On Sunday, February 19, from 3:00–5:00 pm, we kick off our Spring 2023 programming with “Roads to Religion,” a two-hour open house at which visitors can meet members of 30 local religious communities collectively representing 10 religious traditions. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held on the upper floor (Parents Hall) of the Olmsted Center on Drake’s campus. The room will be set up like a map of the metro area, with the participating communities located accordingly. Visitors will receive a map and guide to the communities in the hall. Food and beverages will be served by Drake’s food service. Parking is available in the Olmsted Lot, which is located on the north side of University Ave. in between 28th and 29th Streets.
Thanks to Jim Zeller for all the pics below (except the first one, which is Catalina’s):
On May 11, from 7:00–8:30pm in the Reading Room of Cowles Library, we host the third lecture of the semester, “Sexbots Playing the Imitation Game: Mormonism, Transhumanism, and the Turing Test as Trolley Prize,” by Jon Bialecki, Lecturer in Anthropology, University of California-San Diego.
Jon Bialecki, J.D., 1997, Ph.D., is a continuing lecturer in the UCSD department of anthropology. His first monograph, A Diagram for Fire: Miracles and Variation in an American Charismatic Movement, is a study of the miraculous and differentiation in American religion, with a focus on ethics, politics, language, and economic practices; it was awarded the 2017 Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society and Honorable Mention in the 2018 Clifford Geertz Prize by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. A second book, Machines for Making Gods: Mormonism, Transhumanism, and Worlds Without End, addresses religious transhumanism, and was published 2022 by Fordham University Press.
With recent public attention to advancements in generative text programs such as Chat-GPT and Bing/Sydney, the ‘Turing Test’ has returned as an object of discussion. What these discussions, mostly centered around anxieties concerning whether these artificial intelligences are sentient, obscure is the fact that the Turing Test is not just an answer to the question as to whether “machines can really think.” The Turing Test is also implicitly a test of what moral obligation we may owe an artificial intelligence. This talk lays bare this aspect of the Turing Test through a presentation of Mormon transhumanists’ debates regarding (admittedly hypothetical) sexbots and similar artificial life forms; Mormon Transhumanists tend to be sharply opposed to the creation of such entities — but not for the reasons that one might expect.
Here is a recording of Prof. Bialecki’s lecture:
And here is a video recording of Seth Villegas’s response to Dr. Bialecki:
On Sunday, March 19 from 11:00 am–1:00 pm (roughly), we will join the Hindu Temple and Cultural Center (33916 155th Lane, Madrid) in the annual celebration of Holi. Guests will be able to tour the temple, observe the Holi fire ritual (Holika Dahan), throw colored powered at one another, and dance. (Please dress accordingly if you are going to participate in the throwing of colors.) Lunch is available for purchase from the temple. (This event is part of the “Meet My Religious Neighbor” series, which is co-programmed with CultureALL, the Des Moines Area Religious Council, and Interfaith Alliance of Iowa.)
The site visit is to the grand opening and inauguration of the community center of the Hindu Cultural and Educational Center on 1960 East Army Post Road in Des Moines. On Saturday, October 1, from 1:30 to 6:00 pm, this Bhutanese Hindu community will offer a “cultural program” including cultural songs and dances, bhajans in which visitors can participate (religious singing and dancing), guest speakers and dignitaries, and an introduction to the community. Modest but comfortable attire is recommended. Visitors will need to remove shoes and should not point outstretched legs (feet) toward the statues (murti-s) of the Gods.
James “J.” Hughes Ph.D. is a bioethicist and sociologist who serves as the Associate Provost for the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB), and as Senior Research Fellow at UMB’s Center for Applied Ethics. He holds a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Chicago where he taught bioethics at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Since then, Dr. Hughes has taught health policy, bioethics, medical sociology and research methods at Northwestern University, the University of Connecticut, and Trinity College. Dr. Hughes is author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (2004) and is co-editor of Surviving the Machine Age: Intelligent Technology and the Transformation of Human Work (2017). In 2005 Dr. Hughes co-founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) with Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, and since then has served as its Executive Director and Associate Editor of the Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Dr. Hughes speaks on medical ethics, health care policy and future studies worldwide.
Our tendency to attribute enduring, even eternal, existence to transitory and insubstantial phenomena is at the root of our psychology and our theology. This tendency leads us to see gods in nature and souls in people. Attributing essentialized binary genders to ourselves and the world is another attributional error when sexual dimporphism is an evolutionary accident and our gender identities are malleable.
The Enlightenment philosophes started deconstructing these commonsense assumptions, and Enlightenment empiricism has challenged the existence of God, essentialized genders and the self. As these pre-scientific ways of seeing the world erode, the systems of power invested in their perpetuation are fighting back, for theocracy, patriarchy and “human nature.” The transgender and nonbinary movements are battlefronts because they advance the Enlightenment claim that technology should be used to adapt nature to the service of the liberal individual, a subject that transcends race, class, sex and gender. Freeing the liberal individual from biological constraints is also the goal of transhumanism’s campaign for morphological freedom. The opponents of morphological freedom assert an inviolable human nature, and believe it will be catastrophic and suicidal for humans to take control of their own evolution.
