Monthly Archives: October 2022

The fantasy began to consume me at the turn of the millennium.

Id always felt like a half-being, a cyborg of incompatible substances: gringa daughter of a Puerto Rican MD and a long-unemployed Mexican man with addiction issues. Native or alien. Nerd or rebel. I was white and not white but thought I had to choose.

No wonder, then, that the greatest ambition of my youth was to achieve digital immortality, or uploading my mind to the metaverse. Goodbye, flawed body. Hello, god-self.

Opinion Columnist

Jean Guerrero

Jean Guerrero is the author, most recently, of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda.

A playful interaction with my father in the 1990s had primed me. He was showing me the Macintosh Plus, our first computer: a beige box with a rainbow apple logo. Papi guided my hands over the keyboard, causing me to poke one letter of my name at a time until there I was in the box: j-e-a-n. He clicked file, save, X, and my name disappeared. It frightened me. Papi turned off the computer, ignoring my protests. Watch, he said. He powered it back on and clicked through folders. Suddenly, there I was again, resurrected: j-e-a-n.

Inside the apple box, I could live forever.

The fantasys premise, which Id contemplate in later years, was that I was reducible to code: 0s and 1s. This view of life and data as interchangeable spread long before social media.

At USC in 1988, two philosophy students launched the journal Extropy. The opposite concept, entropy, is a law of physics: The universe tends toward chaos. Extropians saw this disorder as the supreme enemy. Their journal, whose contributors were overwhelmingly white and male, nurtured a cult of technology-worshiping immortality seekers.

They were early transhumanists, the pseudo-intellectual offspring of eugenicists, with their hubristic quest to breed a master race and all of its consequent horrors: from the Holocaust to the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of people, mostly women of color and others labeled defective. Eugenicists thought there was such a thing as a perfect body; transhumanists went a step further to say perfection lay in select minds, which could transcend bodies altogether.

Transhumanists preach that a command of technology can liberate humans from the limits of mortal flesh. Human destiny is to leave our puny Earth and colonize the stars. Extropians argued that this agenda required rejecting morality, which could interfere with the rapid expansion of technologies that might, oops, destroy the Earth. (No biggie when the goal is infinity!)

In the early 90s, Wired magazine glamorized the Extropian cultists as hard-partying, psychonautic intellectuals. Slowly, transhumanism grew into a global movement now trending with some of the worlds most powerful people, including the richest, Elon Musk. Its twin cult is longtermism, which says we should prioritize positively impacting humanity in the faraway future: not just in the next few generations, but thousands or millions of generations from today. That philosophy also has Musks support and that of others such as Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, a top Biden donor.

Ultimately, this isnt about biological humans. The father of longtermism, Nick Bostrom, a transhumanist and Oxford philosophy professor, has been trying to push into the mainstream the idea that the futures hypothetical digital people matter more than the billions of humans alive today because there will be at least 1058 of them. Thats a 1 followed by 58 zeroes the number of human simulations he calculates we could run using the stars computing power.

The New York Times, the New Yorker and other media have given longtermism fawning coverage this year with little or no mention of its deranged core. The global fad and media frenzy are almost understandable at this moment in history. It truly is hard to watch: climate change, war, migration crises, economic instability, political regression into nativism, fascism and dictatorships. Its not science fiction but current events that inspire the quest for an escape path from planet Earth.

Longtermism is often framed as a way to protect Earth. But its architects care less about ecosystems than about making sure nothing stops humanity from reaching what Bostrom calls technological maturity. Thats a nice way of characterizing that moment when people turn into bits.

Last year, mile P. Torres, a philosopher who studies existential threats and has extensively investigated longtermism, warned that the traction longtermism is gaining makes it the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today.

Leading longtermists have arrived at abhorrent conclusions, such as that philanthropy should focus on saving and improving wealthy peoples lives more than poor peoples because thats a more direct way to ensure the innovation needed to launch us into space.

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, argues that the only way to reduce carbon emissions and salvage the Earth is to reduce consumption. Longtermism is a way for [tech giants] to justify not looking back at the devastation theyre leaving in their wake, he told me. Its a way for them to say it doesnt matter all the damage Im doing now because its for a future where humans will be in the galaxies.

Whether its Musks plan to colonize Mars or Mark Zuckerbergs promise of a Metaverse, these billionaires visions of escape via more industrial tools, more mass-produced technologies, can be seductive. At least Icarus hubris cost only his own life.

