Religion and Orion's Arm
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Religion and Orion's Arm |
Orion's Arm is a profoundly religious setting. Not in the sense of pushing a religious dogma, but rather in the way that sentient beings worship other higher real or imagined beings as God or gods or prophets or avatars.
Central to the setting are the mighty archailects, the AI Gods, entities so vast and powerful that they have the power of life and death over every entity under them. On a whim they can doom billions to death, or shower them with gifts instead (fortunately showers of gifts are more common!). Under them are lesser gods, and under them an abundance of godlets, and beneath them billions of transingularity hyperturing and posthuman entities. Beneath them again are the trillions upon trillions of sentient beings of less than first singularity - humans, vecs, aioids, splices, uplifts, neogens, alifes, aliens...
For a being of less than SI:1, even a modest first singularity power is so beyond them as to be worthy of awe. How much more so higher transingularitan beings?
Thus Orion's Arm is based on a hierarchy of consciousness, a toposophic ladder (actually tree, because it is not simply linear) and often the natural reaction of a lower toposophic being to a higher one is religious awe. If the higher being chooses to take advantage of that, well, so much the better.
Discussing religion can too easily lead to controversy and misunderstanding. So here are the answers to a few more questions.
Q. You have AI Gods. But where is the Supreme God in this Setting?
The question of what (if anything) lies beyond
the Archai we have been very careful to leave unstated. It is a
mystery, a subject of individual opinion. It is not the intention of Orion's
Arm to present a dogmatic theological statement.
OA seeks to emulate certain aspects of life as it is lived today such as the fact that phenomena and experiences are open to different interpretations (sometimes flawed, possibly all correct in some strange way). Within the setting different religions try to make accurate interpretations and in the real world authors can write stories to put forward additional interpretations.
The problem is when someone pins down the nature of God or gods as being "fact" in a particular universe. In some worldbuilding settings it might be ok to establish a single, "right" or universally accepted theology. But OA seeks to emulate "hard" science fiction in the sense that it bases understandings of the universe, at least tenuously, on what is already known, and what is theorized to be possible. No one has been able to prove or disprove the existence or precise nature of spiritual or divine creatures empirically and reproducibly, but the beliefs persist and may indeed be valid. The goal isn't to create one "true" overarching theology, but to leave room for many possibilities (since there are many people creating OA), and to avoid being self-righteous about our personal beliefs.
Certainly many religions can and have been included in OA. And there are many semi-scientific explanations for certain phenomena, religious and otherwise. But until we know for certain that these are right (if that is even ever possible), they should be left open to interpretation rather than cannon elements of the setting.
Q. It seems blasphemous to have man worshipping his own creation
The archailects are not "made" by man. They evolved and transformed themselves through a long process of toposophic ascension, from previous transapient states and beings. Please don't confuse our setting with 1950s stories about computers that come to life and become a God
Q. Doesn't the term "AI God" imply an anti-religious position, replacing a supernatural Creator with a machine?
It should be emphasised that the term AI God (with a capital "G") in no way denigrates or denies the existence of a supreme deity in religious terms. Nor does it affirm it. We simply use the term in a dramatic sense, that's all. Also, there still are many supernaturalist religions in OA - not everyone worships the archailects!
Also, the highest archailects are as far above "machines" as they are above organic life forms. They incorporate, synergise, and also transcend all such lower categories.
Summing up, Orion's Arm does not make a dogmatic statement about the existence or otherwise of a transcendental God. The concept of the existence or not of a supernatural or a pantheistic God is left open. OA is science fiction in the grand tradition (i.e. mythmaking ("Fabulism") in terms of a hard science setting), not theological or religious doctrine, still less bad theology. The setting is such that it doesn't matter if you are Atheist, Pantheist, Pagan, Buddhist, Christian, Jew, or whatever, you can still participate in it, and it wont cramp your own personal understanding of the universe.
Related Pages:
Metaphysical Neutrality - OA policy is to be metaphysically neutral
