@roland It helps to have lots of grease marks on your jacket. No dry cleaner or washing machine should ever touch these. The mathematical mastermind is usually dressed in brown and green cords with lots of spots, while an artistic genius looks either like a colourful parrot or a dark-suited banker. On the other hand, bankers like to wear their designer-made bicycle helmets all day long. If you are a female long legged blonde with blue eyes you are more likely to get the job if your employer is a short asymmetric male. The halo effect promising a good shag and many little mini blondes. A long legged blonde tends to employ a short legged dark haired obese female and would like to marry her asymmetric male boss. Boss is going to replace the blonde model if she is older than thirty. All of them are honest and kind as well as greedy, only interested in the best possible outcome for all parties. No irony intended!

Is yours a form of new (old) mystical philosophy utilizing evolution and ‘alien’ gods? Kind of ambiguous text. Everything IS. As we are these curious, never satisfied living entities, we want to know, why. Good for us. It seems that the ones with their monotheistic cultural backgrounds want more, they want to recreate or redesign or even reinvent life. A form of perverted anthropomorphism. First we create a god in our image who supposedly has created us in his, and then we imitate this invented god by creating new lives that will possibly supercede us humans. A form of controlled evolution? Competition with an imaginary god? On top of this, ID is a delusion that allows the curious and religiously motivated ones, to accept evolution, somehow. Eliezer, are you somehow a proponent of a strand of ID?

“It would be H. P. Lovecraft's Azathoth, the blind idiot God burbling chaotically at the center of everything, surrounded by the thin monotonous piping of flutes.”

Certainly you have read Dawkins’ “The blind watchmaker”. If somebody else has pointed this out already, sorry, I haven’t read all contributions.

“nor a form of religion, especially when it is organized as a religion and conducts prostelytic campaigns with fundamentalist fervor –“
Where are these prostelytic campaigns with fundamentalist fervor? Religious groups are omni-present and they interfere with everybody’s lives and concepts. Sometimes they are quite threatening. I have to come across a bullying atheist yet, who wants to convert others more or less forcefully. There are some atheistic organizations (not religions) in the USA and Europe, but they are not really trying to convert the world, are they? It seems to me that you have got your hick-ups because Dawkins, Grayling and Hitchens have written their well received books on ‘god delusions’.

G.s contribution explains very well why atheism is not a religion.

Jakob Stein
“Atheists simply adopt the teachings of the surrounding culture, since that's the most comfortable thing to do. …
Atheism is not a religion, but its an attitude which tends to include cultural moral relativism, hedonism and narcissism.”

This is a quite damning and prejudiced statement on atheism. There is not one ideology of atheism, though. This is the nice thing about atheism that it does not adhere to an ideology. I am a very cultured, ethical and social atheist who does not want to become part of any ideology that is oppressive. I am also not more of a relativist than most people, be they religious or not. Hedonism is not a bad thing per se. Though the ideology of hedonism would be problematic. Narcissism is a psychological condition that can affect many people and groups regardless of their belief systems.
Atheism is not a religion. Here I would agree with Dawkins.

Theocratic dictatorships turned out to be as bad as the frequently mentioned Pol Pot. The emphasis is on dictatorship.
Marxism is a highly moralistic philosophy that has been abused by politicians.

“However when atheists themselves are in control of society, there are no moral rules at all and mass murder follows.”

Mass murder was a sport in Christian medieval feudalist societies, for example.

I would like to rephrase this: However when mad and power-mad people are in control of society, there are no moral rules at all and mass murder follows.

Mad and power-mad people come in all shapes and colours.

“What is the meaning of eating chocolate? That's between you and your moral philosophy. Personally, I think chocolate tastes good, but I wish it were less harmful; acceptable solutions would include redesigning the chocolate or redesigning my biochemistry”

Indulging in sumptuous wonderful cacao products - this is the meaning of eating chocolates - and flavonides come as a free gift. Accepting chocolate as a treat, allowing us to be sort of hedonistic, is far better than a form of Calvinist ‘adaptation method’ of redesigning both chocolate or biochemistry until all fits a theory that might turn out to be wrong anyway. Who can guarantee that chocolate won’t become a super food in near future?

Let's say I am super-gutzperson, beyond post- and past. I am all for utopia. I am all for AI and whatever will come. I am also for co-existence. I am amazed about a species that so happily prepares for their own extinction or replacement. Would you like to test post-evolution on mice and replace them with post-mice? I actually love my body and would like future generations of humans to be able to enjoy this too. As Hayles says in so many words, post-human does not mean without humans. This was my message to Caledonian.

Stefan Pernar Thanks for the links. Interesting texts. I am dreaming of an anarchistic world . Just chaos. Just dreaming. Fearing that anarchy might only work for a metasecond. All this social control scenarios make me feel like an adolescent who wants to break all the rules.

Quote “it is up to us to make sure we will have a place in such a future”

- Question; Are you thinking about Moravec’s fantasies of collective (sub)consciousness spread through the universe?

Quote “The thing about post-humanity is that it will not have humanity in it. It's up to us to make sure that post-humanity comes into existence. This necessarily involves the obsolescence of human beings. The future we must build necessarily cannot have a place for us in it. That's the point! The acorn does not survive the creation of the oak.”

You’re kidding. Post-history is fiction, and history is well and alive. Post-humanity as you describe it, is okay for science fiction. If you want to read something intelligent about post-humanism, please read Katherine Hayles: The Human in the Posthuman. Moravec with his fantasies of extracts of a grey collective brain mass welded together in a post-human orgy of whisper and thought(lessness) makes me weep. His is a truly religiously motivated afterlife fantasy. And yours has got some mystical/mythical aspects, too. Oaks?!?!

I suggest that you read 'Religion in the Public Sphere' by Juergen Habermas.

You can download this as pdf from http://www.sandiego.edu/pdf/pdf_library/habermaslecture031105_c939cceb2ab087bdfc6df291ec0fc3fa.pdf