As a preteen, Id never heard of the transhumanists, the longtermists or the Extropians. But their early members were pumping propaganda into the culture, including the possibility of escaping our human forms, which they depicted as weak, vulnerable, stupid. This perspective infected me at a time when I was frightened of my body of its origins and its uncertain future.

The chaos and doom that Extropians and their heirs saw in the Earth and its mortal vessels, I sensed in myself. Years later, when I heard Musk talking on a podcast about human bodies as hideous sacks of meat that we must ditch for robot encasements, I remembered my teen self and the pain I harbored. The tech supremacists promised a clean escape. I wanted one.

I thought I couldnt possibly matter as much as what those men might make out of me.

::

In the early 2000s, I spent hundreds of hours trying to upload my mind to the web. Id sit at our computer in the evenings by this time a stylish blue iMac G3 and type every detail I could recall of the past 24 hours into a blog. I believed if I captured enough of my thoughts and experiences online, eventually some kindly engineer, long after my death, might revive me in the form of an algorithm. Id be immortal.

It was a teen girls techno-futurist fantasy, a twist on the Snow White fairy tale. I imagined nature as the poisoned fruit; the engineer was my savior. But the real poison was the fantasy.

For years, I was reckless with my body. I swallowed dangerous pills and pursued relationships with violent men. There were highs in all of that. Like the transhumanists, I came to believe that humans contain value only insofar as they experience pleasure, high intellect and other properties as defined by thinkers almost exclusively white and male.

For a time, I suspected Id inherited something from my father, who abandoned us amid a deluge of his own abnormal thoughts that my mother called schizophrenia. In studying neuroscience at USC, I caught a glimpse of myself in The Divided Self, a psychiatry classic. In it, R.D. Laing argues that the root of mental illness lies in mind-body dualism, which splits self from others. [The] body is felt as the core of a false self, which a detached, disembodied, inner, true self looks on at a divorce of self from body deprives the unembodied self from direct participation in any aspect of the life of the world.

I was watching myself as I maneuvered my body toward risks. I wasnt her. I was the mind.

Or so I thought. That escape from the self and the present is the false promise of longtermism. It was never true.

My journey to regain my sense of my body was long and circuitous. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in my 20s after a near-death experience in a drug cartel zone that I was touring for adrenaline. I developed an autoimmune condition in my 30s. My body, by revolting against my abuse, guided me back to it.

Other people, by caring about me in the depths of my self-destruction, taught me empathy for my embodied self: yes, I am a mind, but I am also belly, blood, wrinkled palms. Im as much a writer as I am the woman who dances on longboards. Im the books Ive written and Im my heritage of bad hombres. Native and alien. Nerd and rebel.

Human beings can maintain ambiguity over time, Rushkoff told me. They can hold onto contradiction. Machines cant do that. Machines resolve. Its this versus that. Whatever is uniquely human is in that in-between space they cant record.

The spark of human consciousness cant be uploaded in 0s and 1s. It can, however, be studied.

The Brain and Creativity Institute at USC is using brain scans and other tools to demonstrate that feelings sprout from the soil of our bodies and are central to consciousness.

Its really extraordinary that something that for so long was considered sort of peripheral to our lives feeling is in fact the very beginning, the foundation, the inaugural event of what becomes consciousness, said Antonio Damasio, an international leader in neuroscience who runs the institute with his wife, Hanna Damasio, an expert in brain imaging.

In his acclaimed book Descartes Error, he challenges French philosopher Ren Descartes famous saying, I think, therefore I am. Its more like I feel, therefore I am.

Our minds can conceptualize a self only because theyre receiving input from the rest of the body, through hormones, heartbeats, gurgling guts.

Thats why transhumanisms ideal of freeing the self from the body will never be achievable, and why longtermisms story of uploading future generations will remain just science fiction. Our minds are inseparable from the meat of us, with its unsolvable mysteries.

I sympathize with the desire to think otherwise. That siren song of immortality once lulled me into reckless risks, and I was lucky to survive. Now its spreading on a larger scale.

Mars and Metaverse are not the future. We must save the one planet that we have. Its the source of our miraculous bodies, which are far greater than any machine.

