Transhumanists Want to Be Gods

Wesley J. Smith April 26, 2016 1:24 PM | Permalink

It is always fun to see what our resident technology-worshipping religious fanatics -- the transhumanists -- are up to. For those who don't know, transhumanism is a futuristic social movement -- eugenic in nature -- that seeks to use biotech, cyber tech, and every other kind of tech to transform humans into a "post-human" species.

The movement's goals are right out of a teenage boy's wish list: to live forever with superhero type powers. Take a gander at this by transhumanist proselytizer Zoltan Istvan, as he opines in the Huffington Post that we should become gods. From "Transhumanism and our Outdated Biology":

Futurists like to say evolution is always late to the dinner party. We have instincts that apply to our biology in a world that existed ages ago; not a world of skyscrapers, cell phones, jet air travel, the Internet, and CRISPR gene editing technology. We must catch up to ourselves. We must evolve our thinking to adapt to where we are in the evolutionary ascent. We must force our evolution in the present day via our reasoning, inventiveness, and especially our scientific technology. In short, we must embrace transhumanism -- the radical field of science that aims to turn humans into, for lack of a better word, gods.

Well, no one can accuse transhumanists of humility. Nor do they want humans to remain, well, human:

The transhumanist believes we should immediately work to improve ourselves via enhancing the human body and eliminating its weak points. This means ridding ourselves of flesh and bones, and upgrading to new cybernetic tissues, alloys, and other synthetic materials, including ones that make us cyborg-like and robotic. It also means further merging the human brain with the microchip and the impending digital frontier. Biology is for beasts, not future transhumanists.

I am not worried about these technologies being applied to human beings. For example, I do not believe we will ever upload our consciousnesses into computers -- and even if we did, the uploaded person would be replaced by a mere inanimate software program, no more alive than a piece of granite.

Transhumanism is dangerous because it sees humans as unexceptional -- and because it seeks to create a radical new moral order that can only be described as a symbiosis between social anarchy and fascistic statism:

Our outdated biology's emphasis on social interaction is also dangerous for the overall evolutionary ascent of the human race -- so dangerous that new questions must be asked immediately. Are so many of us healthy for this fragile planet? Should we rid ourselves of all our 25,000 nuclear weapons? Is the sexual ritual even functional anymore? Does matrimony serve purposes outside of private property and economics? Are social customs like monogamy foolishly conservative? Should we embrace a culture of drugs and biohacking? Should government use cranial implant technology to safeguard its citizens? Should society insist that all government and military leadership be equally split between females and males? Should corporations be hindered from catering to the weak, petty sides of human nature? Should religion and superstitious faiths be discouraged? These are challenging and thorny questions to ask. Yet, they should be asked, and maybe even the best answers should be implemented if we are to be true to our highest selves.

There you have it. Behind its pretensions of rationality, transhumanism is rank scientism. Narcissistic to the core, its apostles not only preach against intrinsic and equal human dignity, but also seek to elevate crass hedonism into a sacrament.

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