Entranced – Definition, Meaning & Synonyms – Vocabulary.com
If you’re entranced, you are charmed and mesmerized by something. An entranced theater-goer might gasp out loud when something scary happens on stage.
When you’re entranced by something, it’s got you under its spell. In fact, the earliest definition of the word was “put into a trance” or “put under a spell,” with the roots en-, “put in,” and trance, “state of suspense” or “state of insensibility to mundane things,” from the Old French word transe, “fear of coming evil.” The meaning of entranced has shifted over the years to be more positive — more “charmed” than “cursed.”
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adjective –
filled with wonder and delight
synonyms:beguiled; captivated; charmed; delighted; enthralled; enchanted
- influenced as by charms or incantations
TRUST IN ME… Sterling Holloway – The Python’s Song from the Jungle Book
CLICK THE LINK ABOVE TO WATCH THE VIDEO
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Even beyond good health and longevity, Technology promises so much more. Resistance seems pointless when they can promise us the moon and make us believe it is possible. Especially for a generation that grew up on super heros…but wait, isn’t that what mythology was all about. SUPER HUMANS?? Heroes of the Ancients. YEP…same old culprits. NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.
But how soon we forget. Wasn’t it the fact that they were messing in things they should not have and changing the genetic make up of everything on earth that got the Fallen Angels in big trouble and led to the destruction of the earth in a flood???? A flood that nearly wiped out mankind?
YEP.. but hey… No one believes that stuff anymore. We don’t need the God of the bible. We have our own gods. Science and Money. We have Lucifer the good guy… you know that one that brought LIGHT/Enlightenment. Freed us from that mean old GOD.
NOW, we can make our OWN way. Create our own world. We can be all that we can be and LIVE OUR BEST LIFE.
I mean, who would not want SUPER POWERS??
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It’s in The Blood – Part 8 of 11 – Genetic Engineering/Who Wants Super Powers?
It’s in the Blood – Part 8 – Who Wants SUPER POWERS.continued
THIS IS EACTLY WHY GOD DIVIDED THE NATIONS!
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Robotic insects, often referred to as “robo-insects,” are small, insect-inspired robots designed to mimic the behavior and capabilities of real insects. They have various applications in fields such as robotics, surveillance, environmental monitoring, and search and rescue. On the other side, Yi Zhi Zhu is a robotics artist who turns the concept on its head. If you want to know what this radical twist is, stay and watch the video. We promise you will be surprised. 易知朱YIZHIZHU Youtube: / @yizhizhu Tiktok: / yzzbro Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?… Email: shenzhenyzz@163.com
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Beyond bionics: how the future of prosthetics is redefining humanity
Bionic technology is removing physical barriers faced by disabled people while raising profound questions of what it is to be human. From DIY prosthetics realised through 3D printing technology to customised AI-driven limbs, science is at the forefront of many life-enhancing innovations Subscribe to The Guardian on YouTube ► http://is.gd/subscribeguardian Support the Guardian ► https://support.theguardian.com/contr… Today in Focus podcast ► https://www.theguardian.com/news/seri… Sign up for the Guardian documentaries newsletter ► https://www.theguardian.com/info/2016… The Guardian ► https://www.theguardian.com The Guardian YouTube network: Guardian News ► http://is.gd/guardianwires Guardian Football ► http://is.gd/guardianfootball Guardian Sport ► http://bit.ly/GDNsport Guardian Culture ► http://is.gd/guardianculture #BeyondBionics #bionics #3dprinting #prosthetics #diy
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In this video, Dr. Michael Chua reviews the current myopia epidemic and the best evidence-backed ways to prevent and treat myopia. Timestamps 0:00 Introduction 2:07 What is myopia? 3:18 Scope of the Problem 4:20 Genetic and Environmental Factors 9:06 Country-Wide Interventions 10:42 Other Treatment Options for Myopia Connect with Dr Michael Chua on social media / michaelchuamd Website: https://www.puentehillseyecare.com/ Hashtags #MichaelChuaMD #myopia #myopiacontrol
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In this video, Dr. Michael Chua discusses Neuralink’s bionic vision brain implants and why this technology has the potential to change humanity forever. 0:00 Introduction 1:18 What are brain-computer interfaces? 6:20 Second Sight’s Argus Implant 12:11 Neuralink Connect with Dr Michael Chua on social media / michaelchuamd Website: https://www.puentehillseyecare.com/
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Scientists transplanted human cerebral organoids (“minibrains”) into rats, to better study brain disorders. The neurons grown in vivo looked more like mature human brain cells than those grown in vitro, and they made better models of Timothy syndrome. The human minibrains formed deep connections with the rat brains, received sensory information, and drove the rat’s behavior. Points of Clarification (Q&A based on common comments) – Why didn’t the rat reject the transplant, which frequently happens with organ transplants? /// They used immunocompromised (athymic) rats to avoid the problem of the immune system attacking the transplanted tissue. – Was the licking behavior really due to optogenetics, or just seeing the blue light? /// A separate group of rats (control group), with a transplant but no optogenetics, also completed the red/blue light water training. They showed no significant difference in licking behavior during red and blue light. This suggests that the differences were really due to optogenetic stimulation of the organoid (not, for example, seeing the light). You can see how the control group did, compared to the optogenetic transplant group, in Figure 5j of the study, link below. Support the channel: / ihmcurious More on how minibrains are grown and used, and the issue of organoid consciousness: • Growing “Mini-Brains” in a Lab: Human… On the topic of organoid sentience and playing pong: • Lab-Grown “Mini-Brain” Learns Pong – … Organoid transplant study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158… Sitcom music by John Bartmann: https://johnbartmann.com
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Tech billionaire Elon Musk has said his company Neuralink has successfully implanted a wireless brain chip in a human for the first time. He said initial results detected promising neuron spikes or nerve impulses and the patient is recovering well. Posting on X, formerly known as Twitter, Mr Musk said Neuralink’s first product would be called Telepathy, and if successful, would enable “control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking”. While Mr Musk’s involvement raises the profile of Neuralink, a number of rival companies have already implanted similar devices. Subscribe here: http://bit.ly/1rbfUog For more news, analysis and features visit: www.bbc.com/news #BBCNews
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Elon Musk’s Neuralink puts First Brain Chip in a Human | Vantage with Palki Sharma Elon Musk’s Brain chip company Neuralink has started human trials. The chips are inserted into the brain and will allow users to interact with their phones and computers using only their thoughts. The chips will initially be for people suffering from some form of paralysis. But Musk eventually wants the technology to be available for everyone. Will Brain chips be the future of human development? Palki Sharma tells you. — Elon Musk | Neuralink | Brain Chip Implant | Telepathy | Firstpost | World News | Vantage | Palki Sharma #elonmusk #neuralink #brainchip #telepathy #elonmuskneuralink #firstpost #vantageonfirstpost #palkisharma #worldnews Vantage is a ground-breaking news, opinions, and current affairs show from Firstpost. Catering to a global audience, Vantage covers the biggest news stories from a 360-degree perspective, giving viewers a chance to assess the impact of world events through a uniquely Indian lens. The show is anchored by Palki Sharma, Managing Editor, Firstpost. By breaking stereotypes, Vantage aims to challenge conventional wisdom and present an alternative view on global affairs, defying the norm and opening the door to new perspectives. The show goes beyond the headlines to uncover the hidden stories – making Vantage a destination for thought-provoking ideas. Vantage airs Monday to Friday at 9 PM IST on Firstpost across all leading platforms. Subscribe to Firstpost channel and press the bell icon to get notified when we go live. / @firstpost Follow Firstpost on Instagram: / firstpost Follow Firstpost on Facebook: / firstpostin Follow Firstpost on Twitter: / firstpost Follow Firstpost on WhatsApp: https://www.whatsapp.com/channel/0029…
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Elon Musk’s Neuralink recently implanted a chip in a human for the first time. The emerging market of brain computer interfaces, or BCIs, is in the process of finding its footing. In a world where AI is on the rise, BCIs allow for telepathic control of computers and wireless operation of prosthetics. But how does this tech work? WSJ goes inside a brain surgery to see how the implants work, and breaks down what it’s going to take to get these devices on the market. Chapters: 0:00 Musk’s Neuralink 0:41 The market 3:03 Synchron 3:57 Precision 5:16 What’s next? News Explainers Some days the high-speed news cycle can bring more questions than answers. WSJ’s news explainers break down the day’s biggest stories into bite-size pieces to help you make sense of the news. #Neuralink #Tech #WSJ
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They have you so focused on what Technology promises to do for you, that you don’t even realize what is happening to your humanity. You are becoming less and less human by the day. Like the frog in the pot, you do not even discern what is happening to you.
Wake up WORLD… you are being led down a path that has a very definite END. Those who are pulling the strings, know exactly what they are doing. They have been planning and working their plan for at least a millennium. Those involved knew that it would take a very long extended period of time to bring about the changes they desired. They did not mind that they would not see the fruit of their labor. They knew the spirits who were the driving force behind the plan. They were happy to serve. Time was a commodity that worked to their advantage. However, TIME is running out. We are closing in on the the END of life as we know it. The fruition of their efforts is at the doorstep.
I hope that the following articles will help you to understand what they are doing and how they see what is happening. Remember, I am not in agreement with Transhumanism. I am not even in agreement with our current society and all the technology of today. I am a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ/Yahushua Ha Mashiach. I am a servant of the Most High GOD our Loving Father and Creator of ALL THINGS.
I just want you to hear, right from those who believe in Transhumanism so that you can make informed decisions about your future.
Transhumanism pdf
Abstract
The social and intellectual movement known as transhumanism questions the figure of the ‘human’ at the centre of humanism and modern political formations. As part of a broader ‘posthuman turn’ it is frequently associated with technological enhancements that redefine human bodies and their limits. However, the core argument of transhumanism has to do with the human mind or consciousness. Transhumanists suggest that the human mind is reducible not only to its biochemical substrate but also to something more fundamental called information that characterises all existence in the universe. Since silicon-based computation is the basis of informatic processes today, transhumanists argue that machine intelligence can become conscious, eventually making fleshy humans obsolete. This process of technological advancement towards a super-intelligent computational civilisation is regarded as part of a larger unfolding of intelligence in the universe, a universal telos of existence of which humans are only one instance. Thus, human intelligence is set to yield to a nonhuman destiny. This entry traces the formation of transhumanism, reviews some of the anthropological studies, and concludes by questioning transhumanism’s narrow social and metaphysical visions of post-humanity in which both intelligence and biology end up being delimited around particular (civilisational, racialised) forms of life and thought.
télos, lit. “end, ‘purpose’, or ‘goal‘”) is a term used by philosopher Aristotle to refer to the final cause of a natural organ or entity, or of human art. Telos is the root of the modern term teleology, the study of purposiveness or of objects with a view to their aims, purposes, or intentions. |
Introduction
Transhumanism is a recent set of common ideals, or ideology, with the stated aim of transcending the current physical and mental limitations of the human by technological means. It has primarily taken shape as an American secular scientific project, albeit with growing international reach. Proponents of transhumanism explicitly state that the current form of our species is not its final one, and that a technologically enhanced computational form—transcending the human—will emerge through what they see as the inevitable and exponential acceleration of technoscience, especially in the areas of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the informatic and cognitive sciences (NBIC).
Because of its unwavering espousal of these technologies as the only and ideal route to transcending human limits, transhumanism has grown in reach, appeal, and power alongside the twenty-first century rise of Silicon Valley and the digital tech and biotech sectors more generally. Many of the tech sector’s power players at companies such as Google, Paypal, and Space X are associated with transhumanism. What’s more, ideas that have circulated amongst transhumanists have entered a broader social milieu: for instance, as anthropologist and media scholar Tamara Kneese (forthcoming) has documented, digital and cybernetic immortality (the maintenance of avatars, profiles, and conversations after death) are now part of the discourse and concerns of many tech companies and start-ups.
Transhumanism is part of a broader ‘posthuman turn’, a series of ideas and social and technological developments that have put under question the figure of the ‘human’ at the centre of humanism and modern political formations. Scholars trace humanism’s roots to currents in Greek and Roman thought, and later to the European Renaissance where writers and thinkers began to focus their concerns on human affairs, human thought, and the human condition, rather than on theological (pertaining to a transcendent God) or parochial (pertaining only to their own group delimited by religion, ethnicity, or geography) concerns. But as a specific intellectual tradition and social ideology bearing the name, humanism took form starting in the early nineteenth century. The central tenets held that humans, unlike other parts of nature, are endowed with reason and the capacity for thought and self-awareness; that humans are undetermined and free to make their own laws, and shape their own environment with tools and imagination; and that there is no pre-determined future, fixed destiny, or a transcendent and otherworldly destination, meaning that humans were entirely responsible for making their own history and hence their own future in this earthly world (Janicaud 2005; Sartre [1946] 2007 Chakrabarty 1997; Taylor 2005). This set of claims outlined at once the nature of humanity as a whole and built an idea of humans in contrast to other beings to which the same attributes did not apply and hence the same set of political and legal rights did not extend.
Critics of humanism have pointed out that the supposedly universal figure of the human was at the same time an exclusionary device, erasing or even explicitly justifying the on-going exploitations of non-European people through slavery and colonialism. Along with colonial expansion, the rise of scientific thought, and the gradual advance of secularism, a supposedly universal humanism was marshalled to exclude a vast range of non-European peoples from full participation in modern politics and power. Thus, for example, women were barred from political participation because they were said to not be as fully endowed with reason as men. People of African descent, as well as Indigenous, Aboriginal, and tribal people, were not included in the Euro-American image of humanity (Wynter 2003) and were rendered morally and legally subject to enslavement, extermination, and exploitation.
In another vein, there has been a critique of humanism as a form of unwarranted and destructive exceptionalism. That is, by imagining human thought and action as categorically different from the way the rest of the universe operates (the universe being biologically or physically determined, without thought or self-awareness), humanism rendered the human an exception to nature, with tragic consequences. For example, this exceptionalism has led to the over-exploitation of nature and the hubristic use of technology to harness unlimited but destructive power beyond the control of humans such as with nuclear bombs or the use of fossil fuels, causing climate change.
These critiques gave rise to a range of posthumanist positions, such as new materialism (Coole and Frost 2010), vitalist materialism (Braidotti 2013), multispecies ethnographies (Helmreich and Kirksey 2010), new animism (Harvey 2006) and animacies (Chen 2012), cyborg studies (Downey and Dumit 2006) and critical posthumanism (Roden 2015). These attempt to dissolve the figure of the exceptional human into a broader context wherein the human is neither master of its environment nor maker of its own future; rather, the human appears as part of (indeed, as an effect of) a wide array of forces, agents, and relations over which it cannot have proper and predictable control.
On one level, transhumanism has emerged as one of the many symptoms of the exhaustion of humanism, breaking down and transcending ideas of human exceptionalism in the way that other posthumanisms purport to, for example by merging humans with the technology that they have created. Some analysts, however, describe transhumanism as simply humanism on steroids (Wolfe 2010, Fuller and Lipinska 2015); that is, as a set of goals and practices that merely extend Enlightenment notions of a human essence set apart from the world by language, reason, culture, emotions, and so on (Pickering 2011).
Transhumanist arguments and narratives themselves often claim both: on the one hand, they claim humanism and the Enlightenment as their true heritage (Bostrom 2005, Hughes 2012) and argue that humans have always used tools and have co-evolved with their technologies, so that contemporary versions such as cyborgs or other human-machine hybrids are not new but only a more complex and more intelligent aspect of this history (Bostrom 2014); on the other, they project a radical break from humanity and human history, such that superior forms of machine intelligence will take over and be an independent force in the universe, transcending the human condition, including the evolutionary inheritance of a biological body, and making humans obsolete (Kurzweil 2005; Bostrom 2014). What’s more, this process of technological advancement towards a superintelligent computational civilisation, started off by human projects of mind uploading, is regarded as part of a universal telos (or ultimate purpose) of existence beyond the human, where the emergence of humans is only an instance of a larger unfolding of intelligence in the universe. Thus, human intelligence, which results in control over and the modification of nature via science and technology, becomes part of a nonhuman destiny. In these instances, transhumanism breaks with its humanist roots.
If transhumanism’s speculative ideology of posthuman intelligence and destiny is often disregarded by anthropologists and other social theorists, it may be due in part to the focus on more immediate social concerns regarding the body, technological enhancement, and genetic manipulation. It also may be due in part to the fact that transhumanism’s projection of nonhuman intelligence and destiny in the universe are difficult to place within a recognisable political philosophy or genealogy. This division between the enhancement projects of transhumanism, which may well fit the limits of a secular humanism, and the speculative focus on mind, consciousness, and eventually superintelligence, is sometimes characterised as carbon-based versus silicon-based transhumanism (Sorgner 2021). Regardless, given the centrality of the figure of the human (anthropos) for anthropology, these debates coincide with long-standing core concerns in the discipline on the nature of human nature. Ironically, transhumanism’s position that there is nothing either fixed or sacred about human nature overlaps with a strong trend in anthropology that challenges unitary theories of the human (Fuentes et al. 2010). IS that why they are demanding that ALL CARBON be removed from the EARTH???
Mother Nature Makes an Appearance – To END ALL LIFECLIMATE CHANGE |
Their NEW WORLD ORDER is Literally Built on Sand |
This entry first traces the formation of transhumanism in relation to relevant histories of humanism. It then highlights people and ideas that speculate on and project futures reflective of transhumanism’s specific stripe of posthumanism. It will review some of the anthropological studies of transhumanism and conclude by questioning transhumanism’s narrow social and metaphysical visions of posthumanity in which both intelligence and biology end up being delimited around particular (civilisational, racialised) forms of life and thought.
The emergence of transhumanism
The term ‘transhumanism’ was coined in 1957 by Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist with eugenicist visions of a future scientific utopia honed through a strange mid-twentieth century marriage of socialism and evolutionary biology, of social equality and eugenicist reform. By the time he published the now-famous essay titled plainly ‘Transhumanism’, Huxley had already written on humanism, biology, and evolution, including a seminal text on the modern evolutionary synthesis. He was an atheist and, in his own terms, a ‘scientific humanist’, serving as the first president of the British Humanist Association (Weindling 2012), and later as first director of UNESCO. Importantly, Huxley begins the essay not with humans but with the cosmos and specifically ‘cosmic self-awareness’. That is, he begins by applying evolutionary schemas not just to biology on earth, but to consciousness in the universe: ‘As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself’. The emergence of self-awareness, he continues, ‘is being realized in one tiny fragment of the universe – in a few of us human beings’. (2015, 12) The formulation is striking as much for its teleological vision (some latent potential is being realised in the cosmos) as for the odd place it assigns humans in that realisation. For humans appear at once as central actors and incidental vectors: ‘man’s responsibility and destiny’, Huxley writes, is to ‘be an agent for the rest of the world in the job of realizing its inherent potentialities as fully as possible’. Humans are appointed to take charge in this new version of evolution, driving the universe towards its self-awareness, yet they are mere vehicles for the fulfilment of a destiny beyond the human. Later, transhumanists would push this logic to its end in imagining a future yielded by humanity to superior computational forms of intelligence.
It is noteworthy that Huxley, along with a cohort of fellow scientists and eugenicists such as J.B.S. Haldane, was very much engaged in technological prediction, speculating on space travel, reproductive technologies, and mechanical and industrial prowess (Farman 2015), and yet his essay on transhumanism does not mention any of that. Rather, its vision is centred on ‘the most ultimate satisfaction’ which he describes as the ‘depth and wholeness of the inner life’ for which we need ‘techniques of spiritual development’. In proper pursuit of this dimension,
The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity (2015, 15).
Two main tensions in these passages remain coiled in transhumanism’s practical, ideological, and anthropological features. The first is the tension between a humanist (i.e. non-theistic) sense of responsibility for humanity’s own future and the fulfilment of a larger non-human potential: a notion of a human destiny beyond the human that characterises the strongest posthumanist vision in transhumanism. The second is the tension between a scientific, materialist notion of consciousness and a non-reductive one, often glossed as spiritual.
The focus on consciousness and an awakening universe would be taken up by later transhumanists, notably Ray Kurzweil and Martine Rothblatt, but the first re-uptake of the term ‘transhuman’ comes via the ‘father of cryonics’ (that is, the low temperature freezing and storage of human bodies), Robert Ettinger. A physics teacher, Ettinger began ruminations on death and the power of science in hospital beds after being wounded in World War II, publishing his own science fiction story about freezing and immortality in 1948. He shifted to non-fiction, describing the technical possibility of storing humans in cold freeze. Initially self-published, his first book, The prospect of immortality (1965), was eventually distributed by the publishing company Doubleday after the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov gave Ettinger a thumbs up. The idea garnered some attention in the United States at the time, with Ettinger securing an appearance on the Johnny Carson show and the book getting translated into 11 languages. But none of that translated into a large following or a proper movement nor into volunteers who wanted to get frozen.
Cryonics attracted a small, motley crew of dedicated people who wanted to push the limits and utopian possibilities of science in remaking humans and society. With a set of actual practices (storing bodies for the future), and the prospect of defeating death—the hardest of human and humanist limits—cryonics became transhumanism’s catchment site (Farman 2020), attracting space enthusiasts, biologists, cryobiologists, physicists, writers, sci-fi enthusiasts, and, crucially, computer scientists. This assemblage, navigating the space between science and science fiction, a space that later came to be known as futurism, became the core of the transhumanist movement, though it did not yet bear that name.
The term ‘transhuman’ does not appear in The prospect of immortality, but the book does set out to explore the key notion of non-human intelligence:
Modes and standards of conduct and intercourse may have to be developed with respect to intelligent creatures other than human. The three outstanding possibilities seem to concern the dolphins, robots, and extraterrestrial life forms. (1965, 152)
The anti-exceptionalist move to shift intelligence away from an exclusively human attribute to one shared by aquatic creatures, aliens, and robots had roots in the emerging post-war theories of cybernetics. Without distinguishing between the organic and non-organic, cybernetics examined the behaviour of complex systems in terms of feedback loops, wherein all behaviour could be gauged based on input and output signals which would then modify the system. The simplest example was a thermostat which could be thought of as self-aware, on some level, because it would constantly gauge and modify its behaviour based on information it received from the environment. All behaviour and communication, according to cybernetics (Wiener 1954), was based on this kind of loop, whether the system in question be biological or machinic. Here information and feedback loops became merged with behaviour and intelligence, blurring the boundaries that separated humans from other animals, animals from machines, and inanimate matter from animate beings.
Whilst many secular humanists recoiled from the prospect of the computational reductionism of mind and machine, Ettinger, following cybernetics, tapped into the potential offered by this line of thinking, suggesting the continuation of personal identity beyond biological death through some version of non-organic or artificial intelligence (AI) where a human mind/self would be instantiated on non-biological platforms (1965, 129-33). This was, as Ettinger himself acknowledges, an older trope in science fiction, but from early on, cryonics and immortalism moved beyond simple biological survival to imagine and claim such a post-human future.
It is in Ettinger’s next book, first published in 1972 and provocatively titled Man into super man, that the terms transhuman and transhumanity begin to find a place in the vocabulary of immortality and technological futurism for the first time. Without referencing Julian Huxley (even though he writes several pages on his anti-utopian brother Aldous), Ettinger discusses the achievement of transhumanity as a human goal, with prospects for greater intra-human warmth (110) as well as ‘the storage of personalities in electronic data banks’ (35), an idea he takes, like many others, from science fiction, where disembodied brains had been present at least since 1929 when Huxley’s colleague, another socialist scientist, J.D. Bernal proposed the possibility in his well-known work of speculation The world, the flesh and the devil. Like Huxley, Bernal is amongst the figures claimed today by transhumanists as a predecessor.
Attempts to move away from humanism feature in Ettinger’s earlier edition of the book, in which he counts ‘Eastern Communism and Western humanism’ as ‘the flakiest forms of the traditional insanity – idealism’, and calls them ‘principal secular religions’ (120). However, it’s in the preface for the 1989 edition that he clearly marks a division with humanism: ‘What is happening is a discontinuity in history, with mortality and humanity on one side – on the other immortality and transhumanity’ (5). This position becomes a call that continues to echo in the transhuman world in many ways: humanity must choose transhumanism or fall behind and possibly keep on dying, for, as Ettinger writes, ‘Human stupidity is formidable’ (162).
Transhumanism as a term and an ideology gained additional traction through an Iranian-born populariser and author, Fereidoun Esfandiary, known by his transhumanist name FM-2030. Wanting a better world but disillusioned with cold war politics, nationalism, and the framework of human rights, Esfandiary moved from earthly to cosmic politics with Upwingers, a book he published in 1973. His futuristic predictions and plans got him TV appearances and teaching contracts at the New School and then at UCLA where he became another nucleus around which the futurist movement would cluster. In 1989, having formally renamed himself, FM-2030 published Are you a transhuman?, a manifesto challenging the status quo and envisioning a utopian world of limitless energy, food, and joy. After his medical death, FM-2030 entered cryopreservation at Alcor on July 8, 2000.
It was in the California of the 1980s that transhumanism began to take shape as a movement, and would later continue its growth. FM-2030’s early collaborator in West Coast futurism was Natasha Vita-More, now a leading transhumanist artist and writer married to Max More, a transhumanist philosopher and president and CEO of Alcor, the main cryonics company in the United States. Born Max T. O’Connor in the United Kingdom, More changed his name a year after he moved across the Atlantic to the University of Southern California in 1988 to complete a Ph.D. With Tom Morrow, another man with a signifying name, they launched a journal and an institute called Extropy, named to counter the pessimistic destiny promised by entropy. The Extropy Institute, joined by many who had recently gathered around a space exploration group called L-5, became the new hub of West Coast futurism, focusing on enhancement technologies that, in the early 1990s, were beginning to hold up a new set of promises: control over biology, control over the brain, control over the size and speed of computational processes, control over all matter in the universe. Many current futurists and immortalists trace their roots and early sense of transhumanist excitement back to the Extropian gatherings. The dissolution of the Extropy Institute would lead, in 1998, to the formation of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), the first of its kind, co-founded by philosophers David Pearce and Nick Bostrom, who later set up the Future of Humanity Institute, a transhumanist think tank at Oxford University advocating strongly for technofuturistic solutions to human problems. How amusing that they call it Future of Humanity, when indeed they are seeking a POST HUMAN future.
