The Economy of Godhood
Lincoln Cannon is an American philosopher and technologist who co-founded the Mormon Transhumanist Association in 2006, serving as its president from 2006 to 2016. He is a leading advocate of technological evolution and postsecular religion, combining software engineering expertise with degrees in philosophy and business. ¶ Cannon is also a founder and board member of the Christian Transhumanist Association. He formulated the New God Argument, a logical argument for faith in God that has become popular among religious transhumanists. His academic work includes “Mormonism Mandates Transhumanism” published in Religion and Human Enhancement: Death, Values, and Morality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and “Transfigurism: A Future of Religion as Exemplified by Religious Transhumanists” published in The Transhumanism Handbook (Springer Verlag, 2019). ¶ Mormon transhumanism, as articulated by Cannon, holds that humanity should learn how to be compassionate creators. This idea is central to the Mormon theological tradition, which provides a religious framework consistent with naturalism and supportive of human transformation. Cannon’s work bridges religious faith with scientific advancement, advocating for the ethical use of technology to extend human abilities in ways consistent with a religious worldview.
Godhood is the ultimate conceptualization of power. From many Gods through one God, human minds evolved. We knew many. We knew one. Now the apocalypse is here: whether there’s one God or many Gods, all are being revealed. And as they appear, we are seeing that we are like them.
For theosis, it will never be enough simply to think or pray or even love harder—unless “harder” implies concrete application of knowledge via the technology of the day. Mysticism and righteousness in themselves won’t be enough. Faith without works has always been dead.
I love philosophy. I’d love to believe that high-minded thoughts, in themselves, can save us. I love Christianity. I’d love to believe that grace in itself can save us. And surely we need high thought and grace. But neither will be enough.
I could write for a thousand years. Plato or Paul could do the same. None would be enough. We need more than thoughts and words. We need power. And we need genuine deep incentive to apply that power toward compassionate creation. This is fundamentally an economic challenge.
If we want to see the face of God, we need to do more than open our eyes. We need to change the way we think such that we change the way we act. We need to think what we’ve never before thought, so we can do what we’ve never before done. And that requires incentive to change.
For theosis, we need new abstractions of value. And we need to make them concrete. We need new money. And we need new banks. The love of money was the root of all evil in a monotheistic world. But money was centralized. Money was the incarnation of oppression. That’s changing.
Money can be something different than we’ve ever before conceived. And it must become that before we will adequately incentivize unprecedented change. We need new values in new coins for new ways of cooperating. We need a heavenly economics for a heavenly world.
Syndicated from Lincoln Cannon.