PART 25 -- Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald the Dawn of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare

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Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald the Dawn of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare


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FROM ANTICHRIST’S MARK TO HIS TRANSHUMAN CHURCH


Perhaps related to the rise of Antichrist and his human-transforming “mark of the Beast” technology is an intriguing aspect of transhumanism that is only now developing into what could be an end-times universalist religion. Is it a coincidence that this comes during the same epoch in which the United States Supreme Court, for the first time in its history, became devoid of Protestant representation with the confirmation of Elena Kagan; a time also in which the Claremont School of Theology analyzing the future of American religion concluded at its 2010 Theology After Google Conference that “technology must be embraced” for Christianity to survive?

Although most transhumanists, especially early on, were secular atheists and would have had little resemblance to prototypical “people of faith,” in the last few years, the exclusion of supernaturalism in favor of rational empiricism has softened as the movement’s exponential popularity has swelled to include a growing number of Gnostic Christians, Buddhists, Mormons, Islam, Raelianism, and other religious traditions among its devotees. From among these groups, new tentative “churches” arose—the Church of Virus, the Society for Universal Immortalism, Transtopianism, the Church of Mez, the Society for Venturism, the Church of the Fulfillment, Singularitarianism, and others. Today, with somewhere between 25–30 percent of transhumanists considering themselves religious, these separate sects or early “denominations” within transhumanism are coalescing their various religious worldviews around generally fixed creeds involving spiritual transcendence as a result of human enhancement. Leaders within the movement, whom we refer to here as transevangelists, have been providing religion-specific lectures during conferences to guide these disciples toward a collective (hive) understanding of the mystical compatibility between faith and transhumanism. At Trinity College in Toronto, Canada, for instance, transhumanist Peter Addy lectured on the fantastic “Mutant Religious Impulses of the Future” during the Faith, Transhumanism, and Hope symposium. At the same meeting, Prof. Mark Walker spoke on “Becoming Godlike,” James Hughes offered “Buddhism and Transhumanism: The Technologies of Self-Perfection,” Michael LaTorra gave a “Trans-Spirit” speech, nanotechnologist and lay Catholic Tihamer Toth-Fejel presented “Is Catholic Transhumanism Possible?" and Nick Bostrom spoke on “Transhumanism and Religion.” (Each of these presentations can be listened to or downloaded at our Web site, http://www.forbiddengate.com/.)

Recently, the New York Times picked up this meme (contagious idea) in its June 11, 2010, feature titled Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday, speaking of transhumanism and the Singularity as offering “a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans—or at least something derived from them—can have it all.”[i] In commenting on the Times article at his blog, one of our favorite writers, bioethicist Wesley J. Smith, observed the following:

Here’s an interesting irony: Most transhumanists are materialists. But they desire eternal life as much as the religionists that so many materialists disdain. So they invent a material substitute that offers the benefits of faith, without the burden of sin, as they forge a new eschatology that allows them to maintain their über-rationalist credentials as they try to escape the nihilistic despair that raw materialism often engenders. So they tout a corporeal New Jerusalem and prophesy the coming of the Singularity—roughly equivalent of the Second Coming for Christians—that will...begin a New Age of peace, harmony, and eternal life right here on Terra firma.[ii]

In the peer-reviewed Journal of Evolution and Technology published by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (founded in 2004 by transhumansists Nick Bostrom and James Hughes), the “Apologia for Transhumanist Religion” by Prof. Gregory Jordan lists the many ways transhumanism is emerging as either a new form of religion or a mirror of fundamental human ambitions, desires, longings, shared hopes, and dreams that traditional religions hold in common. In spite of denial by some of its advocates, Jordan concludes that transhumanism may be considered a rising religion because of its numerous parallels to religious themes and values involving godlike beings, the plan for eternal life, the religious sense of awe surrounding its promises, symbolic rituals among its members, an inspirational worldview based on faith, and technology that promises to heal the wounded, restore sight to the blind, and give hearing back to the deaf.

Of the technological Singularity in particular, Jordan writes how some transhumanists especially view the Singularity as a religious event, “a time when human consciousness will expand beyond itself and throughout the universe.” Quoting Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,” Jordan provides:

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 expand outward, turning all the dumb matter [normal humans] and energy we encounter into sublimely intelligent—transcendent—matter and energy. So in a sense, we can say that the Singularity will ultimately infuse the world with spirit.

According to these Singularitarians, this expansion of consciousness after the Singularity will also be an approach to the divine:

Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without any limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, infinite love, and so on.... So evolution moves inexorably toward this conception of God.... We can regard, therefore, the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form to be an essentially spiritual undertaking.[iii]

Yet while development of a new universalist religion appears to be forming among members of transhumanism’s enlightenment, conservative scholars will taste the ancient origin of its heresy as the incarnation of gnosticism and its disdain for the human body as basically an evil design by an evil God (Yahweh) that is far inferior to what we can make it. “Despite all their rhetoric about enhancing the performance of bodily functions,” says Brent Waters, director of the Jerre L. and Mary Joy Stead Center for Ethics and Values, “the posthuman project is nevertheless driven by a hatred and loathing of the body.”[iv] Transhumanist Prof. Kevin Warwick put it this way: “I was born human. But this was an accident of fate—a condition merely of time and place.”

Conversely, in Judeo-Christian faith, the human body is not an ill-designed “meat sack,” as transhumans so often deride. We were made in God’s image to be temples of His Holy Spirit. The incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ and His bodily resurrection are the centerpieces of the gospel and attest to this magnificent fact. While in our fallen condition human suffering is reality, most traditional Christians believe this struggle makes us stronger and that healing and improvements to the human condition are also to be desired. Throughout history, the Church has therefore been at the forefront of disease treatment discovery, institutions for health care, hospitals, and other medical schools and research centers. In other words, we do not champion a philosophy toward techno-dystopianism. Indeed, what a day it will be when cancer is cured and we all shout “Hallelujah!”

But in the soul-less posthuman, where dna is recombined in mockery of the Creator and no man is made in God’s image, “there are no essential differences, or absolute demarcations, between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals,” says Katherine Hayles, professor of English at the University of California, in her book How We Became Posthuman. “Humans can either go gently into that good night, joining the dinosaurs as a species that once ruled the earth but is now obsolete,” she says in transhuman contempt of—or outright hostility to—intrinsic human dignity, “or hang on for a while longer by becoming machines themselves. In either case…the age of the human is drawing to a close.”[v]

Thus a gauntlet is thrown down and a holy war declared by the new and ungodly apostles of a transhuman faith! We who were created in His image will either adapt and be assimilated to posthuman, or be replaced by Nephilim 2.0 and the revival of their ancient mystery religion. This solidifies how, the more one probes into the ramifications of merging unnatural creations and nonbiological inventions according to the transhumanist scheme of seamlessly recalibrating humanity, a deeper malaise emerges, one that suggests those startling “parallels” between modern technology and ancient Watchers activity may be no coincidence at all—that, in fact, a dark conspiracy is truly unfolding as it did “in the days of Noah.”

Consider, in conclusion of this entry, the thoughtful commentary by Dr. C. Christopher Hook:

There are several key questions that our churches and theologians will have to address. Is it appropriate for members of the body of Christ to engage in alterations that go beyond therapy and are irreversible? Is it just to do so in a world already deeply marked by inequities? What does it mean that our Lord healed and restored in His ministry—never enhanced? Is it significant that the gifts of the Holy Spirit—wisdom, love, patience, kindness—cannot be manufactured by technology?[vi]

AVAILABLE NOW!

Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald the Dawn of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare

PART 24 -- Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald the Dawn of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare

Forbidden Gates Is Now Available here! http://survivormall.com/prophecyandendtimes.aspx

In the last entry we provided a long list of events illustrated a progressive move toward what some believe to be mark-of-the-beast technology. This is important because a while back, my wife and co-author of Forbidden Gates (Nita) brought up a point I had not considered. She asked if the biblical mark of the Beast might be a conspiracy employing specific implantable technology only now available. Her theory was gripping. An occult elite operating behind the U.S. government devises a virus that is a crossover between human and animal disease—let’s say, an entirely new and highly contagious influenza mutation—and intentionally releases it into the public. A pandemic ensues, and the period between when a person contracts the virus and death is something like ten days. With tens of thousands dead in a few weeks and the rate of death increasing hourly around the globe, a universal cry for a cure goes out. Seemingly miraculously, the government then steps forward with a vaccine. The only catch, the government explains, is that, given the nature of the animal-human flu, the “cure” uses animal dna and nanobots to rewrite one’s genetics so that the person is no longer entirely human. The point made was that those who receive this antidote would become part “beast,” and perhaps thus the title, “mark of the Beast.” No longer “entirely human” would also mean—according to this outline—that the individual could no longer be “saved” or go to heaven, explaining why the book of Revelation says “whosoever receiveth the mark” is damned forever (while also explaining why the Nephilim, whose dna was part human and part animal, could not be redeemed). If one imagines the global chaos of such a pandemic, the concept of how the Antichrist “causes all,” both small and great, to receive this mark becomes clearer. When looking into the eyes of dying children, parents, or a spouse, it would be incredibly difficult to allow oneself to die or to encourage others to do the same when a “cure” was readily available. Lastly, this scenario would mean that nobody would be allowed to “buy or sell” in the marketplace without the mark-cure due to the need to quarantine all but the inoculated, thus fulfilling all aspects of the mark of the Beast prophecy.

