October 26, 2010
By Thomas and Nita Horn
© 2010 RaidersNewsNetwork
A nefarious clock is ticking...
According to secret government reports cited in Forbidden Gates, the "human enhancement revolution" will begin in earnest within the next 36 months. Unprecedented announcements will follow the 2012 US presidential election detailing "plans for large scale technological reinvention and far-reaching morphological transformation of the specie," which will begin via military adoption then "quickly move out to the rest of us not engaged in warfare." This vision is international, intellectual, and under codification by government advisors, bioethicists, law professors, and academics, in which use of genetics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology will provide tools for radically redesigning our minds, our memories, our physiology, our offspring, and even perhaps—as former investigative journalist for the Washington Post, Joel Garreau claims—our very souls.
Unfortunately for mankind, the related September 2010 US National Intelligence Council and EU Institute for Security Studies Report, the May 2010 Rockefeller Foundation Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development report, and similar private and published US Government Security Scenarios envision this technological and cultural shift as not only forecasting a future dominated by a new species of unrecognizably superior humans, but ultimately an unfathomable war—both physical and spiritual—that the world is not prepared for. It will be fought on land, within the air and sea, and in dimensions as yet incomprehensible. Even so, these synthetic forces, which overshadow man’s wholesale annihilation, are quietly under design in leading laboratories, public and private, funded by the most advanced nations on earth, including the official governments of the United States, France, Britain, Australia, and China. As a result of progressive deduction, reasoning, and problem solving in fields of neurotechnology and cybernetics, strong artificial intelligence or “artilects” will emerge from this research, godlike, massively intelligent machines that are “trillions of trillions of times smarter than humans” and whose rise could prove profoundly disruptive to human culture, leading to a stark division between philosophical, ideological, and political groups who either plan to integrate with the newly evolved life forms as the next step in human and technological evolution or who view this as an incalculable risk and deadly threat to the future of humanity. These diametrically opposed worldviews will ultimately result in a preemptive new world war—what is described by scientists involved in the research as gigadeath—the bloodiest battle in history with billions of deaths before the end of the twenty-first century.
Lest anyone think the statements above are overly paranoid, consider that this catastrophic vision is derived from near-future situational strategies, which think tanks such as the JASONs—the celebrated scientists on the Pentagon's most prestigious scientific advisory panel—and Darpa, the leading research projects agency of the United States Department of Defense have outlined.
The task before us is significant... but winnable
When looking at the awesome scope of government and academic interests in Grin technology combined with the insidious replacement theology known as "transhumanism" (this generation's vastly superior and appealing "New Age Religion" threat) and the planned rollout of industrialized techno-sapiens, we as conservative Christians may feel small or powerless, as though our singular efforts will be of little effect. The spirit behind the Tea Party movement in the United States illustrates this is not true. A nation is simply a multitude of persons. Each time an individual takes a righteous stand, we move one person closer to victory. Consider, for instance, Charles Finney, who launched his evangelism effort during the early 19th century by taking onto his team a man named Nash, who made prayer his only role. When Finney preached, Nash stayed behind and prayed, and guess what? As many as fifty thousand people per week accepted Jesus as Lord. Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Catherine Booth, Gilbert Tennent, Shubal Stearns, Fanny Crosby, Daniel Marshall, Billy Sunday, Maria Woodworth-Etter, and numerous others proved one cannot underestimate the power of a single dedicated believer.
Having said that, the past also reveals what happens when individuals become apathetic and allow themselves to be ruled by anti-God forces. On this, more than one student of history has looked with interest at the French Revolution, which was marked by death and torture under Maximilien Robespierre, and compared it to the Revolutionary War in America that eventually resulted in unprecedented cultural and monetary success. While citizens after the war in America were rejoicing in newfound freedoms, in Paris more than twenty thousand people died in the guillotine. The years to follow in France witnessed a reign of terror leading to totalitarianism and the rise of an antichrist figure, Napoleon. Why were the American and French Revolutions followed by such contrasting conclusions? The difference was that in America the pilgrim influence had created strong Christian sentiments, while in France the movement became anti-God. The forces behind the French Revolution set out to eliminate God as the enemy of France. They placed a statue of a nude woman upon the altar in the church of Notre Dame and proclaimed the God of Christianity dead. Soon after, the French government collapsed.