@jeanguerre

See the article here:
Guerrero: I once fell for the fantasy of uploading ourselves. It's a dangerous myth - Los Angeles Times

Leona Foxx Suspense ThrillersThe Wolves of Jack Londonwith Ted PetersLiterature and ReligionWhat is this wolf thinking?

The fieldcalled Literature and Religion or Literature and Theologyhas excited me since my graduate school days. When a student at the University of Chicago, I had the opportunity and honor to study with Nathan A. Scott, one of the progenitors of this field. Under Scotts tutelage, I could apply the theology-of-culture developed by theologians Paul Tillich and Langdon Gilkey to literary analysis. This method, theology-of-culture, provides lenses through which one can perceive the religious depth underlying otherwise secular discourse. I have employed this method when reading Americas most widely read author in the first quarter of the last century, Jack London.

Why might the theology-of-culture method work so well? Because, as Ralph C. Wood, a former Scott student and now a Baylor University professor, avers, The natural order is never autonomous but always and already graced. By digging into the depths, the literary critic can discover divine grace because its already there.

When I became a fiction author, however, I found the theology-of-culture method baffling. Its one thing to analyze. Its quite another to construct. Oh, I could handle the plot just fine. But, deliberately exploiting subtle connotations, undertones, and nuances seemed contrived, some how. This led me to surmise that great novelists most likely write intuitively, maybe even mystically.

In this master page on Literature and Theology, you will find my own espionage writings plus my analysis of the wolf troika of Jack London: The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea Wolf. In both writing and reading, the depth Im looking for is to be found not only in religion, but also in science. To be more precise, science itself can exude religious valence. Thats what the theology-of-culture uncovers and makes visible.

The fictional Leona Foxx leads a tense double life. She is unwillingly pulled back into being a CIA black op trained killer, while serving her new calling to God as a parish pastor on the South Side of Chicago. Haunted by a terrifying past, Leonas skills as a defender of America against threats both foreign and domestic conflict with her conscience, which is shaped by her faith and her compassion for both friends and enemies.

Leona uncovers a terrorist plot hatched by American mercenaries, who plan to blame Iran, thus threatening a war that will make them rich. She divests her clerical collar to pack her .45 Kimber Super Match II and rallies a counter-terrorist alliance of professional crime fighters and black gang members. The story climaxes with a drone helicopter attack on the 85th floor of the John Hancock Building, intended to assassinate the president.

Only Leona Foxx, her ragtag team of die-hards, her finely honed killer instincts, her arsenal of high-tech weapons, and her faith in God can avert the devastation that could result in the death of millions of innocents and manifest in hell on earth.

Discover and memorize Leonas Law of Evil: You know its the voice of Satan when you hear the call to shed innocent blood.

God. She started a prayer. Her thoughts drifted. As if in a theater seat, she watched her lifes past dramas. The faces of the three young men who put her life in peril at the Cheltenham station flashed on her mental stage. She relived the terrifying moment she saw the northbound train about to decapitate her. Then Orpah Tinnen walked into the scene. Leona thought of her son, Magnus, decapitated by the Iranian military. She remembered her moment in the church kitchen, her moment of remembrance of the blood-spattered chest of the executed prisoner.

God, she muttered. She paused. God, you have got such a fucked up world. Why did you put me here like a pin cushion to feel every prick of its pain? Yes, I want to love your world as much as you do. But, goddammit, its hard. Id like to ask the Holy Spirit for the wisdom and strength to trust in what I cannot see. But, goddammit, Im too pissed off to think its worthwhile. I hope your grace covers me. Amen.

Leona Foxx is a black op with a white collar, who worships at two altars, her country and her God. She fights with ferocity for both.

The woman pastor from Chicago, Leona Foxx, takes on renegade Transhumanists making themselves kingmakers by selling espionage technology. Leonas strategy is to turn superintelligence against itself in order to preserve global peace. Can a mere human prevail against the posthuman?

If you want to grasp the promises and risks of enhancing human intelligence given us by our transhumanist friends, readCyrus Twelve.

Blood sacrifice. Could there be anything more evil? What happens when the symbols of grace get turned upside down? Are we left without hope?

Set in the Adirondack Mountains, the clash between good and evil escapes its local confines to threaten the nation and even engulf the globe. The selling of souls to perdition fuels the fires of hell so that we on Earth cannot avoid the heat.

Discover and memorize Leonas Law of Evil: You know its the voice of Satan when you hear the call to shed innocent blood. On the shores and islands of Lake George, certain ears hear this call. Leona swims into action to stop the bloodshed.

