Category Archives: Transhumanist

In giving themselves godlike abilities, the technocratic elites are moving towards a transhumanist future powered by their own intelligent design that could give them the divine authority to rewrite human rights as we know them.

Through gene editing, synthetic biology, and the merger of humans and technology, governments and corporations are fundamentally altering what it means to be human.

In a future where humans are no longer considered to be natural humans, what would that mean for human rights?

History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods Yuval Noah Harari

The American Declaration of Independence holds that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Rights are rights because they are considered to come from the creator they are God-given and therefore, every citizen is born with these natural rights.

Article 1 of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights also says that humans are born free: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Ourintelligent design is going to be the new driving force of the evolution of life Yuval Noah Harari

In the era of transhumanism; however, our technocratic elites are looking to replace God, the creator with their own intelligent design.

In doing so, technocrats become the creator the higher power that endows humanity with certain rights.

In making themselves godlike through their own devices, the cyborg priesthood wouldnt have to answer to anybody.

Rules do not apply to gods. Gods are meant to be worshipped. Gods can be vengeful.

Now, the peoples elected representatives face a fateful choice: restore citizen controls of technology or surrender to the cyborg theocracy James Poulos, 2021

Unless ordinary Americans regain a hands-on mastery of our most powerful digital tools, we will become compliant posthumans or ungovernable psychotics, sacrificing what is left of our civilization and nation to vengeful new gods James Poulos, 2021

In his written testimony to Congress in December, 2021, author James Poulos observed that our technoethical elite believe that we will fully merge with our technology and become as gods.'

He added that unless ordinary Americans regain a hands-on mastery of our most powerful digital tools, we will become compliant posthumans or ungovernable psychotics, sacrificing what is left of our civilization and nation to vengeful new gods.

Pouloss message to lawmakers was clear: restore citizen controls of technology or surrender to the cyborg theocracy.

Putting technocrats in the place of God could give them the unaccountable, divine authority to redefine human rights as they see fit from their position as the creator.

You dont have to be a religious person in order to appreciate the role that the concept of God plays in the construction of human rights.

Can humans be endowed with natural rights without a higher power to endow them?

Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled Hermetic Principle of Polarity, The Kybalion, 1908

The technocrats transhumanism agenda is lined with half-truths, where the promise of superhuman abilities will likely be reserved only for a select chosen class while the programmable plebs exist in a constant state of surveillance and control until they become irrelevant.

For the chosen ones, they could receive human performance enhancement that would give them the ability to never tire, think smarter, move faster, jump higher, see farther, hear better, hit harder, live longer, adapt stronger, and calculate quicker than any other human being on the planet.

For the rest of us programmable plebs, the fourth industrial revolution is already merging our physical, biological, and digital identities in order to monitor, manipulate, and reprogram our behavior.

If and when humans become fully integrated with machines on a large scale, where will the technology end and the human begin?

Eventually, they [our technoethical elite] believe, we will fully merge with our technology and become as gods' James Poulos, 2021

Its like what Obi-Wan Kenobi said about Darth Vader in Star Wars, Hes more machine now than man, twisted and evil.

Technology and bioengineering can blur the lines of who or what is responsible for a persons behavior the human, the technology, or the humans behind the technology.

This concept of who is ultimately calling the shots between humans and technology can be expanded to the notion of public-private partnerships.

For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which is a founding partner of the GAVI vaccine alliance has historically given more money to the World Health Organization (WHO) than every single nation state except the US.

When it comes to WHO policy recommendations that affect billions of people around the world, whos ultimately calling the shots governments elected by the people, or unelected and unaccountable globalists with ulterior motives?

Permittinghuman enhancement could aggravate existing social or economic inequalities World Health Organization, 2021

In July, 2021 the heavily-Gates-funded WHO published a series of reports on human genome editing recommendations and governance frameworks, which acknowledge the profound ethical implications surrounding human performance enhancement.

According to the WHOs Human genome editing: a framework for governance report:

Who will own the technology that resides within us or the genes that were altered synthetically?

Will human performance enhancement be reserved only for soldiers and the elite, or will it be made available to all?

What happens when technology embedded within the human body becomes obsolete?

Can a genetically-modified soldier ever return to a normal, civilian life?

Governments, corporations, and armies are likely to use technology to enhance human skills that they need like intelligence and discipline while neglecting other human skills like compassion, artistic sensitivity, and spirituality Yuval Noah Harari

Militaries around the world are already making some of the biggest strides towards transhumanism because of the advantages their super soldiers would have over their adversaries.

In April, 2022 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) issued a broad agency announcement looking for Human Performance Enhancement solutions for military use that include:

When humans fully integrate with machines, or are otherwise genetically altered through synthetic biology, will we still be able to call ourselves Homo sapiens?

Would our natural rights endowed at birth still apply to us after we are no longer considered natural humans?

The DARPA announcement follows a November, 2021 Pentagon-sponsored RAND report on human performance enhancement that revealed the US Department of Defense was looking into adding reptilian genes that provide the ability to see in infrared, and making humans stronger, more intelligent, or more adapted to extreme environments.

What sort of advantages would a person with godlike abilities have over a natural human being?

According to the RAND report, Technological Approaches to Human Performance Enhancement, modalities for human performance enhancement (HPE) can be grouped into three principal categories:

For the US Defense and Intelligence communities, human performance enhancement offers the potential to increase strength, speed, endurance, intelligence, and tolerance of extreme environments and to reduce sleep needs and reaction timescould aid in the development of better operators.

But what is to become of these super soldiers once their tour of duty has ended?

What happens when I leave the military? Does my implant get removed? Do I get to keep my implant? Does my implant get upgraded? Military Officers concerns about neural implants

According to the session, When Humans Become Cyborgs, at the 2020 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the majority of military officers were primarily concerned about ownership and bodily integrity when it came to neural implants.

These military officers wanted to know:

Hardware may be implanted and removed from the human body without affecting the course of human evolution as long as it isnt passed down to the next generation.

Genetically modifying human biology; however, can indeed forever alter the course of what it means to be human as the alterations can be passed from parents to their children.

The ability to edit biology can be applied to practically any cell type, enabling the creation of genetically modified plants or animals, as well as modifying the cells of adult organisms including humans Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, 2017

Humanity can also split into several different species depending on the types of genetic engineering taking place.

Just as human performance enhancement can create indefatigable superhumans with superior immune systems, improved cognitive abilities, and enhanced digestive systems, it can just as well create a weaker class of humans by removing their God-given abilities to defend themselves against viruses, to cognitively think for themselves, or to even break-down certain foods in their bodies.

When WEF founder Klaus Schwab talks about the fourth industrial revolution as not only changing what we are doing, but changes who we are fundamentally, hes not speaking in metaphors.

Schwab is telling us that technology is becoming part of our anatomy, both above and below our skin.

Klaus Schwab, 2015:

"And you see the difference of the #4IR is it doesn't change what you are doing, it changes you. If you take #genetic editing just as an example, it's you who are changed. And, of course, this has a big impact on your identity." #mRNA pic.twitter.com/SV7AmBBjGF

In his 2017 book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Schwab remarked that synthetic biology will provide us with the ability to customize organisms by writing DNA.

Whats more, The ability to edit biology can be applied to practically any cell type, enabling the creation of genetically modified plants or animals, as well as modifying the cells of adult organisms including humans.

Schwab also observed that The list of potential applications is virtually endlessranging from the ability to modify animals so that they can be raised on a diet that is more economical or better suited to local conditions, to creating food crops that are capable of withstanding extreme temperatures or drought.

The science is progressing so fast that the limitations are now less technical than they are legal, regulatory and ethical Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, 2017

Following the logic, this means that humans can also be modified to be raised on a diet that is more economical or better suited to local conditions.

When it comes to editing human biology, Schwab argues, the science is progressing so fast that the limitations are now less technical than they are legal, regulatory and ethical.

Seeing how the unelected globalists wish to drastically reduce meat consumption worldwide, the idea of modifying humans to be raised on a steady diet of bugs and lab-grown protein while potentially making people physically ill after consuming meat would definitely help achieve that goal.

In fact, NYU professor Matthew Liao has suggested on numerous occasions that engineering humans to be intolerant or allergic to meat would serve the climate change agenda because it would cut down on greenhouse gases and CO2 emissions.

Just as some people are naturally intolerant to milk or crayfish, like myself, we could artificially induce mild intolerance to meat by stimulating our immune system against common bovine proteins Matthew Liao, TED Talk, 2013

In his 2013 TED Talk, Liao remarked, Just as some people are naturally intolerant to milk or crayfish, like myself, we could artificially induce mild intolerance to meat by stimulating our immune system against common bovine proteins.

The professor has also suggested giving hormone treatments to children, so they dont grow to be so big and tall, because being smaller is environmentally friendly and more energy efficient.

If too much of the data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humanity will split, not into classes, it will split into different species Yuval Noah Harari

Software requires updates from time-to-time.

If there were ever an agenda to normalize software upgrades for a transhumanist future, then incentivizing or coercing the general population into routinely accepting updates to their bodies in the form of booster shots would definitely fit that bill.

In order for technology to give humans godlike abilities, it requires a complete surrender of all bodily autonomy to whomever controls the data.

That same data can also be used to enslave all of humanity.

Whether intentions are noble or nefarious, the ability to hack humans requires massive biological data collection in real-time.

Biological knowledge multiplied by Computing power multiplied by Data equals the Ability to Hack Humans Yuval Noah Harari

Once enough biometric data is collected, all that is needed is a lot of computing power to figure out how to hack human beings, which means governments and corporations know more about you than you know yourself.

On one end of the spectrum, the military and anyone else who is rich and powerful enough to get their hands on the technologies can give themselves superhuman abilities.

On the opposite end, people like you and I end up with human behavior modification instead of human performance enhancement.

How did we get to this point?

