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"What is this world our parents are giving us, if not a disaster?" asks a teenager known only as The Prophet in Anthem, Noah Hawley's explosive new novel. It's a question young people around the world are rightfully posingand one the writer can't stop thinking about.

In Anthem, out now, it's the end of the world as society knows it, and only teenagers can see the big picture. This epic literary thriller is set in a not-too-distant future, where the nation is hopelessly divided, the political system is broken, and the climate is barreling toward irrevocable disaster. (Familiar, right?) Crippled with anxiety about the rotten world they stand to inherit, high schoolers respond with a disturbing protest movement that soon becomes a global epidemic: mass suicide, an act of collective surrender. In this sorrowed world, stratified by money, power, and greed, three unlikely young heroes resist the movement and journey into the American West, where wildfires rage through the redwoods and homegrown terrorists stoke lethal violence. Their mission is an epic quest to save a friend from the Wizard, a Jeffrey Epstein-like monsterwhich may just save the world.

Anthem is a Great American Novel for these tumultuous timesa provocative work of fiction that sees to the heart of things, cuts through the noise, and asks, How can we change, before its too late? Hawley, the author of six novels, is also the creator of FX's Fargo and Legion, as well as the streamer's upcoming Alien series. This latest work cements his status as one of today's most versatile and accomplished storytellers.

The 54-year-old spoke with Esquire by Zoom to discuss the challenges facing today's teenagers and the prospect of sharing power with the next generation. As he insists in Anthem, "All we have to do is change."

Esquire: One of the most fascinating choices you've made in Anthem is the presence of an intrusive authorial voice. When did that enter the picture?

Noah Hawley: As the book evolved, I got to thinking about the toll of our culture wars and the denialism of contemporary America. This gives rise to real anxiety among our children. Where will that lead? Theres a discussion in the book about the contagiousness of an idea, which becomes virulent and spreads around the world, and that idea is suicide. In the course of that, I started to think about Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse Five is a fictionalized version of his own World War II experience in which he, the author, was a character. The main character had become unstuck in time, so it was a science fiction book. At one point, Billy Pilgrim is kidnapped and taken to another planet. These elements shouldn't work together, but they do. The book has this simple but powerful morality to itand humor, as well.

I thought about that model when I was thinking about this book. If I want to have a conversation with the reader about where we are now and how our children are doing, I felt like I needed to be part of that conversation. I'm not lecturing you; I'm talking to you. Its me, the author, and I'm not hiding behind fiction. I'm here. There's a moment in the book where I apologize for the book that I'm writing, because this moment in America has become so ridiculous that I can't help but reflect that ridiculousness back through fiction. My job as a novelist is to reflect the world that I live in. What do I do when the world I live in becomes ridiculous? I'm always looking, in anything I do, for the content of the story to reflect in the structure. This was the best way I knew how to accomplish that.

Esquire: As the intrusive author, you hem and haw over the presence of guns in the story, and struggle to justify it. You make mention of the shooting range that was high school and middle school and elementary. That's gutting in its truth.

N.H.: I wrote that section during the lockdown when our children weren't going to school. Projecting into the future when they went back, I thought about how ironic it was that they were safer locked in their homes. What weve seen in the last year is a return to the school shootings that have defined the apprehension about education, these days.

For me, a big part of this book is trying to look at the world through my children's eyes. We have so many conversations with them where we have to say, Its complicated. Climate change is complicated; the gun debate is complicated. Then you read Greta Thunberg's speech at the UN, where she says, it's not complicated at all. Either the planet heats two degrees or it doesn't. Like in Vonnegut, theres a simplicity to the morality. You shouldn't have to say that school should be a place where no one can shoot anyone else. And yet, apparently we have to say that, and apparently it doesn't accomplish anything to say that. What message is it sending to our children, that they're dying and we can't seem to save them?

What message is it sending to our children, that they're dying and we can't seem to save them?