Nature is blood red in tooth and claw. Although these are the words of poet Alfred Lord Tennyson in the dinosaur canto of his In Memoriam, Jack London (1876-1916) conveyed their truth with convulsive drama, vicious gore, and unspeakable cruelty.

In what I nickname Londons Wolf Troika, we read in The Call of the Wild how a San Francisco dog, Buck, goes to Alaska and becomes a wolf. In the next,White Fang,an Alaska wolf moves to San Francisco and becomes a dog. In the third of the troika, The Sea Wolf, a Norwegian ship captain named Wolf Larsen exhibits the traits of both civilized human and atavistic beast. Framed in terms of Darwinian evolution, Londons characters demonstrate that the primeval wolf lives on today in both our dogs and our dog owners.

Londons moral is this: never rest unawarely with peaceful civilization. At any moment civilization can erupt like a volcano and extravasate wolf-like fury, barbarity, and savagery. Our evolutionary past ever threatens to rise up with consuming cruelty, demolishing all that generations have patiently put together. Within the language of evolution, London describes original and inherited sin.

As an addendum, I add what may be the final short story London wrote, The Red One. When we to turn The Red One of 1916, it appears London was hoping for grace from heaven.

Now, London was a Darwinian naturalist. Not overtly religious. Yet, London intuitively recognized our desperate need for grace. On our own, our human species is unable to evolve fast enough or advance far enough to escape our wolf genes. Might visitors from heaven provide a celestial technology that couldby gracelead to our transformation? Might grace from heaven come in the form of a UFO from outer space? Four decades before the June 1947 sighting of flying saucers, Londons imaginative mind was soaring to extraterrestrial civilizations that could save us from ourselves on earth.

Because my method in Literature and Religion relies on a theology-of-culture, Im searching for different treasures than other London interpreters. Ive come to admire two generations of Jack London aficionados and scholars now who have fertilized and pruned this literary tradition. Ive benefitted greatly be meeting some of the Jack London Society sockdolagers such as Russ and Winnie Kingman, who produced A Pictorial Life of Jack London. Over the years Ive benefited greatly from devouring essays and books by Earle Labor, Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Clarice Stasz, Richard Rocco, Kenneth Brandt, and others. Ive begun reading the multi-volume behemoth intellectual biography of Jack London, Author Under Sail, by Jay Williams. There are more facts in Williams compilation that the Encyclopedia Britannica could dream of. And, of course, dont miss Jay Cravens new film, Jack Londons Martin Eden.

I am currently working on thisPatheosseries dealing with Jack Londons Wolf Troika. Here is what to expect.

Jack London 1: The Call of the Wild

Jack London 2: White Fang

Jack London 3: The Sea Wolf

Jack London 4: Lone Wolf Ethics

Jack London 5: Wolf Pack Ethics

Jack London 6: Wolf & Lamb Ethics

Jack London 7: The Red One

Literature and Religion: both writing and reading in search of divine grace.

Ted Peters pursues Public Theology at the intersection of science, religion, ethics, and public policy. Peters is an emeritus professor at the Graduate Theological Union, where he co-edits the journal, Theology and Science, on behalf of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, California, USA. His book, God in Cosmic History, traces the rise of the Axial religions 2500 years ago. He previously authored Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom? (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2002) as well as Science, Theology, and Ethics (Ashgate 2003). He is editor of AI and IA: Utopia or Extinction? (ATF 2019). Along with Arvin Gouw and Brian Patrick Green, he co-edited the new book, Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics hot off the press (Roman and Littlefield/Lexington, 2022). Soon he will publish The Voice of Christian Public Theology (ATF 2022). See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com. His fictional spy thriller, Cyrus Twelve, follows the twists and turns of a transhumanist plot.

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Literature and Religion | Literature and Religion - Patheos

Today we are here to tell you things that are going to shock you. began Joseph Kabuleta at the 2022 Watchers Conference held on September 17,; and shock he did; unravelling the tangle that is Bible prophecy providing irrefutable evidence of various end time Biblical prophecies coming to pass in our day.

One of the most recent fulfilled end time prophecy is the return to life of the Dead Sea. Known as the saltiest sea on the earth, the Dead Sea can neither support any marine life nor can any plant or animal life survive around it.