To find out if the science behind this abstract would be as reasonable as it appeared on the surface, we again contacted Sharon Gilbert. This was her troubling response:

Tom and Nita:
What is human? Until recently, most of us would readily respond that we are humans. You and I, we might argue, are Homo sapiens: erect, bipedal hominids with twenty-three pairs of matched chromosomes and nifty little thumbs capable of apposition to the palm that enable us to grasp the fine tools that our highly developed, bi-lobed brains devise.

Humans, we might argue, sit as rulers of the earth, gazing down from the pinnacle of a pyramid consisting of all plant and animal species. We would remind the listener that natural selection and evolution have developed mankind into a superior thinker and doer, thereby granting us royal privilege, if not infinite responsibility. The Bible would take this definition much farther, of course, adding that mankind is the only part of God’s creation formed by His hands, rather than spoken into existence, and that you and I bear God’s unique signature as having been created “in His image” (Genesis 1:27).

Many members of the “illuminated brotherhood of science” would likely demur to the previous statement. These have, in point of fact, redefined human. Like Shelley’s Modern Prometheus, Victor Frankenstein, today’s molecular magicians play “god” not by stitching together rotting corpses, but by reforming the very essence of our beings: our dna.

So-called “postmodern man” began as a literary reference but has evolved into an iconic metaphor representing a collective image of perfected humanity beyond the confines of genetic constraints. Transhumanism, also known as the H+ movement (see www.HPlusMagazine.com, for example) envisions a higher life-form yet, surpassing Homo sapiens in favor of Homo sapiens 2.0, a bioengineered construct that fuses man’s original genome with animal and/or synthetic dna.

While such claims ring of science fiction, they are indeed science fact. For decades, laboratories have created chimeric combinations of animal, plant, and even human dna under the guise of medical research. The stated goal is to better man’s lot by curing disease, but this benign mask hides an inner, sardonic grin that follows an ancient blueprint to blend God’s perfect creature with the seed of fallen angels: “You shall be as gods.”

You two speak to the heart of the matter when you warn of a day when true humans may receive transhuman instructions via an implant or injection. A seemingly innocuous vaccine or identification “chip” can initiate intracellular changes, not only in somatic or “body” cells but also in germ-line cells such as ova and sperm. The former alters the recipient only; the latter alters the recipient’s doomed descendents as well.

In my second novel, The Armageddon Strain, I present a device called the “BioStrain Chip” that employs nanotechnology to induce genetic changes inside the carrier’s body. This miracle chip is advertised as a cure for the h5n1/ebola chimera that is released in the prologue to the book. Of course, if you’ve read the novel, then you know the BioStrain chip does far more than “cure”—it also kills.

Though a work of fiction, The Armageddon Strain raises a chilling question: What limitations lie within the payload of a biochip? Can such a tiny device do more than carry digitized information? Could it actually serve as the mark of the Beast?

The answer is yes.

Dna (Deoxyribonucleic acid) has become the darling of researchers who specialize in synthetic constructs. The “sticky-end” design of the dna double-helix makes it ideal for use in computing. Though an infinite number of polyhedra are possible, the most robust and stable of these “building blocks” is called the double crossover (dx). An intriguing name, is it not? The double-cross.

Picture an injectible chip comprised of dna-dx, containing instructions for a super-soldier. Picture, too, how this dna framework, if transcribed, might also serve a second, sinister, purpose—not only to instruct, but also to alter.

Mankind has come perilously far in his search for perfection through chemistry. Although millennia passed with little progress beyond roots, herbs, and alchemical quests for gold from lead, the twentieth century ushered science into the rosy dawn of breathless discovery. Electricity, lighter than air travel, wireless communication, and computing transformed the ponderous pace of the scientific method into a light speed race toward self-destruction.

By the mid-1950s, Watson and Crick had solved the structure of the dna molecule and the double helix became all the rage. Early gene splicing, and thus transgenics, began in 1952 as a crude, cut-and-paste sort of science cooked up in kitchen blenders and petri dishes—as much accident as inspiration. As knowledge has increased (Daniel 12:4), genetic scientists learned to utilize microbiological “vectors” and sophisticated methods to insert animal or plant genes from one species into another. It’s the ultimate “Mr. Potato Head” game, where interchangeable plastic pieces give rise to an infinite number of combinations; only, in genetic splicing, humanity is the unhappy potato.

Vectors provide the means of transport and integration for this brave new science. Think of these vectors as biological trucks that carry genetic building materials and workers into your body’s cells. Such “trucks” could be a microsyringe, a bacterium, or a virion (a virus particle). Any entity that can carry genetic information (the larger the load capacity, the better) and then surreptitiously gain entry into the cell is a potential vector. Viruses, for example, can be stripped of certain innate genes that might harm the cell. Not only does this (supposedly) render the viral delivery truck “harmless,” it also clears out space for the cargo.

Once inside the cell, the “workers” take over. Some of these “workers” are enzymes that cut human genes at specific sites, while others integrate—or load—the “cargo” into appropriate reading frames—like microscopic librarians. Once the payload is stored in the cell’s nuclear “library stacks,” the new genes can be translated, copied, and “read” to produce altered or brand-new, “alien” polymers and proteins.

The resulting hybrid cell is no longer purely human. If a hybridized skin cell, it may now glow, or perhaps form scales rather than hair, claws rather than fingernails. If a brain cell, the new genetic instructions could produce an altered neurotransmitter that reduces or even eliminates the body’s need for sleep. Muscle cells may grow larger and more efficient at using low levels of calcium and oxygen. Retina cells may encode for receptors that enable the "posthuman being" to perceive infrared or ultraviolet light frequencies. The hybrid ears may now sense a wider range of sounds, taste buds a greater range of chemicals. Altered brains might even attune to metaphysics and “unseen” gateways, allowing communication with supernatural realms.

Germ-line alterations, mentioned earlier, form a terrifying picture of generational development and may very well already be a reality. Genetic “enhancement” of sperm-producing cells would change human sperm into tiny infiltrators, and any fertilized ovum a living chimera. Science routinely conducts experiments with transgenic mice, rats, chickens, pigs, cows, horses, and many other species. It is naïve to believe humans have been left out of this transgenic equation.

If so many scientists (funded by government entities) believe in the “promise” of genetic alteration and transgenic “enhancement,” how then can humanity remain human? We cannot. We will not. Perhaps, some have not.

Spiritually, the enemy has ever sought to corrupt God’s plan. Originally, fallen angels lay with human women to corrupt the original base pair arrangements. Our genome is filled with “junk dna” that seemingly encodes for nothing. These “introns” may be the remains of the corrupted genes, and God Himself may have switched them off when fallen angels continued their program, post-Flood. If so, today’s scientists might need only to “switch them back on” to resurrect old forms such as Gibborim and Nephilim.

I should point out that not all “trucks” (vectors) deliver their payload immediately. Some operate on a time delay. Cytomegalovirus (cmv) is a common infective agent resident in the cells of many humans today. It “sleeps” in our systems, waiting for a window of opportunity to strike. Recently, genetic specialists began utilizing cmv vectors in transgenic experiments. In 1997, the Fox television program Millennium featured an episode in the second season called “Sense and Antisense” (referring to the two sides of the dna molecule). In this chilling story, a scientist named Lacuna reveals a genetic truth to Frank Black: “They have the map, the map, they can make us go down any street they want to. Streets that we would never even dream of going down. They flip a switch, we go east. They flip another switch, we go north. And we never know we have been flipped, let alone know how.”[i]

In the final days of this current age, humanity may indeed “flip.” Paul tells us that Christians will be transformed in a moment (1 Corinthians 15:51–53). Is it possible that the enemy also plans an instantaneous “flip”? Are genetic sleeper agents (idling “trucks”) already at work in humanity’s dna, waiting and ready to deploy at the appropriate moment?

Science is ready. Knowledge has been increased. The spiritual players have taken the stage.

