Instead of praying for transcendence let’s engineer transcendence. Let’s engineer ourselves into blissful utopian existence. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it”. (YouTube description)
“Unfortunately, the singularity may not be what you’re hoping for. By default the singularity (intelligence explosion) will go very badly for humans… so by default superhuman AIs will end up optimizing the world around us for something other than what we want, and using up all our resources to do so.“ (Reddit’s CEO Luke Muehlhauser)
The sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had even in Ransom’s own time begun to be subtly maneuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists, indifference to it, and a concentration upon power had been the result. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with pan-psychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave, the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of deep set repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power.
Indeed, they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with nineteenth-century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition. It was different now. Perhaps few or none at Belbury knew what was happening: but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men? From the point of view which is accepted in hell, the whole history of our Earth had led to this moment. There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, hell would be at last incarnate. (C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, Scribner, 2003, p. 203)
They (Nazism and Communism, my note, M.C.) are at war with nature. Human nature. This is the root of totalitarianism! Nazism is an ideology based on counterfeit biology, while communism is based on counterfeit sociology , although both systems claim to have scientific basis”. (Fr. Thom in The Soviet Story)
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. 3 They said to each other,
“Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.”
They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said,
“Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said,
“If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth. (Genesis 11:1-9)
Hand Fixing Hand by Shane Willis
Alonewithothers's Blog 