With a representative body also came conferences (Transvision) and publications (Journal of Transhumanism), declarations, mission statements, as well as internal conflicts. Although transhumanists generally see themselves as iconoclasts eschewing doctrine and imagine technology as an independent force apart from, even transcending, politics, transhumanism was never free of ideology. From the early years, social regulations and religious congregations were feared as threats to technological advancement. With its emphasis on the individual body as well as on individualism as an accompanying ethical stance, transhumanism moved in step with libertarianism. Libertarianism had and continues to have two strands: a left anarchist one and a capitalist, free-market individualist one, the latter where Ayn Rand is a common influence and innovation through the market is assumed to be the only way forward with no regard for historical and structural forms of inequality. Whilst some transhumanists have espoused a more liberal democratic ethic based on a regulated civil libertarianism (Hughes 2004), the dominant Silicon Valley tendency has been marked by strong anti-government individualism and free-market ideology.
Even as the link to the power and capital of Silicon Valley has made the souped-up capitalism of Randian techno-libertarians dominant, transhumanism is not a uniform project. For example, former WTA president and sociologist James Hughes (2004, 2012) has tried to underline the distance between the Silicon Valley billionaires and socially progressive transhumanism. Additionally, there are other variations in transhumanism besides: the transgender transhumanism of inventor Martine Rothblatt (2013); AI guru Ben Goertzel’s cosmism (2010); propositions for a Black transhuman liberation theology (Butler 2020); and budding anarchist attempts to reshape the propositions of transhumanism.
If Silicon Valley has influenced transhumanism, so transhumanism has transformed Silicon Valley. As transhumanists gained ground and moved into powerful positions, their propositions for immortality, mind uploading, nanotechnology, space colonisation, and the expansion of consciousness into the cosmos have gained ground in the tech world. Inventor Ray Kurzweil, known for his theory of the singularity, helped set up the Singularity University at NASA and was hired as an adviser by Google. In turn, Google would start its own company to do research into extending lives – the California Life Company (CALICO). Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and an early investor in Facebook, took on the mantle of transhumanism and has funded biotech projects aimed at defeating death, or advancing brain mapping and mind uploading options. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has also espoused transhumanism, whilst anti-aging researcher Aubrey de Grey transplanted his research organisation, the SENS Foundation, to Mountain View, California.
Due in part to its espousal of right-wing libertarianism and heroic individualism, its ideological linkages to eugenics, and calls for the maximisation of ‘personal autonomy’ (Anders 2001, 3) over an analysis of social forces, transhumanism as a movement has remained overwhelmingly white and mostly Anglo-American in membership. Racism, colonialism, imperialism, or class inequality are almost never taken up as issues of importance for thinking about the past or future of humanity, with some key actors promoting far-right ideologies. For example, Thiel has also co-authored a nativist book called The diversity myth, reportedly donated $1 million to the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA, and backed the Donald Trump presidency.
Although the membership continues to skew male, gender has become an important point of inflection within transhumanist thinking in part because of the presence of inventor, CEO, and writer Martine Rothblatt who has seen gender as the paradigmatic site for jettisoning biological heritage. Rothblatt, who herself transitioned in the 90s and has advocated for transgender rights, has written about The apartheid of sex (1995) and the creative freedom and technological power to determine one’s own form (2011), what transhumanist philosopher Anders Sandberg has called ‘morphological freedom’ (2013).
Consciousness, telos, and cosmic utopianism
When today’s transhumanists trace their history back to the Enlightenment, it is to a particular strain of science-based utopian humanism that focuses on the human power to determine its own future. This largely eschews the tragic strain of humanism (Eagleton 2009), in which the human condition is thought to be locked into insurmountable contradictions and the inevitability of death. Of course, the very basic notion of progress at the centre of the Enlightenment and modern thought is inseparable from European utopianism and scientific advancement. Science and technological advances, for example, were already part of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, published in 1627, with its vision of a future state in which humans live long and can use technology to satisfy their needs. Transhumanists have been most attracted to the stadial framework of progress and utopia, such as the Marquis de Condorcet’s 1792 Sketch for a historical picture of the progress of the human mind which presents an atheistic telos moving through ten epochs of development to arrive at the ‘epoch of the future progress of mankind’ when the growth of scientific knowledge would put an end to inequality, and human moral progress would start on its final path. Whereas European thinkers such as Condorcet are mentioned as ‘proto-transhumanists’ by the WTA (now called ‘Humanity+’) and by thinkers such as Nick Bostrom and James Hughes, it is important to note that the original European Enlightenment project was to create a better world through the proper rearrangement of social units. Transhumanism, on the other hand, hinges its utopian vision on the rearrangement of molecular, even atomic, units as per nanotechnology, or the ‘informatisation’ of the universe. In this sense, it fits the neoliberal paradigm where state and society are pushed aside in favour of individual responsibility for health and advancement.
The informatic approach, influenced by cybernetics, was popularised by Ray Kurzweil in The singularity is near (2005), a widely-read book on the emergence of an intelligent universe. In this view, the rise of intelligence is the telos of the universe, and technology is the means and the index of this evolution. From its origins in flint-knapping to the current digital platforms whose power and speed are rising exponentially, human intelligence has brought the world to the brink of a vast machinic, nonhuman ‘intelligence explosion’ coming upon us so fast that the laws and certainties with which we are familiar will soon no longer apply. That event-horizon is called ‘the singularity’, a concept originated in 1993 with computer scientist, mathematician, and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, and institutionalised by AI researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Tyler Emerson, who set up the Singularity Institute For Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) in 2000.
The key aspects of the informatic theory of the universe are that A) all matter is constituted, or at least can be captured and encoded, by information and complexity; since all matter, including the human brain, is constituted by and legible as patterns of information, there must be a continuum between not only human and nonhuman animals but also biological and nonbiological matter. Thus, B) humans may be regarded as one instance of the evolution of the universe from simple to complex informatic formations, bound to be superseded by super-intelligence. And since computation can capture and modify information, so C) information in the informatic cosmos may be translated from one medium to another, making all mental states potentially transferrable across matter. Minds may be downloaded and uploaded, migrating from the electrochemistry of the brain to a computational platform, rendering the biological body obsolete. This latter is the task and promise of AI. After humans create real AI, Kurzweil writes,
the matter and energy in our vicinity will become infused with the intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty and emotional intelligence (the ability to love, for example) of our human-machine civilization. Our civilization will then expand outward, turning all the dumb matter and energy we encounter into sublimely intelligent—transcendent—matter and energy. (2005, 389)
This progression of intelligence over time and into all matter in the universe has also been called a ‘telos of rationality’ (Bostrom 2008).
A number of philosophical objections have been raised regarding the informatic view. Scholars like Katherine Hayles (1999) have argued that the informatic approach, in which any mind may be transferred to other substrates (i.e. downloaded and uploaded) because it is reducible to information, mistakenly reinscribes a Cartesian dualism of mind that presumes the separation of mind from the matter in which it arises. In this way, it is actually undermining its own materialist assumptions. The transhumanist goal of reproducing consciousness in silicon-based substrates will fail because a state in silicon can simply not be the same as a state in the synaptic and neuronal assemblage that is the biological brain. As David Roden (2015, 56) points out, however, this does not preclude the development of other kinds of powerful if unpredictable mental states (and thus versions of personhood) in computational agents, in which case a kind of posthuman being, ‘Human 2.0’ as he calls it, would emerge. A thornier distinction between consciousness and computation may make that debate moot. Reviewing Kurzweil’s work in The New York Review of Books, for example, the philosopher John Searle (2002) argued that ‘increased computational power’ is a different order of thing from ‘consciousness in computers’. In that case, there would be no posthuman case to make, as human consciousness will not have been broached at all.
Either way, as most scholars agree, consciousness is a hard problem to crack (Chalmers 2002, Nagel 2012), and no view regarding it is settled. Anthropologically, it is just the absence of convincing accounts of what it is that opens up an undetermined realm in which speculative ideas grow, giving shape to current transhuman practices and subjectivities. These in turn shift the function and valence of important, though unstable, categories such as ‘consciousness’ itself, and challenge established notions of ‘personhood’ and ‘human’, two categories whose distinct coherence relies on the kind of self-awareness associated with human consciousness.
Transhumanism as subject of scholarly inquiry
Much of the scholarship on transhumanism has moved along two paths. The first is in relation to the enhancement and modification of the body (brains included) and, ultimately, of the nature of being human. In these debates, transhumanism becomes a bellwether for technology’s dangers and possibilities. It has been termed as one of the greatest threats to humanity by its detractors (Fukuyama 2002) and heralded as the best way to save humanity by its proponents (Bostrom 2014). Susan Levin (2022) has made a convincing argument that the empirical bases of transhumanist speculation are too often erroneous, especially with regards to the components of intelligence and rational decision-making. For example, whereas transhumanists tend to dismiss emotions as irrational, cognitive neuroscience has shown the importance of emotions in good decision-making and creative thinking. Similarly, the individualism of some transhumanist visions belies the fact that intelligence is distributed and contextual. Critics also liken the enhancement fantasies of transhumanists to eugenicist fantasies that reek of racism and will lead to the abandonment of fellow humans who are not enhanced or on their way to technological posthumanity (Levin 2018, Farman 2020). In response, transhumanists tend to flatten all medical and technological intervention as proto-transhumanist, arguing that you cannot coherently accept hearing aids whilst rejecting neural implants, or promote lifesaving medicine in one instance whilst rejecting the technological quest to eliminate death. Either way, the discussion about transforming human nature via technology and the control of biology is not unique to transhumanism; it has been part of an older general debate about the power of science, especially since the emergence of genetic biology, the identification of DNA, and the manipulation of species genomes gave humans a vision of ‘limitless self-modification’, to use ethicist Paul Ramsey’s (2009) words from the 1970s.