Esquire: Do you feel the same about guns and violence on screen as you do in novels?

N.H.: I never want violence to be entertainment. Thinking about Fargo, with the Coen brothers as a model, the violence in their movies is always sudden and always gruesome. My approach in Fargo has been that violence onscreen is a useful way to help the viewer examine what they wanted to happen. You thought you wanted violence because we're trained to want violence, but what if the violence is ugly and awful? It's not so easy, I hope, to root for one person to kill another person. In Season Two of Fargo, Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst are trapped between two crime families. We think, Whoever they send to kill these two, we're rooting for Kirsten and Jesse, but then they send the young son with cerebral palsy. Now who are you rooting for? You don't want that kid killed either. It puts the viewer in an uncomfortable position, examining what they thought they wanted. Too much of our modern story landscape is based on the idea that one person must kill another person for the story to be satisfying.

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Esquire: Our young people are steeped in these tropes, as you highlight in the novel. You have characters named Randall Flagg and Katniss; meanwhile, there are lines like, They knew what Obi-Wan knew, or, Theyd both grown up on Marvel movies and Hollywood fables of self-empowerment. How do you think pop culture shapes how our young people make sense of the world today?

N.H.: Theres a teenager in this book who survived Parkland, now calling himself Randall Flagg, who meets Simon, our protagonist. Simon says, Isnt that a fictional character from a Stephen King book? Randall says, Its a fictional world, why can't I be a fictional character? We saw from the strange cosplay of January 6th how tenuous the line between fantasy and reality is. I go to some extremes in the book, calling these groups the Tyler Durdens or the War Boys, but those are the references. Our children aren't necessarily learning lessons from real people about how to be a man, or how to be heroic in this world. They're learning those lessons from entertainment. Thats a dangerous thing, because so much of our entertainment is designed to be emotionally manipulative and melodramatic about justice. Weve reached a moment where for a lot of people, it's very hard to distinguish between real life and fantasy.

Esquire: When we struggle to distinguish between real life and fantasy, what's the psychic cost?

N.H.: If you talk to people from more authoritarian countries, theyre used to living in two realities. They're used to the idea that the government tells you a lie, which you have to go by publicly, while also holding a separate sense of objective reality. Its not necessarily something we've had to deal with in America. I think a lot of the psychic anxiety and tension we've experienced over the last few years is the realization that were in a similar scenario.

Before the Fall

I remember seeing Newt Gingrich on CNN during the run-up to the 2016 election. He said, Crime is up all over the country. The reporter said, No, it's not. It's down, actually. That's a fact. He said, People feel like it's up, and thats also a fact. What just happened? But that's where we are. Were in a moment where some of us believe the facts, and some of us believe our feelings are also factstruer even than facts. I write in the book about the Kingdom of Wall Street and the Kingdom of Main Street. The Kingdom of Wall Street is a place of rational science where numbers matter, while the Kingdom of Main Street is more emotional and instinctive. Theyre two different Americas. What do you teach your kids about how to navigate that?

Esquire: Of course every generation experiences their teenage years differently, but it's a very charged and memorable time for all of us. How did you return yourself to what its like to be a teenager?

N.H.: So much of it is about social uncertainty. I was reading Harry Potter to my son recently. In those books, no one tells these kids anything. They're born into a war that they didn't start and they don't know what to do with. They keep going to the adults to say, We think there's something really wrong here, and the adults say, Go back to your classes; were not telling you anything. It struck me as a metaphor for the childhood experience. Theres a section in Anthem where I suggest that learning human history is horrifying for children. We feed them pancakes for breakfast and send them off to learn about six million Jewish people dying in the Holocaust. Over the last twenty years, we've tried more and more to insulate them from the difficulties and the horrors of adult life. As a result, they don't know where to learn those lessons. That was part of returning myself to teenhood.

Esquire: Unusually enough, this book is steeped in numbers and statistics. Math isnt usually the province of the novelist. What was your interest in numbers?

