The Church of Euthanasia is founded upon at least one great fallacy. To
explain, the population problem is defined by two metrics, population
per amount of resources. If the problem is too many people per resource
we have two options: 1) decrease the number of people or 2) increase the
amount of resources.
That being said, we only have a population problem by the standards of
todays scientific knowledge. Why don't they advocate colonization of the
moon? Or mars? Or asteroid mining? Or solar power? Or
genetically-engineered meat grown in vats? Or hydroponic skyscrapers? Or
cryonics? Or nanotechnology? As Buckminster Fuller observed, there is
more energy in a cubic meter of hydrogen than Malthus could ever have
known. These fancy views on the population "problem" are based only on
the state of technology we have *at this point in time*. We have no idea
what discovery or breakthrough is going to happen a year from now, or
tomorrow. The scarcest resource we have is intelligent life. They can't
take the position they're taking without looking at all of the options
we have available. Death is permanent.
> They do not subscribe to ending one's life because of pain.
> CoV on the other hand, believes somehow in immortality through memes, in
> the supperriority of human etc.
Why stop there? Why not become memes ourselves? There's some interesting
stuff written on uploading, I recommend Moravec's _Mind Children_.
Science-fiction? See for yourself.
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Uploading/
> Although I phrased things badly, I think I subscribe to both churches (and
> would obviously subscribe to satanism if not its hermeneutics) since I am
> both atheist and suicidal. I did my research on memes on church of zero
> (It was about using computational tools for memetics; I suggested
> developing a whole new programming language with a conception of memetics
> instead of using implementaion of OO on existing tools) but I am far of
> being a memetics optimist.
Speaking pessimistically, a lot of memetics today is morass of blither.
I recall somewhere someone actually suggesting (in print) that genes are
memes themselves. Speaking optomistically, The Journal of Memetics is
taking some steps to bring the subject-matter into the world of
peer-reviewed academia. I hope to see some good scholarship in the near
future.
> Care to share your thoughts?
>
> Ariel Brosh, ariel@atheist.org.il, http://www.atheist.org.il
> D/l my recent song at http://audio.mossad.co.il/BarakOded/HeIsGone.mp3
> "If not for that god-full-of-compassion, there would be some compassion in
> the world and not only in god" (Yehuda Amichay, Israeli poet)
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