Gender-Ideology, Transhumanism-Ideology: the Connection

11-10-2024Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

The Transhumanism in the Middle of the "Gender Identity" Living Room “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.” — Edward L. Bernays

There is an apparition that is floating around the global institutionalization of “gender identity.” What is it? What is happening? We can see something going on but can’t quite make it out. Why are these changes being catapulted through western cultures, driven by big money and governments? This apparition has a name: Transhumanism. It is the unnamed issue that is sitting in the middle of the “gender identity” living room, which we can’t quite address. All the other tentacles of changes transforming society, wrought in the name of gender, grow out of this apparition, this thing we refuse to name and face.

Transhumanism is the single most important thing to resist if we are to stop the deconstruction of our species. We, as human beings, are sexually dimorphic, and “gender identity” is deconstructing sex. (NOTE: Deconstruction doesn't necessarily mean "demolition;" instead it means "breaking down" or analyzing something (especially the words in a work of fiction or nonfiction to discover its true significance, which is supposedly almost never exactly what the author intended.) “Gender Identity,” has many different iterations, but most of us are looking at the sequences and missing the whole. We need to look at what "gender identity" does and not what it means. It destroys sex as a meaningful category and it is literally desexing children and young people. This is the point of it. This is how it is used by those forcing it into the culture, to normalize our dissociation from our sexed reality.

The acceptance of desexing the human body is being invested in by billionaires in Pharma and tech, like Martine Rothblatt, a transsexual-transhumanist, and Jennifer Pritzker, another transsexual, and his family. They hold considerable investments in the medical, industrial complex. Tim Gill of the LGBT NGO, Gill Foundation is also driving the normalization of body dissociation globally via “gender identity” and is invested in tech and AI. Jon Stryker, the heir to the Stryker medical fortune, drives gender identity, or body dissociation, worldwide with the LGBT NGO, Arcus Foundation, which he founded. These men are all deeply wedded to global LGBT NGOs that drive body dissociation through our cultures under the banner of human rights. They are dismantling sexual dimorphism and promoting a multiplicity of sexes. This doesn’t suggest all these men know each other and work in unison, though most do. It means they are of a class that holds financial power, are already invested in tech and Pharma, and are aware of advancements that drive profits in these industries. https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/the-transhumanism-in-the-middle-of-the-gender-identity-livingroom?fbclid=IwAR2Ieq5YC22Qr6o997XTHlm2b-JtG1X8EnCAMdPRy3sgqZrS0iewdmNTEx4

Catholic Philosopher Edward Feser remarks: …(I)f we start instead with the materialist’s conception of mind. The prevailing tendency for decades now among materialists has been to think of the mind in functionalist terms. That is to say, it is to analyze mental phenomena in terms of what they do rather than in terms of what they are made of. That idea, in turn, is typically developed in terms of the thesis that the mind is a kind of software that can be run on any number of different kinds of hardware. On this analysis, mind, like matter, turns out to be a kind of abstract structure. Like matter, it is essentially dematerialized, in the name of materialism. And you get other results that sound odd coming from a materialist, such as the idea that a mind might jump from one embodiment to another by way of software being uploaded from its old hardware and downloaded onto new hardware See his discussion of materialism here:https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/01/materialism-subverts-itself.html#more 

Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates for the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition. It also predicts the inevitability of such technologies in the future. Wesley Smith provided an essay on the incompatibility of the transhumanist claims, another version of Frankenstein without a soul, with Christianity. You can read the whole essay here: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2022/03/the-impossibility-of-christian-transhumanism Here are some bullet-points:

- Transhumanism is a futuristic social movement. Its adherents believe that immortality is attainable in the corporeal world through the wonders of applied technology. The goal is to become “H+,” or more than human. The problem with these efforts is that the transhumanist worldview and the Christian faith are incompatible. One cannot be a “Christian transhumanist”— any more than one can be a Christian Buddhist or Christian Muslim.

- That transhumanism became a phenomenon is not surprising. Western society is becoming increasingly secular, with an exponential growth of “nones” among the young. (NOTE: A none is a person who claims to have no religion. Such a societal shift has consequences. Removing God from the human equation engenders hopelessness and breeds nihilism. Nihilism is the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless) This is the crucial weakness of modern materialism, one that transhumanism seeks to remedy. By offering adherents the hope of technological rescue from the ultimate obliteration of death, transhumanism offers nonbelievers a postmodern twist on faith’s promise of eternal life. I can live forever, the transhumanist believes fervently, if we just develop the technology soon enough.

-…(S)ome transhumanists hope to repeatedly renew their bodies through breeding clones as sources of organ replacements. Others plan to have their heads cryogenically frozen to allow eventual surgical attachment on a different body or a cyborg. But transhumanists’ greatest passion is to eternally save their minds—as opposed to souls, which is not a transhumanist concept—via uploading into computer programs, a concept known as “digital immortality.” This is hardly what St. Paul meant when he asked, “Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?”

- Transhumanists not only believe that life is too short, but that human capacities are inadequate. Thus, the second great goal of transhumanism is “morphological freedom,” i.e., radical quality improvement—not through self-discipline, embracing the virtues, or focused efforts at character building, but via materialistic means such as gene editing, brain implants, and merging with AI technologies. Transhumanists don’t just want to manipulate their own bodies, but also those of their children. They hope to do this through genetic engineering and unnatural means of family formation. According to the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, “All sentient entities are entitled to reproductive freedom, including through novel means such as the creation of mind clones, monoparent children, or benevolent artificial general intelligence.” And I haven’t even gotten into how, by granting rights to AI computers and proposing to “upgrade” animals into rational beings, the movement rejects Christianity’s view of human uniqueness.

- As Istvan wrote in 2016 in the Huffington Post: “We must force our evolution in the present day via our reasoning, inventiveness, and especially our scientific technology. In short, we must embrace transhumanism—the radical field of science that aims to turn humans into, for lack of a better word, gods.” It’s hard to see how any of that squares with the Christian’s call to humility.

There’s a lot of prideful dangerous huffing and puffing threatening humanity in its rebellion against God and His creation not our creation. In that light Friedrich von Hardenburg a writer in the Romantic era known as Novalis pointed out” We cannot know anything on our own; all real knowledge must be given to us.”