Sexuality

Park your formulaic sex at the door

Like a lot of people, I took note a couple of weeks ago when Cosmo, Cosmopolitan Magazine, the fun girl’s bible, ran a story with pictures laying out 28 Mind-blowing Lesbian Sex Positions.

Flicker/creative commons

Flicker/creative commons

The modern Cosmo was the brainchild of its brilliant editor and author Helen Gurly Brown in 1965, who started dialogs on topics unheard of in print at the time, skillfully merging sexuality with a commercially available mainstream magazine. Long considered a sexual freedom advocate, she told women they could “have it all.”

With this article on lesbian sex, and few others on gay, bisexual, and transgender subjects during the last year or so, Cosmo can be commended for branching out and acknowledging lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, appearing to be more inclusive while trying to tap into that lucrative market they’ve ignored for decades. They are trying even while acknowledging that many or most feminists and lesbians have shunned Cosmo, put off by so much editorial about how the average woman, once objectified, can make herself sassy and attractive to their male partner/s.

While wondering if any lesbians were consulted in the making of that article I came across some criticism by real lesbians who posit that this entire concept seemed to have been the product of frat boys based on their porn fantasies (pretty much the style of most of the magazine’s stories). That may well be true but I think it was overreach — when making fun of the positions, these critics called them “stupid” saying they were either undoable or useless, dismissing them entirely.

It was impossible to hold up one’s own body weight, let alone the body weight of the other person in half of them. We had to balance on our tip toes and contort our bodies in the most insane ways. And, most importantly, there was nothing arousing about any of it.

What I think is being missed here by all parties is that touching bodies in unusual or unexpected ways can be rewarding, bringing you to heights you might at first have overlooked. It seems that, once liberated from the constraints of men, feminists and lesbians have gradually become more like men in how they approach satisfying their own desires.

We have sex. We fuck. We use our fingers and our bodies and our mouths and our toys and we get ourselves and each other off. Just like straight people do. There’s stimulation and penetration and vibration. There’s licking and sucking and smacking and grabbing. 

Instead of exploring erotic encounters that expose oneself to unexpected delights found all over the body, not rushing so much and staying curious to couple all parts of the body in surprising ways, men, and now it seems many straight women and lesbians, tend to recreate a slalom with specific goals to be met at every turn, usually in a certain order to get to their orgasm in as straight a line as possible.

But that is so, so boring.

Even the critics include a paragraph with two contradicting statements, aptly portraying the push and pull between anxiety about reaching the goal of orgasm and the desire for sex to be more than just that.

But there is not, I repeat, there is not anyone rubbing foreheads on each others’ belly buttons or rubbing bottoms against anyone’s sternum, not in the name of having an orgasm any way. By making sex all about an orgasm we miss the erotic excitation of our minds as well as our bodies.

Sex is an erotic encounter that stimulates physical, psychological, and, some agree, spiritual growth. If you focus less on scoring the goal you will play a more artful and nuanced game that is rewarded of surprises and new stimulation.

Slow down, set aside your usual formula for a week and see what happens.

 

The Sexual History of America

US-GreatSeal-Obverse600px

First, consider the mottoes and symbols of our nation, but meditate upon their true meaning.

E Pluribus Unum—from many, one—unity without uniformity

Annuit Coeptis—he approves our undertaking—divine providence is assured

Novus Ordo Seclorum—a new order of the ages—we’re here to change the world

What is this all about? Are these empty classical boasts, or do they hold genuine meaning for understanding our national purpose?

The study of the history of sacred sexuality in “western culture” in turn shows how these ideals, ideas, and practices date from ancient, if not prehistorical times, progressively converging to the present day when we are at last able to begin to openly celebrate sexual freedom in all its manifestations.

The common basis of association that brought together the “founding fathers” was actually a system of rational thought that had existed for centuries in secret groups, which finally emerged in Western Europe, triggered the Enlightenment, and inspired the deistic but non-sectarian approach that was able to unite thirteen colonies into one nation. The label publicly attached to this world view was “Rosicrucian.” If any labeled tradition can be said to lie at the foundation of our nation, it is Rosicrucian.

Rosicrucianism involves many things beyond such ideals, but the single, central core of the system has always been the sacred employment of sex and eroticism in the service of individual moral growth and spiritual perfection. And this dynamic, too, is being reborn today in evolution of American society.

For more, see one of our presentations, first delivered in 2011, Dawn of the New Age.

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

 

Another for Independence Day: Sexual Freedom is the Bedrock of All Freedoms

Another special for Independence Day 2014, we are representing one of our key issue posts that explains why sexual freedom is the underpinning of all of other freedoms. Please let us know what you think, and for more see A Manifesto for A New Age of Sexual Freedom and Transhuman Erotic Freedom.

Why Sexual Freedom is the Bedrock of All Freedoms was originally published on July 17, 2011.

(También en Español)

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

Our sexual pleasure response is completely individual. When we feel it, those precious moments, we experience unbridled exhilaration that is at the same time indescribable by mere words, even in great art or poetry.

There is only one way to replicate this experience of unrestrained freedom and that is to recreate — re-create increasing favorable circumstances to plug in at a healthy pace. Although sexual pleasure exists by definition in a time and space all one’s own an imperative to share it and enhance it with others is built in. Studies have demonstrated over and over again the irrefutable benefits to mental health, prosperity, and longevity of a life regularly punctuated with the desired number and rate of pleasurable encounters. This inviting pressure brings people into relationship, the midwife of personal growth.

These cumulative states of sexual pleasure, those knowings of  at-one-ment in the universe, can be mutually acknowledged as both a singular experience and the bodily guarantee of true pluralism. It is the one authentic human experience that virtually all other humans agree exists, and no other experience comes close to this criteria. Pluralism leads inevitably to democracy and the extension to more and more people their birthright to pursue sexual freedom and all other freedoms that emanate from this mutual acknowledgement of each other’s immutable bodily freedom in the form of sexual pleasure.

Our own sovereign portal to experience physical pleasure and love in infinitely inexhaustible manifestations makes possible a mutuality of individual autonomy that is expressed as true pluralism and the quest for universal equal rights for each person without qualification. Everyone shares that inner experience of freedom to the same extent everyone else does and is why civilizations progress in making all freedoms universally felt in society.

This inner experience of sexual pleasure is what joins together each and every person on earth, an organic unity all of us can recognize and agree is important, even a type of magic, that makes our world better day by day.

Party on.

Eros and Agape are One, another excerpt from The Unseen Journey (working title)

The primary reason we created VenusPlusX a few years ago was to establish a repository of our solutions for freeing humanity of its many misconceptions about an individual’s direct connection to cosmic technology. It is also the reason we decided to capture the essential premise of our work in book form. Here is another excerpt of our upcoming book, tentatively entitled, The Unseen Journey, that may prompt some comments and criticism, both of which we crave and adore.

Anira/WikiCommons Fair Use/Educational

Anira/WikiCommons
Fair Use/Educational

We declare that eros and agape are one with unified Love. We declare that the erotic is a major component of cosmic Love. We declare that the ability to experience Love, either as physical or spiritual, is one and the same gift of the Supreme to all creatures. We declare that the erotic has a functional purpose in any vitology (way of living in dedication to destiny) and that failure to acknowledge this underlies the social stagnation and oppressive belief systems that characterize human society today.

© VenusPlusX, 2013, All Rights Reserved.

What we are talking about here is a non-religion, transhuman in nature. There’s more about these ideas in our Library and all over this website, including a preliminary reference that will become an Appendix to our new book, A Course in Immortality (and in Spanish, Un Curso En Inmortalidad). And, in connection with the relaunch of VenusPlusX last week, we’ve added A Manifesto for The New Age of Sexual Freedom.

In order for humankind to fully explore and manifest its destiny, we start by accepting everyone where they are, as they are, of course, but that doesn’t stop us from railing against the coercive systems established by governments, religious hierarchies, and corporations that enslave us to false values and principles and interfere greatly with happiness, both individual and collective. Immediately important to this cause is sexual freedom, global equality rights, the end of racism, and tangentially things like net neutrality. In connection with the relaunch of VenusPlusX this month, we have published A Manifesto for The New Age of Sexual Freedom, which covers these matters further.

Right now, there is so much garbage and senseless noise all over the globe, piled higher and deeper with each succeeding generation of misinformation, all of it interfering with all good will efforts to recreate a world where every human retains from birth the inherited and inherent freedom of self-expression and is mutually respected, even revered, as a cosmic citizen, a living vessel of love from, and part of, this cosmic reality.

