The Same as All Gods Have Done Before You: Transhumanism and the Religion of Tomorrow

Speaker 1

Our last speaker today is John Ogden. His bio is really short. He’s participated in a number of the MTA meetups that I’ve been at and is the author of When Mormons Doubt: A Way to Save Relationships and Seek a Quality Life.

Jon Ogden

Thank you. Thank you, I appreciate that. We’ve been standing for quite a while. I wonder if you could just stand up for maybe 30 seconds and stretch, because Well, this is the last stretch, right? Maybe feel into where you need to stretch and stretch there. And maybe do one big breath. Yeah, shoulders, knees, and toes, yes. Thank you.

Jon Ogden

So, I’d like to start today by talking about Paradise. It’s as good a place as any to start, right? So, here we see Adam and Eve. With their horse friend, their peacock friend, ostrich friend, right? Just living in peace and harmony. In paradise, and everything is well, until you can see up on the branch the serpent shows up, and the serpent says, In the day you shall eat You will not surely die, your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as the gods, knowing good and evil. Right? So you should be as the gods. There’s this sense, there’s this tension in this story that I really like. They’re in paradise and yet it isn’t quite sufficient, right? And I think this tension could play out in our lives day to day. We can be completely At peace in the present, and yet there’s this yearning to reach for something else, right? And so we move toward it. There’s total satisfaction and dissatisfaction. And so we move. We want to be like the gods, right? Or to improve.

Jon Ogden

And so I’d like to start with this quote from Joseph Smith, You’ve got to learn how to be gods yourselves, the same as all gods have done before you. And then immediately follow up with the question, what sort of gods? And I’d like to posit that the history of gods isn’t Terribly impressive. So, or it’s maybe tremendously cruel. So, we have this story of the Flood, God killing everyone but a family and an ark. Right?

Jon Ogden

The ancient Israelites decided that they wanted The warrior god Yahweh to lead them because they wanted to win wars, and so they chose Yahweh and They had mixed success. They won some wars, lost some, right? But they wanted to worship Yahweh above all. They started a polytheistic, but then decided: no, Yahweh’s the only God, and we’re going to choose Him so that we can win more wars.

Jon Ogden

The Hellenistic god is a really gruesome painting, but it’s the Hellenistic gods ate their children. Right? You have stories of that. Here’s Saturn. Being brutal.

Jon Ogden

The Hindu gods. Jackson showed the happy side. Here’s the dark side of the, you can see around the necklace. Human heads. So that’s gruesome.

Jon Ogden

And then even in Christianity, you have the idea that the whole world is about to be burned, right? Coming in, it’s going to be a complete destruction. The four horsemen of the apocalypse, Jesus gets in on this as well, talking about some will be taken. He says, As in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man, and so gods destroy.

Jon Ogden

So, do our gods embody our destructive traits? If we go back 200,000 years ago at the dawn of Homo sapiens, you can see how we’ve, wherever we go, wherever we migrate. we bring destruction as well. You can see that we eliminated the Neanderthals and other species, and we cause this destruction. And as human population rises, we see a rapid rise in extinctions as well. We see ecological damage. And cruelty in a mass scale.

Jon Ogden

Well, this is local. This is ten miles away. So I grew up here in Utah Valley and Utah Lake. It’s been they’ve had problems with algae blooms. And when My Mormon ancestors came here. We overfished the lake in the 1870s and introduced invasive species. And we dumped raw sewage into Utah Lake until 1967. And so we might think That these the things that we’re doing today are going to have distant effects, but that’s not so, right? I don’t really Swim in Utah Lake, especially when there’s algae blooms, because we’ve affected it so much. It says that 90% of the biomass in the lake is crap. Or carp, sorry. That was I did not I did not intend that I did not intend that, but yes, that was well um hold on, parodian slip. Um And so we’ve made Provo less like paradise in this sense, right? Our ancestors have made it less paradisitical.

Jon Ogden

And so we must ask, do we become what we worship? Is that what’s happening? Do we see, oh yeah, those are the gods that we want to emulate, and then we start emulating them even in their destructive capacities? And if so, I would posit that we must worship better gods. We must worship gods that aren’t racist, that aren’t sexist, that don’t have bloodlust. Right? This is the direction we must head in if we’re going to really answer the question if we want to be the right sort of gods. And our concept of God needs to evolve, not just in what we can become, but in the vision that we have. So, the Vision must be ecumenical and full of love, even for the weakest among us, if we’re really going to be godlike in the sense that we want to be godlike, right? We’re not aiming just to flood the earth out of anger and vengeance. That’s not really what we’re going for here. We’re not going for an early concept of God.

Jon Ogden

So, what’s happening is that more and more young people are turning away from religion. I think this is one component in that, in the reason why it’s happening. That they’re seeing You know what? I just don’t find that to be ethical. I don’t believe that vision of God matches my ethical worldview. A racist God, a sexist God, a God of bloodlust. So they tap out, right? They just say, no, no, thanks.

Jon Ogden

And the worry that I have is that there might be some sense of like a god of distraction, right? We might be going from like These cruel gods and saying, No, thanks, I’m going to tune out to whatever I’m going to tune out to. And it’s not to say that any of these things are inherently bad. But that’s a lot of time. They say that fifty billion hours is the equivalent of one human living six million years. You think of what you could do in six million years. Probably a world of perfect. Oh, yeah. Exactly. That’s life.

Jon Ogden

Or what about just Brutal consumerism. This is a billboard. I looked it up on Snopes. It’s a real billboard. And it’s there’s only one way to live: the Trump Way, right above. Homeless people, right? And it’s a Trump Tower, you know, this is the one way to live. Dramatic disparity in the haves and the haves-not, and just a brutal sense that all that matters is getting the most toys.

