(January 3, 2015 at 4:46 pm)Spooky Wrote: How harsh. But it appears accurate. I agree that big religion is basically a corporation.
In my model of reality corporations and religions share many attributes.
Each can be described as a large, emergent self-replicating pattern riding on top of communities of human individuals. They are alive in the sense that they use energy to maintain homeostasis, they reproduce and fill niches available to them. They even have their own, individual moralities: for corporations, lack of profit is evil which leads to destruction, for religions, failure to maintain belief among the members is evil which leads to extinction of the corpus.
They eat, and boy can they shit!
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat?