Comment by ben_w
Cargo cults are a religion, the things they worship they do not understand, but the planes and the cargo themselves are real.
There's certainly plenty of cargo-culting right now on AI.
Sacred texts, I don't recognise. Yudkowsky's writings? He suggests wearing clown shoes to avoid getting a cult of personality disconnected from the quality of the arguments, if anyone finds his works sacred, they've fundamentally misunderstood him:
I have sometimes thought that all professional lectures on rationality should be delivered while wearing a clown suit, to prevent the audience from confusing seriousness with solemnity.
Prophets forecasting the end-of-days, yes, but this too from climate science, from everyone who was preparing for a pandemic before covid and is still trying to prepare for the next one because the wet markets are still around, from economists trying to forecast growth or collapse and what will change any given prediction of the latter into the former, and from the military forces of the world saying which weapon systems they want to buy. It does not make a religion.
A means to escape death, you can have. But it's on a continuum with life extension and anti-aging medicine, which itself is on a continuum with all other medical interventions. To quote myself:
Taking a living human's heart out without killing them, and replacing it with one you got out a corpse, that isn't the magic of necromancy, neither is it a prayer or ritual to Sekhmet, it's just transplant surgery.
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Immunity to smallpox isn't a prayer to the Hindu goddess Shitala (of many things but most directly linked with smallpox), and it isn't magic herbs or crystals, it's just vaccines.