Daily Archives: March 21, 2022

Transhumanist ideology is advancing among scholars who profess Christianity so the question must be asked, is the dream of a post-human (Human+) existence compatible with the Christian faith? More specifically, is transhumanism (H+) compatible with the doctrine of Adam and Eve as the first humans created in the image of God (imago Dei)?

The answer is no. The biblical doctrine that Gods image exists in every human person and also in humanity as a whole shuts the door to transhumanism. We can see this if we look at what the Bible teaches about anthropology, ethics, and salvation in Christ alone.

First, the transhumanist history of human origins and Human+ destiny denies that God made human persons with a fixed and final nature that glorifies our Creator. In practical terms, H+ is a gnostic endeavor that celebrates the immaterial and disparages the material embodiment of our souls. In contrast, the Bible teaches that, while the image of God was deformed by the fall (Genesis 3), the impact of sin did not destroy the sacred nature of human personhood. Nor did it undermine the intrinsic value of our soulish bodies.

The paradox of human sacredness and sinfulness is resolved in the Apostle Pauls affirmation of our identity in Christ (Galatians 2:1920). For Paul, the incarnation of Christ, and his subsequent death and resurrection, affirms the dignity of our bodies, and yet promises to transform every believer into a glorified state. In 1 Corinthians 15:49, he assures believers that, just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man. The transformation offered through the cross of Jesus Christ does not imply that humans evolve into something beyond the human. Even in the final eschaton, when our salvation is made complete, Scripture does not teach that we somehow transcend humanity. The image of the heavenlies of which Paul speaks is a glorification of our humanity, both body and soul, and not the elimination of it. Therefore, the beauty of our humanness as it exists today seen through the lens of Christs redemption shuts the door on transhumanism which treats the human species as only one short stage along an infinite spectrum of evolved forms.

Second, H+ is the programmatic de-humanization of humanity. Just as Darwinists search for the missing link to our past, transhumanists seek to make each human a new link toward our unknown future. For transhumanists, the value of an individual person is tied to their perceived utility as an agent of technological evolution. Rights and dignity are tied primarily to the survival of the collective and only secondarily to the individual. Humans are no longer a uniform kind but a hierarchy of inferior vs. ever-evolving superior beings.

Consequently, the Christian duty to care for the sick and poor is altered into a duty to advance the species by giving economic privilege to the strong. Ultimately, this Nietzschean vision of the evolving bermensch does not eliminate suffering but justifies the use of techniques that cause individuals to suffer for the greater good of the species. And while the pursuit of technology to eradicate suffering, biological defects, and infirmities is compatible with biblical Christianity, the sacrifice of the imago Dei on the altar to the collective good shuts the door on transhumanism.

Finally, Christian transhumanists use ambiguous terminology to improperly connect technological transformation to the Bible. To achieve technological salvation, the human body is diminished and demeaned as a hindrance to Human+. Given transhumanist anthropology, it is no surprise that their theology emphasizes technology as the path toward post-human salvation. To make their case, transhumanists equivocate on the term change in the Darwinian sense of random mutation and equate it to change in the biblical sense of salvation through the cross of Christ. Despite this claim, there is no etymological, scientific, or hermeneutical connection between biological/technological change and biblical change except in the imagination of transhumanist theologians.

Finally, it is a category error to equate the universal salvation of the human species through technological advance to the particular salvation of the individual person through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Even more, what H+ soteriology offers is not the salvation of humanity per se but the elimination of humanity in favor of a transcendent Human+ race. The mission to self-evolve beyond humanity begs the question, how is humanity saved through technological advancement designed to eliminate humanity? In light of Scripture, transhumanist soteriology seems nothing more than a replay of Isaac Asimovs I, Robot, where the AI determines that the only way to save humanity is to exterminate humanity. In the final analysis, it seems self-evident that the biblical doctrine of imago Dei shuts the door on transhumanism.