A second path has run along attempts to identify transhumanism as essentially a kind of religion. Some (Geraci 2010) have read visions of a machinic future in which the human species must be superseded in order for a better world to emerge as an extension, not of secular humanism, but of the Christian dialectics of apocalypse and salvation. However, this approach does not account for the new forms, subjectivities, technologies, and philosophies that emerge through transhumanism. Jon Bialecki (2022) takes a nuanced approach in his ethnography of Mormon transhumanists, suggesting that Mormonism and transhumanism ‘rhyme’; that is, they have affinities that resonate with each other, and a group of Mormons recognising this have been building on the resonance. Such resonances between Mormonism and transhumanism include attempts to resurrect the dead, the conviction that man can become god, and the possibility that humans live in infinitely simulated worlds. One might point equally to affinities between transhumanism and an unlikely mix of emerging intellectual trends, such as the growing interest in panpsychism (Klinge 2020), the mixture of animism and technology in ‘techno-animist’ perspectives (Richardson 2016), or the emergence of informatic selves (Farman 2014), in which selves are increasingly understood and enacted through informational or algorithmic platforms that record one’s movements, choices, desires, or physiology as informational patterns.
Despite its engagement with the core figure of anthropology—anthropos—transhumanism has yielded only a handful of sustained studies in anthropology. The overall anthropological question turns around subject formation: what kinds of subjects are made through the ideals, technologies, practices, and social formations of transhumanism? Bialecki’s (2019, 2022) aforementioned work on Mormon transhumanists examines how these two sets of ideas have come together in shaping the new subjectivity of Mormon transhumanism. Anya Bernstein (2015, 2019) studied Russian transhumanists, tracing their history through Russian cosmism, pre-revolutionary esoteric futurist movements, and the Soviet scientific and utopian secularist project, showing how Russian transhumanists disagree amongst themselves over the relationship of mind to body, over notions of personhood, and over the spiritual ideas and practices as opposed to mechanical approaches to body and mind. In either case, Bernstein argues, their approach is quite different from the American libertarian hyper-individualist vein, embracing a more collective, kin-based approach. Nevertheless, she identifies a tension that echoes the North American version of transhumanism: seeking life beyond mortality under the constant shadow of and obsession with extermination and other world-ending scenarios. Jenny Huberman (2021) brings a comparative approach to suggest that within transhumanism, kinship and personhood are being reconfigured. Drawing on Irving Hallowell, for instance, she argues that transhumanists are envisaging an Ojibwa-like world in which personhood is distributed among an array of other-than-human powerful beings, and relations with robots and software-based kin are already changing what the future family may look like. I have examined the development of algorithmic subjectivities (Farman 2014), transhuman spiritualities (Farman 2019), and suspended personhood, produced by transhumanism’s quest for immortality, specifically via cryonics, and the challenges to the category of personhood in secular law (Farman 2013, 2020). The Technoscientific Immortality project at the University of Bergen, led by anthropologist Annelin Eriksen, is researching changes in social relations and notions of the human through six transhumanist case studies between the US and Russia that are radically transforming practices and awareness around death, long considered as one of the central markers of humanity. Together, these studies underline the ways in which transhumanism is unstable and destabilising, not fitting neatly into categorical divides, becoming a contested but flexible site for further thinking and rethinking of what it is to be human and to be conscious.
This may be one reason why some social theorists have found it hard to simply brush transhumanism aside, even if they disagree with its libertarian tendencies (Hayles 2011). Andrew Pickering (2011) has made the argument that transhumanist cyborgs are interesting in their human-nonhuman ‘mangle’, but overall transhumanism starts from a very narrow premise regarding the kinds of possible mind-body capacities that exist and may be imagined for the future. As powerful as a human-machine cyborg may be in some respects (for example, in knowing what you should buy!), computationalism only cultivates one aspect of possible powers in what Pickering (2009) calls the ‘performative brain’, many others of which may be cultivated through other modalities, from psychedelic experiments to meditation. The machinic, in other words, is not attentive to other emergent selves and ‘the continual bubbling up of irreducible novelty in the world’. Thus, the problem is not that transhumanism is essentialist with respect to human nature—indeed, transhumanists see humans as a species whose nature is to change its nature, and breaking up the category ‘human’ presents the opportunity to transcend our ‘natural heritage’ and its limits (Bailey 2005; Kurzweil 2005). Rather, the problem is that transhumanism values only a specific form of intelligence or life, one that is translatable and shapeable via computation (Farman 2020). In this mode, the machinic and the computational are turned into their own reified nonbiological value—that is, they are valued in and of themselves as though they were meaningful aside from the human social contexts in which they exist. To transhumanists, the value of nonhuman superintelligence overrides human interests, and is encoded in efforts to achieve the vaunted telos of a posthuman techno-civilisation. For example, in transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom’s (2002, 5) influential analysis, one of the existential risks to humanity is argued, paradoxically, to be when ‘the potential of humankind to develop into posthumanity is permanently thwarted’ by human societies, even if ‘human life continues in some form’. What is valued over humanness in this informatic cosmology is the perpetuation of a posthuman form of life—in which the power, accuracy, and speed of computational technologies become the utmost measures of worth, mainly because these are also supposed to lead to the rise of conscious beings who, as one famous blog has it, are ‘less wrong’.
Transhumanism then may be properly understood as a social project for claiming particular techno-libertarian futures, imagined as part of an inevitable and universal trajectory of intelligence and informatic complexity. Whereas these futures promise emancipation from the limitations of human biology and embodiment, including those of race, gender, and even labour, they keep erasing and so in practice reproducing the racial and settler colonial histories and on-going structural inequalities that undergird the development of such technologies and the accrual of power and wealth to a few. In this way, they follow the white mythos of the autonomous subject ‘whose freedom is in actuality possible only because of the surrogate effect of servants, slaves, wives, and, later, industrial service workers who perform this racialized and gendered labor’ (Atanasoki and Vorna 2019, 17-9). In other words, whatever is invoked in the name of humanity or transhumanity, the futures idealised by transhumanists cannot be valued universally.
Indeed, transhumanist forms of life represent a danger, especially to those in already structurally precarious situations (racially, geopolitically, by class, by status, by physical ability) as well as those engaged in political struggles that aim against the wider contemporary socioeconomic and civilisational formations. As others have remarked, America’s soldiers are the most advanced transhumanist prototypes,
with their smart weapons, their body armor, their night-vision goggles, their special diets, their training in and integration into remote robotic combat systems, and, we would suspect, their ingestion of neuropharmaceuticals such as Modafinil to keep them alert even when deprived of sleep for 36 hours (Allenby and Sarewitz 2011, 24).
This is no accident. The projected transhumanist technologies often emerge from military research and are fed back into the military. Despite their libertarian gestures against the state, high-powered transhumanists are enmeshed with the American state and the military: for example, Ray Kurzweil has worked closely with DARPA and NASA, whilst Peter Thiel owns a policing and surveillance company called Palantir (closely linked to Cambridge Analytica).
Conclusion
Transhumanism is part of the wider set of posthumanisms that have ripped apart the common Enlightenment-era conjunction of person and human—that is, of an entity whose dignity and rights were premised on a notion of special consciousness that emphasised self-awareness, reason, and the ability to speak and act freely. If, as transhumanists claim, those features are not exclusively based in biological forms, and may be attributes of computational devices, then personhood is decoupled from exclusive humanism, and even multi-specieism, and its attributes and pursuant rights may be extended to what was previously thought of as inert or disenchanted matter.
Transhumanism will likely raise questions of personhood in anthropology, forcing us to rethink its relations to nature and technology: is it enough to be able to attribute agency or consciousness to mountains or avatars in order to make them count as persons? Do agency and consciousness only arise relationally, as an effect of interactions between beings? Or is there some metaphysical or subjective essence that agency or consciousness refer to and which may or may not be discerned in entities such as mountains or avatars? Is ‘personhood’ a more inclusive category than ‘human’? Or are these questions moot, because they are effects of formations of power that constantly work to render certain people’s claims to rights and power impossible, regardless of the categories used, and despite the struggles of people to expand the embrace of those categories?