All we need is the signal. The sign. The injection. The mark. The moment.

We shall all be changed. Some to incorruptible bodies ready to meet the Lord. Others to corrupted genomes ready to serve the Beast.

NOTE! The new book Forbidden Gates is now available at www.ForbiddenGate.com

"Please help us," ask Tom and Nita Horn

A nefarious clock is ticking...

According to secret government reports cited in Forbidden Gates, the "human enhancement revolution" will begin in earnest within the next 36 months. Unprecedented announcements will follow the 2012 US presidential election detailing "plans for large scale technological reinvention and far-reaching morphological transformation of the specie," which will begin via military adoption then "quickly move out to the rest of us not engaged in warfare." This vision is international, intellectual, and under codification by government advisors, bioethicists, law professors, and academics, in which use of genetics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology will provide tools for radically redesigning our minds, our memories, our physiology, our offspring, and even perhaps—as former investigative journalist for the Washington Post, Joel Garreau claims—our very souls.

Unfortunately for mankind, the related September 2010 US National Intelligence Council and EU Institute for Security Studies Report, the May 2010 Rockefeller Foundation Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development report, and similar private and published US Government Security Scenarios envision this technological and cultural shift as not only forecasting a future dominated by a new species of unrecognizably superior humans, but ultimately an unfathomable war—both physical and spiritual—that the world is not prepared for. It will be fought on land, within the air and sea, and in dimensions as yet incomprehensible. Even so, these synthetic forces, which overshadow man’s wholesale annihilation, are quietly under design in leading laboratories, public and private, funded by the most advanced nations on earth, including the official governments of the United States, France, Britain, Australia, and China. As a result of progressive deduction, reasoning, and problem solving in fields of neurotechnology and cybernetics, strong artificial intelligence or “artilects” will emerge from this research, godlike, massively intelligent machines that are “trillions of trillions of times smarter than humans” and whose rise could prove profoundly disruptive to human culture, leading to a stark division between philosophical, ideological, and political groups who either plan to integrate with the newly evolved life forms as the next step in human and technological evolution or who view this as an incalculable risk and deadly threat to the future of humanity. These diametrically opposed worldviews will ultimately result in a preemptive new world war—what is described by scientists involved in the research as gigadeath—the bloodiest battle in history with billions of deaths before the end of the twenty-first century.

Lest anyone think the statements above are overly paranoid, consider that this catastrophic vision is derived from near-future situational strategies, which think tanks such as the JASONs—the celebrated scientists on the Pentagon's most prestigious scientific advisory panel—and Darpa, the leading research projects agency of the United States Department of Defense have outlined.

The task before us is significant... but winnable

When looking at the awesome scope of government and academic interests in Grin technology combined with the insidious replacement theology known as "transhumanism" (this generation's vastly superior and appealing "New Age Religion" threat) and the planned rollout of industrialized techno-sapiens, we as conservative Christians may feel small or powerless, as though our singular efforts will be of little effect. The spirit behind the Tea Party movement in the United States illustrates this is not true. A nation is simply a multitude of persons. Each time an individual takes a righteous stand, we move one person closer to victory. Consider, for instance, Charles Finney, who launched his evangelism effort during the early 19th century by taking onto his team a man named Nash, who made prayer his only role. When Finney preached, Nash stayed behind and prayed, and guess what? As many as fifty thousand people per week accepted Jesus as Lord. Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Catherine Booth, Gilbert Tennent, Shubal Stearns, Fanny Crosby, Daniel Marshall, Billy Sunday, Maria Woodworth-Etter, and numerous others proved one cannot underestimate the power of a single dedicated believer.

Having said that, the past also reveals what happens when individuals become apathetic and allow themselves to be ruled by anti-God forces. On this, more than one student of history has looked with interest at the French Revolution, which was marked by death and torture under Maximilien Robespierre, and compared it to the Revolutionary War in America that eventually resulted in unprecedented cultural and monetary success. While citizens after the war in America were rejoicing in newfound freedoms, in Paris more than twenty thousand people died in the guillotine. The years to follow in France witnessed a reign of terror leading to totalitarianism and the rise of an antichrist figure, Napoleon. Why were the American and French Revolutions followed by such contrasting conclusions? The difference was that in America the pilgrim influence had created strong Christian sentiments, while in France the movement became anti-God. The forces behind the French Revolution set out to eliminate God as the enemy of France. They placed a statue of a nude woman upon the altar in the church of Notre Dame and proclaimed the God of Christianity dead. Soon after, the French government collapsed.

Conversely, when we look at how during the American Revolution a small number of mostly agrarian Americans stood up for something that mattered and held tightly to a Christian faith that could not be stamped out by the fires of revolution, we comprehend where the strength of those generations that followed came from, including the so-called Greatest Generation, the children of the pioneers who overcame the Great Depression, who won World War II, and who outperformed their competitors during the Industrial Revolution. Those who followed them built on the same success until finally the United States emerged as “a shining city on a hill,” a beacon of hope and inspiration to the rest of the world—what President Ronald Reagan in his January 11, 1989, farewell speech called “a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”

A new revolution is coming, and it will be a monstrous one

Ronald Reagan's depiction of America above is sweet, but as we document in Forbidden Gates, a worrying trend is darkening today's horizon, threatening to undo this dream and similar big ideas in countries around the world. Recent polling depicts a generation increasingly disinterested in the faith of their fathers and especially unattracted to Judeo-Christian definitions about sin and repentance. Society now wants a God that makes them happy and who only comes around when needed. This new widespread movement even has a name: it is titled “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” (dubbed so by researchers during a National Study of Youth and Religion at the University of North Carolina). It defines what has become the “Christianity” of choice among modern teens and their parents. Like the deistic God of the freemasons and eighteenth-century philosophers, “This undemanding deity is more interested in solving our problems and in making people happy,” concludes Dr. Albert Mohler Jr. for the Christian Post. “In short, [this] God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process.” In continuing his troubling dissertation, Mohler, perhaps unknowingly, describes elements of transhumanism as evolving within contemporary Christian theology similar to what we document in Forbidden Gates concerning the rise of an end-times universalist religion, an increasingly popular and growing replacement theology that smacks of end-times prophecy.

Is it a coincidence that this comes during the same epoch in which the United States Supreme Court, for the first time in its history, became devoid of Protestant representation with the confirmation of Elena Kagan; a time also in which the Claremont School of Theology analyzing the future of American religion concluded at its 2010 Theology After Google Conference that “technology must be embraced” for Christianity to survive?

Although most transhumanists, especially early on, were secular atheists and would have had little resemblance to prototypical “people of faith,” in the last few years, the exclusion of supernaturalism in favor of rational empiricism has softened as the movement’s exponential popularity has swelled to include a growing number of Gnostic Christians, Buddhists, Mormons, Islam, Raelianism, and other religious traditions among its devotees. From among these groups, new tentative “churches” arose—the Church of Virus, the Society for Universal Immortalism, Transtopianism, the Church of Mez, the Society for Venturism, the Church of the Fulfillment, Singularitarianism, and others. Today, with somewhere between 25–30 percent of transhumanists considering themselves religious, these separate sects or early “denominations” within transhumanism are coalescing their various religious worldviews around generally fixed creeds involving spiritual transcendence as a result of human enhancement. Leaders within the movement, whom we refer to here as transevangelists, have been providing religion-specific lectures during conferences to guide these disciples toward a collective (hive) understanding of the mystical compatibility between faith and transhumanism. At Trinity College in Toronto, Canada, for instance, transhumanist Peter Addy lectured on the fantastic “Mutant Religious Impulses of the Future” during the Faith, Transhumanism, and Hope symposium. At the same meeting, Prof. Mark Walker spoke on “Becoming Godlike,” James Hughes offered “Buddhism and Transhumanism: The Technologies of Self-Perfection,” Michael LaTorra gave a “Trans-Spirit” speech, nanotechnologist and lay Catholic Tihamer Toth-Fejel presented “Is Catholic Transhumanism Possible?" and Nick Bostrom spoke on “Transhumanism and Religion.” (Each of these presentations can be listened to or downloaded at our Web site, http://www.forbiddengate.com/.)

Recently, the New York Times picked up this meme (contagious idea) in its June 11, 2010, feature titled Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday, speaking of transhumanism and the Singularity as offering “a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans—or at least something derived from them—can have it all.” In commenting on the Times article at his blog, one of our favorite writers, bioethicist Wesley J. Smith, observed the following:

Here’s an interesting irony: Most transhumanists are materialists. But they desire eternal life as much as the religionists that so many materialists disdain. So they invent a material substitute that offers the benefits of faith, without the burden of sin, as they forge a new eschatology that allows them to maintain their über-rationalist credentials as they try to escape the nihilistic despair that raw materialism often engenders. So they tout a corporeal New Jerusalem and prophesy the coming of the Singularity—roughly equivalent of the Second Coming for Christians—that will...begin a New Age of peace, harmony, and eternal life right here on Terra firma.

