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By Root 523 0

Me that Online Religion by Brenda Brasher. It is a delightful romp through spiritual cyborgs, virtual monks, and the new world of cyberspirituality. Global prayer-chains, e-prayer wheels, cybercast seders, and neo-pagan cyber-rituals are all practiced from home, finally making Martin Luther’s proclamation of “every man his own priest” a virtual reality. Even mainstream religions have gone online, offering adherents and potential converts a smorgasbord of doctrines to download (except Scientology. whose lawyers pounced on an ex-member who was posting their religious documents like Torquemada on a relapsed heretic). Much of this book will leave you LOL (for the computer illiterate that’s laughing out loud), my favorite being Brasher’s discussion of the more than 800,000 web “shrines” devoted to Princess Diana and other celebrities. “Scanning fan sites, it is easy to believe that the spiritual discipline of imitato Christus has been replaced by imitato Keanu Reeves.” For those who do not wish to risk choosing the wrong God to achieve immortality. read about the transhumanists. who believe that some day we will be able to download our minds from our protein brains that survive only about a century, to silicon-chip brains that can last hundreds of centuries, by which time they can be downloaded into something more permanent still, ad infinitum to infinity. Is this in any sense possible? The transhumanists think it is, but since the technology is not yet available cryonics is a temporary solution, a quick fix if you will. Recall the brouhaha that developed shortly after baseball legend Ted Williams died, when his son whisked the body away to Phoenix, Arizona, where it was cryonically frozen at minus 320 degrees. The hope is that one day “Teddy Ballgame” would be resurrected to play again. If Williams’s body were reanimated one day, would it still be the cranky perfectionist who was the last to hit .400? In other words, even if future cryonics scientists could bring him back to life, would it still be “him”? Is the “soul” of Ted Williams also in deep freeze along with his brain and body?

Duke University philosopher Owen Flanagan would probably answer “yes,” if by soul we mean the pattern of Ted Williams’s memories, personality, and personhood, and if the freezing process did not destroy the neural network in the brain where such entities are stored. But as for some ethereal entity that continues past physical death (whether buried, cremated, or frozen), Flanagan would offer an emphatic “no.” In his latest book, The Problem of the Soul, a courageous and daring look into the heart of what it means to be human, Flanagan builds a bridge between two irreconcilable views of the mind: the humanistic/theological versus the scientific/naturalistic. The former includes a place within our brains for nonphysical mind, free will, and a soul, but fails to offer any tangible proof that such things even exist. The latter is grounded in solid empirical data but fails to show how humans as evolved animals can lead moral and meaningful lives. Flanagan’s purpose is to reconcile the two, and he has done so successfully in this crisply reasoned work. “Can we do without the cluster of concepts that are central to the humanistic image in its present form—the soul and its suite—and still retain some or most of what these concepts were designed to do?” Flanagan’s answer is an emphatic “yes.” To that I add “amen.”

It may simply be that I resonate well with Flanagan because I am a nonbelieving, nontheistic, naturalistic scientist. After a lifetime spent reading the obfuscating works of philosophers and theologians twisting logic into pretzelian contortions to prove such unprovable concepts as God, the soul, and free will, I want to stand up and cheer when I read passages such as this one from Flanagan’s opening salvo: “There is no point beating around the bush. Supernatural concepts have no philosophical warrant. Furthermore, it is not that such concepts are displaced only if we accept, from the start, a naturalistic or scientific visions of things. There