Whilst the informatic cosmology of mind and cosmos allows transhumanists to move beyond the secular humanist disenchantment of matter and argue for such things as robot rights or intelligent matter in the universe, it also narrows the possibilities of mind by fetishising algorithmic intelligence (Ziewitz 2016). For in the name of expanding human capacities and transcending human limits, algorithmic modalities are narrowing the range of valued forms of life in ways often reminiscent of the colonial divides that separated ‘primitive’ from ‘civilised’—in this case, separating the technologically enhanced forms of life from regular old Homo sapiens, and without acknowledging the social and historical conditions that enable enhancement. Thus the populations overvalued and undervalued in these imaginaries have been de facto racially and geopolitically defined; that is, white Americans, or Western-educated urban denizens more generally, are the main proponents as well as the assumed subjects of that future. Other human socialities and possible lifeways are erased from that future, and quite likely a particular human subjectivity is being produced by the mediation of computational devices that makes for a recursive loop of algorithmic affirmation: we learn with computers how to behave computationally and so we value computational behaviour. What is noticeable in the meantime is that as transhumanism has gotten increasingly entrenched in the tech world’s networks of power, its discourse, anxieties, and projects have become harder to distinguish from those of the military, scientific, technological, and financial institutions of late capitalism: existential risk, space colonies, neural implants, robotic automation, avatar selves, and mind uploading have moved from being the maligned concerns of a few technofuturists to more common, popular goals of a post-human future.
Acknowledgements
With gratitude to those whose comments helped me think through these matters more deeply, especially the editor of the encyclopedia Felix Stein, two anonymous reviewers, and Noreen Khawaja.
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Jeffrey Epstein & the Hideous Strength of Transhumanism
Most of Jeffrey Epstein’s so-called “philanthropy” was directed to the financing and promotion of transhumanism. At the prideful heart of this movement is a disdain for all that is authentically human and a sordid desire to replace human frailty with superhuman or transhuman strength.
The sordid life of Jeffrey Epstein serves to highlight the decadence of the deplorable epoch in which we find ourselves, as do the suspicious circumstances surrounding his death. The web of vice and viciousness that he had spun was widespread, serving to entrap not only underage girls but also the rich and famous who preyed upon them. Using the allure of underage sex to lure his wealthy associates into his web, Epstein secretly filmed them in the act of sexually abusing minors, thereby turning his “associates” into his blackmail victims.
Epstein seems to have believed that the powerful people whom he’d entrapped in his “insurance policy” would have a vested interest in keeping him safe from the law, a strategy which worked for a while. In 2008, Epstein was convicted in Florida of sexually abusing a fourteen-year-old girl, receiving a scandalously light sentence, but due to a plea deal he was not charged with sexually abusing thirty-five other girls whom federal officials identified as having been abused by him.
After another ten years in which Epstein masterminded the trafficking of young girls to satisfy the pornographic and pedophilic appetites of his powerful network of friends, he was finally charged in July 2019 with the sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York. A month later, he was found dead in his jail cell. Although the medical examiner originally recorded the death as being a case of suicide, there are so many anomalies and mysteries surrounding the circumstances of Epstein’s death that many people agree with Epstein’s lawyers that the death could not have been suicide. One thing that is certain is that Epstein’s death removed the possibility of pursuing criminal charges. There would be no trial, and therefore no exposing of Epstein’s powerful associates by their victims in a court of law. Seen in this light, or in the shadow of this possible cover-up, it is tempting to see Epstein’s “insurance policy” as his death warrant. He was too dangerous to be allowed to live when the lives of so many others depended on his timely death. It is no wonder that “Epstein didn’t kill himself” has become a hugely popular meme, nor that TV networks have sought to dramatize his sordid life.
One aspect of Epstein’s life which is unlikely to be the focus of any TV drama is his obsession with transhumanism. For those who know little about this relatively recent phenomenon, transhumanism is usually defined as the movement in philosophy which advocates the transformation of humanity through the development of technologies which will re-shape humans intellectually and physiologically so that they transcend or supersede what is now considered “human.” At the prideful heart of this movement is a disdain for all that is authentically human and a sordid desire to replace human frailty with superhuman or transhuman strength.
Transhumanism rides roughshod over the dignity of the human person in its quest for the technologically “created” superman. Its spirit was encapsulated by David Bowie in the lyrics of one of his songs: “Homo sapiens have outgrown their use…. Gotta make way for the homo superior.”
Most of Epstein’s so-called “philanthropy” was directed to the financing and promotion of transhumanism. The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation pledged $30 million to Harvard University to establish the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and also bankrolled the OpenCog project which develops software “designed to give rise to human-equivalent artificial general intelligence.” Apart from his support for the cybernetic approach to transhumanism, Epstein was also fascinated with the possibility of creating the “superman” via the path of eugenics. He hoped to help in a practical way with plans to “seed the human race with his DNA” by impregnating up to twenty women at a time at a proposed “baby ranch” at his compound in New Mexico. He also supported the pseudo-science of cryonics which freezes human corpses and severed heads in the hope that technological advances will eventually make it possible to resurrect the dead. He had planned to have his own head and genitalia preserved in this way.
Jeffrey Epstein Estate Unloads New Mexico Megamansion and Ranch
The more than 8,000-acre property included a 30,000-square-foot main house
EPSTEIN’s ZORRO RANCH HAVEN | ZORRO RANCH AT TIME OF SALE |
In addition to his bizarre association with the wilder fringes of technological atheism, Epstein also co-organized a conference with his friend, the militant atheist Al Seckel, who is known, amongst other things, for his creation of the so-called “Darwin Fish” symbol, seen on bumper stickers and elsewhere, which depicts Darwin’s “superior” evolutionary fish eating the ichthys symbol or “Jesus fish” of the Christians. Seckel fled California after his life of deception and fraud began to catch up with him, and he was found at the foot of a cliff in France having apparently fallen to his death. Nobody seems to know whether he slipped, jumped, or was pushed.
Apart from his unhealthy interest in atheistic scientism, Jeffrey Epstein was also a major figure amongst the globalist elite. According to his lawyer, Gerald B. Lefcourt, he was “part of the original group that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative” which works to force the poor countries of the world to conform to the values of the culture of death. Even more ominously, Epstein was a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, two of the key institutions responsible for fostering and engineering the globalist grip on the world’s resources.
As we ponder the sordid and squalid world of Jeffrey Epstein and his “associates,” we can’t help but see his life as a cautionary tale, the moral of which is all too obvious. It shows that pride precedes a fall and that it preys on the weak and the innocent. It shows that those who think they are better than their neighbours become worse than their neighbours. It shows how Nietzsche’s Übermensch morphs into Hitler’s Master Race and thence to the Transhuman Monster. It shows that those who admire the Superman become subhuman. It also shows that the subhuman is not bestial but demonic. It shows that those who believe that they are beyond good and evil become the most evil monsters of all.
Those of us who have been nurtured on cautionary tales such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength will know that fiction often prefigures reality. We will see that the real-life figure of Jeffrey Epstein is a latter-day Viktor Frankenstein, reaping destruction with his contempt for his fellow man and his faith in the power of scientism to deliver immortality to those who serve it. We will also see that the transhumanism which Epstein financed is a mirror image of the demonic scientism of the secretive National Institute of Coordinated Experiments in Lewis’ prophetic novel. We will also be grimly amused by the fact that the “leader” of the demonic scientistic forces in Lewis’ tale is a severed head which has apparently been brought back to life.
And there is one final lesson that the pathetic life of Jeffrey Epstein teaches us. It shows us that the adage that the devil looks after his own is not true. It is in fact a lie told by the devil himself. The devil hates his disciples as much as he hates the disciples of Christ; once he has had his way with them, he disposes of them with callous and casual indifference, much as Jeffrey Epstein disposed of those whom he sexually abused.
Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine.
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Epstein’s Temple – ZORRO RANCH – NO JUSTICE FOR THE PEOPLE IN A RICH MAN’S WORLD –Part 3
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The Magic of Scientism: Harry and Ray at Work and Play
The generations to be born towards the end of this decade, or the beginning of the next, should by all means endeavor to preserve their inner child for as long as possible. For the childhood dream of changing reality through a tap of the magic wand, wielded by a playful magus, could soon, in words of Google Lab’s CEO Ray Kurzweil, become “feasible activity in full-immersion virtual reality.” In so saying, Kurzweil actually has in mind a particular magician, the popular sorcerer Harry Potter from J.K. Rowling’s bestsellers. For those acquainted with Kurzweil’s labors, there is nothing unusual in him relying on a fictional character, whose personal traits seem to closer resemble those of the IT geek, like a young Bill Gates, than a classical wizard from our fairy tales. Moreover, Ray’s pop-science book Singularity is Near and Rowling’s postmodern occultism perfectly complement each other on the market, not least because they target the same demographic: people on the threshold of adolescence.
If we allow Harry and Ray to enlighten us, we are also obliged to repress the fact that their stories are fiction, not because reality refutes them, but because its logic burdens them with implications which, at least for an adult, shatter the “immersion.” Magic is an activity of producing effects while sidelining their visible connection to causes. As such it is particularly attractive to children and younger adolescents, not only because it promises the possibility of performing the impossible, but even more so because it implicitly renders obsolete any responsibility for an act. Meanwhile, the virtual world prophesied by Ray functions according to astonishingly similar rules: the rift between word and speaker, deed and consequence, widens and deepens inasmuch the virtual avatar is perfected, i.e. removed from reality. The power of creativity grows proportionally to diminishing responsibility. And we all know that in today’s society RESPONSIBILITY is a DIRTY WORD!