In the peer-reviewed Journal of Evolution and Technology published by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (founded in 2004 by transhumansists Nick Bostrom and James Hughes), the “Apologia for Transhumanist Religion” by Prof. Gregory Jordan lists the many ways transhumanism is emerging as a new form of religion and mirror of fundamental human ambitions, desires, longings, shared hopes, and dreams that traditional religions hold in common. Jordan concludes that transhumanism is thus a new form of religion because of its numerous parallels to religious themes and values involving godlike beings, the plan for eternal life, the religious sense of awe surrounding its promises, symbolic rituals among its members, an inspirational worldview based on faith, and technology that promises to heal the wounded, restore sight to the blind, and give hearing back to the deaf.

Yet while development of a new universalist religion is growing among members of today's "enlightenment", conservative scholars will taste the ancient origin of its heresy as the incarnation of gnosticism and its disdain for the human body as basically an evil design by an evil God (Yahweh) that is far inferior to what we can make it. “Despite all their rhetoric about enhancing the performance of bodily functions,” says Brent Waters, director of the Jerre L. and Mary Joy Stead Center for Ethics and Values, “the posthuman project is nevertheless driven by a hatred and loathing of the body.” Transhumanist Prof. Kevin Warwick put it this way: “I was born human. But this was an accident of fate—a condition merely of time and place.”

Conversely, in Judeo-Christian faith, the human body is not an ill-designed “meat sack,” as transhumans so often deride. We were made in God’s image to be temples of His Holy Spirit. The incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ and His bodily resurrection are the centerpieces of the gospel and attest to this magnificent fact. While in our fallen condition human suffering is reality, most traditional Christians believe this struggle makes us stronger and that healing and improvements to the human condition are also to be desired. Throughout history, the Church has therefore been at the forefront of disease treatment discovery, institutions for health care, hospitals, and other medical schools and research centers. In other words, we do not champion a philosophy toward techno-dystopianism. Indeed, what a day it will be when cancer is cured and we all shout “Hallelujah!”

But in the soul-less posthuman, where dna is recombined in mockery of the Creator and no man is made in God’s image, “there are no essential differences, or absolute demarcations, between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals,” says Katherine Hayles, professor of English at the University of California, in her book How We Became Posthuman. “Humans can either go gently into that good night, joining the dinosaurs as a species that once ruled the earth but is now obsolete,” she says reflecting transhuman contempt of—or outright hostility to—intrinsic human dignity, “or hang on for a while longer by becoming machines themselves. In either case…the age of the human is drawing to a close.”

Thus a gauntlet is thrown down and a holy war declared by the new and ungodly apostles of a transhuman faith! We who were created in His image will either adapt and be assimilated to posthuman, or be replaced by Nephilim 2.0 and the revival of their ancient mystery religion. This solidifies how, the more one probes into the ramifications of merging unnatural creations and nonbiological inventions according to the transhumanist scheme of seamlessly recalibrating humanity, a deeper malaise emerges, one that suggests those startling “parallels” between modern technology and ancient Watchers activity may be no coincidence at all—that, in fact, a dark conspiracy is truly unfolding as it did “in the days of Noah.”

Now, like a ship adrift at sea, a gilded age is rising in which intellectual achievements and human-transforming technologies are valued supreme. The net result is the dawn of a generation without sacred moorings, an era in which people are sufficiently prepared to accept the nightmarish transhuman vision unfolding around us. The question is, is it too late to reverse these trends and set this age on track toward moral and spiritual recovery? We must believe that it is not too late—that if we stand up to the infernal power operating just beyond the range of normal vision, it will yet be possible to illustrate the living dynamic against which the gates of hell cannot prevail.

But make no mistake about this, friends: The gods of chaos are coming. They are plotting to redefine what it means to be human, and to remove anyone or anything that stands in their way. The church must prepare for this now, both physically and spiritually, as the threat is real. Something wicked this way comes whether we like it or not, whether we're ready or not, but we can stop "it" dead in its tracks if we get engaged now.

Will you help us make people aware?

To help people comprehend what is unfolding we are at our own great expense providing two free books and a free 263 page 13-week teachers guide in portable document format that lays out in simple-to-understand language the basics of transhumanism, GRIN technology, and the plan for human enhancement. The free materials also instruct believers about the armor we have as saints, how to fast and pray, and numerous related subjects. Furthermore, we have even taken the unprecedented step of not allowing our new book Forbidden Gates to be placed in regular retail distribution for the first 90 days. Stores like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million etc. will not have copies of this book to sell until February 2011. If you know anything about the industry, this will cost us substantially, but we are doing this because we are on a mission to accomplish more than just selling some books (though we need to do that too to pay for this project). We want to awake this generation to the unprecedented issues of GRIN technology, transhumanist aspirations and the government's human enhancement goals while there is time. By having people go to http://www.survivormall.com/ to purchase Forbidden Gates, they will also receive the free supplemental books and teachers guide, which retailers like Amazon will not provide and that includes significant additional information for the study of this issue, in order that individuals, study groups, church classes, discussions groups, and college classes will be able to educate themselves and those in their circle on this cultural and spiritual paradigm shift now forming on the horizon.

But frankly, even with all of these efforts, this task is too big for us alone. We simply cannot accomplish what needs to be done without your help. As you probably know, we have never asked for a favor before, we do not solicit "donations" on our website or email lists, and we have a long history of giving away as much as we can for free. We are not seeking money or donations this time, either, but we do need help; so here is what we are asking each of our friends to do:

1. Download the free, thirteen-week teacher’s guide based on Forbidden Gates and use it to conduct classes, studies, discussions or sermons instructing others on transhumanism and the coming human enhancement revolution. The free 263 page teachers guide is a powerful supplement for this work and contains additional information and resources.
2. Download the free, 207-page supplemental version of our 1998 book, Spiritual Warfare: The Invisible Invasion” in pdf format (at any page here) to learn more about spiritual warfare, the armor we have as saints, how to fast and pray, and numerous related subjects.
3. Download the free, 191-page supplemental version of our 1999 book, The Gods Who Walk among Us in pdf format (any ad page here), to learn more about the role of pagan “gods” and their relationship to spiritual warfare.
4. If at all possible, plan to attend the “Future Congress on Emerging Threats and Challenges” to be held the third week of July 2011 in Branson, Missouri. More information on this event—and why you should be there—is in the book Forbidden Gates and will be posted before the end of 2010 at http://www.forbiddengate.com/
5. If you are well informed on the subject of GRIN technology, transhumanism, and the coming human enhancement revolution and do not need this information, please consider helping a small church or group that cannot afford the below-wholesale student copies of Forbidden Gates. The cost is very minimal and with the free supplements and teachers guide that we are providing, this would be a powerful way for you to partner with us in addressing the #1 need in conservative and Christian circles today—the task of becoming educated and involved in the emerging national and international debate regarding biotechnology and the future of man. Together we can make a meaningful difference, perhaps a historic one, while also being a huge blessing to God's people.
6. Please pray for us. If you have been following Raiders News Network over the last few months, you know that we have been increasingly targeted by advocates of posthumanism who do not want the Christian community aware of what is coming or involved in the human enhancement revolution discussion. For simply asking Christian leaders to become aware and to get involved in this discussion, we have been vilified by the #1 online transhumanist think tank, the #1 transhumanist blog, and even by the co-author of the taxpayer funded National Science Foundation report "Ethics of Human Enhancement: 25 Questions and Answers" which have stated out-rightly that they do not want their scheme mired through the ethics that could be raised by theists (those who believe in a personal God). They intend to keep Christians asleep on this issue. We intend to wake them up.
7. Stay attuned to developments within transhumanism and related fields of science by visiting www.RaidersNewsNetwork.com on a daily basis. This is the world’s leading conservative Web site on such issues and you will need to stay informed as things quickly unfold over the next 36 months.

 

 

 

PART 23 -- Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald the Dawn of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare

 

WILL YOU G.R.I.N. FOR THE MARK OF THE BEAST?

Unless you’ve been hidden under a rock for the past twenty years, you are probably familiar with the development of radio-frequency identification (rfid) technology that under certain applications is forecast to be connected to future Grin technologies, especially neurosciences, brain-machine interfacing, and cybernetics. RFID chips employ tiny integrated circuits for storing and processing information using an antenna for receiving and transmitting the related data. This technology is most commonly applied as a “tag” for tracking inventory with radio waves at companies like Walmart, where consumer goods are embedded with “smart tags” that are read by hand-held scanners for supply chain management.

