By Matt Maier
We get asked a lot: “why a church”?
It’s a fair question. Who starts a new church anyway? The idea sounds crazy, or at least grandiose.
Humanity First
We want to prioritize the best interests of Humanity above anything else. Humanity first. What kind of organization does that?
Our scope is broader than any of the non-profits we’re aware of. In pursuing Humanity’s best interests we need to tackle the “big questions”. We settled on churches as organizations that can encompass life and eternity.
When Humanity isn’t first priority
A hyperbolic example is the cliche paperclip maximizing AI. The idea is a super powerful AI prioritizes paperclips over everything else, except maybe it’s own existence. The AI ends up wiping out the human race as the AI progresses towards its goal of maximum paperclips. No hard feelings. The AI doesn’t necessarily want to destroy Humanity. That’s just a side effect of pursuing it’s on top priority (paperclips).
A less extreme, but more tangible, example is the modern food industry. The food industry has a top priority of making profit. They prioritize making more money over everything else. So Humanity has unhealthy products pushed on it. No hard feelings. Maybe try to exercise more, or take some supplements. The pharmaceutical industry invented a lot of it’s own profitable products to treat the negative effects from the “food” products. Nobody is willfully trying to make Humanity sick. It just happens as a side effect of prioritizing profit above anything else.
We want an organization that can prioritize Humanity’s best interests above paperclips and profit. That way we can push back against forces that might degrade Humanity, whether or not it’s intentional.
Most situations aren’t as clearly black/white as mindlessly creating paperclips. Most actors don’t actually have a well articulated set of priorities and many share the same priorities but disagree on how to pursue them.
For example, humans needs to move around, which means expending energy, which means side effects. Burning fossil fuel is in Humanity’s interest on one hand because it’s a cheap, flexible source of energy. On the other hand it’s not in Humanity’s interest to burn fossil fuel because it distorts politics and pollutes the only environment we can currently live in. We want to make sure someone is framing the situation as “what best advances Humanity” because not everyone will. Additionally, it would be nice if the Humanity-first pressure was large enough to be a relevant factor in a situation as big as global economics and geopolitics.
By articulating a Humanist philosophy and evolving a Humanist church we can create large force pushing Humanity towards it’s best future instead of hoping it happens accidentally.
Competing Priorities
We are not including any ideas to the effect that other priorities are bad. Other priorities simply are. No hard feelings. We will work to maximize our top priority (Humanity first) even if that means clashing with other priorities. We expect to cooperate with the vast majority of people and organizations in the vast majority of circumstances.
Pro-human, not anti-X
This is a positive priority, not a negative priority. We are advancing Humanity’s agenda, not degrading any other interests. If it turns out we can’t all have everything, which seems likely, Being Human Church will ensure Humanity has a champion fighting for it.
To see more of what we are about check out our Sunday Services on YouTube about Why a Humanist Church? and the Being Human Church foundational philosophies.
Is humanity really big enough to prioritise first? I say no. And what will happen when transhumans arrive on the scene? Who’s first then?
I wrote a cover story for Humanist magazine about this titled, “When the Human in Humanism Isn’t Enough”:
https://thehumanist.com/magazine/march-april-2016/features/human-humanism-isnt-enough
There are huge overlaps between human-first and life-first priorities, so we’d see eye to eye on the vast majority of things. But the latter life-first priority seems more useful and correct at the extremes to me, which is where the most difficult moral dilemmas do and will arise.
As I said in another article about replacing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:
“If we are to consider needs at all, we must enlarge our circle of concern as far as it will go. If I held that the flourishing of Ed Gibney was the absolute highest priority, others would find me selfish and stop working with me. They might even imprison me depending on my acts of callous selfishness. Only a lack of power and opportunity would stop me from acting for myself by exploiting others. If, instead, the flourishing of my family were the highest priority, I would provoke feuds with clans or mafias around me. If the flourishing of my community were the highest priority, ideological crusades and genocides would be eventual outcomes after intractable disagreements. If the flourishing of my nation were the highest priority, wars would be the result. If the flourishing of my species were the highest priority, we would commit ecocide without a second thought. If my ecosystem were the highest priority, our invasive species would produce monocultures with little resilience in the face of change. It’s only when our absolute highest priorities are concerned with the evolution of life in general that we can find ways for all of life to flourish together and ensure its long-term survival.”
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/sacrednaturalism/2017/10/an-evolutionary-hierarchy-of-needs/
I don’t think we’ve articulated what we mean by “humanity” yet. Roughly, we mean anything that is part of creating shared meaning. So there are degrees, like babies and dolphins are pseudo-humanity, but mostly there is a clear difference between humanity and not-humanity. For example, chickens are not part of humanity, because they don’t show any signs of creating meaning, let alone meaning we could share with them. Life is merely a host for meaning, so focusing on life creates contradictions that focusing on meaning resolves. For example, it’s appropriate to eradicate the polio virus because it’s too much of an existential threat to humanity’s meaning-baton race. Similar in kind, but at a different degree, it’s appropriate to not worry too much about whales, because whales don’t have any chance of escaping the next killer asteroid or the sun swallowing the earth. Only humanity can direct resources towards a project of that scope. So human priorities are fundamentally different from whale priorities.
Eeks. When exactly did meaning show up in the evolution of life? It sounds like you are treating it like some elan vital that makes humans super duper special. And the lack of respect for other forms of life is appallingly hubristic to me. I cannot support that at all.
The way we see it, meaning showed up when we gained self-awareness and the ability to run mental simulations by projecting thought into the future. There isn’t anything “special” about it. Instead, it is simply a condition that exists due to our complexity.
We do not “lack respect” for other forms of life. Instead, we respect them through our individual perspective and by considering the impact of other forms of life on humanity. We would absolutely eradicate diseases to protect humanity as we see continuing meaning as priority one. However, we also need to understand the consequences of our actions.
For example, there is a discussion ongoing about eradicating mosquitoes. If we did that, we may save human lives in the short term. However, we may also bring about the collapse of the food chain in the long term. Therefore, we must be very cautious about being cavalier with other life forms.
To challenge your charge of hubris against this idea, what would you define as “forms of life?” Are diseases life? Animals we eat? Bacteria we eradicate? Where is the dividing line between life and non-life? What happens when two forms of life are existential threats to each other? Which should win?
When you say “what will happen when transhumans arrive on the scene?”
Do you mean materialist, cyborg type transhumanists? Or transcendental-self type transhumanists? Both?
I mentioned this to Matt on twitter, but the comment is relevant here for anyone else who might read it. David Sloan Wilson wrote something recently that I think helps justify your project being called a church. He wrote:
“…there is not one but two major definitions of religion. One is based on belief in supernatural agents. The other is Emile Durkheim’s definition: “A system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”
The rest of the article was about how science and religion need not be at war. (Hint, it depends on your definition of religion.)
https://evolution-institute.org/science-and-religion-need-not-be-at-war/
(Note: I also wrote a post once about how different definitions of “sacred” allow me to be a part of a group called Sacred Naturalists: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/sacrednaturalism/2015/10/ed-gibney-01/#sthash.R4HWrPCL.rOfoHkEv.dpbs)
Yeah, those are basically the two uses of “religion” we’re running into. There are also many associated ideas that aren’t part of the religion but are closely linked in people’s experience, such as faith, dogma, authority, etc. I would tweak your “religious replacements” idea to be more like “replacements for traditional religion” because it seems like the replacements need to basically be new religions to function as replacements. I think the opportunity is that the people who need “religion” are starting from a very different place than the people who invented “religion” back in the day.