Now, ain’t that cool?
Biological automatons gathered under the aegis of a transhumanist, or in a more final version, posthumanist movement would more or less unequivocally answer in the affirmative. For those unaware, Ray Kurzweil is merely the most media-savvy face among many others: an inventor, entrepreneur and futurologist whose job seems to be marketing the process of braving the political, economic and epistemological peak of the age of transition. It is an all-encompassing social project whose feasible and intermediate aim is our death.
A Perfect Homicide
We must ask ourselves: if the process of eliminating humanity as such is afoot, why does no one talk about it, except the usual muffled voices of conspiracists and a few bioethicists enslaved by academic argot which is in itself already post-human? We speak here not merely of the concrete posthumanist movement per se, but of the social transition whose results it anticipates. There are infinite ways to kill a man, and not all of them qualify as homicide. There is, for instance, the practice of euthanasia – the exercise of the right to die – slowly entrenching itself in codes of fundamental human rights.
Allow to leap forward – we can affirm that the real reason for transhumanism lies in the very nature of transition itself. It’s not merely a transitory movement from one state to another, as often branded. On the contrary, when taken as a historical epoch, it is an entirely self-sufficient and enclosed process, the process of infinite ending. If you want to see it – and it’s necessary to see it before proceeding to define it – remember, have you ever paused while walking down the busy avenue and asked yourself a simple question: where does all this busy mess of pedestrians and traffic go? Stop in front of a fitness center with glass panels overlooking the street, and observe all the people running in place on moving tracks; therein lies your answer. For a long time now cities are silent when you interrogate them, so in accordance with the Zeitgeist, the answer is written on the wall. It says: nowhere.
The ground cause of transition is the erosion of every ground; perpetual movement obliterating the past and infinitely delaying the future, a state, we must add, in which the human being as such will soon be unable to survive. In this sense, a perfect homicide is the one that rules out the possibility of being qualified as homicide. That’s where posthumanism comes into play.
Singularity
The posthumanist movement sees the age of transition as an acceleration of history towards technological explosion, whose culmination is to be expected no later than the year of 2050, when, it is predicted, the singularity is to finally commence. The term has many meanings, but posthumanists usually apply two among them. The first, made possible by one of the inciters of digital revolution, John von Neumann, says the singularity is a moment in history when a torrent of technological progress becomes so strong, so quick and so pervasive that human life in turn becomes irrevocably transformed. Contemporary posthumanists join this to a fully developed artificial intelligence immeasurably stronger than that of man and the final assimilation of not only human beings, but the universe in toto, with intelligent machines.
Sculpture from the 2013 Bilderberg Meeting in Watford, England.
Singularity’s second meaning, brimming with religious pathos for posthumanists, is a hypothetical construction taken from the field of theoretical physics: singularity is a point in which the curve of time/space vectors becomes infinite, thus creating the point of infinite mass and, consequently, infinite gravity field. What happens in singularity remains hidden from the outside observer, because gravity annihilates any movement contrary to it, and so light cannot escape it once in its field. In that sense, physical singularity can be visualized only by analogies, because the witness passing over its threshold can never return to relate what he has seen. This threshold is termed event horizon. Singularity denies return to anything that enters it, and this means we can talk about it only in mathematical constructions or images, outside observers blind to its shape and form, but certain of its existence in all its magnificence. Bearing in mind the necessity of light for perception as well as the construction of metaphors, this phenomenon is also known as a black hole.
Gods by Merit
Why compare the acceleration of technological growth with the properties of cosmic monstrosities, frequently the inspiration for creators of science fiction? Namely because there exists a strikingly correct analogy between them, and the posthumanists are all too eager to exploit it. The idea is that the absolute peak of technological progress is not merely a contingency. It is a moment in the future acting as causa finalis, transforming everything “moving” towards it; it is the endpoint of evolution, and not only of biological life, but of the universe as a totality. Man is the being through and by which the discarding of biology is coming to pass, because he is capable of creating technology and, by dissolving his biological foundation, integrating himself into the world-system. He is able to assume a form perfectly appropriate for dead infinity – that of the machine.
Notably, posthumanists view all existence as an information system. In that respect, the behavior of constitutional elements of matter and energy is intelligent by its very design, in the way a computer with no operator can be defined as intelligent: it is the activity of dead binary reactive material points. On a biological level, this digital structure elevates to the level of genes and their elements, and further, towards an intelligence reduced to the ability to calculate for pattern recognition. In this respect it is astonishing how well the term intelligent design suits both posthumanists and pseudo-Christian creationists. Both groups reduce the world to mechanical categories, with the notable difference that the sophistication of posthumanists transcends mere materialism and mechanics, their hope being far better-founded. It is easier to wait for the rapture we shall create than sell one that was never really in store. Besides, the posthumanist promise to the faithful is formulated clearly and distinctly and fixated to a foreseeable and definite future. The conquest of death through assimilation of man to technology, AI, and finally to the universe itself, is presented with the winning smile and smooth spin of the megachurch prosperity preacher: “Because you deserve it!”
This is all about the fallen angels using mankind to thwart God’s plan. The Devil wants to be AS GOD. Not like him, he wants to BE GOD. He wants to rule over all things. ESPECIALLY LIFE AND DEATH! He wants to find a way to escape God’s Righteous Punishment because he already knows his end.
But, in this age… death comes to all. Judgement comes after death. GOD is the one and ONLY giver of life and he determines who lives and who dies, and when.
Romans 5:12-21
12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: |
Romans 6:23
23 For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. |
Hebrews 9:27
27 And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: |
1 Corinthians 15:26The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. |
Deuteronomy 32:38-40
39 See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand. 40 For I lift up my hand to heaven, and say, I live for ever. |
Man without Characteristics
To understand the motive of posthumanists and the grounds on which they assert their ambition, we must peer into the metaphysics at the roots of the movement. It is the humanist ideal of absolute freedom of the conscious individuum driven to its final consequences. The individuum is that which cannot be further divided and whose only limit is the other, equal, individuum. The point of this definition is best reflected in Protagora’s homo mensura, i.e. the proposition that man is the measure, not only of history, but all things – those that are, that they are and those that are not, that they are not. It is an attitude developed from the late Renaissance of Descartes to the modernity of Hegel through the idea and the possibility of an absolute or at least potentially absolute system of science. At the peak of modernity, that is to say between the two world wars, the final dissolution of the subject came to pass. But that doesn’t equal its abandonment as a principle. We still can’t deny that we are human, but in order to plant ourselves at the root of all things – in fact to deify ourselves – we must transcend reality and re-form it, as well as ourselves, according to our own will. That process can be defined as virtualization, the state in which man lives and behaves as if he is still human, but thinks and works as if he is ceasing to be. It is the advent of postmodernity, the epoch at whose peak – which means right now – the final decision of man is to be made: Will man remain himself, or will he, after long centuries of the metaphysical equivalent of fruitless foreplay, finally cease to be human?
The individuum as metaphysical principle provokes some questions. Namely, how is it possible for something indivisible to be dissolved? In other words, how can the conscious subject, as an unconditional principle, disintegrate? Does that not point into a direction of uncertainty? The key for a proper answer to this question, as well as for the explication of the inner structure of the term ‘posthumanism’, lies in the method the predecessors of posthumanism relied upon to reach it in the first place. It is the reduction of wealth of experience to one principle, moreover the one everybody likes best: a reflection in the mirror. Conceiving the individuum as a metaphysical principle finds its genesis in the urge to remove all obstacles to individual freedom. That freedom is completely arbitrary; it presupposes the autonomy of an individual’s reason and will with only one inescapable condition: the individuum is a subject without properties, namely the being whose only identity is contained solely within oneself. This conclusion is inescapable, since it is otherwise impossible to attain absolute freedom. Any other property or qualification – ethnicity, race, religion, family, and finally sex – contaminates absolute identity with a moment of differentiation, thereby destroying it and rendering the individual principle finite and conditioned.
Of course, to be free solely in volition yet unrelated to the “outside” world is worthless. Therefore the individual is free to creatively model its world to the point it bangs its head on the wall of un-human reality, i.e. when it decides to actualize itself by playing solitaire in a steel mill’s furnace or, less dramatically, limit the freedom of another individual endowed with the same dignity. Up to this point modern liberalism, which is the social modification of this metaphysical principle, will raise no eyebrows on behalf of enlightened contemporary men. There’s a catch, however. Limited freedom is not absolute, and the concrete human being is not really an individuum. For his identity must in some measure conform to others’ identities, and Narcissus has to allow all the other narcissists absolute right to be the center of the world. Equality is as much necessary as it is unacceptable. The only way out is for all particular forms of volition and identity to be reduced to a single one, and that means to finally level all forms of differentiation to nothingness. Hence the global struggle for such principles as “minority rights” is inhumane in its essence. Its real purpose is the dissolution of ethnic, cultural, religious, family and sexual differences. Postmodern metastasis of this metaphysics points towards infinity, i.e. aims at the abolition of all human characteristics under the cover of achieving freedom from all human limitations. So posthumanists promise us that when we ingest millions of nano-bots, we’ll be able to play poker in crematoria, calculate at the speed of supercomputers, change our perception of the world and our bodies at will, because the new paradise will be also pervaded by nano-sensors to enhance its every delight. We will ultimately become as gods: through inconceivable AI we will know everything, and through diffuse nano-bodies we will practically live forever.