Here are the first four short essays in this series by J. R. Miller:

With transhumanism, what happens to human rights? The transhumanist accepts suffering for the individual if suffering can advance the evolution of the species toward immortality and singularity. If humans can redefine what it means to be human, what prevents us from eliminating anyone opposed to this grand vision? (January 1, 2022)

Eugenics, transhumanism, and artificial intelligence If we were to succeed at creating an ethical decision-making AI, whose ethics would it abide by? The utilitarian goal of a sustainable future must be guided by a higher ethic in order to avoid grave mistakes of the past. (January 13, 2022)

The deadly dream of Human+ Look at the price tag Some are prepared to sacrifice actual humans now for the hope of future immortality. Without a fixed and final definition of human personhood, there is no foundation for a fixed and final ethic of human rights. (January 20, 2022)

and

Can Christian ethics save transhumanism? J. R. Miller looks at the idea that the mission to self-evolve through technology is the definitive Christian commitment. In Millers view, Christian transhumanists do not provide a stable and persistent definition of human personhood, thus cannot ground human rights. (February 27, 2022)

See the rest here:
Why the Imago Dei (Image of God) Shuts the Door on Transhumanism - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

On September 8th, 1966, the world was introduced to the greatest science fiction franchise in history. Star Trek: The Original Series hit the TV screens 56 years ago and has since amassed 13 movies, 8 television series, 3 animated shows, 2 magazines, a plethora of books and video games, plus innumerable fan fiction. Even fictitious languages such as Klingon have been offered as courses in several universities. Star Treks impact on the culture is beyond compare as it has pushed its audience to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Throughout its tenure, the franchise has always been largely progressive in its viewpoint. It never avoided taboo topics but instead encouraged the viewer to consider such issues through the looking glass of fiction, creating an intellectually open space for internal debate and discourse. However, the wokeification of its current series Discovery has altered Treks trajectory of thoughtful cultural commentary into a non-stop homily of political jockeying and woke promotion.

A sampling of Treks finest moments helps to shed light. These issues include race, gender roles, sexuality, xenophobia, transhumanism, globalism, war, and countless others.

Often credited as the first on-screen interracial kiss between a white man and a black woman, Star Treks William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols helped shatter a taboo when they locked lips in the 1968 episode Platos Stepchildren. As Smithsonian notes, The episode aired just one year after the U.S. Supreme Courts Loving v. Virginia decision struck down state laws against interracial marriage. At the time, Gallup polls showed thatfewer than 20 percent of Americans approved of such relationships. Back then, Star Trek pushed political boundaries without preaching. There was no diatribe or moralizing, just a nuanced normalizing of things now rightly considered trivial.

Later in the Star Trek universe, a subtle but bold change came to the introductory speech. Captain Kirk opened the 60s episodes with Space: The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new lifeforms and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has before. In the subsequent 1987 series Star Trek: The Next Generation, Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean Luc Picard changed the phrase to where no one has gone before introducing gender neutrality in its framing and progressing the Trek franchise even further.

Throughout the series, not only were there more prominent female characters (four regulars in TNG as opposed to one in the original), but women were rarely portrayed as sexually as they were in the original series. Instead of the scantily dressed alien babes Captain Kirk often encountered, the women in TNG always dressed the same as men, rarely revealing their bodies and were given rich character development. This was done naturally, not as an editorial from the writers rooms.

Later still, in 1993, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine introduced the first Black captain, Avery Brooks as Captain Benjamin Sisko, and the show often dealt with issues of race relations, prejudice and slavery. In the episode Far Beyond the Stars, Captain Sisko travels in a dream back to 1950s America where he is the science fiction writer Benny Russell experiencing racism and segregation, even being beaten by two police officers in a racially incited scene. The episode often finds itself in Top 10 lists of Star Trek episodes and the Movie Blogs summation is apt Far Beyond the Starsis a love letter to the transformative potential of science-fiction, an ode to the capacity to imagine a world that is better than this one.

Star Trek Voyager introduced the first female captain with Kate Mulgrews phenomenal portrayal of Captain Kathryn Janeway. Notably, the Trek timeline awarded her the ranking of Admiral before any other on-screen Captain who came before her.

Star Trek: TNG addressed issues of sexual orientation, transgenderism and reparative therapy in the 1992 episode The Outcast. At the time, the media still depicted gay lifestyles largely through the lens of the AIDS epidemic, but Star Trek took a much more nuanced approach. It dealt with an androgynous alien race that prohibited gender identification. It then portrayed how these aliens underwent reparative therapy in the event they deviated into identifying with a specific gender.

