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Friends O' the Sift
What is a cult? The definition is difficult and elusive. It's nigh impossible to define just what is a cult without encompassing all organized religion. Many of us may in fact subscribe to that particular definition, but for the purposes of this Sift Channel we'll loosely use the following: "a quasi-religious group, often living in a colony, with a charismatic leader who indoctrinates members with unorthodox or extremist views, practices or beliefs"- Webster's New World College Dictionary.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult for more information.
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What are you saying exactly, twenty/thirty years until parents can start selecting for intelligence? So then another twenty years until it sees any significant adoption, assuming it isn't criminalised, which it will be; a generation to see the results, which I guarantee will be obfuscated and difficult, and contested with at least the same vigour as the health effects of cigarettes; another generation or more for the populations most in need of improvement to be persuaded; then a generation for their children to mature. That's in the west and the best case scenario seems to be well over a hundred years before the average intelligence can be raised to, what, college graduate? And we all know college graduates can still be retards.
That's based on selection. People can only be made so much smarter without actually reengineering them, and who knows when that technology will mature given the complexity of intelligence and the problem of human testing.
Yes, application of what you're calling reprogenetics is inevitable and positive, and you're absolutely right that when sufficient genetic advancement is made, eventually theists will disappear on their own. I've expressed my mistrust of persuasion as a means for change, but no one can argue with genetics. What I don't see is a timescale anything like as short as you're describing. If it isn't, the further damage these people will do ranges from a technological deficit that will affect every human being who will ever live, to the extinction of our race.