Transfiguration V Transhumanism
God fearing human beings are discovering that a new secular world and a new secular order is being set up by intelligences, human and otherwise, gradually, collectively and step by step and piece by piece. Indeed, it feels like we are engaged in a form of multi-dimensional Chess that is and has been operative in history where human beings will either be transformed by God or transformed by man. The end of this last stage of history seems to point us in a direction where either humans will be transfigured or abolished!
God wants to transform us into beings able to live the life of God through the Life, Death and Resurrection of His Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, but without destroying our nature, rather he wishes to elevate and perfect our nature. However, Transhumanism also wants to transform humanity but it does so through technology and in so doing it seems that it does destroy, delete or harm human nature as we see with the experiments of artificial wombs [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2RIvJ1U7RE&ab_channel=HashemAl-Ghaili ], experiments on human embroyos viz a viz animal cells [https://time.com/5954818/first-human-monkey-chimera-embryo/ ], cosmetic and general surgery which transforms children into their opposite sex, men into women, women into men, and even kids into cats [https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/03/21151/ and https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/20/rye-college-children-neo-pronouns-cats-moons-rishi-sunak/ ]!
Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind champions the coming of the superhumans - made such by technology - when he writes:
‘True, we still don’t have the acumen to achieve this, but there seems to be no insurmountable technical barrier preventing us from producing superhumans. The main obstacles are the ethical and political objections that have slowed down research on humans. And no matter how convincing the ethical arguments may be, it is hard to see how they can hold back the next step for long, especially if what is at stake is the possibility of prolonging human life indefinitely, conquering incurable diseases, and upgrading our cognitive and emotional abilities’ [Signal Books, E-book, 627].
To those who oppose this view of man and of history’s next step, Harari raises a chilling question in his book Homo Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow, which we have heard before in the 20th century:
‘The most important question in twenty-first-century economics may well be what to do with all the superfluous people. What will conscious humans do, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better?’ [Harper-Collins, E-book, 326]
It is alarming that such a figure through his works, ‘Sapiens’ and ‘Homo Deus’, has had a great iinfluence on bodies like The World Economic Forum [WEF], and indeed one could even say that Harari is the Philosopher of the WEF [cf the Behavioral neuroscientist’s, Darshana Narayanan, critique of Yuval Noah Harari’s works: https://mindmatters.ai/2022/11/neuroscientist-takes-aim-at-yuval-noah-hararis-claims-re-humans/].
How did we come to this situation where human beings all over the world are unintentionally preparing the ground for such a godless and inhumane future? What C S Lewis called the Abolition of Man:
“At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’ – to their irrational impulses.”
Well it is been a battle ground for over a century and a half but the war against man and woman made in the image of God is more like a multilevelled game of chess where the two players are Christ and Satan. The pieces are brought to combat in a vast aray of different ways and so we could have a range of battle fields with different combatants operating at different times and places but at the heart of each of these battles are fundmental principles.
We could begin with the Protestant Revolt [the revolt against Tradition and Authority for Faith alone] or the French Revolution [the Revolt against Monarchy, Religion and Social order for Reason alone] or the Bolshevik Revolution [revolt against Monarchy, Democracy and Liberty for the State and the Party alone] or the Garibaldi revolution in Italy [against the Papal States and for a Republic founded by freemasonry forces] but in and around these battles were the Abolition of Slavery which Britain first arose in triumph in outlawing it but America needed a Civil War to join the side of the good. Then there is the Suffragette fight for the woman’s vote which had good arguments for it but also there spun around this issue other women’s issues that would come more to the fore as the First and Second World War came and went. Indeed it would become a revolutionary movement called Feminism. Before and between the World Wars the rise of Eugenics was to be found and which became a dirty word after the discovery of Auchwitz and Dachau at the end of Second World War. Julian Huxley had to invent a new word in place of Eugencis and that word was ‘Transhumanism’ and of course his brother Aldous Huxley wrote his reply to this philosophy in his science fiction story called ‘Brave New World’.
We come to the era of Free Love that is the 60s where the separation of the unitive principle [conjugal act forges a bonding between the married couple] and the procreative principle [the conjugal act will normally result in children when not interfered with] was made possible by the production, wide distribution and promotion of the contraceptive pill [see Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI issued on July 25th, 1968, n. 11-12 - https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html ]
So with this separation of the unitive and procreative dimensions of the conjugal act we have the begining of a pathway where we have sex without babies and babies without sex that leads to an increase in divorce, children out of wedlock, sex as entertainment, rise of personal expermentation of sexual forms, rise of pornography for all sexes and for all ages, rise of abortions, rise of infertility, rise of IVF, rise of the use of embryos for experimentation…ad infinitum till we have a denial that human beings have gender, a human nature and any moral law. Welcome to the 21st Century and the rise of the machines, the rise of bio-engineering and the rise of a brave new world that is being fashioned by the conditioners and controllers of humanity who want to govern all human beings according to a transhumanist vision:
The transhumanist vision of the first half of the 21st century is emerging… but the overall picture looks similar to the following broad description by George Dvorsky:
Some experts believe that all genetic-based diseases will be eliminated by 2030. The widespread application of genetic and other technologies, it is thought, may also result in significant increases to human intelligence, memory, physical health and strength. Some expect the achievement of indefinite lifespans this century and believe that immortals already walk among us.
Researchers suspect that the development of strong nanotechnology in the coming decades will result in molecular assemblers that effectively function like Star Trek replicators. A number of experts are hopeful that medical nanotechnology will be used to revive those who are preserved in cryonic stasis. It is also suspected that advances in both nanotechnology and robotics will greatly alter the current socioeconomic infrastructure, potentially resulting in such things as massive unemployment, the need for a basic guaranteed income, and the general rethinking of how people should coordinate their activities and leisure time.
Steady advances in computing processing power are leading many experts to conclude that human-equivalent artificial intelligence may be attainable by the year 2040, if not sooner. After that, as intelligent machines continue to redesign themselves and recursively improve, they will likely develop into superintelligences, with cognitive capacities thousands of times greater than that of humans. No one knows what this will mean to humanity, causing futurists to dub the hypothesized event the "technological singularity," or simply the Singularity [https://future.fandom.com/wiki/Transhumanist_Vision ]
Makes us all feel warm and fuzzy doesn’t it!
Personally, I prefer the technology of God, called the sacraments, to be the source of my and our transfiguration. A transfiguration that does not destroy us as male and female, does not destroy our liberty, does not destroy the truth and reality that is the facticity of our bodies but elevates and perfects our human nature. I prefer God’s transfiguration of us for a world that does not end, unlike this world and this universe which will end. A transfiguration that makes us fit and able to dwell in the Kingdom of Heaven, where we will meet the angels, the saints, our loved ones [hopefully] and see God our Creator face to face in the Beatific vision.
A transfiguration where evil and all the subjects of evil no longer hold sway over our being, our lives nor our loved ones.
Check out Neil Oliver’s video called ‘What kind of society are we living in?’ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2COPif3HnMg&ab_channel=GBNews ]
Listen to protest song going viral by Oliver Anthony, ‘Rich men north of Richmond’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqSA-SY5Hro&ab_channel=radiowv
