

A programming religion? - hackerboy

If a religion were to be based around computer programming, what would it be like? Who would be the main deity/deities, how would the worship be performed, what sort of buildings would the worship be performed in (e.g temples, churches, etc) what be the concept of afterlife (if any), etc?&#60;p&#62;I asked this on stackoverflow and they closed it! :(
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pbhjpbhj
I think that programming communities as they stand fit in the same
psychological and spiritual "space" as religion and religious practice. Do you
really think anyone would sincerely take up a deity you just invented?

Presumably, in programming terms, computers are your creator - except they
create logical streams rather than being responsible for creation of those you
are proposing to be the worshippers (from what I can tell) who in fact are the
creators of the machines that would form the focus of worship.

I don't think you can form a deistic religion on this basis. Perhaps if we
have computers that can write their own code, replicators running on vacuum
energy, and ability of computers to generate their own parts and have control
over biological systems that can affect the permutations of DNA which
precipitate? Such machines could mould mankind and be perpetually self
generating. Perhaps then it would make some sense to have religion focussing
on the programming.

This does lead on to how broad a definition you'd accept. Recall the t-shirts
with "God said ..." and the Maxwells equations (
<http://www.zenker.se/Surprise/quantum.shtml#Links> ) "... and there was
light". This is effectively claiming the universe as an actualisation of a
program made by God. DNA too is a program for replicating with alterations
DNA.

So, on a loose enough definition one could argue that Christianity could fit.
One of the Matrix Neo as Christ metaphors weighs heavily in this direction; a
Christ figure that enters the program in order to fix a bug and release those
held captive in the algorithms. Or something.

Ooh, that was long, who's round is it?

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hga
For a serious treatment of this concept read _The General_ series by David
Drake and S.M. Sterling. It's set on a post-fall of interstellar civilization
planet where high technology is literally worshiped, but no longer really
understood (and all flavored by it being set in thinly disguised Byzantium
times, e.g. pay attention to the comments on "vandals" in the second book).
"... save us from the hard rads..." (radiation), something about their souls
being saved into ROM (or at least the good parts) ... it's rather interesting.

I have a friend who posited a "Church of the Cyber Revelation", based on the
idea that that final book of the canonical Bible can be construed to say most
anything.

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gexla
I think once Google's / Amazon's datacenters become self aware they will force
us to worship them or we will all die. Anyway's you want to see religion in
action, start talking about how X IDE is better than all the others, or how X
programming language sucks.

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wanderr
In the magical world of programming, _you_ are god (or at least a god),
assuming you are a programmer. Programming involves creating something from
nothing; what could be more god-like than that?

So I guess such a religion would involve self-worship?

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shaunxcode
I actually just registered <http://www.churchofturing.com> for such a purpose.
I am thinking lambda the ultimate but with more of a focus on the parallels
between [meta]programming and philosophy.

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Groxx
Lisp:

    
    
      Deity / Deities: the Left and Right Parenthesis.
      Worship: (NULL ()).
      Buildings: paired arcs of varying sizes, always less than a semicircle.
      Afterlife: garbage collected.

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iterationx
A religion based on programming might make sense if you were an AI bot or
something. Other than that the metaphor doesn't work for me.

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DanielBMarkham
Sufficiently provocative for an upvote. I'm interested in what other HN'ers
have to say.

I'm a lukewarm fan of Tipler and a believer in some form of The Singularity.
I'll go further out on the wacko limb and say that the reason we haven't been
contacted by ET is that _true_ intelligence is machine-based. Mankind is just
an evolutionary bump in the road on the way to a true machine lifeforms.

Having said all that far-out stuff, I can't imagine a religion based on
programming. Programming is just one way machines interact. It'd be like
having a religion based on lymph nodes.

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Mz
I imagine "temples" would include online spaces (like Hacker News).

