Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Do Liberalism and Sexual liberation lead us to "Transhumanism"?

A rather lengthy article crossed my desk the other day from Crisis Magazine. In it, the author discusses the "transhumanism" movement which I describe as certain people's goal to move their consciousness into an artificial intelligence, to leave their brains and bodies behind and become a non-human or "transhuman". To me, this is a natural progression of the trans-sexual movement with which our society is currently enraptured. Where "liberalism" fits into this trend depends on how one defines liberalism and that is why you should probably take the time to read the entire article. If you just want some key points, let me provide them here.
"Liberalism, remaining officially neutral on the subject of ultimate goods, serves to enshrine preference satisfaction as the ultimate good. Liberalism can’t help but privilege rights over duties and so undermines, even to the point of erasure, the conception of human dignity out of which duties arise. By making preference sovereign, liberalism communicates what we might call a proto-transhumanist anthropology. It says, humans are what they desire to become. You are what you want."
The current gender confusion that today's children are being taught is exactly this, "You are what you want." This liberal indoctrination creates questions of personal identity for our young which are unlikely to be answered by the ever changing "wants" of their all too human minds. I suspect transhumanists want an improvement upon the human mind. Who knows what wants a transhuman intelligence will desire next?

Connecting the dots of liberalism's technological understanding of sex as something that satisfies "wants" to the transhuman movement which proclaims the superiority of the artificial brain and body, the author continues,
"The liberal understanding of sex sanctions the pursuit of mastery over natality, and it is a short step from desiring control over natality to desiring control over mortality. Transhumanists explicitly conceive of the two as linked; their goal to defeat death is frequently parsed as a goal to manipulate life."
"As Michael Hanby explains it,
'if knowledge of nature is really engineering, then the truth of this knowledge is essentially whatever is technically possible. But since the ultimate limits of possibility can only be discovered by perpetually transgressing the present limits of possibility, a technological view of nature and truth commences an interminable revolution against every antecedent order or given limit. A thoroughgoing technological society will therefore establish revolution as a permanent principle, paradoxically giving it the stability of an institutional form.'"
"Revolution as a permanent principle", where have we heard that before?

What does all of this have to do with God and religion?
"To surrender to technology, just as to surrender to sexual license, is to abandon the possibility of discovering transcendent truth. Both sexual liberation and transhumanism are blind to the historical, philosophical, and theological foundations that make truth humanly attainable. Both movements devote their energies to engineering a world where truth is no longer necessary, where the givenness of the world we inhabit is entirely subverted. This is surely what makes an anti-culture: the labor to erase every trace of an order that demands reverence for permanent things (the marriage bond, parenthood, the sexual lineaments of the soul…)."
Welcome to the present world, the world of the "anti-culture". It is hard for most of us to understand its attraction. The way of Jesus seems much more attractive to me.

4 comments:

  1. "The current gender confusion that today's children are being taught is exactly this, "You are what you want." Living out the desires of the "Id".

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    1. If living out the desires of the Id results in anything like what happened to Walter Pidgeon in "Forbidden Planet", then we are in for one helluva ride.

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  2. I believe his famous line was "I am my evil self".

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  3. When we ignore created reality, which was, remember, created by God, there are no limits to the insanity.

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