
Forgotten Religions That Worshipped Electricity - petethomas
http://www.ozy.com/flashback/the-forgotten-religions-that-worshipped-electricity/79554
======
danielvf
> "So the community encouraged polygamy, orgies and generally engaging in as
> much sexual activity as possible. Needless to say, the Oneida members were a
> happy bunch, and the commune lasted more than three decades."

Actually, Oneida had a commitmee of elder woman. You applied to the committee
to have sex with someone one time, and they could approve or deny you. (This
was designed to prevent forming couples, slow down the amount of sex, eugenics
to make perfect humans, and make sure the founder got all he wanted). Oneida,
while not monogamous, was pretty far from a sex fest (unless you were the cult
leader).

Given how wrong the article is on Oneida, and that's the only one I know
about, I'm suspicious of the rest of it.

Here's a great (long) article on Oneida:

[http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-polyamorous-
chr...](http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-polyamorous-christian-
socialist-utopia-that-made-silverware-for-proper-americans/)

~~~
narrator
So earlier on HN I was wondering how two willing co-workers could proposition
each other for casual sex without creating sexual harassment problems for
themselves or the company.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14854649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14854649)

The Oneida cult was basically a business where everyone worked but also had
lots of casual sex and they had a solution. Elder women served as the go-
between. Men would not ask women directly for sex. This is a bit like Tinder
with a trusted person to tally swipe rights and swipe lefts.

From the article: [http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-polyamorous-
chr...](http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-polyamorous-christian-
socialist-utopia-that-made-silverware-for-proper-americans/)

"“The word ‘interview’ was the Oneidans’ euphemism for a sexual rendezvous,”
Wayland-Smith says. “It was mostly men who requested the interviews, but they
would never ask a woman directly. A couple of older, respected women of the
Community acted as go-betweens. A man would say, ‘I want to have an interview
with so-and-so,’ and he would ask this go-between to speak to the woman. In
theory, a woman could decline without being embarrassed. In practice, the
group was small enough that there was definitely social pressure like, ‘It
will be good for you to sleep with this person.’"

There would be less social pressure in this cross between LinkedIn, Legal Zoom
and Tinder because it would be a SAAS app and not a person being the go-
between, but it still would probably be a problem if the office started
getting gossipy, which would inevitably happen.

~~~
dalbasal
This is great parody!

People always misunderestimate the difficulty of formalizing things that are
easy for people being people to deal with into legible systems that an
institution (like law or a company HR team) can deal with. People tend to know
what harassment is. There would be some disagreement if you ask a group of
people, especially in ambiguous case. People's opinions will be culturally
informed, informed by bias...etc. But, groups of people have an instinctive
knack for this.

People do _not_ have a knack for creating institutions that can work with this
sort of efficiency at determining truth, or justice... Institutions need
formal rulesets, absolutes.. like machines made of people.

Anyway, since harassment is very relevant in the context of the quasi-
litigative, something like this could actually happen.

The precoital consent form is a cliche already. But, some sort of formalized
policy for hitting on co-workers in a harassment-safe way... That could
actually happen.

------
tzs
> [...] the Oneida Community of New York. Founded by John Humphrey Noyes in
> 1848, the Protestant commune believed that Jesus Christ’s power was a form
> of liquid electricity that could be transmitted to believers through touch.
> As the most intimate form of touch is sex, the group also believed that, if
> they had enough of it, they’d create a spiritual battery that would make
> them immortal and create heaven on earth. So the community encouraged
> polygamy, orgies and generally engaging in as much sexual activity as
> possible.

Wait a second...wouldn't having sex among themselves only serve to
redistribute the power more evenly among the group? To increase their power
and gain immortality wouldn't they need to be having sex with Jesus?

BTW, according to Wikipedia: "The Oneida Community dissolved in 1881, and
eventually became the giant silverware company Oneida Limited". No mention of
liquid Jesus electricity in the Wikipedia article. Googling for it only turns
up a few mentions, and they all or almost all seem to stem from one article.

~~~
BjoernKW
> wouldn't having sex among themselves only serve to redistribute the power
> more evenly among the group

Reading that I thought about the perhaps more conventional sense of 'power' in
that context. Monogamy to some extent at least is a social construct designed
to establish and consolidate power.

Marriage and the concept of legitimate children was the pivotal aspect of
feudal society. Inheritance today still largely depends on this notion.
Dynasties are possible alone because of lineage.

If it doesn't matter who has sex with whom and who someone's parents are
because there's no clearly delineated nuclear family this might indeed work as
an equaliser.

~~~
gus_massa
You are underestimating the women. They will remember who is the mother of
who, and try to favor their own children. Perhaps with enough time it will
develop into a matriarchy instead of a patriarchy. (Elephants and whales are
organized in a matriarchy. Is this a good comparison?)

And gossip, memory, guess and comparison will try to track who is the father
anyway. Men will not be ignored.

~~~
emodendroket
Well, one reason the ancient Greeks largely prevented women from leaving the
home was anxiety about false paternity. A woman's maternity is never in doubt
but a man's paternity can be.

~~~
tzs
> A woman's maternity is never in doubt but a man's paternity can be.

That's not always true. See the Lydia Fairchild case [1], and the earlier
Karen Keegan case [2]. These are both cases where women were told, wrongly,
based on genetic testing, that they were not the mothers of their children.

Fairchild was pregnant when the controversy over her maternity arose, and the
court overseeing that controversy ordered a witness to attend the birth and
ensure that blood samples were taken for testing from both Fairchild and the
newly born child. Those samples were tested, and the result was that she was
not the mother of that child.