Organisms are algorithms Yuval Noah Harari

The road to transhumanism starts with digital identity, which lays the technological framework to monitor and record the personal details of every individual on the planet.

From there, the data stored in interoperable digital wallets can merge with the biometric data collected in real-time from devices connected to the human body via the Internet of Bodies.

Once technology gets in-and-under the skin to collect as much intimate data about you as possible, you are well on the way to transhumanism and the beginning of what could be the worst totalitarian surveillance regime in human history.

After all the genetic editing and the technological manipulation stemming from the fourth industrial revolution, will we still be able to call ourselves human?

How much of our humanity will be left after the synthetic overwrites the organic?

If we are to split into different species, can our rights be split as well?

When the time comes, will you bow down to your technocratic, cyborg priest class in service of their AI god?

Or will you risk being made irrelevant if it means theres even the slightest chance of winning the great battle for the preservation of humankind as we know it?

Original post:
Endowed by their Creator: exploring human rights in the age of transhumanism - The Sociable

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You can tell a lot about the anxieties of an age by the common themes that show up in its narratives. Art tends to channel cultural preoccupations. In recent years, one theme has shown up again and again in movies and television: technology. From Black Mirror to Bo Burnhams Inside, from The Social Network to The Social Dilemma, theres no shortage of thought-provoking reflections on the moral dimensions and ethical questions arising in a world where technological development often outpaces the cultivation of wisdom. Its not just limited to the science-fiction genre, either. These days, comedies, dramas, and even martial art action films (see below) are also wrestling with technology-related themes.

Theres no shortage of thought-provoking reflections on the moral dimensions and ethical questions arising in a world where technological development often outpaces the cultivation of wisdom.

Christians should be leading the charge in thinking wisely about technology. There are several new books out there to facilitate these discussions: Tony Reinkes God, Technology, and the Christian Life, Felicia Wu Songs Restless Devices, Jason Thackers The Age of AI, Chris Martins Terms of Service, my own book on wisdom in the digital age, and more. If Hollywoods recent output is any indication, our society is conflicted and uncertain about technology. Even secular artists sense the moral complexity of technologys onward march. Consider picking up one of these books to be better equipped to bring Christian wisdom to the sorts of questions being asked in pop culturelike those in the five narratives below.

Kogonadas sublime family drama is the quietest and subtlest film on this list, yet it still raises big questions about the nature of being human. The story follows a family of four, in which each member comes from a different background and the son (Yang) just so happens to be a robot. After Yang malfunctions at the end of the (highly memorable) opening dance scene, the film goes on to explore familial grief as if a human child and brother had been lost. Whats the meaning of human connection when one part of that connection isnt human? Can a nonhuman being help humans rediscover the weird wonder and texture of lifefrom butterflies to tea to Chinese fun facts? If a nonhuman like Yang can experience friendship and love, work and leisure, happiness and pain, and social membership in a family and culture, what about the human experience does it lack? The film asks more questions than it answers, which is the type of science-fiction drama I like. Watch on Showtime. Rated PG.

As its very apt title suggests, theres a ton going on in this multiverse-hopping, maximalist martial arts film starring the brilliant Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan. Directed by the filmmaking duo Daniels (Swiss Army Man), EEAAO is rife with philosophical ideas and theological implications. While the films ideas are all over the map and ultimately land in a rather vacuous place (We can do whatever we want, nothing mattersbut be kind to one another anyway), its the form of the gonzo experience that rings true to life in the internet age. The film is more or less a microcosm of your average day onlinescrolling through feeds of random information, seeing context-less fragments of peoples lives, and generally feeling overwhelmed by the limitless drama unfolding at any given time, all over the world. The films three-part structure (I. Everything, II. Everywhere, III. All at Once) also captures the overwhelming chaos of perceptual life in the smartphone agewhere we literally have access to everything, everywhere, all at once. The internet has overcome the old constraints of space, time, and geographyrendering to humans the closest approximation of god-like powers (omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence) theyve yet experienced. Its no wonder the films protagonist is a nod to Eve (Evelyn). Her choice is the same one Eve faced in Eden and the same one we face any time we open Google: Do we take the bait of infinite knowledge and timeline-shifting, we can do whatever we want metaverse fantasy? Or do we rest content in our limitations, happy that we can know some things, be somewhere, and live in some time, even if we cant do it all? Now in theaters. Rated R.

Steven Soderberghs KIMI is a taut, brisk-paced thriller that essentially reworks Hitchcocks Rear Window for the age of Alexa and COVID-19. Zo Kravitz shines as a (rightly, it turns out) techno-paranoid data analyst for a tech company whose home assistant (Kimi, basically Siri or Google Home) doubles as a surveillance juggernaut. Anyone leery of Big Techs data-mining capabilities should probably avoid this film, which frighteningly plays out the implications of a world where the tech in your home (or hand) records your every movement and decision. Yet the film also ponders the potentially good implications of technology that makes sin and injustice harder to hide. Are the trade-offs worth it? If surveillance technology can expose crime and lead perpetrators to justice, are we willing to let go of our privacy? And is the truth-telling nature of objective technology really reliable when its owned by profit-motivated, often morally compromised corporations? The filma good supplement to reading Shoshana Zuboffs The Age of Surveillance Capitalismleaves us unsettled about these questions. Watch on HBO Max. Rated R.

This acclaimed new workplace drama on AppleTV+ has a fascinating premise. Mysterious corporation Lumon Industries pioneers a medical procedure called severance in which select employees can opt to sever their work and nonwork memories, such that they functionally live two lives with two perceptual realities. For severed employees, their innie (workplace self) only knows life within Lumonthey literally never get to sleep or leave, only toil (the parallel to hell is doubtless intentional). Meanwhile, their outie self has no idea what their innie does in the workplace, and most dont seem to care. The concept displays in exaggerated relief aspects of our lives we already experience: digital technology that allows us to fragment and compartmentalize multiple selves (e.g., our projected Instagram self vs. our real self, our Zoom self vs. our camera-off self); the struggle of increasingly fluid work-life boundaries (who wouldnt want a cleaner break between the two?); the temptation to escape stress and other unpleasantries, like death, if technology allows (A life at Lumon is protected from such things). The showjust renewed for a second seasonis incredibly thought-provoking on the nature of consciousness and the dangers of the dis-integrated self. We need to be thinking through these questions as Web3, the metaverse, and virtual reality grow in prominence. Watch on AppleTV+. Rated TV-MA.

Mahershala Ali shines in this 2021 sci-fi drama, which plays like a more tender episode of Black Mirror. Directed by Benjamin Cleary, the film (set in the near future) centers on an ethical dilemma posed by technology that allows a terminally ill human to secretly undergo a procedure where a clone version of themselves is created, complete with all their memories and personality, yet without the sickness. Would your loved ones know any different if one day a healthy replicant version of their husband or father was subbed in, while the old one went away to die in secret convalescence? Is sparing people trauma and grief always a worthwhile goal for technology, regardless of the cost? This seems like a key question in technological ethics. If a technology helps us avoid pain, does that automatically make it worth it? What about technology that creates a semblance of immortality, where some version of you is reproduced in perpetuity (the goal of transhumanism)? Or is humanitys beauty irrevocably tied to its contingency and potential for real loss and suffering? Swan Song helps us think through these questions in a moving, life-affirming way. Watch on AppleTV+. Rated R.

Link:
5 Screen Narratives Reckoning with Technology - The Gospel Coalition

It always sounded as if David Cronenbergs Crimes of the Future would be a return to the veteran directors preoccupation with body horror, transhumanism, and weird, organic sci-fi and the films first trailer proves this very much to be the case.

Featuring strange, fleshy technologies, body parts sewn shut or relocated to unfamiliar places, and scenes that confuse sex with surgery as well as what appears to be a shot of someone eating a waste paper basket Crimes of the Future is very recognizable as the work of the man who made such unsettling explorations of the human-machine interface as Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Crash, and Existenz in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

Crimes of the Future, which will be released in theaters in June, reunites Cronenberg with Viggo Mortensen, star of his much more grounded (but also excellent) 2000s crime thrillers A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Mortensen plays a near-future performance artist who publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs, assisted by his partner (La Seydoux). Kristen Stewart plays an investigator from the National Organ Registry who looks into the couple, and uncovers a plan to use their fame to shed light on the next phase of human evolution. (You can get a very slightly better sense of this plot from the French version of the trailer below.)

In a statement, Cronenberg said, Crimes of the Future is a meditation on human evolution. Specifically the ways in which we have had to take control of the process because we have created such powerful environments that did not exist previously. [...] At this critical junction in human history, one wonders can the human body evolve to solve problems we have created? Can the human body evolve a process to digest plastics and artificial materials not only as part of a solution to the climate crisis, but also, to grow, thrive, and survive?

Crimes of the Future comes after a fairly long hiatus for the 79-year-old Cronenberg, whose last film was 2014s Maps to the Stars. In 2020, his son Brandon Cronenberg released Possessor, a horror film that seemed strongly influenced by the elder Cronenbergs work.

It was also revealed that Crimes of the Future will premiere at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in May in the main competition. The winner of last years top prize at Cannes, Titane, also owed a clear debt to Cronenberg, so it seems the Canadian elder statesman of horror is making his comeback at a time when his twisted visions are in fashion.

Also premiering at Cannes will be Top Gun: Maverick; Baz Luhrmanns Elvis biopic; a new crime thriller from Oldboy director Park Chan-wook; a French remake of the cult Japanese zombie film One Cut of the Dead; a new film by Mad Max director George Miller; the directorial debut of Squid Game star Lee Jung-jae, and much more. Looks like a great festival.