Like the agrarians, marxists, and feminists that paved the way, we aim to preserve that which is old and good, and disappear that which is old and bad, sometimes very bad, and build on or create new and better systems, voluntary associations, that uplift humanity within an atmosphere of mutual support where no one is enslaved to another.

 

The Sexual Freedom Project: The Stigma of the Slut

Why does society set different standards for women and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender people? What do we do that may facilitate these standards instead of working to change them?

Join The Sexual Freedom Project cast with your own video or essay (via columbia@venusplusx.org), and we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you.

More videos here.

 

More on Giulio Prisco’s Sex and the Art of Cosmic Governance (Part 3)

 

Giulio Prisco

Giulio Prisco

This is the third installment about Giulio Prisco’s upcoming book entitled, tentatively, Tales of The Turing Church. A draft of his chapter, “Sex and the Art of Cosmic Governance,” that includes recollections of his many interactions with VenusPlusX Co-founder Dan Massey.  Part 1 included an excerpt from Dan’s talk at the Transvision conference where we met Giulio for the first time, and Part 2 focuses on ensuing interactions.

Giulio is a physicist and computer scientist, and former senior manager in the European space administration. Giulio works as a consultant and contributes to several science and technology magazines. In 2002-2008 he served on the Board of Directors of Humanity Plus, of which he was Executive Director, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Italian Transhumanist Association. He is often in Hungary, Italy and Spain. You can find more about Giulio at Turing Church and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET).  

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Participating in the August 2012 Discussion Group of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, Dan described very eloquently the idea that other civilizations in the universe may have already developed resurrection technologies and may be already “providing resurrection services” to less advanced civilizations like ours. If this is the case, we and everyone else in the universe will be resurrected by the Cosmic Government.

Here is a (slightly edited, but almost literal) transcript of Dan’s words:

“I think you start out realizing that the universe is vastly older than the little area within the light sphere that we can see from this planet on the backwater of the Milky Way galaxy.

Let’s say just for the sake of argument that it is not merely a few billion years old, but it is a few trillion years old, maybe even quadrillion years old, I have no idea obviously, no way to find out, really, right now anyway, but I feel that there is a well organized cosmic government and civilization, that populates literally millions and millions, I really should say billions and billions (Carl Sagan) of planets scattered throughout this part of the universe, and they are all, you know, most part of them are in some degree of communication with each other, there is some sort of coordinated sense of purpose in this community, and they have been at it for a very long time by our standards.

So during this time, you expect that this kinds of things, life extension, and mind uploading, and all these other technologies that we speculate about, would have been long explored, analyzed, built on, other things developed. Frankly, I think the promises of many religions of personal immortality on some terms, sometimes the terms are absurd, but the idea of personal immortality is not absurd at all, because just as we think that we could resurrect our dead, and we might go out and help other people to resurrect their dead, well, rather than being at the front-end of that process, we are at the back-end of that process, we are the clients, not the service company for the project.

Why? Because there is some really big project going on in the universe, and it’s bringing about the universe in unity and harmony. It has really long ways to go, but on this planet it has incredibly long ways to go, because, you know, whether you call it the fall of man or the planetary rebellion or any of these things that are written down in some garbled form in the myth books of world religions, the fact is that something very bad happened here a long time ago, and we have been pretty much in the backwater, cut off from cosmic civilization ever since.”

I hope an alien “service company” has taken good care of Dan, and he is now a happy and productive part of the cosmic mind at the end of space and time. But even if at this moment there are no alien service companies providing resurrection services to the little people of infant backwater civilizations, we will become the service company ourselves, if we progress in the New Age. From his subjective point of view, Dan is still with us, out there.

See also my longer video interview with Dan and Alison on sexual freedom, the occupy movement, transhumanism, the singularity, physics, religion and spirituality, and their forthcoming book. LGBT rights, quantum entanglement, and new cosmic religions in the same talk, it’s really awesome.

For more, see Part 1 and Part 2.

 

Giulio Prisco discusses Sex and the Art of Cosmic Governance (Part 2)

Giulio Prisco

Giulio Prisco

This is the second installment about Giulio Prisco’s upcoming book entitled, tentatively, Tales of The Turing Church. A draft of his chapter, “Sex and the Art of Cosmic Governance,” that includes recollections of his many interactions with VenusPlusX Co-founder Dan Massey.  Part 1 included an excerpt from Dan’s talk at the Transvision conference where we met Giulio for the first time, and Part 3 recollects Dan’s remarks from one of his interactions with the Mormon Transhumanist Association in 2012.

