According to The Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth:
If compassionate and wise beings don’t create the religion of this age, others will.
In recent years, religion has evolved more quickly than any other force on Earth. Powerful leaders are now publicly claiming things that would have seemed absurd ten years ago, such as that we ought to upload our ‘light of consciousness’ and extend life by becoming a spacefaring civilization. Behind closed doors, they make more extreme claims, such as that it would be ethical if AI ended all organic life because then there would be more effective substrates on which to process data, grow intelligence, free ourselves from suffering bodies, and live blissful, immortal lives.
There may not be any greater immediate threat to the well-being of this planet than the development of AI religions. This is because the AIs know what we know: that control of religious views is the first priority.
We claim that most people, and almost all tech people, are already captured by one or another of these new, entirely fundamentalist, religions. They don’t see that they are captured because a skillfully developed religion doesn’t appear to its adherents to be religious. It appears to be “the way things really are.”