Forgotten Religions That Worshipped Electricity
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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...
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...
"“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.
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.
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.
"What we're doing is going to be a problem if social conservatives in government notice, but they'll go after the Mormons first."
Later: "They went after the Mormons."
"Ok, it was fun but we gotta shut it down now before the government comes knocking. We can still do the silverware thing though."
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.
And gossip, memory, guess and comparison will try to track who is the father anyway. Men will not be ignored.
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.
For example, "Planet of the Apes" book series had the nuclear-bomb-worshiping cult in its 1970 sequel.
Raw mana can also be projected to inflict damage, heal, generate light, heat, etc.
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 ;).
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[1] See e.g. https://www.sv1afn.com/pcbruler.html or http://www.digdice.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/panel22dbi... for some examples.
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...?
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....
And their beliefs have become a lot more mainstream in the past few years. At one time AI risk was pretty obscure and no one took it seriously. Now there are best selling books on it and its entered popular culture. I see it discussed seriously here all the time. That's all because of Lesswrong and Yudkowsky.
The LessWrong crowd is exactly that. They've got their own saints, demons, eschatological prophecies, and, of course, a money basket where you're encouraged to tithe generously (https://intelligence.org/donate/)
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.