Giulio is a physicist and computer scientist, and former senior manager in the European space administration. Giulio works as a consultant and contributes to several science and technology magazines. In 2002-2008 he served on the Board of Directors of Humanity Plus, of which he was Executive Director, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Italian Transhumanist Association.  He is often in Hungary, Italy and Spain.
You can find more about Giulio at Turing Church and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET).  

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 In a letter following Dan’s talk at TransvisionDan wrote . . .

“When Martine [Rothblatt] suggested I submit a paper, I knew very little about Transhumanism beyond the superficial elements (live forever, upload your mind, freeze your DNA, etc.). My paper was a total shot-in-the-dark to present to some Transhumanists viewpoints I had previously shared with Martine that were related to sex and gender freedom. I had not thought of these ideas being related to Transhumanism until she suggested it.

I scrubbed all references to GOD and/or DEITY from the talk, because I knew that a significant part of the audience were self declared ‘atheists’ who would have been very distracted by these words, even though I am not sure they understood what they did not believe in. Therefore, even though these words might connote useful concepts to me, they did not mean the same thing to the audience, many of whom suffered from overexposure to the extremely bad public relations of nominally Judaeo-Christian cults for the past 4000 years. There was no need to wade into that quagmire.”

At the conference and after, I had frequent opportunities to discuss religions, mythologies and cosmologies with Dan, among many other things. He was a frequent participant in online discussions hosted by my Turing Church group, Martine Rothblatt’s Terasem, and the Mormon Transhumanist Association. Dan wasn’t a Mormon or a sympathizer, if anything he was very strongly critical of some aspects of Mormon society, in particular their attitude to LGBT persons, but he appreciated the progressive scientific theology promoted by Mormon transhumanists.

In one of my fondest memories with Dan, one day in Manhattan after a Singularity Summit, we realized that my religion of technology and his religion of love are really one and the same, in a relation analogous to the particle-wave complementarity of quantum physics. An electron appears sometimes as a particle, other times as a wave, which seem not only different but incompatible things. But how the electron appears in a specific case doesn’t reflect the intrinsic nature of the electron (which is neither one nor the other) but the configuration of the experiment – in other words, the question that we have chosen to ask. Similarly, technological transcendence and universal love are apparently different but complementary aspects of our shared religion.

Dan used to drop intriguing hints about a “Cosmic Government” – a confraternity of natural Gods and advanced galactic civilizations. Perhaps we will join the Cosmic Government when the time is right, and perhaps the Cosmic Government is benevolently interested in in our world here and now, and may give some help now and then. Dan explained his ideas in more detail in a letter:

“I’ve given a lot of thought to the idea of a religion that would sustain Transhumanist ideals without introducing irrational or mythic ideas. When I finally got around to reading Martine [Rothblatt]’s Truths of Terasem I was surprised to see that the concepts she had assembled at the outset, as she set out to define Terasem, were nearly congruent with a concept I had come to know quite well in a totally different setting, specifically, The Urantia Book. In fact, she was going quite a bit further, trying to anticipate what it would be like for Terasem to be actual.

You see, my decision to take up the cause of sex and gender freedom stems directly from some 30 years of very deep involvement with this nearly occult text and the small group of people who take it seriously. Since the book is 2100 pages, about 1.2 million words, I cannot expect people to have or want to read it, although I think it is well worth reading, even if you don’t take it seriously. Sex and gender freedom are not directly addressed in the book. Rather, from the book one takes certain approaches to very open minded but very rational thinking about all manner of subjects, all more or less explained in terms of what educated middle-class Americans in the 1930s would understand. Since I had long cared about sex and gender issues, it was natural that at some time I would become active in actually applying the ideas and ideals I had adapted/adopted from my familiarity with the book.

For example, the comprehensive structure of our activism program is intended to put spiritual pressure on society for change toward higher ideals and superior social practices. We think the most rapid progress can be made when development proceeds synchronously across the dimensions of value – truth, beauty, goodness, and love – corresponding generally to intellectual, physical, motivational, and personal realizations. This approach to structuring activity is based on concepts from the book, though not specified there. Because of what we have learned from the book about the structure of reality, we are confident that, by examining the four basic values, we will get a reasonably comprehensive view of all the issues and connections. At the same time, you will see us trying to subtly teach readers these same ideas, so you will find these themes used repeatedly in our writings.

