Jon Ogden

This talk asks a hopeful question: What if it all works out? The speaker envisions AI's positive potential at three levels—garden, city, and planet. At the garden level, he invokes the simple paradise of Epicurus: friends discussing ideas in peaceful surroundings, suggesting we may already be closer to Eden than we realize. But this vision falters when one considers the unhoused sleeping under Zion's Bank, prompting a turn to the Mormon vision of Zion where there are no poor. Finally, at the planetary level, the speaker sees AI's greatest promise in its capacity to detect microscopic toxins and enable truly sustainable material cycles—going from “one to zero” as nature does, so that everyone might eventually enjoy the simple luxury of talking about ideas with friends.

Jon Ogden proposes that religion’s future resembles an API—a plug-and-play system where individuals maintain their cultural and religious context while integrating wisdom from other traditions. Citing the Dalai Lama’s advice to learn from Buddhism while remaining Christian or Jewish, Ogden argues this syncretism is not new—from ancient Egyptian-Greco-Roman religious blending to LDS General Conference speakers quoting C.S. Lewis and Shakespeare. In an increasingly connected world where locality no longer limits exposure to ideas, seeking truth wherever it surfaces becomes both natural and necessary. The challenge lies in maintaining community and particularity while developing a global perspective on wisdom traditions.

The speaker presents a speculative fiction concept exploring a future Mormon practice of “redeeming the dead” through technological resurrection. In the story, a man named Scott Cahoon dies in a car accident and experiences a near-death vision where he encounters his ancestors stretching back through human evolution to single-celled organisms. Upon awakening in the year 2432, he learns that a future religious community has been systematically resurrecting their ancestors by compiling their life data—a technological fulfillment of genealogical work. The narrative serves as a transhumanist myth, offering a telos that combines traditional religious themes of ancestral connection with emerging possibilities for digital preservation and resurrection.

Jon Ogden’s presentation, “The Same as All Gods Have Done Before You: Transhumanism and the Religion of Tomorrow,” explores humanity’s inherent desire to transcend current limitations and become “gods.” Ogden questions whether the traditional, often destructive, depictions of gods throughout history should be the model for our aspirations. He challenges the audience to consider evolving our concept of God to encompass ecumenical love and ethical considerations, arguing that doing so is crucial as younger generations turn away from traditional religion due to its perceived unethical underpinnings—suggesting that humanity must strive to worship better gods to become better beings.