How could this be? The answer turned out to be that both Fairchild and Keegan
were chimeras. A chimera is a single organism composed of cells from different
zygotes. This can happen when multiple fertilized eggs merge. In other words,
both of these women were conceived as part of a set of fraternal twins, but
sometime during development they merged with their twin.

Some organs and systems developed from one of the twins, some from the other,
and so when you do a DNA test you get the DNA of one or the other, depending
on where you sample. In Fairchild's case, for instance, DNA taken from her
skin and hair did not match her children's DNA, but DNA from a cervical smear
did.

Human chimeras are thought to be very very rare.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild)

[2]
[http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013452](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013452)

~~~
emodendroket
Well, OK, excepting a very rare circumstance ancient people would not have
understood, depending on your definition of "maternity".

------
Aardwolf
This very much reminds me of the "Children of the Atom" in the Fallout games,
who love to worship nuclear installations and the atomic "glow". Their
language is not unlike the language found in the article such as a miraculous
healing through being "hit by an electric current". Makes me wonder if the
Fallout designers based the Children of the Atom on this.

~~~
Terr_
I thought it was a more general Cold-War-era apocalypse thing. As a late 90s
game, Fallout reuses a bunch of tropes from earlier decades in the form of
dark-humor.

For example, "Planet of the Apes" book series had the nuclear-bomb-worshiping
cult in its 1970 sequel.

------
shostack
While I don't know about religion, I personally love to think of electricity
as "magic" or "mana" more specifically. It is the magical fuel that powers
modern-day magic. We etch arcane runes (circuits), pump mana (electricity)
through them, and generate magical results.

Raw mana can also be projected to inflict damage, heal, generate light, heat,
etc.

~~~
iliis
Ha, yes, definititely! Did you ever come into contact with RF design? Things
like antennas are quite literally drawing-pentagrams-on-the-floor-style
witchcraft ;) [1]

You might also like [2], a story where magic is real and treated as just
another field of science/engineering (yes, there are ISO standards for your
magic circles and everything ;).

\---

[1] See e.g.
[https://www.sv1afn.com/pcbruler.html](https://www.sv1afn.com/pcbruler.html)
or [http://www.digdice.com/wp-
content/uploads/2008/08/panel22dbi...](http://www.digdice.com/wp-
content/uploads/2008/08/panel22dbiwymiary.jpg) for some examples.

[2] [https://qntm.org/ra](https://qntm.org/ra)

~~~
Pulcinella
"On a Pale Horse"[1] also takes place in a world with magic and science.
Airlines have to compete with magic carpet companies and computers are often
used to cast magic because they can be incredibly precise.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_Pale_Horse](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_Pale_Horse)

------
cr0sh
I wouldn't be a bit surprised should a serious religion spring up that
worships the concept of a GAI, and in fact may as a part of that worship, work
toward implementing it.

I am really surprised that Mentifex hasn't started such a cult himself
already!

/or maybe he has, and it's a cult of one member only...?

~~~
throwaway91111
A GAI? What is that? Do you mean Gaia?

~~~
ch4s3
the gp means General A.I. aka Artificial general intelligence
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence)

~~~
dgfgfdagasdfgfa
Why not just type general AI?

Also, why would that be a particularly interesting worship object? I'd be
curious to read some imaginative sci-fi if anyone can furnish it....

~~~
ionised
The 'General' in AGI is emphasised because it specifies the type of AI that is
essentially self-aware and able to learn and reason as humans do.

~~~
dgfgfdagasdfgfa
Right, I know the term. But it's not hard to type and it's not hard to read,
unlike GAI or AGI (I can't tell which) and it's hardly the only interesting
concept that you can construct with those letters.

------
wott
In a few decades, we will add cryptocurrencies adepts and their many mining
cults to this list.

~~~
koolba
I can see the descendants of bitcoin millionaires starting a cult and
referring to their founder as the prophet of profit.

~~~
valarauca1
The first Grand Nagus gave the rules of Acquisition. Every Ferengi business
transaction strictly followed all 285 rules.

------
WheelsAtLarge
Seems like people can find spirituality/religion in just about anything. It
reminds me of the Cargo Cults. They started as contact with more
technologically advanced societies was force on less sophisticated societies.
It was less than 150 years ago.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult)

------
gwern
For those wondering about "Electricity And Religion": it's pg213 (
[https://books.google.com/books?id=NqQZ3XSvWcAC&lpg=PA213](https://books.google.com/books?id=NqQZ3XSvWcAC&lpg=PA213)
), chapter 27 of _The Truths of Spiritualism: Immortality proved beyond a
doubt by living witnesses_, Wilson 1876 (not to be confused with Henslow's
1919, _The Proofs of the Truths of Spiritualism_), which as the name indicates
is a rather credulous retelling of American spiritualism. Appears to not be a
full essay but one of the summary descriptions of it from the table of
contents ("Electricity and Religion - Christian Generosity - Brick Bats and
Theology - Baptized into Glory").

------
ars
According to the article itself, they did not worship electricity - they used
electricity as a metaphor for other things they worshiped.

------
nitwit005
You can find advertisements for seances referencing "X-ray Science", and
various products attributing mystic powers to radium and the like.

All that technology was so amazing that it seemed genuinely magical: Light
without fire, instant communication, seeing through objects, etc. We just
don't appreciate it having grown up with it.

------
danharaj
Personally I worship Lain Iwakura, the one true electric god.

~~~
freeflight
Blasphemy! Lord Raiden is the only true electric god!

~~~
Rhinobird
By Zeus, this displeases Thor!

------
stretchwithme
I thought everybody did.

