The Ascent of Humanity

I'm reading another book by Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity. It's very slow going. I read a section and have to take a break to chew the words. It's amazing. It has taken me 2 weeks to read 2 chapters.

I have some quotes to share:

Thanks to god Technology, we will leave behind all vestiges of mortality and enter a realm of without toil or travail and beyond death and pain.

This is a message we seem to hear a lot. Yesterday I heard it from the cashier at the cash register. She pointed to the way that most money is electronic today, and that this is an example of a trend to a virtual life (which, when complete, presumably mimics real life exactly?)

One thing I like about this quote a lot is that if you remove "Thanks to god Technology", it sounds like a message we're used to hearing from many religions. That suggests that science and technology is a religion for us today.

Next quote, when discussing the way that language is used to separate the words from the speaker:

The goal would seem to be to pretend that the words had no human author at all, existing purely as objective facts. Indeed, use of the first person is considered bad from in academic writing - a convention the author of the present work finds ridiculous!

How witty.