William Sims Bainbridge

A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult

Satan's Power

The Sociology of Religious Movements

Rodney Stark

Religion is alive and well in the modern world, and the social-scientific study of religion is undergoing a renaissance. For much of this century, respected social theorists predicted the death of religion as inevitable consequence of science, education, and modern economics. But they were wrong. Stark and Bainbridge set out to explain the survival of religion. Using information derived from numerous surveys, censuses, historical case studies, and ethnographic field expeditions, they chart the full sweep of contemporary religion from the traditional denominations to the most fervent cults. This wealth of information is located within a coherent theoretical framework that examines religion as a social response to human needs, both the general needs shared by all and the desires specific to those who are denied the economic rewards or prestige enjoyed by the privileged. By explaining the forms taken by religions today, Stark and Bainbridge allow us to understand its persistence in a secular age and its prospects for the future,

Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation

The Future of Religion

Employed by the government to infiltrate cults, an author believes that the controversial and disbanded Process Church should be resurrected.

Resurrecting the Process Church of the Final Judgement

Revival

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Religion, Deviance, and Social Control

Mihail C. Roco

M. C. Roco and W.S. Bainbridge In the early decades of the 21st century, concentrated efforts can unify science based on the unity of nature, thereby advancing the combination of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and new technologies based in cognitive science. With proper attention to ethical issues and societal needs, converging in human abilities, societal technologies could achieve a tremendous improvement outcomes, the nation's productivity, and the quality of life. This is a broad, cross cutting, emerging and timely opportunity of interest to individuals, society and humanity in the long term. The phrase "convergent technologies" refers to the synergistic combination of four major "NBIC" (nano-bio-info-cogno) provinces of science and technology, each of which is currently progressing at a rapid rate: (a) nanoscience and nanotechnology; (b) biotechnology and biomedicine, including genetic engineering; (c) information technology, including advanced computing and communications; (d) cognitive science, including cognitive neuroscience. Timely and Broad Opportunity. Convergence of diverse technologies is based on material unity at the nanoscale and on technology integration from that scale.

Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science

Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance

Goals in Space draws upon a detailed sample of 4,000 Americans to discover what values this society attaches to the space program. Systematic survey procedures identify 125 specific goals of the space program, and Bainbridge examines how these represent the perceived general values of spaceflight, including economic, industrial, environmental, social, spiritual, emotional, and military benefits. While the most popular justifications for spaceflight offered immediate gain for the current society, many Americans have a clear image of the revolutionary transformations that spaceflight may accomplish in the long run, notably colonization of the solar system. The findings of this study clarify the ideological bases for space technology and set the terms for the future debate on investment in space exploration.

American Values and the Future of Technology

Goals in Space

At the intersection of astronautics, computer science, and social science, this book introduces the challenges and insights associated with computer simulation of human society in outer space, and of the dynamics of terrestrial enthusiasm for space exploration. Never before have so many dynamic representations of space-related social systems existed, some deeply analyzing the logical implications of social-scientific theories, and others open for experience by the general public as computer-generated virtual worlds. Fascinating software ranges from multi-agent artificial intelligence models of civilization, to space-oriented massively multiplayer online games, to educational programs suitable for schools or even for the world's space exploration agencies. At the present time, when actual forays by humans into space are scarce, computer simulations of space societies are an excellent way to prepare for a renaissance of exploration beyond the bounds of Earth.