Jon Ogden

So let’s talk about the religion of tomorrow. I’ll stop right here just for a second to say that really what’s motivating me is a personal story, and it is For lack of a better term, my own faith crisis. Just realizing that Mormonism that I grew up with is not The thing I thought it was. And it’s far more nuanced and not as happy as I maybe thought it was. Though I still have this longing for so much of. What is right in the religion. And after this faith crisis, I felt a sense of nihilism and a sense like I didn’t know what to hold on to. And I eventually decided that I was going to try to hold on to three ideas. Vision, paradise coupled with knowledge, transcend our past, yet include and embrace truth, beauty, and goodness. I’m going to skip over that. But the three ideals are truth, beauty, and goodness.

Jon Ogden

And I see these as the head, the heart, and the hands. Just the raw, most basic elemental. Aspects, elemental virtues that we might pursue. And I might define them. Actually, I’m going to come, I’m going to define them first. So, truth I see as intellectual honesty. I don’t know exactly what to believe in terms of a cosmology or all the fine details in that regard, but I know that I can stand for intellectual honesty, and that is an attitude, the pursuit of truth. Beauty being, I know that I need more spiritual experiences in my life, more profound spiritual experiences, to really pay attention and be attuned to the heart. And really nurture those moments of beauty and profound presence and goodness, having compassion for the least among us.

Jon Ogden

So, from these three ideals, I can turn to these three people who talked about them. Albert Einstein said, The ideals that have lighted my way and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully have been kindness, beauty, and Truth.

Jon Ogden

And W. U. B. Du Bois in the middle here, he said that the purpose of education wasn’t just to get a job, to work in a factory, the purpose of education is to come to a deeper knowledge of truth, beauty, and goodness. That’s the goal.

Jon Ogden

And Bertrand Russell wrote, Probably my very favorite piece of writing right near the end of his life, he s It’s just a short piece in an introduction to one of his, I think, an essay. He says, Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life. The longing for love, which I would say is beauty. The search for knowledge, which I would say is truth, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind, which I would say is goodness. And then that he goes on to explain what he means by that in really profound, beautiful, poetic language. And he’s doing this as an old man looking back, saying, These are the keystones of his life. So intellectual rigor, spiritual sensitivity, and compassion for the least among us.

Jon Ogden

So when we ask what sort of gods I don’t know the exact answer. I don’t know all the answers to that. But I hope that we can touch into these elemental virtues and ideals and have them be a guiding star. as we take each step to have an anchor of sorts as we move forward.

Jon Ogden

I’ll just end with a thought about transhumanism and why I’m so drawn to it. Because Again, I don’t know the answers, but I know the evol the general direction. And becoming more godlike is the general direction as long as it’s grounded in this compassion for the least among us. I’ll say that as we move in this direction, we will find Zion and we will find paradise and it will be coupled with knowledge. Unlike the story of Adam and Eve, where it was paradise without knowledge, we will move in that direction. And I’ll end by saying I believe our descendants are saying, come to Zion, come to Zion. Thank you.

Speaker 3

I think I have just a few moments. Maybe? I don’t know. Two minutes. Okay. Yeah, Jackson.

Jackson

Okay, so I’m not giving this push. Pushback, but I’m anticipating that this could be a pushback you could receive. What would you respond for people that say that you’re looking to create a god in your own image or you know that you were constructing your ideal God. You were creating the God you want to worship, which is kind of what you suggest.

Jon Ogden

Yeah. Yep. I would say yes. I don’t mean that. I don’t know. To me, it doesn’t strike me as. as bad, because I say all of the gods have been in the image of humans. So but it’s not I don’t I don’t have a good image. I’m I’m listening. You know, for that. I’m not positing any specifics about what that God might be, but I’m trying to be sensitive to what that might be, if that makes sense. So. Carl, I don’t know if you had questions.

Carl

I was gonna just say that, but like, since when has it ever been any different?

Jon Ogden

Right. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Carl

Yeah, but I might also have to say something. Like, we’ll point out the dangers of not doing that.

Jon Ogden

Right. The dangers of not doing that is uh Consumerism. You just default to the easiest. It doesn’t have to be consumerism necessarily, but it’s living mindlessly, in my opinion. If you’re not deliberately. Envisioning the future you want, you’ll end up with the future you don’t want.

Speaker 6

Third rule does.

Jon Ogden

Interesting, elaborate.

Speaker 6

Well, who has time to watch next when you barely have enough food to Who has time to go to a war crowd when you’re worried about your children dying? Who has time to worry about all these beautiful benefits and sing Bertrand Russell spend time in the library when you’re worried about your crops dying. These are first world gods. These are not third world gods.

Jon Ogden

The gods of distraction?

Speaker 6

Yeah, God’s third world, but even the gods who replace them. And people play world warcraft in the third world.

Speaker 7

Yeah, let us know.

Speaker 6

I’m worried about that there’s so much disparity in life’s experience that sometimes you project. the ideal that we would like to see and people are struggling to survive for them, a God that can come save them from their pains and travails is much more important than Than you know, truth and beauty.

Jon Ogden

I a hundred percent agree with that.

Carl

I would say many people surf actually had more free time than a lot of people have today. So uh You know, you know, that’s a point to make that like they may not play well before Warcraft due to his cards or whatever, but you know, there there are plenty of ways that people various strategies

Speaker 1

Sorry, these are usually half the next time we have. Thanks.

Speaker 7

Hopefully, you can catch him after in the hall. Thanks, Ben.