“It’s very ‘Handmaid’s Tale’-esque,” one official said.
The Trump administration has ordered State Department employees to report on any instances of coworkers displaying “anti-Christian bias” as part of its effort to implement a sweeping new executive order on supporting employees of Christian faith working in the federal government.
The department, according to a copy of an internal cable obtained by POLITICO, will work with an administration-wide task force to collect information “involving anti-religious bias during the last presidential administration” and will collect examples of anti-Christian bias through anonymous employee report forms.
The cable was sent out to embassies around the world under Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s name. The instructions also were released in a department-wide notice.
You could always choose to believe in a scientifically plausible religion! Here’s one of my favorites:
Imagine a far future utopian society. Something Star Trek or better. No one wants for anything, even aging is cured.
However, utopia has a problem. How do you raise children in paradise? In a world where your every whim can be conjured up for free, how do you raise children without them turning out to be a bunch of spoiled sociopaths?
Simple. Don’t even try. Raise them in a simulation. Choose the environment carefully. Raise them in a simulation of an earlier historical era. Far enough back that they will experience some struggle, but not so far back that they’ll be living as slave in ancient Rome or something. You want to educate people, not torture them. And ideally in a period that has a concept that the future can be far more advanced than the present. Ancient societies didn’t really grok the concept of technological advancement. The 21st century is a great era to build an ancestor simulation around.
And, just like that, there’s your religion. When you ‘die’ in this life, you just wake up in the real world. Maybe there’s even a judgment component there. Maybe you have to go through several lifetimes if you don’t live a good enough life in the simulation. Are you a sociopathic billionaire in this life? Back in the tank with you, you’re going around the wheel again until you learn not to be an asshole. When you’ve shown you can live a just, noble, and compassionate life, only then are you allowed to graduate from school and enter into the real world. You’re biologically immortal, so you can just keep spinning on the wheel as long as necessary. Oh, and you’ll be reunited with all your departed family and friends, once they graduate as well.
There. A completely scientifically plausible religion that requires zero supernatural forces or entities. It rewards the virtuous, punishes the wicked, provides for the resurrection of the dead, and promises eternal paradise. No God or gods required. It’s a hybrid of Christianity and Buddhism packaged in a techno utopian wrapper. I call it “The Church of Graduation.”
Thats a fun thought, thanks for sharing
Wouldn’t that like…fuck with one’s psyche at a fundamental level? You die, a traumatic experience, and then you wake up and you’re literally in the “afterlife”? Wouldn’t that just be a massive confirmation bias to the individual, despite being entirely fabricated by the people who run this hypothetical program?
Am I overthinking this?
Sure. But how I think of it is most people go through several virtual lifetimes. Your memories are temporarily suppressed during each one. In the end, they all come together, and you have the wisdom of several lifetimes to guide you. A mindfuck, yes. But utopia has some really good psychologists. And they wouldn’t just dump you from the tank out onto the proverbial sidewalk. There would be a lengthy orientation and education process. There’s no rush. You have all the time in the world to come to terms with things.
I don’t know if you’ve ever read the short story “The Egg” by Andy Wier, but if not, I think you’d like it.
https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
Yup! This is a similar idea, just grounded entirely in our physical universe.