In recent years, rfid technology has been expanding within public and private firms as a method for verifying and tracking people as well. We first became aware of this trend a while back when chief of police Jack Schmidig of Bergen County, New Jersey, a member of the police force for more than thirty years, received a VeriChip (rfid chip) implant as part of Applied Digital Solution’s strategy of enlisting key regional leaders to accelerate adoption of its product.

Kevin H. McLaughlin, VeriChip Corp.’s chief executive officer at the time, said of the event that “high-profile regional leaders are accepting the VeriChip, representing an excellent example of our approach to gaining adoption of the technology” (note that VeriChip Corp. was renamed to PositiveID Corp. on November 10, 2009, through the merger of VeriChip Corp. and Steel Vault Corp.). Through a new and aggressive indoctrination program called “Thought and Opinion Leaders to Play Key Role in Adoption of VeriChip,” the company set out to create exponential adoption of its fda-cleared, human-implantable rfid tag. According to information released by the company, the implantable transceiver “sends and receives data and can be continuously tracked by gps (Global Positioning Satellite) technology.” The transceiver’s power supply and actuation system are unlike anything ever created. When implanted within a body, the device is powered electromechanically through the movement of muscles and can be activated either by the “wearer” or by the monitoring facility. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, an information technology report highlighted the company’s additional plans to study implantable chips as a method of tracking terrorists. “We’ve changed our thinking since September 11 [2001],” a company spokesman said. “Now there’s more of a need to monitor evil activities.” As a result, PositiveID has been offering the company’s current incarnation of implantable rfid as “a tamper-proof means of identification for enhanced e-business security...tracking, locating lost or missing individuals, tracking the location of valuable property [this includes humans], and monitoring the medical conditions of at-risk patients.” While PositiveID offers testimony that safeguards have been implemented to ensure privacy in connection with its implantable microchips, some believe privacy is the last thing internal radio transmitters will protect—that in fact the plan to microchip humanity smacks of the biblical mark of the Beast. Has an end-times spirit indeed been pushing for adoption of this technology this generation?

Consider the following:

• According to some Bible scholars, a biblical generation is forty years. This is interesting, given what we documented in our book Apollyon Rising 2012 concerning the time frame 2012–2013, from which, counting backward forty years, one arrives at the year 1973, the very year Senior Scholastics began introducing school kids to the idea of buying and selling in the future using numbers inserted in their foreheads. In the September 20, 1973, feature “Who Is Watching You?” the secular high school journal speculated: All buying and selling in the program will be done by computer. No currency, no change, no checks. In the program, people would receive a number that had been assigned them tattooed in their wrist or forehead. The number is put on by laser beam and cannot be felt. The number in the body is not seen with the naked eye and is as permanent as your fingerprints. All items of consumer goods will be marked with a computer mark. The computer outlet in the store which picks up the number on the items at the checkstand will also pick up the number in the person’s body and automatically total the price and deduct the amount from the person’s “Special Drawing Rights” account.
• The following year, the 1974 article, “The Specter of Eugenics,” had Charles Frankel documenting Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling’s suggestions that a mark be tattooed on the foot or forehead of every young person. Pauling envisioned a mark denoting genotype.
• In 1980, U.S. News and World Report revealed how the federal government was plotting “National Identity Cards” without which no one could work or conduct business.
• The Denver Post Sun followed up in 1981, claiming that chip implants would replace the identification cards. The June 21, 1981, story read in part, “The chip is placed in a needle which is affixed to a simple syringe containing an anti-bacterial solution. The needle is capped and ready to forever identify something—or somebody.”
• The May 7, 1996, Chicago Tribune questioned the technology, wondering aloud if we would be able to trust “Big Brother under our skin?”
• Then, in 1997, applications for patents of subcutaneous implant devices for “a person or an animal” were filed.
• In August 1998, the bbc covered the first-known human microchip implantation.
• That same month, the Sunday Portland Oregonian warned that proposed medical identifiers might erode privacy rights by tracking individuals through alphanumeric health identifier technologies. The startling Oregonian feature depicted humans with bar codes in their foreheads.
• Millions of Today Show viewers then watched in 2002 when an American family got “chipped” with Applied Digital Solution’s VeriChip live from a doctor’s office in Boca Raton, Florida.
• In November of the same year, ibm’s patent application for “identification and tracking of persons using rfid-tagged items” was recorded.
• Three years later, former secretary of the Health and Human Services department, Tommy Thompson, forged a lucrative partnership with VeriChip Corp. and began encouraging Americans “to get chipped” so that their medical records would be “inside them” in case of emergencies.
• The state of Wisconsin—where Thompson was governor before coming to Washington—promptly drew a line in the sand, passing a law prohibiting employers from mandating that their employees get “chipped.” Other states since have passed or are considering similar legislation.
• Despite this, in the last decade, an expanding number of companies and government agencies have started requiring the use of rfid for people identification. Unity Infraprojects, for example, one of the largest civil contractors in India, tracks its employees with rfid, as does the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for workers involved in baggage handling at airports.
• Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has proposed several versions of a national id card that would use rfid technology.
• Starting in 2006, the U.S. government began requiring passports to include rfid chips.
• Hundreds of Alzheimer’s patients have been injected with implantable versions of rfid tags in recent years.
• Rfid bracelets are now being placed on newborns at a growing list of hospitals.
• Students are being required in some schools and universities to use biometric id employing rfid for electronic monitoring.
• Thousands of celebrities and government officials around the world have had rfid radio chips implanted in them so that they can be identified—either for entry at secure sites or for identification if they are kidnapped or killed.
• Others, like Prof. Kevin Warwick (discussed earlier), have been microchipped for purposes of controlling keypads and external devices with the wave of a hand.
• Besides providing internal storage for individual-specific information like health records, banking and industry envisions a cashless society in the near future where all buying and selling could transpire using a version of the subdermal chips and wireless authentication. As mentioned above, in 1973, Senior Scholastics magazine introduced school-age children to the concept of buying and selling using numbers inserted in their forehead. But more recently, Time magazine, in its feature story, “The Big Bank Theory and What It Says about the Future of Money,” recognized how this type of banking and currency exchange would not require a laser tattoo. Rather, the writer said, “Your daughter can store the money any way she wants—on her laptop, on a debit card, even (in the not-too-distant future) on a chip implanted under her skin.”[i]
• In 2007, PositiveID, which owns the Food and Drug Administration-approved VeriChip that electronically transmits patients’ health information whenever a scanner is passed over the body, ominously launched “Xmark” as its corporate identity for implantable healthcare products.
• And now, at the time this book is going to the printer, the Department of Homeland Security is working out how to implement the “Real id Act,” with the goal of codifying an international biometric id system.

The list above continues to accumulate, causing a growing number to wonder if rfid adoption will, for all practical purposes, result in every man, woman, boy, and girl in the developed world having an id chip inside them (like animals worldwide already do) sometime this century. Students of eschatology (the study of end-times events) find it increasingly difficult to dismiss how this all looks and feels like movement toward fulfilling Revelation 13:16–17: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

As newer versions of rfid-like transmitters become even more sophisticated—adding other “prophetic” components such as merging human biological matter with transistors to create living, implantable machines—the authors of this book believe the possibility that the mark of the Beast could arrive through a version of this technology increases. That is one reason we found the recent Discovery News report, “Part-Human, Part Machine Transistor Devised,” particularly disturbing:

Man and machine can now be linked more intimately than ever. Scientists have embedded a nano-sized transistor inside a cell-like membrane and powered it using the cell’s own fuel. The research could lead to new types of man-machine interactions where embedded devices could relay information about the inner workings of proteins inside the cell membrane, and eventually lead to new ways to read, and even influence, brain or nerve cells.

“This device is as close to the seamless marriage of biological and electronic structures as anything else that people did before,” said Aleksandr Noy, a scientist at the University of California, Merced, who is a co-author on the recent ACS Nano Letters. “We can take proteins, real biological machines, and make them part of a working microelectronic circuit.”[ii]

A similar story (“Dna Logic Gates Herald Injectable Computers”) was published by New Scientist magazine the same month as the story above, and a few weeks earlier, an article by the Daily Mail (“Meet the Nano-Spiders: The dna Robots that Could One Day Be Walking through Your Body”) reported the creation by scientists of microscopic robots made of dna molecules that can walk, turn, and even create tiny products of their own on a nano-scale assembly line. This is important because a while back, a secret was entered into our new book Forbidden Gates that we could not have even imagined in the recent past...