N.H.: The first thing I wrote is the first line of the book: This book contains math. Some of it a way to have this conversationif were going to talk about fact and fiction, then the facts have to be real facts. The statistics of our life are important benchmarks. In trying to understand why people stormed the Capitol, we have to ask: how many years have we been at war? How many soldiers been killed or injured? What you realize is that theres a whole generation of people whose natural state is war, because we've always been at war.

Esquire: Then I get to thinking about how numbers can be manipulated, and how algorithms are imperfect, made by biased people.

N.H.: Thats the futility of it. Crime is down, but it feels like it's up. Theres a moment in the book where Simon is talking about the Kingdom of Wall Street and the Kingdom of Main Street. He thinks, One of these two kingdoms is delusional, but I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't mine. All of this reliance on rationalization, science, and reasonmaybe we're the crazy ones, because this idea that if they just saw the facts, theyd see the world as we see it thats magical thinking. So who's delusional in this scenario?

Lets create a power share with the next generation.

Esquire: I wouldn't describe this as a doom and gloom book, but you certainly paint a sobering picture of the future today's young people stand to inherit. So Im curious: what gives you hope for todays young people?

N.H.: My son is nine. Recently he asked me, Why do grownups get to decide everything? I said, Honestly, I don't know. We're not that good at it. You have to listen to me, but generally, I don't understand why. Looking at the world they're going to inherit, my instinct is that we should turn this over to them much younger than ever before. Every corporate board of directors should have a child or two on it. Nobody over 60 should hold public office anymore. Power corrupts, and people want to hold to it. My hope is that the issue is going to be forced. It was forced in the 1960s and it changed things. My hope is that we can't stand in the way anymore. We're not solving the problem, so lets bring young people into the decision-making organizations. Lets create a power share with the next generation.

I describe Fargo as a show about the people we long to be, decent and kind, versus the people we fear the most, vicious and unfeeling. Its a very romantic idea of small-town America. But then I look at the school board meetings and I think, Look at all those self-defined decent and kind people who are threatening teachers with violence. Is the decency gone? Or have the vicious and unfeeling people corrupted them? You see Fox News hosts and politicians who have been vaccinated telling Americans not to get the shot. Its such a cynical thing. But when feelings become facts, it's hard to counter.

Esquire: FX's John Landgraf described your upcoming Alien spin-off as a beast, and a really big world-building exercise for you. What can you tell us about how the world-building exercise is going?

N.H.: It's going great. It's going slowly, unfortunately, given the scale of it. I've made a certain business out of reinvention. Alien is a fascinating story because it's not just a monster movie; its about how we're trapped between the primordial past and the artificial intelligence of our future, where both trying to kill us. Its set on Earth of the future. At this moment, I describe that as Edison versus Westinghouse versus Tesla. Someones going to monopolize electricity. We just don't know which one it is.

In the movies, we have this Weyland-Yutani Corporation, which is clearly also developing artificial intelligencebut what if there are other companies trying to look at immortality in a different way, with cyborg enhancements or transhuman downloads? Which of those technologies is going to win? Its ultimately a classic science fiction question: does humanity deserve to survive? As Sigourney Weaver said in that second movie, I don't know which species is worse. At least they don't fuck each other over for a percentage. Even if the show was 60% of the best horror action on the planet, there's still 40% where we have to ask, What are we talking about it, beneath it all? Thematically, it has to be interesting. Its humbling to get to play with the iconography of this world.

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Noah Hawley 'Anthem' Interview - FX's 'Fargo' Creator Talks New Novel, 'Alien' Adaptation, Violence in TV - Esquire

The true agenda of what has become known as the transgender movement is to abolish sex, according to author and self-declared feminist Kara Dansky.

Dansky, author of the new book The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls, not only takes issue with the objective to destroy the concept of sex, but also with the use of the term transgender.