See more here:
David Cronenbergs Crimes of the Future trailer shows return to sci-fi body horror - Polygon

The news about actor Alain Delons decision for assisted suicide is a disturbing call for reflection. I never liked getting old, the actor said on one occasion. At 86 years old, the right to leave calmly would make provoked death the most logical and natural thing to do, in the Frenchmans opinion, which is far from being considered a terminal patient. The youngest sons recent statements, denying that his father intends to end his own life and asking that he be allowed to live in peace, seem to reinforce the thesis that a nostalgia for the spotlight has motivated the farewell atmosphere. . In any case, Delon reminded us of the urgency of thinking about what Albert Camus defined as the only truly serious philosophical problem: judging whether or not life is worth living.

The rejection With aging, the obsession with eternal youth and permanent happiness seem to be creating a generation of adults without emotional maturity, who confuse whims with rights and have an aversion to duties. This is evidenced by the Argentine psychologist Sergio Sinay, in his book The society that does not want to grow. A society committed to remaining a teenager lives in immediacy, in the fleetingness, in the escape from responsibilities, he says.

The alleged constant duty of happiness is the theme of the essay The Perpetual Euphoria, by French Pascal Bruckner. Happiness is no longer a chance that happens to us, a favorable moment in relation to the monotony of days, as well as unhappiness, since both are natural in human life, in the authors view. happiness a program of life and ends up feeling unhappy precisely because of that.

If the path of reflection and subjective intention does not account for the desire to reduce the burden of a self-consciousness that weighs and makes suffer, why not take the shortcut of objective intervention through technological manipulation?, provokes Eduardo Gianetti da Fonseca, in the suggestive work Felicidade. The reflection on antidepressants and drugs is easily applicable to the extreme of assisted suicide.

The promise of quality of life embedded even in the transhumanist discourse (a kind of overcoming biological limitations by technology) hides in itself an attack on the sacredness of life, points out gynecologist and obstetrician Elizabeth Kipman, audible knowledge of Personalist Bioethics. The population is absorbing this discourse of individual empowerment, without knowing the political issues that are behind it. It absorbs the idea of an earthly paradise, without realizing that it will be necessary to eliminate those who are worthless, such as the sick and the elderly. To achieve this, it is first necessary to build a social consensus, and that is what is happening, he defends.

The idea of control of the population through pleasure already appeared in the Brave New World , by Aldous Huxley, who paints a paradise without family ties, responsibilities and pain, even with the help of a drug soma to guarantee well-being free from side effects. Published in 1932, the work seems like a prophecy of the ideal of many today: The world is now stable. People are happy, they have what they want and they never want what they cannot have. They feel good, they are safe; they never get sick; they are not afraid of death; they live in the blissful ignorance of passion and old age; they are not burdened with fathers and mothers; they have no wives, no children, no mistresses for whom they can suffer violent emotions; they are conditioned in such a way that they practically cannot help but behave as they should. And if, by chance, something goes wrong, theres the soma.

With the infinite possibilities brought by technology, came proposals about new ways of dying. And although, in the Hippocratic Oath, every doctor at the end of his training utters that Even when urged, I will neither give a deadly drug nor advise it, practices such as assisted suicide and euthanasia offer help usually medical in dying. The difference is that in the first, the patient administers the lethal drug and in the second, it is the medical team. From a moral point of view, however, they are not different from common suicide, in the opinion of the oncologist and master in philosophy Franco Scariot, author of the book Ethical issues in terminal patients according to personalism (2021).

This is in fashion because the priority of the value has been inverted. Before it was clear that the value of life was superior to that of freedom, now it is reversed. But it has no logical argument, because to be free, you have to be alive. Not to mention that he shows little knowledge of the concept of freedom, since there is no full freedom, lifes contingencies are always suffered, he recalls.

Thinking life as a right or as a duty is in the x of the issue of suicide, according to Professor Jos Dias, a member of the Graduate Program in Philosophy, Masters and Doctorate at Unioeste Campus de Toledo. For the first conception, there are no major ethical problems involved in suicide, as we are not obliged to enjoy a right when it has become an unbearable burden. However, for the second conception, suicide presents serious ethical problems, because if life is considered a duty for the living, we need to put into the equation the rights of the other parties involved: family, friends, society, he ponders.

Scariot adds that, in addition to contradicting a natural tendency to fight for survival, inherent to every being, suicide is immoral as it promotes a break in relationships. Studies show that man is a social being, a being of relationships, he is not alone. Suicide not only takes the persons life, but breaks relationships with family, friends, it is a selfish act in which the person thinks of himself, not of who he is leaving, he adds.

The suicide is a definitive answer to a temporary problem, says nurse Lidiane Melo, a professor at the postgraduate course in Suicidology at the Municipal University of So Caetano do Sul, pointing out that at least ten people are impacted in each case. And it is thinking about these broken relationships that the specialists work in postvention, that is, in the assistance to those who stay. The last days of survivors bereaved by a suicide are carrying the pain of someone who saw in suicide the way out of suffering. It gives the impression that the problem is solved, but it generates infinite grief, the bereaved is never the same again, he laments.

Suicide causes an irreparable break in relationships, and it is precisely it is in human relationships that the meaning of life can be found, says Elizabeth Kipman. I remember a patient with breast cancer, who lived alone, without a partner, one child had been killed by drug trafficking and the other, whom she loved very much, was in prison for the same reason. She didnt want to have the surgery, she was aggressive, she swore a lot, she says. Everything changed when a psychologist got her son a permit from the prison to go to the hospital. It was very exciting. She discovered that she could offer what was going through him, and he promised that he would regenerate for her, he recalls.

More than physical pain, reinforces the doctor, what leads to suicide is the pain of hopelessness, of nothingness, of emptiness. The human person exists to seek a meaning beyond himself. Giving up on life because you cant stand the pain due to the inner emptiness or the lack of horizon is not realizing a meaning. It is always possible and necessary to come out of oneself to achieve some value, opines the doctor, evoking the neuropsychiatrist Viktor Frankl, father of Logotherapy.

A survivor of four concentration camps, the Austrian said that every person can discover the meaning of life in the realization of creative, existential and attitudinal values. The first ones happen when you act, build, love; the second are linked to what he receives, to love, to the beautiful; but the most properly human value is that of attitude. When someone is affected by unavoidable suffering, such as illness or the death of a person, it is properly human to take an attitude in the face of suffering, summarizes Kipman.

Scariot adds that practically all patients who ask for help to die give up when suffering is suppressed. As a society, we should fight to address suffering, not to fulfill the request for suicide with a false humanitarian justification, she argues. Thus, if from a subjective point of view it is the anguish caused by physical or emotional pain that almost always leads a person to make this decision, a large part of the voluntariness of the act is lost since there is an internal coercion, adds the doctor.

The dignity of the person, expressed in the right to a dignified and painless death, is among the main arguments of the pro- assisted suicide. Dignitas, by the way, is the name of a Swiss non-profit society that offers alternatives to die.

Legal principle of principles, which underlies all rights and ethics, human dignity is not it is related to any external condition or usefulness of the person, recalls Professor Jos Dias. In this sense, neither old age nor infirmity can hijack someones worth. His dignity (human value) goes beyond his physical, chronological or mental situation, therefore, whether child, young or old, healthy or sick, every human individual is an absolute value: it is priceless, because it cannot be replaced, it is single. Under no historical circumstances could the individual lose their dignity, as this would mean ceasing to be human, which is impossible, he reinforces.

The fundamental choice for life in limiting situations is far from religious motivations. A record holder in longevity among those diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), physicist Stephen Hawking, who died in 2018, at 76 years old, is a good example of this. My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21 years old. Everything since then has been a bonus, he said on one occasion.

With his muscles paralyzed by the disease, Hawking who declared himself an atheist on several occasions used a wheelchair and used a wheelchair. voice synthesizer to communicate. Ive been living with the prospect of dying early for the last 49 years. Im not afraid of death, but Im in no hurry to die. I want to do a lot before that, declared the physicist, considered one of the most brilliant minds in history.

Elizabeth Kipman recalls that Hawking himself saw in transhumanism a great disaster, a risk of dehumanize man. In this sense, she reinforces the importance of accepting death as a natural stage in the cycle of life. Its about getting ready, learning to face the things that happen to us, the disappointments, which are small deaths that life teaches us to live. However, it is completely different to act to dominate ones own life and death. Suicide is not the realization of a value, even from apparently good justifications. It is a slope of dominance, manipulation and subjection, even when it is advocated as conquered freedom, he defends.

In March, the Alain Delons eldest son told the press that the actor had asked for help to undergo assisted suicide in the near future. Delon even posted a farewell text on his Instagram account. I would like to thank everyone who has followed me over the years and given me great support. I hope that future actors can find in me an example not only in the field of work, but in everyday life between victories and defeats. The post was later deleted.

With one of the least restrictive laws in the world in this area, Switzerland where Delon lives and would plan to undergo assisted suicide, which was denied last Friday (8). ) by the actors youngest it is the destination of a strange type of tourism, in which people pay large sums to take their own lives. Without requiring the candidate to have a terminal illness, the legislation opens precedents for situations that are difficult to explain, such as that of two North American sisters, 54 and 49 years old, who disappeared in February after traveling to the country.

They would have sent messages to family and friends, who they believe they were written by other people the day before he died by assisted suicide. The two American ladies died in 11 February, the Swiss government said in a statement reproduced by the Daily Mail. Both health professionals, the sisters were healthy and had not previously expressed a desire for the procedure.

One of the best known names in this Swiss death tourism is Philip Nitschke. Known as Dr. Death, he created a suicide machine called Sarco (of sarcophagus), which gained approval for use late last year. The invention is a kind of capsule made in 3D printing, where the person dies a few minutes after the release of a gas. After that, the wrapper itself becomes a coffin.

Among the countries with laws that allow some type of assisted death are Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Austria, Canada, some states in the United States and Colombia.

See more here:
How the generation that refuses to grow old and feel pain invented assisted suicide News Release India - News Release India

The World Economic is the anti-human, techno-fascist scum of the Earth.

WEF founder Klaus Schwab and his minions are the enemies of humanity and freedom for the global population.

Last week, I introduced WeLoveTrump readers toYuval Noah Harari, Schwabs top advisor. If you havent heard of this transhumanist, I recommend viewing his creepy presentations.

Who is Professor Yuval Noah Harari, Klaus Schwabs Top Advisor?

But I want to shine awareness on another sickening aspect of the World Economic Forums transhumanist agenda.

What is transhumanism?

Per Wikipedia:

Transhumanismis a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates for the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhancelongevityandcognition. It also predicts the inevitability of such technologies in the future.[1][2]

Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers ofemerging technologiesthat could overcome fundamental human limitations as well as theethics[3]of using such technologies. Some transhumanists believe that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the current condition as to merit the label ofposthumanbeings.

In simpler terms, transhumanism is merging humans and machines through artificial intelligence.

So, Im not joking when saying Klaus Schwab wants to turn you into a cyborg.

Its a legitimate presentation given by these anti-human globalists.

As stated by the WEF:

Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces are blurring the lines between mind and machine. What steps do leaders need to take now to ensure the ethical and responsible application of human enhancement?

Join an in-depth discussion that explores the principles and priorities for governing disruptive technologies.

One of the speakers at When Humans Become Cyborgs is Victor Dzau, President of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine (NAM).

Dzau is also the President of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB).

The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) is an independent monitoring and accountability body to ensure preparedness for global health crises. Co-convened by the Director-General of the World Health Organization and the President of the World Bank, the GPMB is comprised of political leaders, agency principals and world-class experts. It is tasked with providing an independent and comprehensive appraisal for policy makers and the world about progress towards increased preparedness and response capacity for disease outbreaks and other emergencies with health consequences. In short, the work of the GPMB is to chart a roadmap for a safer world.

Guess whos a former Board member of the GPMB?

Anthony Fauci.

Get an understanding of the God-complex these transhumanists possess by watching When Humans Become Cyborgs.

As a reminder, Klaus Schwab has bragged about infiltrating world governments to insert these types of individuals into positions of power.

VIDEO FOUND: Klaus Schwab Admits To Penetrating The Cabinets Of Most World Governments

Read more:
"When Humans Become Cyborgs." A Glimpse Into the World ...

This is the story of how one man challenged the system.

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Dr. Zelenko Crimes Against Humanity and the Transhumanist ...

The radical leftist nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court who favors slaps on the wrist for child pornography addicts cant say what a woman is. Even though she was only appointed because she could check off that box, in addition to the black one. So she cant really prove that, in fact, she qualifies as a woman since she doesnt know what one is. She said to ask a biologist.

But the postmodern paradigms Judge Kentanji Brown Jackson fetishizes dont care about the verdict of biology. If you present as a woman, then others must treat you as one. So presumably drag queen RuPaul could equally fulfill Joe Bidens campaign promise. But not Rachel Dolezal, because she only presents as black.

And you cant claim membership in another race, just the opposite sex. This even though race is a biologically trivial detail, while sex is absolutely crucial to thousands of species, including our own. So I could change my name to Tallulah and insist that Im a white woman, and you must treat me as such. But I couldnt rename myself Africa X. Zmirak and insist that Im a black man. Because we are governed by reason and science, you see.

In fact, we are governed by blank insanity. Sometimes it feels like were living through a mishmash of bleak, dystopian novels from the past. We flinch in fear of committing thoughtcrimes out of George Orwells 1984. Then we drown our anxieties in pleasures proper to Aldous Huxleys Brave New World. We watch as our society gets balkanized by multicultural colonization straight out of Jean Raspails The Camp of the Saints. We see eunuchs and perverts elevated to prestige and power, as in Anthony Burgesss The Wanting Seed. And we cringe in helpless horror as our own church leaders betray both reason and faith, as they do in Robert Hugh Bensons The Lord of the World.

But more than any other prophetic work of fiction, C.S. Lewiss That Hideous Strengthseems like a document produced in 1945 by a time traveler from 2022. When I first read the novel in the early 1990s, parts of it struck me as shrill and overly alarmist. I just finished re-reading it, and it seemed like a documentary.

Among his many theological, philosophical, and literary gifts, C.S. Lewis possessed what we must call vision. He could see 50 chess moves ahead how abstract ideas seemingly harmless in the classroom or the laboratory would wreak absolute havoc. Not just in the social and political life of the West, but in the fragile ecosystem of the human heart and soul.

If you havent read the Space Trilogy, of which That Hideous Strength forms the third volume, you need to. I mean, the way you need to take your blood pressure or heart medication if its prescribed. The books themselves are masterworks of imaginative fiction, exquisite blends of futuristic fancy and learned historical allusion. Lewis had devoured the fictional works of men like H.G. Wells, written in service of shallow, degrading theories of human life. Lewis decided to plough the same fictional field on behalf of Biblical, Classical accounts of mans nature and fate. In this trilogy, as well as the seven Narnia novels, Lewis succeeded brilliantly.

In That Hideous Strength, Lewis shows the corrosive, corrupting effects of false pictures of man, especially of scientific materialism such as Darwins. He depicts the logical fallacies such worldviews entail such as reasoning to the conclusion that reasoning is impossible. More importantly, he depicts how entertaining such theories degrades our perceptions of the world, undermines our wholesome instincts and virtuous habits, and ends in the abolition of man. Pretend for long enough that you are just a trousered ape, or a meat robot, and eventually you will act like it. Or worse, youll soak in a demonic contempt for man as God made him, and join in the Enemys attack on Creation as Transgenderists and Transhumanists are attacking it today.

Lewis managed the remarkable prophetic feat of telescoping into the plot of a single novel, with a small cast of characters, the moral collapse into tyranny that in the real world took seven decades. We today may be the first people who can read That Hideous Strength and realize exactly how prescient it was.

But there is much more to this novel, and Lewis imaginative fiction, than doleful prophecies of doom. In fact, the Space Trilogy and the Narnia novels are healthy, wholesome meals for the mind and soul. They contain in them the antidote to materialism and Gnosticism, the alternative to disillusionment. Lewis worked in those books to re-enchant Creation with the Creators light and love. As a scholar of Medieval literature, he treasured a deep love for the cosmology that underlay its masterworks, from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy. That worldview stands in stark contrast to the bleak materialism mixed with political superstitions that produced todays Woke religion, and props up its priests of Baal, such as Judge Jackson.

Lewis sought to revive in modern readers the Medieval sensibility, which saw in the heavens the orderly handiwork of a glorious Craftsman, and in each planet an emblem of certain attributes of God. To really appreciate these novels, I recommend two books by astute Christian critics: Planet Narnia by Michael Ward (on the Narnia books), and Deeper Heaven by Christiana Hale (on the Space Trilogy). These authors delve into minute detail, unpacking Lewis imagery and allusions in light of his project.

One more author, if I might. Perhaps the most powerful practitioner of the scientific discipline known as Intelligent Design is Hugh Ross. A vastly knowledgeable physicist, he is also a gifted theologian. He strives in his books to show how scientifically implausible materialist claims really are, in the light of the massive fine-tuning required to make any life possible, much less human life. Beyond that, he reflects on the accounts in Genesis to show how (if properly read) they anticipate the latest findings of contemporary cosmology. Get hold of his The Creator and the Cosmos and Why the Universe Is the Way It Is. These books, dealing with real-world astronomy and biology, serve the same goal that Lewiss novels did: restoring to our view of the world the proper gratitude and wonder.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of God, Guns, & the Government.

See the original post:
CS Lewis's Space Trilogy: A Guide to Living on Earth - The Stream

Regular readers might be getting tired of my pointing out how theres nothing new under the antivax sun in terms of deceptive arguments, conspiracy theories, and tropes designed to argue against vaccinating. However, the COVID-19 pandemic introduced these talking points to a much large audience than had ever seen them before so I considered it my duty to educate our readers and to point out that none of the antivaccine misinformation that has hit us like a tsunami since COVID-19 vaccines first entered large clinical trials in the summer of 2020 is anything new. It just seems new if you havent seen it before. Examples include, of course, misinformation claiming that the vaccine kills based on misinterpretation of the VAERS database; that it sterilizes our womenfolk; that it sheds and endangers the unvaccinated; and that it causes cancer, none of which are anything new. Even the claim that it permanently alters your DNA, although it might appear like a new talking point based on the fact that Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines were the first successful translations of mRNA technology into a clinical product, if you look really hard, is not a new claim. (Transhumanism, anyone?) As Charles Pierce likes to say, history is so cool. In this case, though, Id add: Its only cool and useful if you know about it and can use it to counter the pernicious misinformation about vaccines of the sort published by, for example, The Wall Street Journal and deconstructed by Jonathan Howard yesterday.

Last week the journal Bioethics published another example of how everything old is new again in the form of an article titled Against COVID-19 vaccination of healthy children. It might as well have been titled Against vaccination of healthy children, because pretty much every one of the arguments presented could be used to argue against long-accepted childhood vaccines that have been mandated as a prerequisite for school enrollment in the US for decades. Ill explain in a moment, but, given that this is presented as piece of serious scholarship, I wondered who was behind it. It turned out to be from a last-year graduate student named Steven R. Kraaijeveld at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and Associate Fellow at the Research Consortium on the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies. Its noted in the Biographies section that his PhD dissertation is on the ethics of vaccination. His research focuses on philosophy and ethics of technology, medical ethics, public health ethics, and moral psychology. After reading this article, Id say that he needs to go back to the drawing board, particularly given the Tweets with which he bragged about his paper on Friday:

In the thread, as he lists his reasons for arguing against the both routine and mandatory COVID-19 vaccination of healthy children he brags about all the data that back up his ethical conclusions, after, of course regurgitating the health freedom and parental rights arguments that have long been a staple of antivaccine activists going back decades:

Mr. Kraaijevelds co-authors include Rachel Gur-Arie, PhD, MS, Hecht-Levi Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics and Infectious Disease at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, and Euzebiusz Jamrozik, MD, PhD, practicing Internal Medicine Physician and fellow in Ethics and Infectious Diseases at Ethox and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities at the University of Oxford, as well as Head of the Monash-WHO Collaborating Centre for bioethics at the Monash Bioethics Centre. Youd think that at least Dr. Jamrozik would be aware of the antivaccine tropes being recycled in this graduate students paper, but apparently not. Ive found that, depressingly, a lot of academics who actually work on infectious diseases and vaccines are blissfully unaware of common antivaccine tropes, which leads them to regurgitate them inadvertently in a much more palatable, academic-seeming form. This is what this paper does.

