The Geek Rapture

BitPig ^ | 2003.09.12 | BitPig ( B-Chan)

[B-Chan]

Oh, boy. Another evangelist singing the praises of the Geek Rapture, aka the Singularity: “Some day the Big Computer in the Sky will appear and whisk us all away from this mean old carnal world to a clean, brightly-lit technoheaven, where we can all be rockets and have sex with other rockets.”

Uh, okay, whatever. The Transhumanist desire to shed the dirty world of imperfect flesh for a paradise of pure gnosis would be familiar to St. Augustine; he was trapped in Faustus‘ Manichaean misasma for nine years. Now come the new Manichaeans:

“To set the light-substance [mind] free from the pollution of matter was the ultimate aim of all Manichæan life. Those who entirely devoted themselves to this work were the "Elect" or the "Perfect", the Primates Manichaeorum...” [Source]

The Preacher is correct: there is nothing new under the sun. The Transhumanists and others who eagerly look forward to the propellerhead Parousia of the Singularity are really nothing more than religious believers – the new Elect of the cult of the computer, that ultimate god of the fast-fading scientistic/materialist age. Like their historical predecessors the Manichees, these New Model Primates Manichaeorum are convinced that only by the final divorce of Mind and Matter can happiness be achieved; and, like the millions of fundammentalist fans of the Left Behind novels, they have become True Believers, whose goal is to stay alive until the Digital Second Coming (“Coming 2.0”?) arrives to take them all to Glory.

No thanks. I'm not interested in any religion that seeks to save the human race by destroying it, and the idea of my mind being reduced to the equivalent of a high-resolution scan for all eternity sounds more like Hell than Heaven to my ears. I'll take my God straight up, if you please: the eternal Logos of Christianity, not the manmade gnosis of the Transhumanists.

[B-Chan]

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