Computer Simulations of Space Societies

What is the relationship between religion and multi-player online roleplaying games? Are such games simply a secular distraction from traditional religious practices, or do they in fact offer a different route to the sacred? In eGods, a leading scholar in the study of virtual gameworlds takes an in-depth look at the fantasy religions of 41 games and arrives at some surprising conclusions. William Sims Bainbridge investigates all aspects of the gameworlds' religious dimensions: the focus on sacred spaces; the prevalence of magic; the fostering of a tribal morality by both religion and rules programmed into the game; the rise of cults and belief systems within the gameworlds (and how this relates to cults in the real world); the predominance of polytheism; and, of course, how gameworld religions depict death. As avatars are multiple and immortal, death is merely a minor setback in most games. Nevertheless, much of the action in some gameworlds centers on the issue of mortality and the problematic nature of resurrection. Examining EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, Rift, World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and many others, Bainbridge contends that gameworlds offer a new perspective on the human quest, one that combines the arts, simulates many aspects of real life, and provides meaningful narratives about achieving goals by overcoming obstacles. Indeed, Bainbridge suggests that such games take us back to those ancient nights around the fire, when shadows flickered and it was easy to imagine the monsters conjured by the storyteller lurking in the forest. Arguing that gameworlds reintroduce a curvilinear model of early religion, where today as in ancient times faith is inseparable from fantasy, eGods shows how the newest secular technology returns us to the very origins of religion so that we might "arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

Faith versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming

eGods

Does religion have the power to regulate human behavior? If so, under what conditions can it prevent crime, delinquency, suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, or joining cults? Despite the fact that ordinary citizens assume religion deters deviant behavior, there has been little systematic scientific research on these crucial questions. This book is the first comprehensive analysis, drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary data, and written in a style that will appeal to readers from many intellectual backgrounds.

In the modern era, every family and local community can cultivate its own history, endowing living people with meanings inherited from the people of the past, by means of today’s computer-based information and communication technologies. A new profession is emerging, family historians, serving the wider public by assisting in collection and analysis of fascinating data, by teaching talented amateur historians, and by producing complete narratives. Essential are the skills and technologies required to preserve and connect photos, movies, videos, diaries, memoirs, correspondence, artefacts and even architecture such as homes. Online genealogical services are well established sources of official government records, but usually not for recent decades, and not covering the valuable records of legal, medical, and religious organizations. Information can be shared and interpreted by family members through oral history interviews, social media, and online private archives such as wikis and shared file depositories. This book explores a wide variety of online information sources and achieves coherence by documenting and interpreting the history of a particular extended American family on the basis of 9 decades of movies and videos, 17 decades of photographs, and centuries of documents. Starting now, any family may begin to preserve their current experiences for the historians of the future, but this will require social as well as technical innovations. This book is the essential resource, providing the fundamental principles, effective methods, and fascinating questions required to make our past live again.

Family History Digital Libraries

A fascinating examination of a religious counterculture group showing how it differs from mainstream society, yet is similar in other ways.

Children of God

Endtime Family, The

This book explores the remarkable sociocultural convergence in multiplayer online games and other virtual worlds, through the unification of computer science, social science, and the humanities. The emergence of online media provides not only new methods for collecting social science data, but also contexts for developing theory and conducting education in the arts as well as technology. Notably, role-playing games and virtual worlds naturally demonstrate many classical concepts about human behaviour, in ways that encourage innovative thinking. The inspiration derives from the internationally shared values developed in a fifteen-year series of conferences on science and technology convergence. The primary methodology is focused on sending avatars, representing classical social theorists or schools of thought, into online gameworlds that harmonize with, or challenge, their fundamental ideas, including technological determinism, urban sociology, group formation, freedom versus control, class stratification, linguistic variation, functional equivalence across cultures, behavioural psychology, civilization collapse, and ethnic pluralism. Researchers and students in the social and behavioural sciences will benefit from the many diverse examples of how both qualitative and quantitative science of culture and society can be performed in online communities of many kinds, even as artists and gamers learn styles and skills they may apply in their own work and play.

Virtual Sociocultural Convergence

Personality Capture and Emulation is the gateway to an amazing future that actually may be achieved, enabling the preservation and simulation of human personalities at progressively higher levels of fidelity. This challenge is no longer the province merely of uninhibited visionaries, but has become a solid field of research, drawing upon a wide range of information technologies in human-centered computing and cyber-human systems. Even at modest levels of accomplishment, research in this emerging area requires convergence of cognitive, social, and cultural sciences, in cooperation with information engineering and artificial intelligence, thus stimulating new multidisciplinary perspectives. Therefore this book will inspire many specific research and development projects that will produce their own valuable outcomes, even as the totality of the work moves us closer to a major revolution in human life. Will it ever really be possible to transfer a human personality at death to a technology that permits continued life? Or will people come to see themselves as elements in a larger socio-cultural system, for which a societal information system can provide collective immortality even after the demise of individuals? A large number and variety of pilot studies and programming projects are offered as prototypes for research that innovators in many fields may exploit for the achievement of their own goals. Together, they provide an empirical basis to strengthen the intellectual quality of several current debates at the frontiers of the human and information sciences.