In the case of this article, its hard not to think of Bioethics like this.

In fairness, I will give the authors a modicum of credit in that they seem to realize that their arguments could be used to argue against other childhood vaccines. They even say so in the introduction, claiming that theyll show you why the arguments in favor of routine vaccination of children against COVID-19, arguments that they find compelling for other childhood vaccines, dont hold up for COVID-19 vaccines. In fact, as Ill show, the arguments they make against the key pillars of the case for vaccinating children against COVID-19 could just as easily be deployed against many, if not most, childhood vaccines currently in use and long accepted.

Kraaijeveld notes:

This article presents an analysis of the ethics of vaccinating healthy children against COVID-19 by responding to the strongest arguments that might favor such an approach.5 In particular, we present three arguments that might justify routine6 COVID-19 vaccination of children, based on (a) an argument from paternalism, (b) an argument from indirect protection and altruism, and (c) an argument from the global public health aim of COVID-19 eradication.7 We offer a series of objections to each respective argument to show that, given the best available data, none of them is tenable. These arguments, which might be compelling for childhood vaccination against other diseases and in different circumstances,8 do not appear to hold in the case of COVID-19 with the currently available vaccines. Given the present state of affairs and all things considered, COVID-19 vaccination of healthy children is ethically unjustified.

If one accepts our conclusion that routine vaccination of healthy children against COVID-19 is ethically unjustified, then it follows that coercion, which is an ethically problematic issue in itself, is even less warranted. Nonetheless, mandatory vaccination of healthy children against COVID-19 is already being consideredand, in some places, implementedas a way of increasing vaccine uptake.9 We therefore also provide two objections specifically against making COVID-19 vaccination mandatory for children, which center on additional ethical concerns about overriding the autonomy of parents and legal guardians and of children who are capable of making autonomous decisions. If vaccinating healthy children against COVID-19 is ethically problematic, then coercing vaccination is even less acceptablebut even if vaccinating healthy children against COVID-19 should at some future point be considered more defensible (e.g., should a much more favorable costbenefit analysis emerge), important ethical objections against coercive mandates will still remain.

As I said before, Mr. Kraaijeveld is recycling the health freedom and parental rights arguments that portray any attempt to require vaccines for children before entering public school or daycare facilities as an unacceptable fascistic assault of freedom. Its a very old antivaccine argument that takes a reasonable debate about the limits of what can be mandated in the service of public health and turns it into a Manichean view that portrays any sort of mandate or even mild coercion as evil. One has only to look at the Defeat the Mandates rally held in Washington, DC in January (with a repeat scheduled for Los Angeles in April) to see this argument taken to an extreme.

Its true that Defeat the Mandates tends to include more than vaccine mandates, but it also adds a healthy dash of parental rights to the rhetoric of health freedom, all with a Boomer-friendly design (note the font) reminiscent of Woodstock.

Lets look at Mr. Kraaijevelds main arguments one by one.

Mr. Kraaijeveld begins by characterizing the appeal to paternalism thusly:

The first argument in favor of childhood vaccination for COVID-19 derives from paternalistic considerations and holds that routine vaccination of healthy children is justified because it is in the best interests of the would-be vaccinated children. The argument from paternalism suggests that COVID-19 vaccination will, all things considered, benefit children the most (or cause them the least harm). Given that routine vaccination is the most effective way to ensure vaccine uptake, it is therefore justified for the sake of the health and well-being of children themselves.

Unsurprisingly, his objections are twofold:

Both Dr. Howard and I have been repeating for months now how these claims are not only wrong, but echo the same claims made by antivaxxers about the MMR vaccine. Whenever the argument that we shouldnt vaccinate children against COVID-19 because the disease isnt that dangerous to children (i.e., quite literally, doesnt kill that many children), Im reminded of the appeal to the Brady Bunch commonly repeated by antivaxxers in 2015. Ill discuss that more in a moment, but first lets see what Mr. Kraaijeveld actually argues:

According to the best available data, healthy children are at a much lower risk of severe illness from COVID-19 and are less susceptible to infection than older adults.10 In contrast to many other vaccine-preventable diseases, healthy children are at low risk of severe COVID-19 infection, morbidity, and mortality.11 Hospitalization of children with COVID-19 is rare, although emerging data suggest that children with severe underlying comorbidities are at higher risk.12 Deaths among healthy children due to COVID-19 are very rare; for example, a large study in Germany found no deaths among children aged 511 without comorbidities.13 We agree with the assessment that COVID-19 is not a pediatric public health emergency.14

That last citation (#14) is to an article by Drs. Wesley Pegden, Vinay Prasad, and Stefan Baral published in May 2021 arguing that COVID vaccines for children should not receive emergency use authorization. Dr. Howard recently discussed that article and its many flaws in great detail in follow-up to his original discussion of the article last year, which means I dont have to now. Read the articles for the details, but, in brief, Pegden et al. presented a case that made COVID-19 appear essentially harmless to healthy children (much as antivaxxers had long claimed that measles, chickenpox, and the like are essentially harmless to healthy children for years before) while leaving out information about how effective the vaccines were in children. Lets just echo what Dr. Howard said by listing again some of his key bullet points (remember, this was May 2021 and lots more children have been hospitalized and died since then in the US):

That sounds serious to me, and, remember, the Pegden et al. article was published almost 11 months ago, and, as our very own Dr. Howard pointed out, there was definitely some cherry picking going on here:

And also, others pointed out how cherry picked Mr. Kraaijevelds citations were:

Actually, it wasnt just cherry picking; it was misrepresentation, too:

Id also suggest that Mr. Kraaijeveld look at who is leaping to his defense. Personally, Id be embarrassed if I had people like this defending me:

If you want to see how bad Mr. Kraaijevelds arguments are, look no further than this passage:

Overall, the burden of COVID-19 in children appears to be similar to or lower than that of typical seasonal influenza in the winter (unlike the much higher disease burden of COVID-19 in adults).16 In 2020, 198 children aged <17 officially died of COVID-19 in the United States.17 In 2021, with Delta being the predominant variant, that number increased to 378,18 which is comparable to the official number of children aged <17 who died in the 20182019 influenza season in the United States (i.e., 372).19

Notice how every time the claim is made that COVID-19 is much less deadly (or at least no more deadly) than the flu in children (even, as I note, routine yearly vaccination against the flu is recommended for children), its always the 2018-2019 flu season thats cited, Always. Of course, that was the last complete flu season before the pandemic, which means that citing it is citing a season with zero mitigations of the likes that the pandemic brought us. There were no mask mandates, no business shutdowns, no virtual schooling, and no social distancing. Its an intellectually dishonest comparison of apples to oranges worthy of antivaccine activists (which is why Mr. Kraaijeveld really shouldnt have used it), and, as Dr. Howard put it, 1,200 is more than six. Basically, in the same environment, with mask mandates and mitigations, COVID-19 was much more deadly to children than the flu. Mr. Kraaijevelds argument boils down to the same argument antivaxxers make, namely that routine (or even mandated) vaccination of children against COVID-19 is unnecessary because its more or less harmless to healthy children and not that many children die of it. Again, it used to be accepted that children arent supposed to die if we can reasonably prevent it (which we can with COVID-19 vaccines), but arguments like Mr. Kraaijevelds amount to a shrugging of the shoulders over a level of child death that used to be considered unthinkable, even though 20% of COVID-19 deaths occur in children with no underlying conditions. Some ethics!

This brings us back to the Brady Bunch.

I last discussed the Brady Bunch gambittwo weeks ago. It was basically an antivax trope pioneered several years ago by antivaxxers about the measles. Theyd point to a 1969 episode of the classic sitcom The Brady Bunch in which all six kids (and, ultimately, Mike and Alice, who, it turns out, had never had the measles as children) caught the measles. The whole situation was played for laughs, with the kids happily staying home and playing games, the only evidence that they were ill being phony-looking red spots on their faces and limbs. It wasnt just The Brady Bunch either. Even though its only two weeks since I last cited it, heres a 2014 YouTube video that was making the rounds then:

You get the idea, I think. I consider Mr. Kraaijevelds paper to be an academic version of the Brady Bunch gambit, which is why Ill take this opportunity to point out yet again that according to the CDC, before the vaccine, 48,000 people a year were hospitalized for the measles; 4,000 developed measles-associated encephalitis; and 400 to 500 died. By any stretch of the imagination that was a significant public health problem, and the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963, followed by the MMR in 1971, made it much less so, bringing measles under such control that it became very uncommon and deaths from it rare. As Dr. John Snyder reminded us nearly 13 years ago in his response to Dr. Sears making the same arguments in his vaccine book that touted an alternative vaccination schedule, measles is not a benign disease, regardless of what popular culture thought of it 50 or 60 years ago. (More recent data show that a severe complication of measles, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), is more common than we used to think.) Meanwhile, over 13 years ago Dr. Sears was claiming that the risk of fatality from measles is as close to zero as you can get without actually being zero. Sound familiar? This is basically the same argument that Mr. Kraaijeveld is making for COVID-19, which has killed over 1,300 children in the US since the pandemic hit, arguably more than the average yearly toll of measles before the vaccine.

