I have no idea what you are responding to here.

You apparently have posted this comment in the wrong place. The word “CHUD” is not used here; if you want to talk about whether it was applicable where it was used, then post there. Otherwise, I actually have argued the opposite position on the use of slurs than you attribute to me. So it does not seem you are very familiar with my blog or how I run it.

As far as having “rational, legitimate reasons” for not associating with some movement or other you haven’t even identified or defined (I assume you mean Atheism+ but I don’t know what you even think that movement is or is about), whose values you claim to share, I already stated a more open-minded and welcoming attitude to exactly the sort of person you claim to be. So yet again it does not seem you are very familiar with my blog or how I run it.

Freethought does not mean anarchy.

Nor does it mean unfettered use of other people’s property.

Mysonginy? What is that? Ginny Wheasley’s love of the philosopher Myson?

And what on earth are you responding to here?

It’s an idea that is going to be very hard to execute on. What I might try to do is team up with some early pioneers in virtual reality games, once I get the basic plot line figured out. I don’t imagine a lord of the rings like trilogy, but an online RPG sounds like a perfect fit, especially if it was running on computers 20 or 30 years from now. Argument could be a major part of gameplay by then. Also, the environment is being conceived as ‘god’. Which makes perfect since for VR, a 1 to 1 fit with VR game design. Do you see the analogy? The VR world is designed, and this fictional world of the book claims the world itself is god.

But I am jumping the gun…back to writing a very boring paper.

In all honesty, religion wouldn’t be so bad if we were to get rid of the supernatural. That the first step, and a decent compromise on a tough question.

Fascinating. Depending on what kind of realism you want, you may have to include the mistakes, too. A lot of bad reasoning and wrong conclusions were arrived at, too, even by the same guys who were super clever and got a lot else right. That’s of course just as true of Galileo and Newton, we just don’t talk about their mistakes and biases and dumb ideas as much as we probably should.

You will get a good idea from reading the top works in ancient science. I have a whole Amazon store category for that subject (Richard Carrier Recommends: Ancient Science). If you want to economize, I would recommend Rihll’s general book on the subject and Irby-Massie’s sourcebook. Those together will give you a taste of all sides. But you will find Rihll’s book on the catapult a goldmine of ideas and inspirations (she covers science and its intersection with technology, but also the social facts surrounding both, which are valuable for a novelist). It’s a really large book, but it’s well worth the read.

Technology will be important. But you can glean a good idea of what they could do from my talk on “From Robots to the Moon” and my past articles on Ancient Science (for realism, it’s important to consider how much technology the ancients actually had, and how the lens of Christianity has distorted what we think we “know” about the pagans, e.g. “Flynn’s Pile of Boners“). Good books on ancient tech are generally very expensive (but if you want the best, you want the Oleson handbook).

I am trying to write a never tried category of fiction: historical science fiction. The science fiction part comes from anachronistic knowledge, which in the setting of the book is revealed by God. God’s chosen people is another race of hominids. In this imaginary world, God doesn’t reveal moral laws but knowledge to his chosen people, which in turn is used to conquer human beings and enslave them.

There is a lot more too it and of course I would love to get feedback on the basic premise. The goal of the book is to demonstrate all of humanities revealed religions have a human origin through principles explored in the book. And I want to keep the notion of god as naturalistic as possible, without using any common science fiction tropes. All the conquering is done using normal human ingenuity, not magic or even God supposedly commanding natural events.

My plan is to have the heroes rescue humanity through superior science and technology. But to do that they have to overcome a cultural brainwashing that keeps them enslaved – this notion of eternal, glorious mystery, and many other techniques to keep humanity in chains – a common thread of religion is to revere mystery. I am found of Yudkowsky’s saying, “What can be destroyed by the truth should be.”

These are just some of the basic ideas, but the basic concept could go in many different directions. What I really want is a significant degree of realism.

Btw, I love to get feedback. I know you have been active within the atheist community, debating Christians. I think another useful way to win the culture war is to create a new kind of culture, and this is best accomplished through story telling and rationality training.