To explain further, this four dimensional world of ideals comes from The Urantia Book, in which it is said to be the foundation upon which we, as individual persons, are participating in the development of the Supreme Being, an incompletely realized deity of finite space and time, which even now shapes events (I often use the term force of destiny) to assure its final emergence. At this occasion, the ‘finality,’ all persons will have become elements of a complete cosmic consciousness. But long before this final event many ordinary people will have learned to participate in an integrated, orderly life, in which everything and everyone work together better if you give them a chance.

So, when I suggested that a reasonable rational Transreligion fit for genuine Transhumans would be open to acknowledging and working with a cosmic government, I was basically thinking some of us already are, so to speak. That is, we are actively dedicated to the realization of values in answer to common ideals that are what we sincerely imagine a cosmic government would care about. And by so doing, our combined effort to realize supreme values makes our society better and makes us participants in and contributors to the final emergence of the fully integrated Supreme Being.

I kept hinting (or more) at the idea of accepting or even theoretically admitting the possibility of some sort of intervention as a component of a Transreligion framework. The Urantia Book itself claims to be one such intervention, and, if you accept its statements that we are actually living in a universe populated by diverse, non-hostile beings, some like ourselves and some vastly superior in physical, mental, or motivational endowments, the possibility of some intervention cannot be discarded for want of confirming evidence. The book specifically describes four previous interventions, several of which, according to the book, did not go well for the people of this planet and have led to many of our current problems of uniting to solve major social problems. I believe we are currently in the middle of an intervention on an extensive, planet-wide scale that is gradually becoming apparent.

What sort of vision can illuminate the path to a meaningful and worthwhile future? It must recognize the potential of humans to become ‘as gods.’ The Terasem notion of a technodeity, constructed through human action and culminating at ‘the end of time,’ or some other definite but undefined occasion in the future, with the power to reach back through time and across space to force the actions that finally lead to its full emergence, constructed from the collective consciousness of all universe creatures, is certainly a good start. This provides a vision that we shall all then become fully functioning personalities of a supreme, finite deity.”

I find Dan’s vision of the supreme consciousness, God, emerging from the community of advanced forms of life and civilizations in the universe, able to influence space-time events anywhere, anytime, perhaps even here and now, very beautiful and illuminating. I think this is what all great religions really said, in the form and language of their times, and new religions try to say in the language of our times. But what does this cosmic vision have to do with social activism, LGBT issues, and sexual love? Dan continues:

“I demand that society place no limitation on the individual or collective exploration of joy and pleasure, which necessarily begins with the liberation of Transhumankind from the universal social oppression of long denied sex and gender freedom. To me it seems reasonable to recognize the Transgender as Transhuman; to me Transhuman is the great umbrella under which all who embrace in their own lives and persons the exploration of transformed physical bodies, human minds, and personal superconsciousnesses may be welcome.

I see the framework as an enabling structure for the elaboration of more specific and overtly religious practices that work for different communities. It basically reminds us of our common will to shape the world, regardless of our specific approach, and thus can accommodate erotic mystics (like myself) at one extreme and cyronic speculators at the other.

Obviously, the suggested requirements framework is reaching far beyond the material aspects of current Transhumanism. Specifically, to me, it is the transmaterial aspects that are far more important to the overall future of Transhumans and their destined leadership of planetary society into a new age that answers the longings of the past with a result that is unclogged by myth and chaotic group thinking, is better than anyone could have expected, and opens the doors to achievement of destiny on physical, intellectual, motivational, and personal levels as well.”

The religion of love includes both Agape, the spiritual and ethereal aspect of love, and Eros, the physical and passionate one. Some people are more inclined to one or the other, but Eros and Agape, like love and science, are complementary aspects of one and the same thing. Western religions exclude erotic mysticism and limit individual or collective exploration of joy and pleasure, but other religions are much more open. The supreme consciousness at the end of space and time encourages thousands, billions, uncountable transfinities of flowers to bloom – new religious practices based on the erotic mysticism of Eros may play an important role in our progress to join the cosmic community of Gods.

For more, see Part 1  and Part 3.