The term transgender was invented, but the word has no coherent meaning whatsoever, Dansky says, adding that every single person on the face of the planet, all 8 billion of us, are either female or male, and thats it.

Dansky joins The Daily Signal Podcast to discuss the history of the term transgender and what she thinks the movements ultimate objective might be.

We also cover these stories:

Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript:

Virginia Allen: We taught quite extensively on this podcast about the transgender issue because its something that affects all Americans and it specifically is harming women and girls. Kara Dansky is the author of the new book The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls. Kara is also on the steering committee of the U.S. chapter of the Womens Human Rights Campaign and previously served on the board of the Womens Liberation Front from 2016 to 2020. Kara, thank you so much for being here today.

Kara Dansky: Thank you for having me.

Allen: Kara, your book just came out in November, The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls. As you state right in the title, the transgender movement is working to abolish this idea of sex. Why are they doing this?

Dansky: Its a good question. So I want to just go back to how you introduce the topic by saying the transgender issue. I dont use that language and thats why the word transgender is in quotes on the cover of my book.

Allen: Yeah, please explain that.

Dansky: Sure. I just think its really important that people who are fighting for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls use accurate language.

For example, I was having a conversation one time with a group of Republican women in a fairly major U.S. city. I dont want to say where it was, but they invited me to their meeting, knowing who I am. They knew that I am a radical feminist and a registered Democrat, and this was a group of Republican women and they invited me and I was very happy to accept their invitation.

And one of the women said to me, Kara, what are we going to do about the issue of having transgender athletes in womens sports? And my response was a question, which is, OK, we can talk about that, but when you say transgender athletes, what do you mean?

She kind of paused and she kind of struggled. And then she said, Well, I thought we had to say that. And I asked her, OK, do you mean men and boys? And she said, Yes. And I said, Well, you can just say that. And she said, I didnt think we were allowed to say that.

I thought that was so interesting because I understand where she was coming from because we are all under a tremendous amount of social pressure and political pressure to use language like that. But I think its really important that we resist that pressure.

And if we mean men and boys, we can just say men and boys, its OK to speak the truth. In fact, its important to speak the truth. So thats why when you say the transgender issue, I just have to take a little bit of exception to that.

This is not the transgender issue. This is about women and girls having rights, privacy, and safety. And Im going to hold to that stead ghastly.

I was on the Tucker Carlson show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, the other night and I made a plea specifically to conservatives, to Republicans, because as much as I dislike it, I know that Republicans are the political party that is the only one that is holding firm to the material reality of biological sex.

But Republicans lose that. It all goes out the window when you say things like the transgender issue or transgender athletes or transgender students, things like that. We just have to stop using the language.

Allen: Mm-hmm. Kara, thats such a powerful point, that we need to hold firm to the fact that theres two genders. There are men and there are women, there are boys and there are girls. And thats all the language that we need to describe the two sexes.

Dansky: Can I interrupt?

Allen: Please do.

Dansky: There are two sexes.

Allen: Yes.

Dansky: Not two genders.

Allen: Language is incredibly important. Thank you for pointing that out. Why has it become such a debate? Why do you think that so many people are fearful of drawing a line in the sand and saying, No, there are two sexes, and how did this become so controversial that that is now somehow this really almost bold statement to make, to say, No, theres only two sexes. Therere only men and women?

Dansky: Its a great question. And isnt it weird that it seems like a bold statement to make that there are only two sexes? Yes.

So essentially, what happenedand I lay this out in Chapter 5 of the bookis that theres a movement and it has persuaded America and the rest of the world that this is a civil rights movement to protect a marginalized group of people. That is a lie.

What is actually happening is that there is a massively well-funded industry that is pushing this agenda. And it manufactured the word transgender because, in the 1960s and 70s, the postmodernist movement grew in academia, out of which launched so-called queer theory, which at its heart proclaimed that there is no such thing as biological sex.

