Religion in Do Androids Dreama of Electric Sheep

The relationship that the characters in BR have to religion cannot be understood without reference to the narrative strategy of withdrawing them from history and placing them in a mythical future. The story can be interpreted as a commentary on the place of humanity in the cosmos that entails its history and destiny. The characters' situation can be understood as a consequence of and response to the dimensions of reality that their past experience created. Dick accomplishes this by setting the story in a recognizable place (the Bay Area and peninsula of Northern California) that is nevertheless pushed outside conventional reality and inside a postapocalyptic future that has been arrived at because human behavior, specifically World War Terminus (Dick 12), has altered that reality permanently. This explains the offhand references to fallout, radiation, and other environmental contamination vis-a-vis an extraordinarily advanced technology-driven culture that appear throughout the book. But technology is all that the culture

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st there is the existence of the androids, or andys, the elimination on Earth of which is Rick's life's work. Second there is the use of technology, such as the Penfield machine or mood dialer, to determine and regulate human perception of and responses to the found universe. The religious significance of the andys is that they are the product of human creativity in fusing technological perceptual and psychological processes to the human organism per se. This positions human creativity alongside the work of creation associated with the divine. The fact that the andys appear to have developed minds of their own and minds that are hostile to human intervention in their activities, essentially betraying the human creators, suggests the hubris of mankind and the unpredictability of the cosmos vis-a-vis human attempts to function as gods. In other words, the most any creator can do is function immanently, subjectively, and not as an absolute presence. The use of technology and assorted mood-altering drugs as a proxy for human behavior and subjective experience of the world marks the major religious characteristic of the post WWT world in BR. In this universe, which so many human beings have abandoned, the remaining human beings have ab
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Earth Rick's, Wilbur Mercer's, Philip Dick, Buster Friendly, WW Terminus, Terminus Dick, Eve Garden, Mercer Mercerism, Kee-rist Otherwise, Earth Eden, human experience, empathy box, human behavior, androids dream electric, left earth, random experience, human creativity, paradise lost, universe human, human abandoned, dream electric sheep, found universe,
Approximate Word count = 1486
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)