Conversely, when we look at how during the American Revolution a small number of mostly agrarian Americans stood up for something that mattered and held tightly to a Christian faith that could not be stamped out by the fires of revolution, we comprehend where the strength of those generations that followed came from, including the so-called Greatest Generation, the children of the pioneers who overcame the Great Depression, who won World War II, and who outperformed their competitors during the Industrial Revolution. Those who followed them built on the same success until finally the United States emerged as “a shining city on a hill,” a beacon of hope and inspiration to the rest of the world—what President Ronald Reagan in his January 11, 1989, farewell speech called “a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”
A new revolution is coming, and it will be a monstrous one
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Why does the taxpayer funded National Science Foundation Report "Ethics of Human Enhancement: 25 Questions & Answers" depict a humanoid with soulless eyes? Find the answer in Forbidden Gates |
Ronald Reagan's depiction of America above is sweet, but as we document in Forbidden Gates, a worrying trend is darkening today's horizon, threatening to undo this dream and similar big ideas in countries around the world. Recent polling depicts a generation increasingly disinterested in the faith of their fathers and especially unattracted to Judeo-Christian definitions about sin and repentance. Society now wants a God that makes them happy and who only comes around when needed. This new widespread movement even has a name: it is titled “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” (dubbed so by researchers during a National Study of Youth and Religion at the University of North Carolina). It defines what has become the “Christianity” of choice among modern teens and their parents. Like the deistic God of the freemasons and eighteenth-century philosophers, “This undemanding deity is more interested in solving our problems and in making people happy,” concludes Dr. Albert Mohler Jr. for the Christian Post. “In short, [this] God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process.” In continuing his troubling dissertation, Mohler, perhaps unknowingly, describes elements of transhumanism as evolving within contemporary Christian theology similar to what we document in Forbidden Gates concerning the rise of an end-times universalist religion, an increasingly popular and growing replacement theology that smacks of end-times prophecy.
Is it a coincidence that this comes during the same epoch in which the United States Supreme Court, for the first time in its history, became devoid of Protestant representation with the confirmation of Elena Kagan; a time also in which the Claremont School of Theology analyzing the future of American religion concluded at its 2010 Theology After Google Conference that “technology must be embraced” for Christianity to survive?
Although most transhumanists, especially early on, were secular atheists and would have had little resemblance to prototypical “people of faith,” in the last few years, the exclusion of supernaturalism in favor of rational empiricism has softened as the movement’s exponential popularity has swelled to include a growing number of Gnostic Christians, Buddhists, Mormons, Islam, Raelianism, and other religious traditions among its devotees. From among these groups, new tentative “churches” arose—the Church of Virus, the Society for Universal Immortalism, Transtopianism, the Church of Mez, the Society for Venturism, the Church of the Fulfillment, Singularitarianism, and others. Today, with somewhere between 25–30 percent of transhumanists considering themselves religious, these separate sects or early “denominations” within transhumanism are coalescing their various religious worldviews around generally fixed creeds involving spiritual transcendence as a result of human enhancement. Leaders within the movement, whom we refer to here as transevangelists, have been providing religion-specific lectures during conferences to guide these disciples toward a collective (hive) understanding of the mystical compatibility between faith and transhumanism. At Trinity College in Toronto, Canada, for instance, transhumanist Peter Addy lectured on the fantastic “Mutant Religious Impulses of the Future” during the Faith, Transhumanism, and Hope symposium. At the same meeting, Prof. Mark Walker spoke on “Becoming Godlike,” James Hughes offered “Buddhism and Transhumanism: The Technologies of Self-Perfection,” Michael LaTorra gave a “Trans-Spirit” speech, nanotechnologist and lay Catholic Tihamer Toth-Fejel presented “Is Catholic Transhumanism Possible?" and Nick Bostrom spoke on “Transhumanism and Religion.” (Each of these presentations can be listened to or downloaded at our Web site, www.ForbiddenGate.com.)
Recently, the New York Times picked up this meme (contagious idea) in its June 11, 2010, feature titled Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday, speaking of transhumanism and the Singularity as offering “a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans—or at least something derived from them—can have it all.” In commenting on the Times article at his blog, one of our favorite writers, bioethicist Wesley J. Smith, observed the following:
Here’s an interesting irony: Most transhumanists are materialists. But they desire eternal life as much as the religionists that so many materialists disdain. So they invent a material substitute that offers the benefits of faith, without the burden of sin, as they forge a new eschatology that allows them to maintain their über-rationalist credentials as they try to escape the nihilistic despair that raw materialism often engenders. So they tout a corporeal New Jerusalem and prophesy the coming of the Singularity—roughly equivalent of the Second Coming for Christians—that will...begin a New Age of peace, harmony, and eternal life right here on Terra firma.