Personality Capture and Emulation

William Sims Bainbridge Virtual worlds are persistent online computer-generated environments where people can interact, whether for work or play, in a manner comparable to the real world. The most prominent current example is World of Warcraft (Corneliussen and Rettberg 2008), a massively multiplayer online game with 11 million s- scribers. Some other virtual worlds, notably Second Life (Rymaszewski et al. 2007), are not games at all, but Internet-based collaboration contexts in which people can create virtual objects, simulated architecture, and working groups. Although interest in virtual worlds has been growing for at least a dozen years, only today it is possible to bring together an international team of highly acc- plished authors to examine them with both care and excitement, employing a range of theories and methodologies to discover the principles that are making virtual worlds increasingly popular and may in future establish them as a major sector of human-centered computing.

Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual

This 2-volume set within the SAGE Reference Series on Leadership tackles issues relevant to leadership in the realm of science and technology. To encompass the key topics in this arena, this handbook features 100 topics arranged under eight headings. Volume 1 concentrates on general principles of science and technology leadership and includes sections on social-scientific perspectives on S&T leadership; key scientific concepts about leading and innovating in S&T; characteristics of S&T leaders and their environments; and strategies, tactics, and tools of S&T leadership. Volume 2 provides case studies of leadership in S&T, with sections considering leadership in informal communities of scientists and engineers; leadership in government projects and research initiatives; leadership in industry research, development, and innovation; and finally, leadership in education and university-based research. By focusing on key topics within 100 brief chapters, this unprecedented reference resource offers students more detailed information and depth of discussion than typically found in an encyclopedia entry but not as much jargon, detail or density as in a journal article or a research handbook chapter. Entries are written in language and style that is broadly accessible, and each is followed by cross-references and a brief bibliography and further readings. A detailed index and an online version of the work enhances accessibility for today's student audience.

Leadership in Science and Technology: A Reference Handbook

William Bainbridge contends that the worlds of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games provide a new perspective on the human quest, one that combines the arts and simulates most aspects of real life. The quests in gameworlds also provide meaning for human action, in terms of narratives about achieving goals by overcoming obstacles.

Faith Versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming

EGods

This lecture introduces fundamental principles of online multiplayer games, primarily massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), suitable for students and faculty interested both in designing games and in doing research on them. The general focus is human-centered computing, which includes many human-computer interaction issues and emphasizes social computing, but also, looks at how the design of socio-economic interactions extends our traditional notions of computer programming to cover human beings as well as machines. In addition, it demonstrates a range of social science research methodologies, both quantitative and qualitative, that could be used by students for term papers, or by their professors for publications. In addition to drawing upon a rich literature about these games, this lecture is based on thousands of hours of first-hand research experience inside many classic examples, including World of Warcraft, The Matrix Online, Anarchy Online, Tabula Rasa, Entropia Universe, Dark Age of Camelot, Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, Tale in the Desert, EVE Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and the non-game virtual world Second Life. Among the topics covered are historical-cultural origins of leading games, technical constraints that shape the experience, rolecoding and social control, player personality and motivation, relationships with avatars and characters, virtual professions and economies, social relations inside games, and the implications for the external society. Table of Contents: Introduction / Historical-Cultural Origins / Technical Constraints / Rolecoding and Social Control / Personality and Motivation / Avatars and Characters / Virtual Professions and Economies / Social Relations Inside Games / Implications for External Society

Online Multiplayer Games

Presents a collection of articles on human-computer interaction, covering such topics as applications, methods, hardware, and computers and society.

William Sims Bainbridge

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