Mr. Kraaijeveld also invokes another common antivax argument:

Furthermore, post-infection immunity has been found to be at least as effective as vaccination at protecting against disease due to reinfection with COVID-19.24 An increasingly large body of evidence suggests that immunity after previous severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection is at least as robust as vaccine-induced immunity.25 Childhood exposure to SARS-CoV-2, which, as previously discussed, is generally associated with mild viral illness, may offer protection against more severe illness in adulthood.26 To date, hundreds of millions of children have already been infected with COVID-19. For children with immunity from previous infection, the potential benefits of vaccination are likely to be lower than for children without immunity

Ill give Mr. Kraaijeveld credit for using the preferred term post-infection immunity rather than natural immunity, but this, too, is an old antivax argument, namely that natural immunity is better than (or at least as good as) vaccine-induced immunity. Its an argument that I first encountered over 20 years ago, which was when I first started taking a serious interest in the antivaccine movement. Sometimes it got really ridiculous too. Does anyone remember the book Melanies Marvelous Measles 11 years ago? It was a childrens book that argued that measles was not only not harmful but that it was good for children because it built natural immunity. Indeed, its blurb read:

This book takes children aged 4 10 years on a journey of discovering about the ineffectiveness of vaccinations, while teaching them to embrace childhood disease, heal if they get a disease, and build their immune systems naturally.

Actually, measles is worse than we thought in that it causes immune amnesia that suppresses immune memory and makes one susceptible to other infections for 2-3 years. You know why natural immunity isnt better than vaccine-induced immunity? Its because achieving natural immunity requires that one actually suffer through the disease and risk its complications, up to and including death.

I like to ask everyone, including Mr. Kraaijeveld, who argues against routine vaccination of children against COVID-19 because it isnt that dangerous to them: Why arent you arguing against routine vaccination against measles? The death toll among children due to COVID-19 over the last two years (>1,300) translates to a higher yearly death toll than the measles produced in the years right before the vaccine. What about chickenpox, which used to kill only around 100 children a year before the vaccine? Why arent you arguing against the varicella vaccine?

Oh, thats right. Its because the COVID-19 vaccine is supposedly so much more dangerous:

The case for vaccinating healthy children against COVID-19 for their own sake is undermined by uncertainty; that is, by the currently poorly characterized potential for rare, harmful outcomes associated with the vaccines in children. Public safety data from the Pfizer-BioNTech clinical trials in children included 2,260 participants aged 12 to 15, of which 1,131 received the vaccine.37 In addition to a small sample size, the trial follow up period was of short duration; therefore, no reliable data presently exist for rare or longer-term vaccine-related harms.38 Though common adverse events occurring less than 6 months after vaccination may be ruled out, the risks of rare or delayed adverse outcomes can simply not yet be evaluated.39 Should vaccine harms occur, they will be revealed in the general pediatric population only after thousands or millions of children are already vaccinated, which would also risk seriously undermining vaccine confidence. The restriction of AstraZeneca vaccines to older age groups due to blood clotting events early on in the COVID-19 vaccination rollout, as well as reports of increased rates of vaccine-related myocarditis among younger age groups illustrates that rare risks are sometimes more common in younger age groups and might sometimes outweigh benefits in children.40 Severe cardiac manifestations such as myocarditis and pericarditis are now recognized as rare risks of the COVID-19 vaccines.41 Myocarditis-induced deaths following COVID-19 vaccination have been documented in adolescents as well as in adults.42

This is a classic antivax argument, namely that the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease. Of course, if the vaccine truly is more dangerous than the disease, then that is a compelling argument. However, as weve discussed many times (particularly Dr. Howard), this is not the case with COVID-19 vaccines. Even the cases of two adolescent deaths after vaccination cited by Mr. Kraaijeveld are not nearly as clearcut as portrayed, as pediatric cardiologist Dr. Frank Han discussed, noting that dilation of the heart (found in one boy) doesnt occur within days and the autopsy findings were missing some key pieces of information that would definitively suggest the vaccine as the cause.

The speculation about potential long term effects is also a common antivaccine trope. Antivaxxers, failing to be able to make the case that routine childhood vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases that they vaccinated against, often pivot to handwaving about unknown (and undescribed and unproven) long term effects. Before COVID-19, those long term adverse events were autism, autoimmune disease, cancer (still a favorite for COVID-19 vaccines), and pretty much every major chronic illness. (Indeed, antivaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. came up with the false claim that the current generation of children is the sickest generation, largely due toyou guessed it!vaccines.) The last time I dealt with the claim of long term adverse events (i.e., greater than a few weeks to six months after vaccination), I noted that they were very rare, so rare that Paul Thacker, for instance, had to do incredible contortions to find very rare cases that occurred only in the special case of immunosuppressed children and cite narcolepsy after the H1N1 vaccine Pandemrix, which actually occurred within weeks after vaccinationhardly long term.

So this section is basically one antivax argument that the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease. Its not; so Mr. Kraaijevelds ethical argument falls apart. Next up, he appeals to a lack of sterilizing immunity.

The next arguments for vaccination against COVID-19 that Mr. Kraaijeveld takes are all based on the observation that COVID-19 vaccines do not produce sterilizing immunity; i.e., they do not completely prevent infection and transmission, although he does concede that they are quite effective at preventing severe disease, hospitalization, and death. Based on this observation (primarily), he takes on the argument from indirect protection and altruism and the argument from global eradication. Ill start with the latter first, because in its service he makes an argument that caused me, literallyand I do mean literallyto facepalm as I read it. Specifically, he objects to claims that ongoing transmission will:

Mr. Kraaijeveld objects to the first argument by pointing out that evolutionary fitness of an infectious virus is determined more by increased transmissibility rather than virulence, which is true as far as it goes, although he cites a 2020 paper making the argument that there was not yet evidence of SARS-CoV-2 variants with increased transmissibility. (Those would arrive a few months later in the form of the Delta and Omicron variants, the Delta variant being more transmissible than the original Wuhan strain and the Omicron variant being more transmissible than the Delta variant.) Howeverand heres where the facepalm came in as I readthat is actually a strong argument for doing everything reasonable, especially vaccination, to decrease the level of transmission to as low a level as is feasible, in order to decrease the likelihood of more transmissible variants arising. Again, as people making these arguments always seem to do, Mr. Kraaijeveld is falling prey to the Nirvana fallacy, in which an imperfect intervention is portrayed as a useless one. When someone like this argues that COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission, it implies that the vaccines dont prevent infection or transmission at all, which is nonsense. Of course they do; theyre just not 100% effective (or, since the rise of Delta and Omicron even close to it).) The way to look at it is that the vaccines are less good at preventing infection and transmission than they are at preventing serious disease and death, not that they dont prevent transmission or infection at all.

What flows from Mr. Kraaijevelds Nirvana fallacy is predictable. He argues, as I mentioned above, that mass vaccination of children will not contribute to preventing the development of more harmful variants. I note that, even as he observes that virulence and transmissibility are often incorrectly conflated, Mr. Kraaijeveld himself seems to be doing the same thing as he in essence argues against a straw man of the real argument, that decreasing transmission is useful in terms of controlling the disease, even if the vaccines dont produce anything near sterilizing immunity. He also argues:

The notion that unbridled transmission would make the virus more likely to escape vaccine-derived immunity makes the eradication argument either self-defeating or incredibly costly. Aside from the fact that current vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission, if certain variants really are highly efficient at evading vaccine-derived immunityor, worse still, if more variants continuously evolve to evade vaccines more efficientlythen attempts at eradication through global vaccination, and the strong evolutionary selection pressures this entails, will be met with diminishing returns for the costs of such a program.

Its also rather funny how Mr. Kraaijeveld fails to note that these new variants are also pretty good at evading post-infection natural immunity as wellpossibly even as good as they are at evading vaccine-induced immunityto the point where its increasingly being concluded that, while its better to prevent COVID-19 with vaccination, if you do get it hybrid immunity (a combination of infection-induced and vaccine-induced immunity from getting the vaccine after youve recovered) is better at preventing the disease than either alone. I also note that there are few areas in the world where the vaccination rate among adults (much less among children) is anywhere near high enough to result in significant selection for variants that evade the immune response; what we are seeing is primarily a selection for increased transmissibility due to wide and largely uncontrolled circulation of the coronavirus among large populations.

Mr. Kraaijeveld also argues that children are not a major driver of COVID-19 transmission, thus making vaccinating healthy children pointless, because, according to him, COVID-19 is not dangerous to healthy children. One notes that there is more cherry picking here, given that all the studies he cites are pre-Delta and pre-Omicron. Moreover, more recent studies showing that mask mandates significantly decreased transmission suggest that schools are not as insignificant a source of COVID-19 circulation as Mr. Kraaijeveld would argue.

The last part of Mr. Kraaijevelds paper opposes any sort of mandates for COVID-19 vaccines for children that are straight from the antivax playbook. First, the appeal to parental rights:

Mandates for children to be vaccinated against COVID-19 would limit and, depending on their nature, even override the autonomy of parents and guardians to make decisions about the health of their children. This requires ethical justification as such, but it demands stronger justification in proportion to the level of coercion that mandates would involve.100 When mandates are in place, the actors who make decisions for the health and well-being of children de facto become governments and public health officials rather than parents, although less coercive measures (e.g., small fines) might allow some parents to opt out and thereby retain decisional autonomy.101

I have to wonder right here if Mr. Kraaijeveld understands how mandates work for children, in the US at least. Here, the mandate is that children require certain vaccines to attend school, but there is no legal penalty for not vaccinating ones children other than not being allowed to enroll them in school. Certainly, there are no fines, and its pretty rare that parents are investigated by child protective services for not vaccinating their children. (Usually, such investigations involve far more than just not vaccinating.) He also seems unaware that most states allow religious and philosophical exemptions to these mandates, in addition to medical exemptions. In the US, at least, the coercion that he decries isnt much in the way of coercion at all, which makes me wonder why he doesnt think that, in the US at least, mandating COVID-19 vaccines for school is acceptable. Oh, wait. As discussed above, he echoesunknowingly, I hope, but possibly knowingly I fearantivaccine talking points about them, such as the claims that COVID-19 doesnt harm healthy children, that the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease, that it doesnt produce sterilizing immunity and is therefore useless in contributing to herd immunity, and other arguments.