IMPORTANT NOTE! THE BOOK Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald the Dawn of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare will begin shipping from our warehouse this Tuesday, October 26! Check out the book here!WATCH THE TRAILER! WARNING: NOT FOR THE WEAK!

  

Can a microscopic tag be implanted in a person’s body to track his every movement? There’s actual discussion about that. You will rule on that—mark my words—before your tenure is over. —U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden, asked during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of John Roberts to be chief justice of the Supreme Court

Although microchip implantation might be introduced as a voluntary procedure, in time, there will be pressure to make it mandatory. A national identification system via microchip implants could be achieved in two stages. Upon introduction as a voluntary system, the microchip implantation will appear to be palatable. After there is a familiarity with the procedure and a knowledge of its benefits, implantation would be mandatory. —Dr. Elaine M. Ramesh, patent attorney for Franklin Pierce Law Center

Now imagine a world in which every newborn baby immediately has a little capsule implanted under his armpit. Inside are monitors, tiny amounts of hormones, a wireless transmitter and receiver.... From birth, no moment in a person’s life will go unmonitored. —Joseph Farah, Whistleblower magazine

PART 22 -- Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald the Dawn of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare

EDITOR'S NOTE: All notations will be cited in the final report. The information is based on research contained in Tom and Nita Horn's upcoming new book:

Forbidden Gates

How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald the Dawn of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

As transhumanist philosophy and Grin technology become integrated within society and national and private laboratories with their corporate allies provide increasingly sophisticated arguments for its widest adoption, those of us who treasure the meaning of life and human nature as defined by Judeo-Christian values will progressively find ourselves engaged in deepening spiritual conflicts over maintaining our humanity in the midst of what the authors believe is fundamentally a supernatural conflict.

Just as the fictional exercise with the seventeen-year-old “Michelle” in the last entry illustrates, intensifying techno-spiritual issues, which Christian families will face this century, will escalate simultaneously at both spiritual and scientific levels. This material/immaterial struggle, which philosopher and theologian Francis Schaeffer once described as always at war “in the thought-world,” is difficult for some to grasp. The idea that human-transforming technology that mingles the dna of natural and synthetic beings and merges man with machines could somehow be used or even inspired by evil supernaturalism to foment destruction within the material world is for some people so exotic as to be inconceivable. Yet nothing should be more fundamentally clear, as students of spiritual warfare will understand. We are body (physical form), mind (soul, will, emotions), and spirit, thus everything in the material and immaterial world has potential to influence our psychosomatic existence and decisions. “There is no conflict in our lives that is strictly a spiritual issue,” writes Robert Jeffress in his book, The Divine Defense. This is because “there is never a time when the spirit is divorced from the body. Likewise, there is no turmoil in our lives that is solely psychological or physical, because our spirit, along with God’s Spirit within us and demonic spirits around us, is always present as well.”[i] Jeffress’ point that material stimulus cannot be divorced from spiritual conditions conveys why the Bible is so concerned with the antitheses of transhumanism; the integrity of our bodies and minds. The goal is to bring both into obedience to Christ (2 Chronicles 10:5) because this is where the battle is first fought and won. No marriage breakup ever transpired that did not start there—no murder, no theft, no idolatry—but that the contest was staged in the imagination, then married to the senses, and the decision to act given to the victor.

How technology is now poised to raise this mind-body-spirit game is hidden in the shadows of the National Institute of Health and Darpa, which for more than three decades have invested hundreds of millions of dollars not only designing new dna constructs but crafting arrays of microelectrodes, supercomputers, and algorithms to analyze and decipher the brain’s neural code, the complex “syntax” and communication rules that transform electrical neuron pulses in the brain into specific digital and analog information that we ultimately perceive as decisions, memories, and emotions. Understanding how this secret brain language functions, then parsing it down into digital computer code (strings of ones and zeros) where it can be reassembled into words and commands and then manipulated is at the center of military neurobiology, artificial intelligence research, and cybernetics.

While significant studies in neurosciences have been conducted with “neuro-prostheses” in mind to help the handicapped—for instance, the artificial cochlear implant that approximately 188,000 people worldwide have received thus far—Darpa “is less interested in treating the disabled than in enhancing the cognitive capacities of soldiers,” says former senior writer at Scientific American, John Horgan. “Darpa officials have breached the prospect of cyborg warriors downloading complex fighting procedures directly into their brains, like the heroes of the Matrix,” and has “interest in the development of techniques that can survey and possibly manipulate the mental processes of potential enemies [by] recording signals from the brains of enemy personnel at a distance, in order to ‘read their minds and to control them.”[ii] Because what develops within military technology eventually migrates into the broader culture, where it is quickly embraced for competitive or mutual advantages, the ramifications of neurobiology has not escaped international interests in both public and private agencies. Entire fields of research are now under development worldwide based on the notion that breakthroughs will provide unprecedented opportunities for reading, influencing, and even controlling human minds this century. The implications from this field are so staggering that France, in 2010, became the first nation to establish a behavioral research unit specifically designed to study and set “neuropolicy” to govern how such things as “neuromarketing” (a new field of marketing that analyzes consumers’ sensorimotor and cognitive responses to stimuli in order to decode what part of the brain is telling consumers to make certain buying decisions) may be used in the future to access unconscious decision-making elements of the brain to produce desired responses. This precedent for government neuropolicy comes not a second too soon, as the world’s largest semiconductor chip maker, Intel Corp., wants brain communicators on the market and “in its customers’ heads” before the year 2020. In what can only be described as Matrix creep, researchers at Intel Labs Pittsburgh are designing what it bets will be “the next big thing”—brain chips that allow consumers to control a host of new electronic and communication gadgets by way of neural commands. Developers at Toyota and the University of Utah are also working on brain transmitters, which they hope will contribute to building a global “hive mind.”

From these developments comes the distant groaning of a “fearful unknown” in which the architecture of the human brain—as transformed by current and future cybernetic inventions—begins to act in ways that borderline the supernatural. Consider experimental telepathy, which involves mind-to-mind thought transference that allows people to communicate without the use of speaking audibly. Most do not know that Hans Berger, the inventor of electroencephalography (eeg, the recording of electrical activity along the scalp produced by the firing of neurons within the brain) was a strong believer in psychic phenomena and wanted to decode brain signals in order to establish nonverbal transmission between people. Grin technology proposes to fulfill his dream.

Another example is telekinesis (psychokinesis), which involves the movement or manipulation of physical matter via direct influence of the mind. As incredible as it may seem, both this idea and the one above are under research by Darpa and other national laboratories as no pipe dream. Such brain-to-brain transmission between distant persons as well as mind-to-computer communication was demonstrated last year at the University of Southampton’s Institute of Sound and Vibration Research using electrodes and an Internet connection. The experiment at the institute went farther than most brain-to-machine interfacing (bmi) technology thus far, actually demonstrating brain-to-brain (B2B) communication between persons at a distance. Dr. Christopher James, who oversaw the experiment, commented: “Whilst bci [brain-computer interface] is no longer a new thing and person-to-person communication via the nervous system was shown previously in work by Prof. Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading, here we show, for the first time, true brain to brain interfacing. We have yet to grasp the full implications of this.” The experiment allowed one person using bci to transmit thoughts, translated as a series of binary digits, over the Internet to another person whose computer received the digits and transmitted them to the second user’s brain.[iii]

The real danger is how these accomplishments within human-mind-to-synthetic intelligence may take the proverbial “ghost in the machine” where no modern man has gone before, bridging a gap between unknown entities (both virtual and real), perhaps even inviting takeover of our species by malevolent intelligence. Note that the experiments above are being conducted at Southampton’s Institute of Sound and Vibration Research. Some years ago, scientist Vic Tandy’s research into sound, vibration frequencies, and eyeball resonation led to a thesis (actually titled “Ghosts in the Machine”) that was published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Tandy’s findings outlined what he thought were “natural causes” for particular cases of specter materialization. Tandy found that 19-Hz standing air waves could, under some circumstances, create sensory phenomena in an open environment suggestive of a ghost. He actually produced a frightening manifested entity resembling contemporary descriptions of “alien grays.” A similar phenomenon was discovered in 2006 by neurologist Olaf Blanke of the Brain Mind Institute in Lausanne, Switzerland, while working with a team to discover the source of epileptic seizures in a young woman. They were applying electrical currents through surgically implanted electrodes to various regions of her brain, when upon reaching her left temporoparietal junction (tpj, located roughly above the left ear) she suddenly reported feeling the presence of a shadow person standing behind her. The phantom started imitating her body posture, lying down beneath her when she was on the bed, sitting behind her, and later even attempting to take a test card away from her during a language exercise. While the scientists interpreted the activity as a natural, though mysterious, biological function of the brain, is it possible they were actually discovering gateways of perception into the spirit world that were closed by God following the fall of man? Were Tandy’s “ghost” and Blanke’s “shadow person” living unknowns? If so, is it not troubling that advocates of human-mind-to-machine intelligence may produce permanent conditions similar to Tandy and Blanke’s findings, giving rise to simulated or real relationships between humans and “entities”? At the thirteenth European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research at the University of Vienna in Austria, an original paper submitted by Charles Ostman seemed to echo this possibility:

