Years ago my search for meaning ended with the frightening yet liberating conclusion that all efforts of the Human to find meaning in the universe will ultimately fail because no such meaning exists. The Human has therefore the freedom and responsibility to give his life a meaning which is harmonious with his being, other beings and nature. 

I found this meaning in posthumanism, a secular philosophy which transcends the ideas and images of the world of classical Renaissance humanism to correspond more closely to the 21st century’s concepts of technoscientific knowledge. 

During this search, one question kept puzzling me: Since knowledge of the existence or non-existence of God is impossible and irrelevant to human welfare, why does the Human have a visceral need to believe in a higher power?Beyond blaming it on a catastrophic failure in critical thinking or the mental conditioning that comes with being raised and living in a particular family and society, I found one answer in biotheology, a protoscience which explains the evolutionary and neuro-psychological origins of the spiritual impulse. According to biotheologians, the Human animal may be ‘hardwired’ to seek solace in mysticism to cope with existential angst.

Now a new question puzzles me that he is also being asked and actually researched by ethical futurist James Hughes: As neurologists identify the parts of the brain implicated in so-called spiritual experiences, what will be the effect on religion once divine awe, ecstatic bliss, meditative absorption, compassion, and renunciative detachment are all safely available in a pill or with the flick of a switch?On a totally different yet not unrelated train of thought, I am increasingly aware of how much I am surrounded by left-wing bioconservatives in my home city of Montreal, a minority of whom are pseudo-pagans. So I’ve often questioned their decision to withdraw from computer technology, at least in part - using it peripherally perhaps as a means of information exchange, but channelling the quest for personal transformation into an engagement with completely natural processes. Andrew Siliar, a self-described neopagan, offers the typical answer in a letter published in the August-September 1997 Wiccan journal Green Egg:

Paganism is a Nature religion, rooted deep in the Earth, honoring the Gods and Goddesses, feeling the heartbeat of the Mother Earth, loving and honoring all of Her creatures. And now we have this wonderful new technology, along with computer graphics. We can link up with other people on-line, and now we can be techno-witches, and cyber wizards…I’m sorry, but that doesn’t sound like much of a Nature Religion to me anymore… I need no on-line link to let me feel the power of the Goddess, I just touch the Earth and connect.

Ironically, I therefore wouldn’t be surprised to see a growing number of neopagans embrace Hughes’ prediction of what a pervasively monitored and managed global ecosystem would be like in his essay Reconciling Humans, Nature and Technology:

Already scientists are telemetrically monitoring wild herds—from deer, wolves, bears and elephants to dolphins and crocodiles. As computers shrink, nanotechnology permits nonobtrusive tagging of virtually everything, and the world becomes densely crisscrossed by electronic communications, we could indeed live in a techno-ecosystem all watched over by machines of loving grace…

Source:

• De Thézier, Vladimir. Moments of Zen. (2007, February 15). Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, CT. Retrieved February 15, 2007

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Lifestyles, Spirituality, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.