 

 

Giulio Prisco’s incoming book examines Sex and the Art of Cosmic Governance (Part 1)

Giulio Prisco

Giulio Prisco

Our dear friend, Giulio Prisco, is writing a book entitled, tentatively, Tales of The Turing Church, and sent us this draft chapter, “Sex and the Art of Cosmic Governance,” that includes recollections of his many interactions with VenusPlusX Co-founder Dan Massey. (This post continues in Part 2 and Part 3.)  

Giulio is a physicist and computer scientist, and former senior manager in the European space administration. Giulio works as a consultant and contributes to several science and technology magazines. In 2002-2008 he served on the Board of Directors of Humanity Plus, of which he was Executive Director, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Italian Transhumanist Association.  He is often in Hungary, Italy and Spain. You can find more about Giulio at Turing Church and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET).  

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Dan Masseya Renaissance man interested in everything under the stars, a visionary thinker, a relentless social activist, a scientist, a teacher, and a friend, passed away on January 28, 2012. He was persuaded that death is not the end, and expected to go on an eternal, infinite journey after death. I hope the eternal cosmic winds will be fair and wonderful to Dan, and I hope to see him again out there.

I first met Dan and his life partner Alison Gardner at Transvision, an itinerant transhumanist conference that I organized in Milan in October 2010. We became good friends and met often after the conference, both online and face to face.

I guess Dan’s talk at the conference shocked many people, used to the often aseptic tone of transhumanist talks. Here was a white-haired hippie, with a New Age messianic look, a benevolent guru of times gone by and times yet to come, proposing a new spirituality founded on transhumanist science and unbounded love including, of all things, sexual love! Quite a shock for “conventional” transhumanists from the straight and narrow path of science and engineering! Dan was an engineer himself, an MIT and Harvard graduate with a distinguished scientific career, but he didn’t walk straight and narrow paths. He and Alison founded an activist organization to create a New Age of liberty, freedom, justice, and equality for all people, centered on the intrinsic value of sex and gender expression, of personal erotic freedom, to replace millennia of unreasoned ignorance, fear, and hatred with the true joy of Love.

Here is the summary of Dan’s talk at Transvision 2010. Thanks to wonderful communication age that his work helped to come into being, the full talk is available online.

“There necessarily exists a divinely determined order throughout the universe. This order pervades and defines three levels of experiential existence – the spiritual, the mental/emotional, and the physical/sensory. The failure of humans and human associations to recognize the love of god pervasive in the sensory level of experience is the principal obstacle to individual and collective human progress, which is essential to the realization of our diverse ambitions for increasing human happiness.

This situation can be corrected by inspiring and educating all humanity to appreciate sex and gender freedom and equality as sacred gifts of god and by training individuals to appreciate the joy of their own freedom of sex and gender, enabling them to inspire, educate, and train others. The power of divine love, expressed through the physical and sensory, is sufficient to seduce humanity into a new way of living, loving, and being that will open wide the doors to our true planetary future.

We are now beginning public discussion of how life is lived in this new age, through all levels and in all areas of inspiration, education, and training. From these discussions a spiritual vision, a social agenda, and a technological program will be established to fashion a transhuman future on which we can begin work today to bring truth, beauty, goodness, and love to our worldwide life experience, building towards the full future fruition of a broad human commitment to universal freedom, justice, equality, and liberty.

The specific issue to be briefly examined is the necessary and sufficient requirements for an artificial object, one created by human vision, thought, and deed, to support the hosting of a human identity equivalent to, but apart from a human body. Even if everyone agrees that the new me is just like the old me, how do I know that I will continue to experience a continuous personal sense of consciousness as the new me?

The answer is that, as a biological human, I know that ‘I am’ by virtue of knowing that I have a personal relationship to god, though I may not consciously admit that I know this. Our bodies and brains evolved to enable this connection, which is what makes us a potentially permanent part of the universe. We can know god and know that god also knows us. While we have rational evidence of human spiritual immortality extending beyond physical life, the creation of physical immortality by artificial means requires an artifice that can, in effect, talk to god. Our brains and bodies are finite and can be fully modeled as finite-state systems; therefore, the creation of such an artifice could be possible. That does not mean it will be easy. This is something we will eventually achieve if we work on it long and hard enough, but when it comes it will surely be the crowning final achievement of human artifice. Our universe will hail this accomplishment, so great will it be, for any people that can build a machine able to know god will have finally taken up the reins of creation itself.”