He also goes straight into Great Barrington Declaration/Urgency of Normal territory of focused protection:

For COVID-19, vaccines are safe and effective in higher-risk groups, including older adults and the immunocompromised,59 and significantly reduce the risk of severe illness even when vaccinated groups are exposed to substantial community transmission.60 While there are some people for whom the current COVID-19 vaccines are contraindicated (e.g., those with severe allergies), this group appears to be small.61 It is therefore not the case that vulnerable groups cannot protect themselves, which would make routine vaccination of less vulnerable groupschildren, in this casemore compelling. Moreover, as argued above, children are not major drivers of COVID-19 transmission. As such, there is no strong ethical justification for COVID-19 vaccination of healthy children for the sake of vulnerable groups.

This is, in essence, the same argument that Great Barrington Declaration authors make about all interventions to prevent the spread of COVID-19including masks, lockdowns, and vaccinesnamely that its possible to protect the vulnerable (focused protection) and that no intervention should be permitted that is not completely voluntary. Unsurprisingly, consistent with this Mr. Kraaijeveld is apparently not a fan of nonpharmaceutical interventions, such as masks and lockdowns, to slow the spread of COVID-19 either, viewing them as ethically problematic as well.

To summarize, Mr. Kraaijeveld argues that, because current COVID-19 vaccines do not produce sterilizing immunity, herd immunity is not achievable, and vaccinating children doesnt protect others, nor would vaccinating them prevent the evolution of more harmful and/or immune-evading variants, and, as a result, vaccinating children is not ethically supportable, and vaccine mandates of any kind for COVID-19 are completely unjustifiable from an ethical standpoint. Of course, he fails to mention that most vaccines do not produce sterilizing immunity. Its not as though this hadnt been discussed at the time the vaccines were being rolled out or that scientists hadnt recognized that COVID-19 vaccines were unlikely to produce true sterilizing immunity. Its just plain incorrect to argue that you have to have sterilizing immunity for a vaccine to contribute to herd immunity or even the elimination of a disease. For example, the smallpox vaccine did not produce sterilizing immunity; yet, as has been observed, it was crucial in eradicating smallpox. Neither the Salk (inactivated) nor the Sabin (live attenuated) polio vaccine produces sterilizing immunity, but the global eradication of polio is within reach, thanks to the vaccines:

Also, while were on the topic of polio, it turns out that the same appeal to the disease doesnt kill that many children argument can be made for polio:

One wonders whether Mr. Kraaijeveld similarly questions whether routine polio vaccination is advisable, as well. Just as most of his arguments could be used against routine measles vaccination, similarly most of them could also be used against polio.

Or rotavirus:

The case of rotaviruswhich causes severe vomiting and watery diarrhea and is especially dangerous to infants and young childrenis fairly straightforward. Vaccination limits, but does not stop, the pathogen from replicating. As such, it does not protect against mild disease. By reducing an infected persons viral load, however, it decreases transmission, providing substantial indirect protection. According to the Centers for Disease Control, four to 10 years after the 2006 introduction of a rotavirus vaccine in the U.S., the number of positive tests for the disease fell by as much as 74 to 90 percent.

I mean

In other words, it is not a prerequisite that COVID-19 vaccines prevent transmission completely for them to be very valuable in curbing the pandemic. Moreover, newer generations of COVID-19 vaccines might actually be able to achieve sterilizing immunity. I also note that it has long been a favorite antivaccine argument to cite one vaccine in particular that doesnt provide sterilizing immunity, specifically the pertussis vaccine, whose immunity also wanes with time, like that from COVID-19 vaccines.

While issues of freedom and parental rights are issues of ethics and law about which there will always be some subjectivity based on differing belief systems and about which reasonable people can disagree, accurate science and data are required to have reasonable debates about how much the state should be allowed to infringe upon individual freedom and autonomy as well as parental rights. By massively downplaying the severity of COVID-19 in children in a manner that is, quite frankly, eugenicist in its emphasis on the disease supposedly being pretty close harmless to healthy childrennot to mention based on cherry picked data primarily from before the Delta and Omicron surgesand exaggerating the dangers of the vaccine, Mr. Kraaijeveld, whether he realizes it or not or will admit it or not, tilts the playing field in favor of his arguments in the same intellectually dishonest manner that antivaxxers have long done. He even recycles their arguments, as the way his appeal to the lack of sterilizing immunity due to COVID-19 vaccination and his claim that COVID-19 is close to harmless to most healthy children, both of which are old antivaccine claims used for a number of vaccines in the past, but particularly MMR, rotavirus, and varicella.

All of these reasons are why I now eagerly await Mr. Kraaijevelds next bioethical treatise arguing that we should not routinely vaccinate children against measles because the disease doesnt kill that many kids and that we shouldnt vaccinate against polio, pertussis, and most other childhood diseases because the vaccines dont produce sterilizing immunity and therefore cannot produce herd immunity or contribute to the elimination of the disease. After all, if hes going to recycle, he should go all-in and recycle everything.

Meanwhile, people who like Mr. Kraaijevelds message will go all Humpty Dumpty about words and argue that an article titled Against COVID-19 vaccination of healthy children is not actually arguing against vaccinating children against COVID-19:

Same as it ever was.

Originally posted here:
Recycling old antivax tropes as bioethics-based arguments against COVID-19 vaccination for children - Science Based Medicine

Star Trek: Picard returned for its second season last week, and its thankfully still available globally on Prime Video. Picking up in real time from the season finale nearly two years ago, The Star Gazer sees Jean-Luc Picard once again a Starfleet admiral reunite with some very old friends and enemies.

1. Regrets, He Must Have A Few

The Star Gazer plays like an extended epilogue for the first season: Picard is back at his chateau and now Chancellor of Starfleet Academy, while Rios, Jurati and Raffi have also been welcomed back into the fold. (Rios himself has become captain of the new Stargazer, Picards first command.) Elnor has also enlisted, while Soji is on a goodwill tour, improving the image of synthetics in the galaxy, and Seven of Nine is still a ranger, now in possession of La Sirena and Rioss hologram alter-egos. Jean-Lucs Romulan housekeeper, Laris, has become a widow in the intervening years offscreen.

Understandably, given how season ones gang have gone or are going their separate ways, Picard is feeling a little wistful, experiencing vivid and ever so slightly alarming childhood flashbacks, and giving a speech at the academy about how he believes time, not space, is the real final frontier. While giving Elnor his advice before his departure, Jean-Luc brings up something Spock said in his memoir, which feels a little like him (and OK, the writers) taking the opportunity to indulge in memories of the late Vulcan. Hes also afraid of moving on: he and Laris clearly have feelings for each other, but hes reluctant to acknowledge it, possibly because it would undermine the stoic destiny hes accepted for himself as the last of his family. At the same time, Picard a man whos already died, so were clear must wonder if this is truly all there is after so many years protecting the Federation.

2. Guinan

This episode was shot well before the controversy over Whoopi Goldbergs comments in the wake of Mauss banning in McMinn County Schools, so I can understand why some mightve felt unenthusiastic about seeing her this season, but solely from a character point-of-view, it was lovely to see Picard reunite with Guinan. She seems to be doing well for herself, now tending bar in Los Angeles, and her taste in hats is as extraordinary as ever; she also continues to be a great counselor for Jean-Luc, listening to him talk about his regret over never settling down. Hes unable to fully go into why hes always felt reluctant to commit to a relationship, and quite rightly, she doesnt press the issue. I have a feeling Picards fear may be rooted in the trauma involving his mother (an issue that is very, very important to Patrick Stewart, so were clear), and thats definitely something he will need time to open up about.

3. New and Improved Borg

Speaking of trauma, the Borg the cybernetic fiends who violated the autonomy of Picard, Seven of Nine and so many more return through an anomaly, but theyre not interested in a fight: they only want to negotiate peace with Picard, and Picard alone. From the little we see here, the 25th century Borg are definitely more visually impressive than their predecessors, with a huge, monolithic ship that seems capable of unfolding into a larger staging post, and the Queen who transports to the Stargazers bridge wears a very gothic helmet, which coupled with her tentacles, makes the Borg the closest theyve ever felt to being a H.R. Giger creation. As impressive as they were, previous Borg make-up and costuming could never shake the subconscious feeling of a group of homeless people; here, theres no mistaking them for an alien culture.

4. Guess Q!

Negotiations go unsurprisingly south, between Seven of Nines emotionally compromised nature, and the sheer hubris of the Borg, causing the whole welcoming fleet to be destroyed after Picard activates the Stargazers self-destruct. Was it all really a trap? Thats likely one of the questions Jean-Luc will have to ponder after being transported to a simulation of his chateau, where hes greeted by his old, omnipotent frenemy, Q, who even kindly ages his appearance after noticing Picards become more frail.

Full disclosure: John de Lancies Q is a major reason I got into Star Trek as a kid he was the first character to show me the series could be funny and it always feels momentous having him reunite with Picard, since they were both there at the start of The Next Generation. Its appropriately ironic given the theme of Picards loneliness in this episode, and I cant wait to see how they spar next time, as well as whether it was all an illusion; and hopefully Q will get to bicker with his older nemesis, Guinan, sometime this season too.

