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.