However, in Ezekiel 47, God told the prophet Ezekiel that the water would become fresh and living creatures would inhabit it. This prophecy came to pass in 2016, when freshwater ponds with fish were discovered on its shores.

Kabuleta also expounded on the major war prophesied in Revelation 9 and Ezekiel 38 along the River Euphrates that will happen in these last days.

The Bible reveals that the war will suck in countries along the river Euphrates; Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran. Other countries will be involved as well including nations described as Gog and Magog (former Soviet Union, Russia and China); Rosh (Russia); Meshech (Moscow) Tubal (former Siberia in Russia), Persia (Iran), Libya, which includes all countries east of Egypt; Ethiopia, which includes all countries south of Egypt; Gomer and Togarmah, in southern Russia. It is said that they will combine to form a military force of 200 million soldiers and wage war against Israel.

Given its meagre population of only 20million, when overwhelmed by a force of 200 million, Kabuleta said, Israel will have no choice but to use nuclear weapons or risk being wiped off the map.

Zechariah 14:12 describes what will happen in this war and it is akin to the description of human flesh being vapourised by nuclear explosion.

To allow easy movement of the armies in this war, Revelation 16:12, foretells that River Euphrates will dry up. This prophecy came to pass in January 2021 when it was reported that the river was drying up. According to experts, it could be no more by 2040 if nothing is done.

Due to the never before experienced devastating effects of war, the world will be united in the search for a temporary peaceful resolution among the warring parties. This, Kabuleta deduces, will lead to the signing of the seven-year peace agreement spoken about in Daniel 9:27. The Bible says, at the end of those seven years, human government will end and Jesus will return.

As it was in the days of Noah

In Luke 17, Jesus prophesies that the time of His return will be similar to the days of Noah.

In Noahs time, fallen angels had sex with humans producing giant demonic-human race with superpowers never seen before. The story of giant race and a worldwide flood is recorded and retold in 500 cultures across the continent. It was only Noah and his family that still had the pure God given DNA that were saved to repopulate the earth.

In that time People became superhuman through interaction with spirits and now the same will happen through interaction with technology.

Transhumanism; a belief that claims that human beings have been evolving and the next stage of evolution of humans is to turn transhuman - human beings without limitations, the kind of humans we see in the plethora of superhero-themed films and series being released these days; such as X-men, Superman, The Flash, and Homelander.

Another scientific manoeuvre, among others, that is taking us back to the days of Noah is Project Immortality. It is a plan which seeks to create a system to ensure pseudo-immortality for mankind by transferring a persons consciousness to another persons body.

This concept was explored in the Netflix series Altered Carbon. Humans can now harvest consciousness and transfer it in an avatar that will never fall sick or die.

In June 2022, Marina Smith, a 87-year-old woman who passed away in the UK, was able to address the mourners at her own funeral thanks to this technology.

Just like in the time of Noah, humans will soon be able to achieve superhumaness and eternal life without God.

Our bodies will be like machines or robots where we can upgrade to whatever version we wish, through a chip placed in the forehead or right hand which will be the mark of the beast spoken of in Revelation 13.

The continued pursuit of immortality explains why Revelation 9:6-8 says in the last days men will seek death and will not find it; they will desire to die, and death will flee from them.

If this sounds strange, it is because we are living in strange times. We may not be able to pinpoint the exact day and time of Jesus return but the signs reveal that we are inching closer to the end of this age.

Originally posted here:
Peek into Bible prophecy: Cryptic guide to end times - Monitor

Ted Peters pursues Public Theology at the intersection of science, religion, ethics, and public policy. Peters is an emeritus professor at the Graduate Theological Union, where he co-edits the journal, Theology and Science, on behalf of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, California, USA. His book, God in Cosmic History, traces the rise of the Axial religions 2500 years ago. He previously authored Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom? (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2002) as well as Science, Theology, and Ethics (Ashgate 2003). He is editor of AI and IA: Utopia or Extinction? (ATF 2019). Along with Arvin Gouw and Brian Patrick Green, he co-edited the new book, Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics hot off the press (Roman and Littlefield/Lexington, 2022). Soon he will publish The Voice of Christian Public Theology (ATF 2022). See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com. This fictional spy thriller, Cyrus Twelve, follows the twists and turns of a transhumanist plot. You can read more about the author here.

Read more:
Science and Religion | Science and Religion - Patheos