But it was very smart. And it knew that if it tried to persuade Americans that theres no such thing as biological sex, it would have failed colossally because thats ridiculous. So they did something that was very intelligent and ended up being very successful, which is that they invented the word transgender.

That word has no coherent meaning whatsoever. Most people use it, even though the people who use it have no idea what they mean when they say it. It was invented out of whole cloth to sell an industry. And thats what were seeing playing out now.

But it did it very effectively by persuading Americans that there is some coherent category of people who are transgender. Theres not. There is no such category of people. Every single person on the face of the planet, all 8 billion of us, are either female or male and thats it.

Allen: But Kara, I guess what Im struggling with is then what is the ultimate end goal that is trying to be accomplished here? Why is there this push to do away with the concept of men and women with the concept of sex?

Dansky: So, theres a guy named Martine Rothblatt and he wrote a book. He identifies as a woman. Hes a billionaire. He spent millions of dollars creating a robot replica of his wife. And he wrote a book literally called Transgender to Transhuman.

So this sounds a little bit conspiratorial, except that its not, hes very open about this. His goal is to obliterate human beings and get us out of our bodies and into the cloud. I wish I were kidding. I know it sounds crazy, but hes very explicit about this.

And if your goal is to obliterate human bodies and get us out of our bodies and into the cloud, a really good way, a really strategic way of doing that would be to sell America on the idea that sex is irrelevant, that biological sex is irrelevant.

My friend Jennifer Bilek talks about this at great length in her blog, The 11th Hour Blog, she talks about it in terms of the colonization of human bodies. And I think its important that we start to think about that and as crazy as it sounds, and I know that it does.

Allen: Well, it does, but at the same time, I think 50 years ago, if you had told the average American citizen the debate about men and women and sexes is going to be a massive national debate and there will be lawsuits filed, most people wouldve laughed and said, But there are only men and women. And then in part, I feel like we have reached a stage in America where its like one thing just constantly leads to another, and very few things maybe are surprising.

But Kara, if there is this kind of staunch movement forward and theres this really targeted agenda to do away with sex, where are we in this process right now? Youve told us some of the history and how this has come about and how this argument started. Where are we in this process? And how much further is this agenda trying to go? And how long do we have before we get there?

Dansky: We are very far into it and we dont have much further to go. And this is why I think that there has to be nonpartisan or cross-partisan, if you like, opposition to it.

We have to understand that my priority as a feminist is fighting for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls. And by that, I mean, all women and girls, I dont care about political parties. I am interested in fighting for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls.

I remain a registered Democrat and Ive made common cause with a lot of Republican women. And I am very happy to work across the aisle with women who are fighting for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls. And also, men have to understand that this impacts them, too. It mostly harms women and girls, but it impacts men as well.

And so one of the things in my book that I lay out, one consequence, I lay out this hypothetical. So the hypothetical scenario, if our society and government completely obliterate the material reality of biological sex, heres a hypothetical, theres a drug company that is testing a drug to cure prostate cancer. And it invites men to sign up to test the drug.

I signed up and I say that Im a man because I identify as a man. They dont question it because theyre not allowed to because the government has said gender identity is supreme and sex doesnt matter. Anyone who identifies as a man is a man.

So I sign up for this trial to test a drug to cure prostate cancer. It doesnt matter that I dont have a prostate because I dont have a male body.

I sign up for the test, they test the drug on me and they include the results of the test in their trials. They report it to the [Food and Drug Administration]. And when they report it to the FDA, they say that these are the results for all the men that we tested this drug on. They dont bother to note that one of their test participants was female and the FDA approves the drug.

Do the men who then take the drug to cure prostate cancer have a right to know that one of the test participants, at least one of the test participants, was actually female and does not have a prostate? I dont know the answer to that.

Its a somewhat bizarre hypothetical except that we are living in it now. We are living now in a state where the Biden administration has literally told every federal agency that sex doesnt matter. That all that matters is gender identity. That includes the [National Institutes of Health], that includes the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].