So Star Trek has always been progressive as it imagines and reimagines humanity moving toward a more perfect union. Unfortunately, the brilliance of a nuanced past has given way to a vapid and often insufferable present.

Star Trek Discovery, the newest series following a different crew seeks to increase its woke credentials in every episode, ad nauseum. Instead of creative episodic stories that challenge the mind and elevate the soul, every single episode turns into a lecture on all things race and LGBTQIA+.

Star Trek Discovery offers its first Black female Captain, Sonequa Martin-Green as Captain Michael Burnham. While Star Trek had already dealt with the gender and race of its captains in past series of DS9 and Voyager, the outright slobbering from media pundits about how brave the show is for introducing a Black female captain is ridiculous. There is nothing profound about this from a Trekkie perspective. It is in fact a normal progression of all things Trek. What is most unfortunate is that phenomenal acting capabilities of Martin-Green are traded for pedantic character development and shallow, predictable storylines. Its as if she serves more as a checkbox to Diversity and Equity than simply as a talented actress (which she more than proved in her Walking Dead days). Her trials and tribulations are subverted by always coming out on top and never having to endure true loss. The accolade Live long and prosper need not ever be said to Captain Burnham because the viewer already knows she will.

Now having recently wrapped its fourth season, the main crew is predominantly occupied by globalist gays, liberal lesbians, tyrannical transgenders, needless non-binaries and twisted transhumans. Instead of writing one or two poignant episodes regarding their identities and orientations, each episode serves to instruct viewers how they must think about these things, not simply challenge them to think more critically.

This season follows the character of Adira, a transhuman becoming a transgender human with the pronouns he/him. Its exhausting. Instead of watching a delightful sci-fi, the viewer is subjected to the woke tropes of a show seeking to break down barriers when all it accomplishes is the viewer needing to read a gay dictionary to understand its warped terminology. If that werent enough, this character develops a romantic relationship with his non-binary crewmate Gray, (the pronouns they/them serves as a heavy-handed lesson in every other episode). They also then become the surrogate children of the gay couple on board, which checks every box the people at the Human Rights Campaign demand.

Discovery deserves praise for only one of its LGBT characters, the lesbian engineer (obviously) Jett Reno portrayed by Tig Notaro. Her orientation just is what it is and no one really needs to think about it. She also provides humorous breaks from the endless sacrifices this show offers up to the rainbow gods. Slow clap.

To end the season, politics bluntly interrupts the storyline. Failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams enters stage-center as the President of United Earth. Never has Star Trek dared be so brazen with its political orientation. The heavy handed move robs the viewer of the experience, causing one to wonder if Stacey even won that election far off in the 29th century.

In the past Star Trek has served as a brilliant cultural commentary that encouraged the viewer to imagine mankinds progress, it now demands culture think a particular way in order to obtain progress. It no longer presents the audience with a debate to consider but rather insists on a politically correct way to think. It is as partisan as it is obvious.

In a time of American cultural upheaval, Star Trek should serve the functions it always has: a release valve for cultural disagreements and a platform that seeks to build ideological bridges. While The Next Generation signed off its series with the episode All Good Things Must Come to an End, Discovery is fast becoming the show that makes the Trekkie look forward to All Woke Things Must Come to an End.

View post:
Woke: The Final Frontier - California Globe

The afternoon of Friday, March 13, 2020: A handful of cultural institutions had already announced they were temporarily going dark in order to flatten the curve of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fourshows I was scheduled to review had already been canceled until further notice and I was in the Smithsonian American Art Museums Renwick Gallery, planning to leave by 5 p.m. for Arlingtons Gunston Arts Center to review Avant Bard Theatres staging of Lauren Gundersons Ada and the Engine. At 4:35 my phone vibrated: the show and the remainder of Avant Bards season had been canceled.

Two years have passed. Avant Bards artistic director Tom Prewitt died in November 2020 and there was a brief period of uncertainty over whether the company would continue. Luckily it has, under a new leadership model of producing partners (including Sara Barker, Alyssa Sanders, and DeMone Seraphin) and theyve revived a couple productions, including Ada and the Engine with its cast and production team.