5. Picards Transhumanism

One major query I had after season one was how Picards status as the first human to have his mind transferred to a synthetic body would be explored: it wasnt touched on at all here, which is odd (youd think Laris would bring it up at least, seeing as her husband passed away and all.) Guinan sort of references it, but shes really talking about the artificial heart Picard received after being stabbed as a cadet (as shown in the Next Generation episode Tapestry.) There are nine more episodes this season, so we mustnt fret, but if it remains a get out of jail free card, it will be a missed opportunity to not explore the material and philosphical questions it poses.

Other Observations:

Picard being Starfleet Academys chancellor feels like a nod to Patrick Stewarts time as chancellor at the University of Huddersfield (a role he served from 2004 to 2015.)

Assuming the Borg are just rude and not liars, who might they be fleeing from? (Perhaps they accidentally spilled Vgers coffee?)

Well, Picard is back, and still being tested by Q: lets hope he lives up to this trial (and our expectations as viewers) once more unto the breach, dear friends.

Go here to read the rest:
Five Thoughts on Star Trek: Picard's The Star Gazer Multiversity Comics - Multiversity Comics

Science fiction nerds (self-identified) around the world would immediately recognize the classic phrase from the popular Star Trek franchise, Resistance is futile! as the chilling, mechanical warning delivered whenever the protagonists encountered the hive-like group of beings called the Borg.

Not actually capable of reproducing themselves, the Borg ravaged the spaceways, overpowering sentient beings they encountered and adopting the best technology available from every race they conquered and integrating and absorbing individuals into their collective by force via technological reconditioning.

To me, the Borg represented the most frightening of antagonists, lacking any kind of empathyinsect-like in their collective programming and actions. Their most disturbing hallmarks were their black bodysuits, protruding cybernetic implants, and pale, vacant visages.

And to be honest, the idea of having technological reconditioning devices injected into, running throughout, and sprouting up all over your body (which completely removed your will) gave me the creeps! But we all knew back then that this was just science fiction.

However, considering the pace at which (not just the idea, but the practical implementation of) technological implants are becoming commonplace, perhaps these fictional characters were a bit more prophetic than we realized.

Using science to enhance living standards in a fallen world is a practical and biblical conceptafter all, Jesus is our great physician (Mark 2). It gives us medicines and mechanisms that can help overcome accidents, crime, disease, and disasters.

Tracking devices can help keep people safe, and medical implants can regulate body functions and alleviate pain and risk. And sometimes, for more cosmetic reasons, surgical implants can improve the quality of life for individuals. And, like it or not, the concept of technological implants is becoming much more common in our society.

The most aggressive example of this in terms of implementation is likely billionaire Elon Musks Neuralink project. He hopes to start activating this brain-interface technology and implanting its microchips in humans this year, saying:

According to Musk, Neuralinks chip would be implanted in peoples brains to simultaneously stimulate and record brain activity in the hopes of treating spinal cord injuries and certain neurological disorders.

Another prominent example of mind-linking is the metaverse concept, which has likely seen accelerated interest as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The term metaverse can mean different things to different people, but in broad terms, it generally refers to a shared, enhanced, lifelike virtual world where people interact through virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) via the internet.

While people currently interact with one another online through social media, messaging applications, and websites, metaverse proponents see it as the next stage of internet development, and the Neurolink (or other similar technologies) implementation is surely a key component in its development.

Presumably, such technology will create online spaces in which peoples interactions can be more multidimensionalfor example, an employee in one part of the world operating a physical machine virtually on the other side of the planet. And the current COVID situation has created an increased demand for ways to make online teaching interaction more lifelike and effective.

So although many people use the word metaverse to primarily describe gaming worlds, many people are envisioning a type of online universe using blockchain technology where users could travel and buy virtual real estate and other digital assets using cryptocurrencies. It will be a place where users will immerse themselves in a whole new way and become linked through digital content rather than simply view it.

And while most reasoning people have no problem with beneficial procedures or applications in technology, like most things, these concepts could possibly produce very negative results as well. And Christians should be aware of one growing movement of particular concern that is rapidly embracing such concepts, dubbed transhumanism.

Transhumanism (as a quick Google search reveals) is the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.

A large part of transhumanisms appeal is its overarching inclusivity. As the promotional blurb to the 2019 release of The Transhumanism Handbook on Amazon declared,

Some ideological stances that would seem unlikely to intersect positively (like Intelligent Design advocates and Darwinists, for example) could be imagined swimming happily together in the warm waters of the transhumanist movement.3

Spiritualists, science buffs, ET promoters, and UFOlogists are all able to coexist somewhat comfortably in a movement that at its core contains a self-guided salvation message that ultimately says that mankind is in control of its destiny.

As one Canadian Christian apologist and researcher (Carl Teichrib) explains,

As stated, implicit in the concept are two components married together: the story of evolution and advanced technology. This concept is not a recent one, as the roots of the transhumanist movement can be traced all the way back to the Great Depression.

At that time in the USA, a growing social movement called technocracy began gaining a lot of popularity because of the financial desperation felt by many. People wanted a quick solution, and with the growing crisis hammering the US economy, progressive engineers such as Frederick W. Taylor imagined a world where elite scientists and engineers should replace politicians as a better way to deal with the economic collapse.

One influential technocrat was the professor and published economist Thorstein Veblen, who championed applying Darwinian principles to societys institutions. A contemporary research professor in business studies (University of Hertfordshire) explained,

So the connection of the story of evolution to the technocracy movement (later to become transhumanism) is quite clear.

Many at this point might be thinking, So what? Nothing about this seems nefarious so far. But what they may be forgetting is that the idea of improving mankind through scientific means has been tried before. It was called the eugenics movement (developed by Darwins cousin, Francis Galton).

The worst applications of eugenics were the horrors performed and documented in Nazi Germany based on social Darwinian concepts that some are more or less fit to survive and procreate. In Nazi Germany, this meant the violent removal of some from the gene pool.

However, todays transhumanists tend to focus on more of a utopian model to bring about the ultimate human. And how will this utopia come about? Apparently, modifying our DNA (what could go wrong?) and merging humans with computers capable of artificial intelligence (who would be operating the computers?) will accomplish this. Teichribs article explains:

As the transhumanist website Technolife states,

By the way, this is no fringe movement. The Technolife website represents a research project funded by the European Union consisting of 27 (primarily European) member states, including France, Germany, Sweden, and the UK.

Although transhumanists are aware of the obvious comparison to eugenics, many have dismissed it because of the supposed overwhelmingly positive benefits it will eventually bring to the human race. But what about if someone doesnt wish to participate?

Well, as one transhumanist and human cloning researcher said,

And as you dig deeper into this growing movement, that statement seems to reveal the outlook of many in the transhumanist community. Wanting to be gods, they seem willing to justify the means by which it happens because of the end they seek.

As leading transhumanist Mark Pesce (coinventor of 3D interfacing for the internet and judge on ABCs TV show The New Inventors) puts it,

We will reach into the improbable, re-sequence ourselves into a new Being . . . translating ourselves into supernatural, incorruptible, eternal. There is no God but Man.

Men die, planets die, even stars die. . . . We seek something morea transcendence of transience, translation to incorruptible form. . . . We seek, therefore, to bless ourselves with perfect knowledge and perfect willto become as gods, take the universe in hand, and transform it in our imagefor our own delight.9

The blasphemous and misleading idea that man can become godlike is one that traces all the way back to the garden of Eden (Genesis 3:5), where Eve was deceived. Satan (the father of all lies) lied to Eve and contributed to her doubting Gods words by asking, Did God actually say?

The Apostle Paul also warned born-again believers about being deceived this way and pleaded with them to be on guard against false promises of salvation that come from anywhere but Jesus.

And yet there are professing Christians that are transhumanists whove bought into the concept wholeheartedly. A fellow named James McLean Ledford (who runs the websites Technical-Jesus.com and Hyper-Evolution.com) is one such person.

The description (no longer available) of a talk he did at the 2010 Transhuman and Spirituality Conference (at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City) called Christian Transhumanism contained the following text:

Transhumanisms universalism is truly unmatched. Here we have a movement where professing Christians and atheists converge around the same ideology.

Atheism could actually morph into an acceptable form of theism for atheists in this view. After all, belief in a god/gods is much easier if you are the god in question. Then they could repeat the commonly heard feel-good mantra: just believe in yourself!

A 2003 report, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance (CTIHP), revealed some clues. This extensive 405-page document issued by the US National Science Foundation and the Department of Commerce explains,

Apparently, this reports answer to humanitys ultimate problems is a worldwide, technology-induced unity among humans, which, like the Borg, seems radical and inhuman, equivalent to losing your identity.

Transhumanists understand this may not be embraced by the average person, so to assist in convincing those that may not be on board, the CTIHP paper suggests,

Radical indeed. Have Christian parents noticed how radical our public education system has become over the last 20 years?

Transhumanist lingo often refers to the convergence or singularity. In essence, they believe humanity will transcend into a higher plane of existence (sometimes referred to as the techno rapture) but ultimately defined as a point in a future time when technological change takes place so fast it produces a qualitative shift in society . . . the merging of Man and Machine.11

And what would be the result of this singularity in the transhumanists way of thinking? Well, their literature and lectures are replete with references to a future where there are basically no tears, no pain, no struggle, no conflict, and no death. We will have new perfect bodies and minds and eternal life. All of mankinds problems will be solved.

However, although this sounds great to the average person, the entire premise is based on a liethe story of evolution. And the sad fact is, what they are looking for is exactly what God has already promised for those who put their faith and trust in Jesus.

Unfortunately, they dont want to repent of their sin and go through the door of salvation to gain eternal life.

Ultimately, the transhumanist movement is simply deception, a way in which mankind is attempting to achieve eternal lifewithout God.

Read more:
Transhumanism and the Evolution Connection - Answers in Genesis