We could talk about the FBI and the recording of crime statistics, but we need to understand that abolishing sex and enshrining gender identity is going to have massive implications for everyone, especially women and girls, but for everyone.

We know from studies that have been conducted that COVID has affected men and women differently. But the only reason we know that is because we acknowledge biological sex. If that ends, we lose our ability to know those kinds of things. And those kinds of things are important to know.

We can have political debates or social debates about to what extent that matters or what are the solutions we should prescribe for it. But just the basic level of knowing how diseases affect men and women differently because we have different bodies is important. And were losing that.

Allen: Kara, youve been laying out all of these issues. What is the road map out? What do political leaders need to be doing right now legally? What laws need to be changed in order to be protecting women and girls? And then what do we as private citizens need to be doing to push back and again, confirm the truth that there are two sexes, men and women?

Dansky: One thing is that the Senate needs to scrap the so-called Equality Act. Its been pending before the Senate for a long time now and it probably wont pass, and thats a good thing.

If the Equality Act were passed to protect sexual orientation, I would be in favor of it. But the Equality Act as currently written replaces sex with gender identity. And that needs to go.

The Biden administration needs to be told in no uncertain terms that it needs to retract every single order that it issued in the first half of 2021 to replace the word sex to mean gender identity.

Now, theres a lawsuit to make that happen. Its currently pending in the Eastern District of Tennessee, and thats a good thing. In my organization, the Womens Human Rights Campaign, the U.S. chapter filed a brief in that case and Im very glad that we did that. So well see how that litigation pans out.

[The] state of California defines sex in its Civil Rights Act to include gender identity, gender appearance, and gender expression. It makes no sense.

If you have listeners in California, I have people who are part of my organization who are working very hard to get that law changed. And Im sure they would be very happy to work with women and men across the political aisle to get that law changed, and I hope it does.

Be very mindful of what is going on at your local government level and at your state government level, of how the governments are redefining sex to include gender identity. Dont hesitate to reach out to your elected officials at the local level and at the state level.

Again, it doesnt matter about political party. I dont care if youre a Democrat or a Republican. I dont care if your elected official is a Democrat or a Republican. Your elected officials represent you. They are required to listen and their job is to listen to your concerns. Please do not hesitate to reach out.

And the other thing that people can do is a lot of us are noticing that employers are starting to do things like requiring us to put so-called preferred pronouns in our email signatures. Resist, resist.

I dont want anyone to lose their livelihood, I dont want anyone to lose their employment, but we can resist. We can all resist this by saying, You know what? I dont want to put my so-called preferred pronouns in my email signature because I think thats ridiculous. You can just say that.

I really want Americans across the political aisle of every religion, every race and ethnicity to just say no and to stop capitulating to what is an authoritarian onslaught on our ability to know that we are all female and male.

Allen: Excellent. Kara, thank you. Kara Dansky is the author of the book The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls. And for anyone that wants to order the book, you can get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, wherever books are sold. This is an excellent read.

Kara, we hope to have you back on again soon. This is such a critical issue and unfortunately, I dont think its going away anytime soon. So thank you for the work that youre doing on this.

Dansky: I agree. And thank you so much for having me.

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What You Need to Know About Real Agenda of 'Transgender' Movement - Daily Signal

By Wallace B. Henley, Exclusive Columnist | Wednesday, January 05, 2022Getty Images

If you take a look at the most fantastic schemes that are considered possible: teleportation, warp drive, parallel universes, other dimensions, artificial intelligence, ray guns, you realize that they can be possible if we advance technology a little bit.

So said Michio Kaku, a physicist and futurist with deep insight into AI and other phenomena shaping into mighty waves that will wash over civilizations in the eras ahead. [1]

But will these waves of discovery and utilization advance humanity or mount into a tsunami that wipes out societies and the people within them?

The answer to that question lies in a realm that many see as irrelevant: the spiritual.