The central Buddhist insight is that liberation requires the deconstruction of all essentialized identities however, including the liberal individual. The final challenge to the Enlightenment’s transcendentalized individual is the accumulating evidence that there is no self and no soul. The Buddhist challenge isn’t to “save souls,” but to ask what we are trying to change into, what aspects of our self-centered natures we are willing to let go of in order to become better people. Can we imagine a collective transcendence for the human project into an increasingly long-lived, peaceful and prosperous future using both Skillful Views (social and psychological transformation) and Skillful Means (technologies of transformation)? Gender fluidity and moral enhancement technologies suggest how we may change “human nature” while technoprogressivism is the attempt to give this project moral and political shape.
Here is James Hughes’s lecture and powerpoint:
And here is Seth Villegas’s response to James Hughes’s lecture:
On Thursday, October 20, members of the local Jain community will visit Drake University to speak about Jainism and conduct Jain practices. The event, which will take place on the lower floor of the Olmstead building, inside of Sussman Theater. We will start at 5:30 pm, and will feature several presentations, darshan (sacred viewing of a Jain Tirthankara), aarti (sacred waving of flame), and Jain vegetarian “snacks.” This is the second “Meet My Religious Neighbor” event of the semester, most of which feature “religions without sites.” (MMRN is co-programmed by CultureALL, the Des Moines Area Religious Council, and Interfaith Alliance of Iowa.)
This year’s “Iowa Interfaith Conference” will be hosted by Drake University on April 8-10. Participants will learn about interfaith leadership and religious literacy, visit places of worship throughout greater Des Moines, and meet student interfaith leaders from other universities and colleges.
SCHEDULE
Friday, April 8, 7:00—9:00pm: reception, poster session, and Hindu bhajan at the Mercy Holiday Inn
Saturday, April 9, 9:00am–12:00pm: interactive sessions on interfaith leadership and religious literacy at Drake University (Meredith Hall)
Saturday, April 9, 4:30–9:00pm: site visits to Wat Phothisophan, Hindu Temple and Cultural Center, Islamic and Cultural Center “Bosniak” and es-Selam Mosque (see the Meet My Religious Neighbor tab for more info about each)
Sunday, April 10, 9:00am–12:00pm: interactive sessions on interfaith leadership and religious literacy at Drake University (Meredith Hall)
At this conference, you will have an opportunity to share a personally meaningful faith experience, practice, or belief. Ideally, by identifying a moment in your life in which you discovered some insight about your religious tradition, community, or life. This narrative will be around 200-300 words. To share your initial ideas about your story, please go to the conference registration site.
For more information or to attend, please contact Timothy Knepper at tim [dot] knepper [at] drake [dot] edu, Professor of Philosophy and Director of The Comparison Project at Drake University.
IS GOD THE MAKER OF THE WORLD? HINDU PROOFS AND JAIN AND BUDDHIST DISPROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF ‘GOD'” (ISHARVA)”
Tuesday, March 22, 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Drake University, Olmsted Center, Sussman Theater
MEET THE SPEAKERS
Marie-Hélène Gorisse
Marie-Hélène Gorisse is a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham in the project “Global Philosophy of Religion” supported by the John Templeton Foundation. She specializes in Jainism and in the way its epistemology and hermeneutics developed in dialogue with other South Asian philosophico-religious traditions. She also works on the contemporary relevance of Jainism as a contributor to global philosophy.
Agnieszka Rostalska
Agnieszka Rostalska is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Ghent University, Belgium, where she pursues a project Cross-cultural Conceptions of the Self: South Asia, Africa, and East Asia (awarded by University of Birmingham’s “Global Philosophy of Religion” project, supported by the John Templeton Foundation). She specializes in Indian and Cross-Cultural Philosophy with a focus on the debates over authority and social justice by philosophers in India and contemporary philosophers in the field of social epistemology.
For more information or to attend, please contact Timothy Knepper at tim [dot] knepper [at] drake [dot] edu, Professor of Philosophy and Director of The Comparison Project at Drake University.
The second Meet My Religious Neighbor (MMRN) of the spring semester occurred on a warm Sunday afternoon on March 8th from 11-2 pm. It took place at the Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of Iowa, and beyond discussing the religion itself, visitors were able to participate in Holi. Holi is the celebration of the banishment of the demon Holika and the triumph of good over evil. During this festival, they banish negative thoughts, emotions, and energies allowing the fire to consume them. The colors represent happiness and the sharing of happiness without judgment.
I have driven past the Temple many times as it is on the way to my grandparent’s house. It is beautiful and unlike any of its surroundings. Situated in the middle of a cornfield down a gravel road, is a beautiful overarching Hindu Temple. The entrance on the side directs you to a room where you are able to leave your shoes and coats. After this, I joined a large group of people gathered in the main area of the temple, where statues of the gods could be observed. Looking back at the past MMRN, this event had a much larger turnout. We circled around one of the main priests and listened to the history of the Temple in Madrid and Hinduism. One thing was prominently repeated which was that Hinduism is more than a religion, it is a way of life.
After a while, a woman took over the tour. She guided us around the Temple counter-clockwise, beginning with Vishnu in the middle. During the tour, she introduced us to each God and their story. Unfortunately, as this was a larger event, I was not able to hear or see everything perfectly during the tour, but I am sure there was, even more, to be discussed. I will admit, it is also difficult to focus in these situations because you are in such a different and new environment filled with unknown people, so don’t be too hard on yourself if you attend and find yourself getting distracted by all the rich culture surrounding you!
Ella Stafford First-Year Religions of Des Moines Student