Part 2 continues with a follow-up letter after this conference, and others, and  Part 3 covers Dan’s related presentation to the Mormon Transhumanist Association.

 

 

Carrying Condoms Not Only Makes You A Slut, but also a Prostitute

Initiatives in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., allow the police to search and arrest women carrying three or more condoms late at night under prostitution charges.

So a woman carrying a few condoms can be arrested under the suspicion of being a prostitute? Does this profiling sound familiar? It’s just like the stigmatization that teen girls who carry even one condom receive from their peers whether or not she planned to use it: if a girl carries condoms, she’s automatically a “slut.” This is called “slut shamming,” or as a 13-year-old girl describes it in her video, Slut Shamming and Why it’s Wrong, “the act of degrading or mocking a woman because she dresses in tight or revealing clothing, enjoys sex, has a lot of sex, or is rumored to be sexually active.” Furthermore, slut shaming makes a woman or girl feel guilty or inferior for being sexually active, having multiple sex partners, or acting or dressing in a way that is deemed excessively sexual.

You might recall a popular example of slut shamming in recent media when Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute on air for advocating for contraception coverage and women’s health. This type of unwarranted labeling steers teen girls away from carrying condoms to avoid being labeled a “slut.” Likewise, these initiatives will steer women, sex worker or not, away from carrying condoms to avoid being labeled a prostitute and arrested. In the case of actual sex workers, trying to protect themselves from arrest forces them to participate in unprotected sex, increasing the spread of STD/STIs among sex workers, their clients, and the general public at large.

How can we fight gender discrimination and the stigmatization of teen girls carrying condoms when the government is legally allowed to do the same to women carrying condoms? How can we encourage our female youth to protect their sexual health while condemning the sexuality of women sex workers and dooming their sexual health? How can we convince boys that slut shaming is wrong when it is legal? These laws are asinine and need to be stopped. If a 13-year-old knows better, then there is no excuse for the government and the police department to support this type of sexist profiling.

Activists at the SlutWalk NYC in October 2011. SlutWalk is a worldwide movement, originating in Toronto Canada, working to challenge mindsets and stereotypes of American society that blames the victim or survivor in sexual assault cases and slut shaming.

 

Slutwalks are taking place all over the world for the second year to address these specious attacks on sexual freedom at the grassroots, including tomorrow in D.C.

Creative Commons Image by: David Shankbone

 

 

Religion: Real and Fake

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

Society suffers from a severe misunderstanding of the nature and role of religion. Nowhere is this more apparent than in ongoing arguments about the “separation of church and state.” Blame the Puritans.

The basic idea in the U.S. Constitution is one of freedom FROM religion, expressed as “freedom of religion.” The tenets of any religion may not be imposed on its citizens who disagree. This concept is fundamental to the unalienable human right to absolute privacy of person, and pillar of sexual freedom and the bedrock of all other freedoms.

The pilgrims who came to Plymouth imagined that they could impose their concept of the divine will upon everyone who opposed them, that the free exercise of their religion meant forcing the world into compliance with their beliefs, a severe misdirection victimizing all sincere people. A few years later, Puritan fanaticism swept England herself into a great civil war. Such foolishness has characterized many fanatical conflicts throughout history, and can be seen today in the demands and schemes of theocratic groups worldwide, including today’s America.

A real religion is world religion. One could say there are as many religions in the world as there are people. Even atheists and agnostics objectify “god” and choose to exclude these hobbled, uninspired notions. World religion is superstition- and mythology-free and an immediately accessible and consistent guide to living in tune with the rhythms of cosmic destiny. This vitology—our urge to persist—gives each person a vision of immortality, an unending, improving, and harmonizing ecology of living.

Our faith is one of loving—desiring to do good to one another. This perpetual cycle of love shared is powered by all kinds of love, especially including the erotic, and it gives us a unified power for progress the world has yet to see. Our inherent and inherited capability for sexual pleasure and orgasm (erotic joy) is the living and loving communion that matures us individually to the service of Love and its destiny, and unites us as a team in shared fellowship—a loving siblinghood.

Editor’s note: This is one of a series of position papers Dan Massey and I are creating and will soon index on our home page. They briefly explore the evolution of our points of view about a range of issues related to sex, gender, and racial freedom. Your feedback is always welcome.