So I guess I’m religious after all. Science without science fiction is like candles, lamps, and incense in places of worship without prayer. Just a way to make light and nice smells.
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Science fiction is the dominant religion of modernity. A lazy, wishful, and comforting extension of a default way of knowing about real things to a way of imagining nice things. Older epochs of religion simply do that with less powerful default ways of knowing
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Most current science fiction seems fairly dystopian though. Less of the “nice things” version of religion, more of the “Left Behind”-type stuff.
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That’s nice things! Any deterministic narrative with any sort of logic of justice impossible onto it is “nicer” than the anomie of meaningless non-determinism
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Polytheism is a religion based on extending the default way of knowing we think of as “agency” for example. Knowing-by-becoming. Explaining things in terms of the transformational desires of agenty things. Monotheism is based on knowing-by-being.
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We've been headed here since the Neolithic Revolution. Now bereft of the old consolations, we fall back to the final redoubt: technological utopianism.
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you’re gonna have to tak about specific examples or else it may be really easy to argue with you
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I don't know that that's correct. Was true up till, maybe the 70s. Now I think it's children's fiction that's the religion. All people are basically good (except a few baddies who are irredeemably bad), problems solved by pluck and green-lanterning. Fantasy trumps reality.
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Feminism, humanism and climate change is more the dominant religion. Most people are sceptical of the future, especially regarding the environment. They can not envision an future different than how it is today. In the tech hubs I can imagine SF is the dominant religion.
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