a FEAR of nothing being real (because nothing is certain, and those minds tend to need certainty) that gets rationalised (lol, pun intended) into "everything is possible".