Ada Byron, the future Countess of Lovelace (Dina Soltan), pores over volume by her late father, the romantic poet Lord Byron (Jon Reynolds) who abandoned her and her mother Lady Byron (Jessica Lefkow) soon after her birth in 1815. In an era in which moral scandal was believed to be inheritable, Lady Byron has spent the subsequent years keeping her daughter from the temptation of poetry, educating her only in mathematics and music, attempting to rehabilitate their reputation so that Ada might marry someone respectable: the Earl of Lovelace (also Reynolds).

This much goes according to plan, but if this were all, Ada Lovelace would be barely a chapter in biographies of her father. Instead, at 18 years of age, she befriended the brilliant mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage (Matthew Pauli) at a presentation of his Difference Engine. By design the machine was capable of calculating polynomials, storing past calculations in the alignment of its wheels, and, if it had been built, printing out tables that wouldve benefitted British navigation and industry. However, Babbage refocused his attention to his Analytic Engine, a machine that could be programmed by punchcard to run any algorithmin short, a computer.

Babbage was prone to feuding with politicians who did not see the value in his work (he never delivered anything beyond partial prototypes). Ultimately his funding was cut-off. Lovelace, however, was more than a friend who was brilliant enough to understand him. When she translated a transcript of Babbages 1840 Turin lecture on the Engine, she published it with her own copious annotations, including an algorithm (regarded as the first published computer program), and a statement on the potential of Babbages invention. It established Lovelace as one of computer sciences founding figures over a century before the transistor was invented. (Without Lovelaces insight, my aforementioned smartphone, and even the methods my editors and I use to publish this review, would be unimaginable.)

Director Megan Behm balances the exploration of ideas with the emotional intimacy of the small playing space. Designer Alison Johnson dresses the characters with distinctive color palettes that persist through their costume changes, and Neil McFaddens score strikes a similar balance between computer generated and humanistic.

Soltan ably portrays Adas growth over 18 yearsfrom the young woman, almost as giddy at being courted as she being at recognized for her intellect, to an adult whos increasingly demanding to be seen as an equal partner by her mentor, and eventually her painful death at 36 due to uterine cancer. Pauli plays Charles with the highs and lows of genius, the exhilaration of his ideas being understood and the frustration of how rare understanding is. Lefkow and Reynolds play fine supporting roles. (Reynolds shows off his physical theater skills in his one scene as Lord Byron, playing the affected dissolute grace with which the poet would conceal his limp.)

While fictionalized portrayals of both Lovelace and Babbage are a mainstay of the steampunk genre, Gundersons script is grounded in the historical record. Her artistry is in how well she melds the emotional lives of her characters with their ideas in often exquisite language: in one scene Ada and Charles manage to describe the functions of the Engine while simultaneously evoking the image of the giant steam-powered brass and steel brain. Gunderson saves her most imaginative leap for the final scene in which all information is recoverable and poetry, scientific exposition, and music are a single contrapuntal invention. Is it Adas deathbed hallucination fueled by religion and laudanum or a future transhumanist utopia?

Avant Bard Theatres Ada and the Engine, by Lauren Gunderson and directed by Megan Behm, runs through March 26 at Gunston Arts Center. avantbard.org. Pay what you can$40.

View original post here:
Ghost in the Machine: Ada and the Engine - Washington City Paper

Outside of all the boi memes, theres a lot of depth to the character of Arthur Morgan, played by video games newcomer Roger Clark. In a sandbox game, theres nothing stopping you from riding around the Wild West, rampaging through towns, and tying civilians to train tracks. But when youre Arthur Morgan, it just feels plain wrong. Hes an outlaw with a heart, and his only major fault is his unflinching loyalty to the wrong people.

One of the things that makes Arthur stand out is his battle with tuberculosis. Open-world games are often about taking over territory, gobbling up collectibles, and consuming every bit of content the world has to offer. In Red Dead Redemption II, you literally die of consumption. It also flips the traditional power fantasy of games on its head, starting you off with a healthy character and ending with you pale, gaunt, and prone to coughing fits. Ill never forget Arthurs private confession that hes afraid of death, not just because of the delivery of the line, but because its so rare to see a protagonist so vulnerable.

Excerpt from:
The 10 best video game characters of all time - For The Win