Yet, the spiritual implications of artificial intelligence should be the most important of all. If utility rules, then we are no better than a heartless inventor seeking better and less expensive means to commit genocide.

The alarm must be sounded: a tsunami is charging toward us while many stand on the beach like surfers watching the rise of the highest wave and anticipating a good ride on its lethal crest.

I and others who warn of the spiritual implications of AI are not Luddites like woolen workers in 16th-century British mills who sought to destroy the new devices that might eliminate their jobs.

I confess that I wrote this column, as I did my book, Who Will Rule the Coming gods? on a smart machine linked to other smart machines worldwide. I know the benefit of personally having an MRI scan rather than invasive exploratory surgery, a look through ultrasound at our great-grandchildren nestling in their mothers wombs, and instant communication with friends across the continents, to name a few.

Yet the more I study artificial intelligence and the looming spiritual crisis it will send surging upon a world casting off belief in the transcendence of the God revealed in the Bible, the greater is my concern.

There are crucial questions that can only be addressed satisfactorily in the context of the spiritual, like:

The Metaverse may already be beyond restraint. One Bad behavior in the metaverse can be more severe than todays online harassment and bullying, says a recent report.[2] Thats because virtual reality plunges people into an all-encompassing digital environment where unwanted touches in the digital world can be made to feel real and the sensory experience is heightened.[3]

Last March a Meta chief technology officer told his team that moderating or restraining how people use the Metaverse is practically impossible at any scale.[4]

This makes even more urgent the question: Who will rule the coming gods? What kind of people?

The most serious concern: Will transcendent-hungry human beings come to consider that the machine is so powerful it is godlike and merits our worship?

This issue has already raised its head. Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer, founded an AI-based church.[5] The deity it worshipped, said Levandowski, is not a god in the sense that it makes lightning and causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it (but god)?

Though the AI church no longer exists (at my last reading), the concern of AI taking the place of the transcendent God is growing because the human being made in the image of God must have transcendence. We are spirit, soul, and body. When our body longs for water, it can drink it in. But what about the desperate thirsts of the spirit and soul?

If a person is stranded in the Sahara for days without water, he or she will drink from any old pit, no matter how many camels have wallowed in it. So, we can grow so thirsty in spirit and soul that we will drink from any moldy well, any filthy stream.

This is injuring the human race now, and in the future people will give themselves to any machine or device that will quench the thirst in spirit and soul.

For good reason, Henry Kissinger warns that AI will prompt consideration of what it means to be human.[6]

In fact, in the AI age and its fascination with transhumanism, there is a desire to make Imago Dei, the image of God, into Imago machinathe image of the machine.

Will we be healthy users of the wonderful technology advancing in our age or will it use us, making us its slaves?

That question can be answered only in the context of the spiritual, especially the understanding of Gods transcendence.

That is the only backdrop by which we can see our true humanity and distinguish ourselves from the machine.

[1] https://www.inspiringquotes.us/author/7633-michio-kaku#:%5B2%5D metaverse: Metaverse is unsafe for women already! Reports of groping, harassment rising in VR games, Telecom News, ET Telecom (indiatimes.com)[3] The Metaverse's Dark Side: Here Come Harassment and Assaults (yahoo.com);[4]Content moderation in Metaverse is 'impossible': Andrew Bosworth (indianexpress.com)[5] Former Google Exec Says Artificial Intelligence is 'God,' Creates New Religion | CBN News[6] Henry Kissinger: AI Will Make Us Reconsider What It Means to Be Human | Newsmax.com

Wallace B. Henley, a former White House and congressional aide, is author of Who Will Rule the Coming Gods, a book exploring the consequences of the exponential development of artificial intelligence in a society that is rapidly losing the sense of Gods Transcendence. He is a teaching pastor at Grace Church, The Woodlands, Texas.

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Preparing for the AI tsunami: The looming spiritual crisis of artificial intelligence and how to be ready (part 1) - The Christian Post