This is Hugh Howey’s fault. (Okay, not really, but that was a fun way to start a blog post.)
[Interlude 1: If you already know who Hugh Howey is, then cool. If you’re a sci-fi fan and don’t know about him yet, let me catch you up with the short version: he wrote this wonderful series called ‘Silo’ starting with book 1, Wool, as an Indie Author. I read it several years ago, and it’s awesome. And it’s just been turned into an AppleTV show that we’ll all get the pleasure of watching soon. In the meantime, watch the trailer. It looks fabulous!]
I follow him on Twitter, and like a lot of people, he’s been tweeting quite a bit about ChatGPT. A week or so ago, he posted about how he asked ChatGPT to create a religion and it was interesting. It sounded nice. One of the holidays really caught my fancy. It was called a “Day of Whimsy” and it sounded so cool and so much less problematic than other holidays…
[Interlude 2: Here’s the deets on my religious background, which is important to how I got here. I come from a mixed family. My father’s side of the family is Roman Catholic. Not surprising if you see notice my uber-Italian last name. My mother’s side of the family is Jewish (and according to DNA tests, I’m more like 75% Jew… there’s another story in there about my dad’s mom, but that’s for another day). Not wanting to raise me and my younger brother in either faith, my parents found the Unitarian Universalists and so from the age of 8, I could stop telling people I’m half-Jewish/half-Catholic, which seemed to break everyone’s brain (“You can’t be half and half! You must be one or the other!” — also another story for another day) and tell them I was part of this obscure thing they’ve never heard of. It required additional explanation, but people seem to have an easier time of accepting I’m part of something they’ve never heard of, rather than accept I belong to these two other worlds.
Anyhoo… I went through all the rituals of UUism, and if I have to claim I belong to one particular religion, I do claim it although I haven’t stepped into a house of worship is a bazillion years because leaving the house on Sunday morning isn’t something I want to do. You’ll also here me tell people I’m an “Italian-Jew” but that’s more from the cultural/DNA side than anything religious.]
Hugh’s ChatGPT religion is called “Harmonism” and I like a lot of the things about it, but not everything. So, it started the wheels turning: why not make my own? And really make it my own? Tweak it until it perfectly represents all the things I would wish for in a “religion.”
So I did. Here was the initial prompt I gave ChatGPT:
“Let’s develop a new religion that draws from your knowledge of all the world’s religions and schools of thought and philosophy. Please start with a central belief system that combines science, stocism, hope, logic, math, semantics, and treating everyone well. Make use of the golden rule. Also make use of the Star Trek philosophy of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (IDIC). Assume that participants love color and whimsy in their lives. Also include the fact that this religion doesn’t preclude belonging to any other. This religion should be hopeful for the future and help people not be fearful of the world or each other.
List seven founding commandments for this fictional religion.
Come up with a name for this new religion and define 2 major holidays and 3 minor holidays. Also add a daily greeting or affirmation and add sayings for each of the major holidays. Feel free to add any other customs or practices. Food should play a big part in all the holidays and customs, especially fruit.”
Now, I’m going to spare you all the iterations we went through from there. I was incredibly disappointed with the initial results. It was little more than a parrot back of my input, but structured in the form I asked for. You might have already come across the term “prompt engineering.” Well, yes, learning how to create the best input to get the best output is going to be an important skill to cultivate. That shouldn’t be a surprise. New technology often means we need to learn new skills. Typing. Driving a car. Heck, riding a horse.
So it is completely reasonable that learning how to best structure a natural language input to get the most meaningful output will be a thing someday soon. Very soon.
But getting back to the results. I wasn’t happy. I walked away from the computer for a bit, leaving my ChatGPT window open and throughout the next couple of days, came back to it periodically to ask it to revise bits and pieces here and there until ultimately I was happy-ish enough to take it off ChatGPT and continue tweaking it on my own.
I’m not going to present all the back and forth. Honestly, it’s boring. It’s tedium. Seeing the sausage made isn’t nearly as awesome as eating the sausage… if you like that kind of thing. I’m mostly vegetarian, so maybe I should talk about making a good loaf of bread instead.
Throughout this process, I’ve been struggling with the definitions and difference between a “religion” and a “philosophy” or “religion” and “belief system.” What I’ve created might be more of a belief system that is not entirely a religion. There are holidays, prayers, and even a leadership/scholarship structure. But there’s no house of worship. No dictum that we must gather and practice Harmonumerics collectively, although nothing precludes having group celebrations or study sessions and so forth.
There’s also no deity in what I created. Although again, nothing precludes the idea that there are one or more deities in the Universe.
Maybe calling this a “belief system” is most appropriate.
But what I’ve created represents a lot of the philosophies I’ve always embraced: IDIC from Star Trek; the Golden Rule from UUism (and every other religion on the planet which has a version); stoicism (although I’ve never been able or willing to fully embrace stoicism because of their ‘eat to live, not live to eat’ philosophy — I like good food too much); and more.
So, after all that, I claim that this is something I created, using an AI tool to help along the way. Not the other way around.
Sci-fi writers aren’t shy when it comes to writing about religion, and Hugh and I aren’t the first sci-fi writers to embark on potentially starting a religion, although I don’t know if he has any plans to go beyond his blog post. But I’ll tell you that we are not the first sci-fi writers to actually start a religion.
The most well-known of the made-up-by-sci-fi religions is Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard was the sci-fi writer who pulled it off (although he wrote more broadly than just sci-fi, but I think sci-fi was paying his bills for a while). Scientology has fascinated me since I learned what it was. Not Scientology per se as a religion, but that it was created by a sci-fi writer. As an 80s kid in NY, I was bombarded by commercials for the book Dianetics. I didn’t know what it was, although I retained a clear memory of the commercial itself and always thought it strange that there was an overabundance of commercials for this one book.
A copy of Dianetics found its way to me in 1985 when my grandmother passed away. It was in a pile of her paperbacks that I inherited and took home and read (there were several Agatha Cristie novels too, and some books of “real” ghost stories in her collection, too, that I inherited and read).
[Interlude 3: OMG because everything really is on the internet, so is that commercial. It was the erupting volcano at the end that always stuck with me. ]
I don’t know when exactly I made the Dianetics < – > L. Ron Hubbard < – > Scientology connection, just that it happened maybe sometime in the late 80s/early 80s. A sci-fi writer started a major religion. A sci-fi writer. (Other sci-fi writers have inspired new religions. The Church of All Worlds, a recognized religion, is modeled after the organization of the same name in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land)
I’m a sci-fi writer, too (although not as far along in my writing career as any of the others I’ve mentioned so far). But I love math and numbers and the Universe and such. I love creativity and having fun with language and writing and math. What better way to indulge all of this than to take what I started with ChatGPT a few steps further…?
What does “a few steps further” mean? It means I set up a website for Harmonumerics and even had a symbol/logo created. Yes. Yes, I did.
I imagine people are going to ask me whether or not this is a joke or if it’s real. I think my answer is going to be: Does it matter? (Although it probably matters if you’re worried if I’m destined to attempt a coup to try to take over your home town — I assure you I’m not; Nor are any aliens or other real or imagined beings speaking to me or through me — I’m 98% sure about that one. And if the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster can make it as a legit religion, then surely Harmonumerics has a shot! )
You’re welcome to come explore Harmonumerics for yourself!
(PS, yeah there’s even a Harmonumerics twitter account… )
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