In a few words: a religion with robot priests. Since I thought you might find the story of how I came up with the idea even more than the idea itself, here’s how it popped into my head:
I work at the BYU Bookstore now, in the stockroom. Basically, we drive around and deliver packages all over campus.
Today, it was me and this female coworker in the van. We pulled out of the MTC just after a laundry truck, and the back end of the truck was open so that we could see all the bags of laundry. We then had an exchange of dialogue that went something like this:
Me: What is that van carrying? Maybe…laundry?
Coworker: Probably.
Me: But it looks kind of like…a bunch of dead bodies…
Coworker: (laughs) That’s right–they kill people in the MTC and carry out their bodies in giant bags!
Me: Exactly!
Coworker: That’s hilarious!
Me: Or maybe…maybe they’re actually robots…
Coworker: ?
Me: Hey! What would it be like if they used robots to do missionary work?
We then got into a wonderfully edifying discussion on the pros and cons of using automatons to do the Lord’s work. She took the position that it would be impossible and nobody would believe them, but I had a lot of fun with it and played the devil’s advocate.
After all, you wouldn’t have to worry about a robot clergy molesting children or stealing church funds: you could just program them not to do that kind of stuff. And since they never need to sleep, they would be available at all times to serve the parishioners. They wouldn’t have to juggle work and family obligations with their church service–they could be fully, completely, and totally dedicated to the work. In fact, you could almost look at them as pinnacle examples of the law of consecration.
Of course, there are a lot of things that they wouldn’t be able to do–or, at least, that wouldn’t come as easy to them. Unless there’s some way to significantly humanize them, they probably would be a lot more logical than spiritual. They would probably rely too much on sheer knowledge to convert people. Plus, how would they go about getting a testimony? When you’re programmed to believe, is that belief really meaningful?
But these problems only raise more questions. What kind of a religion would use robots as priests? Probably one that’s based more on logic and reason than anything else–but depending on how the robots connected with the spiritual, you could leave room for that as well. The robots would probably be filling the lower rungs of leadership than the higher rungs, both to have some human oversight and to keep the leadership more spiritually based.
The thing I like about this idea, however, is the fact that it opens the door for even deeper questions. What is the relationship between spirituality and logic? What can religions offer that makes them unique? What is it that drives us as human beings toward religion? What place would an artificial intelligence have in God’s plan?
And then there are some of the recurring themes: do robots have souls? Can humans and robots coexist peacefully? What does it mean to be human?
These are all fascinating questions! Maybe when I’m finished with The Lost Colony, I’ll combine this idea with a few others and make it into my second novel.