As this threshold of development is crossed, as an index of our human /Internet symbiosis becoming more pronounced, and irreversible, we begin to develop communication modalities which are quite “nonhuman” by nature, but are “socio-operative” norms of the near future. Our collective development and deployment of complex metasystems of artificial entities and synthetic life-forms, and acceptance of them as an integral component of the operational “culture norm” of the near future, is in fact the precursory developmental increment, as an enabling procedure, to gain effective communicative access to a contiguous collection of myriad “species” and entity types (synthetic and “real”) functioning as process brokeraging agents.[iv]

In the next entry we will discuss a similar issue that “pinged” in our memories from past experience with exorcism and the connection between sound resonance and contact with supernaturalism having to do with people who claim to have become possessed or “demonized” after attempting to open mind gateways through vibratory chanting at New Age vortices or “Mother Earth” energy sites such as Sedona, Arizona.

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WATCH THE TRAILER! WARNING: NOT FOR THE WEAK!

TOM HORN AT THE OHIO SCIENCE & SUPERNATURAL CONFERENCE

PART 21 -- Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, & Human Enhancement Herald the Dawn of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare

EDITOR'S NOTE: All notations will be cited in the final report. The information is based on research contained in Tom and Nita Horn's upcoming new book:

Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald the Dawn of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare

STEP 1: UNLOCKING FORBIDDEN GATES

The steady migration toward the fulfillment of biologically and cybernetically modified humans combined with corporate and national investments will predictably fuse this century, ultimately leading to strong cultural forces compelling all individuals to get “plugged in” to the grid. Whoever resists will be left behind as inferior Luddites (those who oppose new technology), or worse, considered enemies of the collectives’ progress, as in de Garis’ nightmarish vision in the Artilect War or former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clark’s Breakpoint, which depicts those who refuse technological enhancement as “terrorists.”

According to the work Human Dignity in the Biotech Century, this pressure to become enhanced will be dramatic upon people in all social strata, including those in the middle class, law, engineering, finance, professional fields, and the military, regardless of personal or religious views:

Consider...whether the military, after investing billions in the development of technologies to create the cyborg soldier...would allow individual soldiers to decline the enhancements because of religious or personal qualms. It is not likely. Individuals may indeed dissent and decline technological augmentation, but such dissenters will find job options increasingly scarce.

Because the network of cyborgs will require increasing levels of cooperation and harmonious coordination to further improve efficiency, the prostheses will continue to introduce means of controlling or modulating emotion to promote these values. Meanwhile, the network is increasingly controlled by central planning structures to facilitate harmony and efficiency. While everyone still considers themselves fully autonomous, in reality behavior is more and more tightly controlled. Each step moves those who are cybernetically augmented toward becoming like the Borg, the race of cybernetic organisms that inhabit the twenty-sixth century of the Star Trek mythology. The Borg, once fully human, become “assimilated” by the greater collective mind, losing individuality for the good of the whole.[i]

Lest anyone think the writers of Human Dignity in the Biotech Century are overly paranoid, consider that nbic (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science) director Mihail Roco, in the U.S. government report, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, wrote,

Humanity would become like a single, distributed and interconnected “brain” based in new core pathways in society.... A networked society of billions of human beings could be as complex compared to an individual being as a human being is to a single nerve cell. From local groups of linked enhanced individuals to a global collective intelligence, key new capacities would arise from relationships arising from nbic technologies.... Far from unnatural, such a collective social system may be compared to a larger form of biological organism.... We envision the bond of humanity driven by an interconnected virtual brain of the Earth’s communities searching for intellectual comprehension and conquest of nature.”[ii]

Nowhere will the struggle to resist this human biological alteration and machine integration be more immediate than in those religious homes where transhumanism is seen as an assault on God’s creative genius, and where, as a result, people of faith seek to maintain their humanity. Yet the war against such believers is poised to emerge over the next decade as much from inside these homes and families as it will from external social influences.

As a simple example, flash forward to the near future when much of the technology previously discussed—factually based on emerging technologies and anticipated time frames—is common. Your tenth-grade daughter, Michelle, walks in from a first day at a new school.

“Well, how did it go, Honey?” you ask with a smile.

“It was okay,” she says, “though the kids here are even smarter than at the last school.” But then she pauses. She knows begging to be enhanced like most of her classmates will only lead to more arguing—common between you two on this subject. How can she make you understand what it’s like even trying to compete with the transhumans? The fact that most of the student body, students who are half her age, will graduate from college summa cum laude with IQs higher than Einstein’s by the time she even enters is a ridiculous and unnecessary impediment, she feels. She can’t understand it. You’ve seen the news, the advertising, the H+ magazines articles and television specials outlining the advantages of enhancement. Even the family doctor tried to convince you. But it will probably take a visit from Child Welfare Services, which in the U.S. is soon to follow the European model where, starting in 2019, parents whose children went without basic modifications were charged with neglect and had their kids put in foster homes. She just wishes it wouldn’t come to that. If only you could be like those Emergent Christians 2.0 whose techno-theology arose during the early enhancement craze of 2016–2018, based on a universalist imperative for “perfectionist morality” and the Christian duty to be “healers and perfecters” as opposed to the “bio-Luddite theology” of your outdated religious “divine order” concept, which only serves to keep people like her at disadvantage. That’s why she gave you the school report compiled by Prof. Joel Garreau describing the average high school pupil today, so you could understand how her classmates:

· Have amazing thinking abilities. They’re not only faster and more creative than anybody she’s ever met, but faster and more creative than anybody she’s ever imagined.

· They have photographic memories and total recall. They can devour books in minutes.

· They’re beautiful, physically. Although they don’t put much of a premium on exercise, their bodies are remarkably ripped.

· They talk casually about living a long time, perhaps being immortal. They’re always discussing their “next lives.” One fellow mentions how, after he makes his pile as a lawyer, he plans to be a glassblower, after which he wants to become a nanosurgeon.

· One of her new friends fell while jogging, opening up a nasty gash on her knee. Your daughter freaked, ready to rush her to the hospital. But her friend just stared at the gaping wound, focusing her mind on it. Within minutes, it simply stopped bleeding.

· This same friend has been vaccinated against pain. She never feels acute pain for long.

· These new friends are always connected to each other, sharing their thoughts no matter how far apart, with no apparent gear. They call it “silent messaging.” It seems like telepathy.

· They have this odd habit of cocking their head in a certain way whenever they want to access information they don’t yet have in their own skulls—as if waiting for a delivery to arrive wirelessly...which it does.

· For a week or more at a time, they don't sleep. They joke about getting rid of their beds, since they use them so rarely.[iii]

Even though these enhanced students treat her with compassion and know that she is biologically and mentally handicapped by no fault of her own, she hates it when they call her a “Natural.” It feels so condescending. And then, at the last school, there was that boy she wanted to date, only to discover it was against the informed-consent regulations passed by the Department of Education two years ago restricting romantic relationships between “Naturals” and the “Enhanced.” She could have crawled into a hole, she was so embarrassed. But she’s decided not to fight you anymore about it. Next year she will be eighteen years old and has been saving her money. With the federal Unenhanced Student Aid programs administered by the U.S. Department of Education and the United Naturals Student Fund (unsf) that provides financial assistance and support for “Disaugmented American Students,” grades pre-kindergarten to twelve, whose motto is “An augmented mind is a terrible thing to waste,” she'll have enough for Level 1 Genetic Improvement plus a couple of toys like Bluetooth’s new extracranial cybernetic communicator. It’s not much, but it’s a start, and though you will tell her that her brain-machine interface, and especially her genetic upgrade, makes her—as well as any kids she has in the future—inhuman, according to the school’s genetic guidance counselor, there will be nothing you can do to legally stop her.

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PART 20 -- Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, & Human Enhancement Herald the Dawn of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare

EDITOR'S NOTE: All notations will be cited in the final report. The information is based on research contained in Tom and Nita Horn's upcoming new book:

Forbidden Gates

How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, & Human Enhancement Herald the Dawn of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare

THE TRANSHUMAN NEW FACE OF SPIRITUAL WARFARE BEGINS



On July 20, 2010, the New York Times ran a feature article introducing a new nonprofit organization called the Lifeboat Foundation.[i] The concept behind the group is simple yet disturbing. Protecting people from threats posed by potentially catastrophic technology—ranging from artificial intelligence running amok to self-replicating nanobots—represents an emerging opportunity for designing high-tech “shields,” and lots of them, to protect mankind this century.

