Sharon and I had a great discussion this afternoon as members of a panel on transhumanism at the World Turned Upside Down conference in Dublin, Ohio. We appreciate the organizers inviting us to Skype in and discuss the issue with Basil and Gonz of Canary Cry Radio, Doug Woodward (author of Uncommon Sense: A Prophetic Manifesto for the Church in Babylon), Gary Winkelman, and Cris Putnam (author of The Supernatural Worldview and co-author with Tom Horn of Petrus Romanus and Exo-Vaticana).
It is a testament to the spirit of the group that seven people, all intelligent and eloquent in their own right (if I do say so), were able to share speaking time about equally and make some excellent points about an issue that the church has yet to address on any scale.
If there had been more time, I would have just added this: Since transhumanists, as we mentioned, incorrectly identify the problem with humanity (it’s not cell death, it’s the depraved nature of the human heart–call it sin, for lack of a better term), their prescription is off the mark. Maybe they will actually achieve radical life extension, and might even someday achieve their goals of immortality and virtual omnipotence. But hold on a minute.
Christian doctrine holds that those who put their faith in Jesus will be saved, and all will be judged according to their works. The saved will receive rewards proportionate to how faithfully they served. The wicked, we are told, will go to eternal punishment.
Transhumanist doctrine is…what? Everybody is saved, upgraded through technology to immortality? That would be universalism, which is inherently unjust. If everyone is upgraded to eternal life, that would include all the warmongers, murderers, child molesters, etc., right? How is that just?
And if all are not upgraded to immortal bliss, then who gets to decide who is worthy? That way lies eugenics. We put a stop to that in the United States–finally–in the 1970s.
Well, sort of; Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg admitted that she assumed Roe v. Wade was “about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
What populations would those be, exactly? Presumably not the wealthy, educated class that Justice Ginsburg associates with. (And what a trick–the “unfit” have been conned into thinking that aborting themselves into the dustbin of history is their constitutional right! But I digress.)
Not coincidentally, “self-directed evolution”, the motto of the International Eugenics Congress gatherings in 1923 and 1932, is a common thread in the writings of today’s transhumanists. The man elected president of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations, Ernst Rudin, went home and wrote the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring for Nazi Germany.
A transhuman future is exactly what Hitler, Himmler, and the National Socialists in Germany tried to usher in seventy years ago. Be careful of what you wish for.