In the peer-reviewed Journal of Evolution and Technology published by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (founded in 2004 by transhumansists Nick Bostrom and James Hughes), the “Apologia for Transhumanist Religion” by Prof. Gregory Jordan lists the many ways transhumanism is emerging as a new form of religion and mirror of fundamental human ambitions, desires, longings, shared hopes, and dreams that traditional religions hold in common. Jordan concludes that transhumanism is thus a new form of religion because of its numerous parallels to religious themes and values involving godlike beings, the plan for eternal life, the religious sense of awe surrounding its promises, symbolic rituals among its members, an inspirational worldview based on faith, and technology that promises to heal the wounded, restore sight to the blind, and give hearing back to the deaf.
Yet while development of a new universalist religion is growing among members of today's "enlightenment", conservative scholars will taste the ancient origin of its heresy as the incarnation of gnosticism and its disdain for the human body as basically an evil design by an evil God (Yahweh) that is far inferior to what we can make it. “Despite all their rhetoric about enhancing the performance of bodily functions,” says Brent Waters, director of the Jerre L. and Mary Joy Stead Center for Ethics and Values, “the posthuman project is nevertheless driven by a hatred and loathing of the body.” Transhumanist Prof. Kevin Warwick put it this way: “I was born human. But this was an accident of fate—a condition merely of time and place.”
Conversely, in Judeo-Christian faith, the human body is not an ill-designed “meat sack,” as transhumans so often deride. We were made in God’s image to be temples of His Holy Spirit. The incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ and His bodily resurrection are the centerpieces of the gospel and attest to this magnificent fact. While in our fallen condition human suffering is reality, most traditional Christians believe this struggle makes us stronger and that healing and improvements to the human condition are also to be desired. Throughout history, the Church has therefore been at the forefront of disease treatment discovery, institutions for health care, hospitals, and other medical schools and research centers. In other words, we do not champion a philosophy toward techno-dystopianism. Indeed, what a day it will be when cancer is cured and we all shout “Hallelujah!”
But in the soul-less posthuman, where dna is recombined in mockery of the Creator and no man is made in God’s image, “there are no essential differences, or absolute demarcations, between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals,” says Katherine Hayles, professor of English at the University of California, in her book How We Became Posthuman. “Humans can either go gently into that good night, joining the dinosaurs as a species that once ruled the earth but is now obsolete,” she says reflecting transhuman contempt of—or outright hostility to—intrinsic human dignity, “or hang on for a while longer by becoming machines themselves. In either case…the age of the human is drawing to a close.”
Thus a gauntlet is thrown down and a holy war declared by the new and ungodly apostles of a transhuman faith! We who were created in His image will either adapt and be assimilated to posthuman, or be replaced by Nephilim 2.0 and the revival of their ancient mystery religion. This solidifies how, the more one probes into the ramifications of merging unnatural creations and nonbiological inventions according to the transhumanist scheme of seamlessly recalibrating humanity, a deeper malaise emerges, one that suggests those startling “parallels” between modern technology and ancient Watchers activity may be no coincidence at all—that, in fact, a dark conspiracy is truly unfolding as it did “in the days of Noah.”
Now, like a ship adrift at sea, a gilded age is rising in which intellectual achievements and human-transforming technologies are valued supreme. The net result is the dawn of a generation without sacred moorings, an era in which people are sufficiently prepared to accept the nightmarish transhuman vision unfolding around us. The question is, is it too late to reverse these trends and set this age on track toward moral and spiritual recovery? We must believe that it is not too late—that if we stand up to the infernal power operating just beyond the range of normal vision, it will yet be possible to illustrate the living dynamic against which the gates of hell cannot prevail.
But make no mistake about this, friends: The gods of chaos are coming. They are plotting to redefine what it means to be human, and to remove anyone or anything that stands in their way. The church must prepare for this now, both physically and spiritually, as the threat is real. Something wicked this way comes whether we like it or not, whether we're ready or not, but we can stop "it" dead in its tracks if we get engaged now.Full article HERE
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