“For example,” the article says, “there’s talk of a Neuroethics Shield to prevent abuse in the areas of neuropharmaceuticals, neurodevices, and neurodiagnostics. Worse cases include enslaving the world’s population or causing everyone to commit suicide.

“And then there’s a Personality Preserver that would help people keep their personalities intact and a Nano Shield to protect against overly aggressive nanocreatures.”

If the Lifeboat Foundation sounds like a storehouse for overreacting geeks or even outright nut jobs, consider that their donors involve Google, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and an impressive list of industry and technology executives, including names on their advisory boards like Nobel laureate and Princeton University Prof. Eric Maskin.

What the development of such enterprising research groups illustrates is that even if one does not believe speculation from the previous entries suggesting mind-bending concepts like Nephilim being resurrected into posthuman bodies via Grin technology, all of society—regardless of religious or secular worldviews—should consider that what we are doing now through genetic modification of living organisms and the wholesale creation of new synthetic life-forms is either a violation of the divine order (biblical creation, such as the authors of this book believe) or chaos upon natural evolution, or both. The road we have started down is thus wrought with unknown perils, and the Lifeboat Foundation is correct to discern how the transhuman era may abruptly result in the need for “shields” to protect earth species from designer viruses, nanobugs, prion contamination, and a host of other clear and present dangers. Part of the obvious reasons behind this is, in addition to the known shortcomings of biotechnology corporations and research facilities to remain impartial in their safety reviews (they have a vested interest in protecting approval and distribution of their products), futurist think tanks such as the Lifeboat Foundation understand that the phrase, “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is axiomatic for a reason. Human nature has a clear track record of developing defense mechanisms only after natural or manufactured threats have led to catastrophe. We humans seem doomed to learn from our mistakes far more often than from prevention. Consider how nuclear reactors were forced to become safer only after the Chernobyl disaster, or how a tsunami warning system was developed by the United Nations following 230,000 people being killed by a titanic wave in the Indian Ocean. This fact of human nature portends an especially ill wind for mankind when viewed against the existential threats of biological creations, artificial intelligence systems, or geoengineering of nature, which carry the potential not only of backfiring but of permanently altering the course of humanity. “Our attitude throughout human history has been to experience events like these and then to put safeguards in place,” writes Prof. Nick Bostrom, himself a transhumanist. “That strategy is completely futile with existential risks [as represented in Grin tech]. By definition, you don’t get to learn from experience. You only have one chance to get it right.”[ii] Because of the truly catastrophic threat thus posed by mostly unregulated Grin advances this century, Richard Posner, a U.S. appeals court judge and author of the book Catastrophe: Risk and Response, wants “an Office of Risk and Catastrophe set up in the White House. The office would be charged with identifying potentially dangerous technologies and calling in experts to inform its own risk assessment.” The problem right now, Posner adds, “is that no single government department takes responsibility for these kinds of situations.”[iii] Not surprisingly, many transhumanists contest Posner’s idea, saying it represents just another unnecessary bureaucracy that would stand in the way of scientific progress.

Yet of greater significance and repeatedly missing from such secular considerations is what the authors of this book believe to be the more important element: supernaturalism and spirituality. Beyond the material ramifications of those threats posed by the genetics revolution is something most scientists, engineers, and bioethicists fail to comprehend—that man is not just a series of biological functions. We are spirit and soul and vulnerable to spiritual, not just environmental, dangers. Thus the “shields” that the Lifeboat Foundation is working on will only protect us so far. We will need spiritual shields too as Grin raises those bigger issues of how human-transforming enhancements may alter our very souls (says Joel Garreau) as well as hundreds of immediate new challenges that Christians, families, and ministries will be facing.

It is an understatement to say that technology often works hand in hand with unseen forces to challenge our faith or open new channels for spiritual warfare. This has been illustrated in thousands of ways down through time—from the creation of Ouija boards for contacting the spirit world to online pornography gateways. But the current course upon which Grin technology and transhumanist philosophy is taking mankind threatens to elevate the reality of these dangers to quantitatively higher levels. Some of the spiritual hazards already surfacing as a result of modern technology include unfamiliar terms like “i-Dosing,” in which teens get “digitally high” by playing specific Internet videos through headphones that use repetitive tones to create binaural beats, which have been shown in clinical studies to induce particular brain-wave states that make the sounds appear to come from the center of the head. Some critics dismiss the danger inherent with this practice, yet Shamans have used variations of such repetitive tones and drumming to stimulate and focus the “center mind” for centuries to make contact with the spirit world and to achieve altered states of consciousness.

More broadly, the Internet itself, together with increasing forms of electronic information-driven technology, is creating a new kind of addiction by “rewiring our brains,” says Nora Volkow, world-renowned brain scientist and director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse. The lure of “digital stimulation” can actually produce dopamine releases in the brain that affect the heart rate and blood pressure and lead to drug-like highs and lows. As bad, the addictive craving for digital stimulation is leading to the electronic equivalent of Attention Deficit Disorder (add) among a growing population in which constant bursts of information and digital stimulation undermine one’s ability to focus—especially in children, whose brains are still developing and who naturally struggle to resist impulses or to neglect priorities. A growing body of literature is verifying this e-connection to personality fragmentation, cyberrelationships over personal ones, and other psychosocial issues. Volkow and other researchers see these antisocial trends leading to widespread diminished empathy between people—which is essential to the human condition—as a result of humans paying more and more attention to iPads, cell phones, and computer screens than to each other, even when sitting in the same room. New research shows this situation becoming an electronic pandemic as people escalate their detachment from traditional family relationships while consuming three times as much digital information today as they did in 2008, checking e-mails, texting thirty-seven times per hour, and spending twelve hours per day on average taking in other e-media.

How brain-machine interfacing will multiply this divide between human-to-human relationships versus human-machine integration should be of substantial concern to readers for several reasons, including how 1) the Borgification of man will naturally exasperate the decline of the family unit and interpersonal relationships upon which society has historically depended; 2) the increase of euphoric cybernetic addiction will multiply as cerebral stimulation of the brain’s pleasure centers is added to existing natural senses—sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch; and 3) the threat of computer viruses or hijackers disrupting enhanced human neural or cognitive pathways will develop as cyber-enhanced individuals evolve. To illustrate the latter, Dr. Mark Gasson, from the School of Systems Engineering at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, intentionally contaminated an implanted microchip in his hand that allows him biometric entry through security doors and that also communicates with his cell phone and other external devices. In the experiment, Dr. Gasson (who agrees that the next step in human evolution is the transhuman vision of altered human biology integrated with machines) was able to show how the computer virus he infected himself with spread to external computer systems in communication with his microchip. He told BBC News, “With the benefits of this type of technology come risks. We [will] improve ourselves...but much like the improvements with other technologies, mobile phones for example, they become vulnerable to risks, such as security problems and computer viruses.”[iv]

Such threats—computer viruses passing from enhanced humans to enhanced humans via future cybernetic systems—is the tip of the iceberg. The real danger, though it may be entirely unavoidable for some, will be the loss of individuality, anonymity, privacy, and even free will as a result of cybernetic integration. Dr. Christopher Hook contends, “If implanted devices allow the exchange of information between the biological substrate and the cybernetic device,” such a device in the hippocampus (the part of the brain involved in forming, storing, and processing memory) for augmenting memory, for instance, “would be intimately associated with the creation and recall of memories as well as with all the emotions inherent in that process. If this device were...to allow the importation of information from the Internet, could the device also allow the memories and thoughts of the individual to be downloaded or read by others? In essence, what is to prevent the brain itself from being hacked [or externally monitored]? The last bastion of human privacy, the brain, will have been breached.”[v]

As we shall see in the next entry, despite these significant ethical and social dangers, industry and government interest in the technological dream of posthumanism, as documented earlier in the upcoming book Forbidden Gates, is more than laissez-faire.

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WATCH THE TRAILER! WARNING: NOT FOR THE WEAK!



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Yet again humankind seems ready to plunge headlong into another human, or demonic, contrivance promising salvation and eternal happiness for all. This time the Faustian bargain is being struck with technology, what John McDermott referred to as the “opiate of the intellectuals.” —C. Christopher Hook, MD

When the stars align, Cthulhu will rise again to resume His dominion over the Earth, ushering in an age of frenzied abandon. Humankind will be “free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy.” —Mark Dery, celebrating the rise of H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic monster