Now, ain’t that cool?
Fine Print
Perhaps, but in marketing there are always key details to be found in fine print. As in all self-respecting religions, the rebirth of New Man from the bosom of a black hole demands the death of “old” man. It comes to pass through renunciation of all properties which make a concrete individual unique by limiting it, thereby making it a person. Everything, including the body and thoughts, must be expelled from the identity of the individuum. The death of the human race in the age of transition is inflicted by stripping away its humanity – the very things by which we are what we are – and re-creating it in absolute freedom. Literally – quod erat demonstratum – a reboot of the Garden of Eden, only this time with a new Author and bountiful, endless fruits from the trees of knowledge and life. However, the intermediary phases of the procedure are quite painful. We can compare it to infinite self-injury, the infinite peeling back of one’s own skin only to find a new bloody layer to remove. The ripping and grinding of everything that can be taken apart. And, surely, everything can be taken apart. Because a center without properties does not really exist. It is, taken in itself and deprived of its mirror, pure nothingness.
Let’s entertain ourselves with a few illustrations.
Dividing the individuum is not as absurd as it seems, nor are these abstract thoughts far removed from everyday life. It is necessary because an individual with no properties is in fact an illusion. In order to hold oneself as a universal principle, it must commence its own virtualization, the transformation of itself and the world into a hologram infinitely divided according to its will. At this moment we can observe to what extent posthumanism is already a dominant worldview today. Popular alternative media guru David Icke, who would surely never define himself as a posthumanist, talks about absolute freedom of “consciousness having experience” in a holographic universe, drawing upon various substitutes for scientific materialism, ideas which in share the same origin as the worldview they try to escape. Posthumanism defines its principle clearly and puts the human being at the same level with all matter indiscriminately. In the informational world-system man is not only indistinguishable from animal; he is no different from anything else. In that sense it is all too legitimate to merge body and technology, just as it is legitimate to genetically modify life. Matter is potentially infinitely divisible, just as the individuum is. New Age fantasies of quantum mechanics and its principles as proof of the spiritual foundation of the world are in fact an immersion into the total materialism of a universe which dissolves, not merely on touch, but on sight, and its corollary: virtual consciousness. Postmodern pop spirituality and conspirology of the same ilk fit in wonderfully with their “truth vibrations”, “emotional fields,” and “Christ consciousness,” because they impose categories of the lower upon that which is higher, thus losing forever the chance of touching it, submerged unaware in the torrent of transition.
Further down the slope of everyday life, we have social projects like the “Internet of Things”, implementation of RFID technology and “smart meters”, but also “flexecurity” and “life-long learning,” constituting the age of transition and rendering us networked and addicted to technology in order to properly assimilate coming generations, all with the goal of the machine final triumphant penetration of the body. Signs of materialization and dissolution mirror themselves in seemingly insignificant phenomena, such as the popularity of tattooing and piercing. Nowadays, covering the body in ink indiscriminately, with no significant message contained in such “art,” is a common phenomenon. It could written off as the expression of desire for sensations, even painful ones, that emanates from deracinated dwellers of a sterilized society. But if we observe it from the posthumanist perspective, it is a clear sign of a gradual discarding of the body’s personal value, its commoditization. Kurzweil himself notes this trend and remarks how it will make fusion of humans and machines easier because it displays the already-developed habit of treating one’s own body as an external object. Various meditation techniques, courses and self-help literature exhibit the same tendency towards “ego-ization” of the spirit and its treatment as an object to be technically modified and improved, or just as well replaced, dismantled, and even uploaded to the network.
Spaghettification of the Subject
The terms in which posthumanists describe themselves are also very interesting. Ray Kurzweil speaks about his innate design, his obsolete hardware and software – i.e. his body and mind – which he endeavors to keep mended and updated by ingesting more than 150 food supplements daily into his system. The vegan crusader against suffering and transhumanist David Pierce laments over being tired in terms of limits of his design, and envisions the future where technologically modified humans will banish all unpleasant sensations from the world. We must note, however, that these are not metaphors. These individuals do not consider themselves human any more. The same can be said for nature. Kurzweil’s final prediction is that in the wake of singularity, the A.I. will start “awaking the universe.” Innumerable nano-bots moving faster than light will commence pervading infinity and create a living, intelligent world.
Will they really?
No, they will not. Cosmos, meaning “beautiful order”, the world organism grounded in spirit, in which the man of antiquity and, to a lesser extent, the middle ages had lived is diametrically opposed to Kurzweil’s vision. A universe inseminated by artificial intelligence is a dead thing endowed with operating system, a titanic computer or, more precisely, a living corpse. The beginning and the end of transition is death, a black hole in which postmodern man finally encounters himself. We who, thank God, still linger on the sunny side of event horizon can’t really know what the reunion looks like, but we can excersise our imagination with some lively imagery taken from theoretical physics. Namely, some physicists speak about the phenomenon of spaghettification, of the observer sinking in the black hole. Driving the impression closer to life, it is also known as the noodle effect. Therefore we can easily let the imagination flow and endow us with images of what sinking to the bosom of posthumanism holy mother really looks like. The image of man rendered into macaroni perfectly fits the final logical outcome of the posthumanist principle. Transposition of categories taken from information technologies applied practically to the whole of experience, and, in a historical sense, to all that has been when those categories didn’t exist, speaks clearly of the fact that postmodern man is already being shredded to a semblance of the popular Italian dish.
Virtual reality is already at work. The ‘real’ reality is unreal, so the apostles of transhumanism contend, believe it or not, from the age of Descartes. Only, as we have already pointed out, humanism never really moved forward from its initial foreplay. Consciousness of a different metaphysics, different principles and original truths had been tolerated in everyday life and works as a private matter, while in politics and science it stood as an underlying corrective to the conventional wisdom. Alas, now the zipper has been unzipped, and there is no turning back from real hardcore intercourse with nothingness. Absolute power commenced its own dispersion, its own logically necessary suicide. The idea of abandoning the original for its simulacrum, detaching past from present, now isn’t merely an idea or a general tendency of infinite growth, sustainable or otherwise. It is reverse engineering. It is re-creation of the world by virtue of insane reason and insatiable volition. By virtue of nothing. In this manner posthumanism, aside from being anti-human, is an anti-cosmic metaphysics. And it is, as they say, the future.
Acceleration towards singularity is reality, but not the reality of progress. It is the reality of free fall. According to posthumanist logic, which is the defining idea of our epoch, it is free fall accelerated by the growing inertia of the black hole of metaphysical egotism. We stand before the most destructive idea that will bring forth the most destructive being ever into earthly existence. Not merely a geek wizard, but a geek god, ironclad in isolation from everyday life, armed with the absolute negation of everything which came to pass before him and hell-bent on applying Darwinism hypertrophied into the compulsion to uproot everything different, right down to the subatomic level. And so we can imagine from our sunny side of event horizon:
Narcissus is speeding and accelerating down the vertical of singularity, ripping himself apart, dissolving in space and time … there is nothing but reflections, a world of mirrors closing in from all directions … touching the mirror, he tears away his face to discover what lies behind the surface. But there is nothing. Can he push Ctrl+Alt+Del, perhaps? Too late. His ‘I’ is now everywhere and nowhere, his world is an infinity of ripping apart and perpetual disintegration into his own reflection, an eternity of falling and dissolving in inescapable darkness.
And what did he herald to the world on the precipice of his triumph?
Singularity is near, resistance is futile.
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Understand that GOD is always in CONTROL. Any and all efforts to try and cheat God or avoid His judgement are futile.
If you want to live forever… it is very simple. Give your heart and life to GOD. Receive the gift of salvation and come under the Blood of Jesus Christ/Yahushua Ha Mashiach.
Fear is of the DEVIL. PEACE comes from KNOWING that GOD is in control. PEACE of GOD that passes understanding will carry you through whatever this life has for you.
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8 There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.
3 For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh:
4 That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
5 For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.
6 For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
7 Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.
8 So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.
9 But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.
10 And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
11 But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.
12 Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh.
13 For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.
14 For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.
15 For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.
16 The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:
17 And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.
18 For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.
19 For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.
20 For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope,
21 Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
22 For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.
24 For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?
25 But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.
26 Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
27 And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.
28 And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.
30 Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.
31 What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?
32 He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?
33 Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth.
34 Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.
35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
36 As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
37 Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.
38 For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
39 Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
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