July 14, 2018 • 50 mins
What do the transhumanist visions and singularitarians have in common with Christian rapture doctrine, apocalyptic prophesies and far-future saviors? Join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick as they explore the space for common ground -- and conflict -- between genetically modified cyborgs and Heaven-teleported believers in this two-part episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. (Originally published Aug 23, 2016)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
It's vault time. What's in the Vault today? In the
Vault today is going to be part one of a
two parter that we did back in August of This
one originally aired August, and it's The trans Humanist Rapture War,
(00:26):
Part one, The trans Humanist Rapture War. I remember this one, Yeah,
I mostly remember. This one's kind of a blur for me,
but I remember we we got to get into a
lot of cool trans humanist territory and also discuss UH
ideas of the Christian rapture and some of the overlap
between these two ideas about our future. Yeah. I think
(00:48):
a lot of it had to do with UH, with
parallels between sort of technological utopianism and ideas that are
contained in popular world religions. Yeah, so this one will
be an exciting one to re air. This will actually
be an exciting topic if we want to, we may
be able to revisit because I feel like, even though
it's uh, you know, it hasn't even been two years
(01:08):
since this one aired, we've we've covered a lot of
additional ground. Uh that that is, that is in this
topic area. Oh heck, you could do a whole podcast
itself on on like techno utopianism and this whole cast
of thinking. Yeah, all right, well let's dive in. Welcome
to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works
(01:30):
dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and my name is Joe McCormick.
And Hey, Robert, I've got a question for you. Any
time in your life have you ever had the feeling
the things are about to come to a very serious conclusion.
(01:53):
And I don't mean like the meeting you're in right now,
I mean the world. Did you ever get that feeling
like you're living in the end times? This has got
to be the last of days? No um. Sometimes I
feel I sometimes I wonder what if the next moment
is going to be the last moment? Like, but it's
(02:15):
always there's always going to be some sort of harbinger
of destruction, right, So I don't I look up into
the sky and think, Hey, what would it be like
to see the you know, civilization busting near earth object
entering the atmosphere? I think about things like that, But
even then I'll have like a few more minutes to
process it. It all does have to come to an
(02:36):
end at some point, so it makes you wonder if
that end is near. And in fact, I think some
people have made statistical arguments that if you assume, okay,
I'm a random observer not a privileged observer. Uh, the
the statistical argument is that humanity has got to be
ending pretty soon because if human if the human population
(02:57):
continues to grow, that any many more randomly selected observers
will be among those born in the future than those
that are living you know, right now or have lived
in the past. And so if we you assume that
you are the middle of the road random observer and
not one of the tail end, then humanity has got
(03:18):
to end pretty soon. I don't really huh, because I
always would think, well, I'm not a privileged observer, why
do I get to live in the end times, Like,
surely I'm at least living in like the penultimate age
and not the ultimate age of man. Well, that instinct
of yours is I would say, fairly unique, because it
is very common for people to think that they are
(03:39):
living in a very privileged time. Have you noticed that. Yeah, well, no,
I think I'm living in a privileged time. I mean
compared with before. I don't mean materially privileged. I think
that's true too. I think we are some of the
luckiest people and the golden age of television, Joe, have
you seen these shows? Yeah, I'm assuming you're referring to
the fact that we can still get quantumly pre run
every now and then. But but yeah, we're materially privileged.
(04:03):
But uh, but I also mean privileged in terms of
I happen to be the person who's of the generation
that's alive when it all comes to the end. So
today's episode is going to be about the field of eschatology,
which is both theological and ostensibly secular, but it's the
(04:23):
study of the end of times. What what happens when
there is a conclusion to it all the either the
end of the human species or a very significant transition
of the human species into another kind of being, or
a very significant transition of the human species into a
very different kind of situation or station, either ushering in
(04:46):
a utopia that brings happiness and prosperity for all, or
you know, an apocalyptic vision. Uh. And we can get
into what these words mean in a minute, but that
brings destruction and calamity and uh, you know road warrior
kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's so much of
it hinges on this feeling that we're talking about, where
it just it seems like something's gotta give, something's gotta break,
(05:09):
something's gotta change for better or worse. It it always
takes me back to to the Yates poem. Right, surely
the second coming is at hand, like, surely something is
about to get the falcon cannot hear the falcon? Or man,
something's going wrong. Yeah, passionate enthusiasm among the worst, right,
passionate passionate intensity intensity? Yes, that's even better. Yeah, what's
(05:32):
the exact line. The the best lack all conviction, and
the worst are filled with passionate intensity. I very often
find that's true. You know, some of the some of
the best people I know with the best opinions don't
speak up that often. But man, people who have bad
opinions are allowed as heck, well, they don't have to
(05:52):
worry as much about saying the wrong thing, do that. No, Well,
I mean it helps when you're never wrong. Yeah, So
let's let's let's get into it here. Um, first of all,
let's just talk a little bit about basic human utopianism.
You know, I want to share a fact with you, Robert. Yeah,
I always assumed that the you in the word utopia
(06:12):
comes from the Greek prefix meaning good, as in uh,
you know, euphoria, the good feeling. But that is not
actually where it comes from too. So the title Utopia,
of course, can be traced back to Thomas Moore's book
Utopia and the sort of fictional but also philosophical treatise
on what a perfect society might look like. You could
look at it as a sort of update to Plato's
(06:34):
Republic in a way, or a laying out of the
groundwork of you know, how could we achieve a perfect world?
And so if utopia and that since had meant it
had been the way I understood it, it would have
meant good place. You know, you utopia a good place.
But the U is not actually eu as in good place,
but it's you as in no place, because it didn't exist, right, Okay,
(06:59):
Well that makes sense. Yeah, so I think that's something
that we should keep in mind. Going all the more reason,
I guess that microsoft word is always telling me that
dystopia is not a word, really, yeah, or at least
I get that. I get that correction all the time.
I mean, obviously, dystopia has come to have a meaning
for us. It's the opposite of utopia, as this dissident
(07:19):
vision of the future. Right. But well, before we get
to dystopia, walk me through utopia, Robert. All right, So,
and really, intofining utopia, we essentially define dystopia human experiences.
Of course, you can think of it as the spark
on the line right between the expanse of the past
and the expanse of the future. It's like, you know,
it's like like a cartoon fuse to a bomb, right,
(07:41):
and we're just sparking along. And humans have thrived in
large part by their ability to perceive and mold that future.
All right. We developed new ways of doing this doing
the things we always did, hunting, farm and crafting, as
what was the ways we think about the world, cosmology, society, etcetera.
And so we ink of human existence, if we think
(08:01):
of human existence has to spark upon the fuse of time.
We judge the soon to ignite, and the igniting based
on the charred and flaming remnants of what proceeded is
and we we we come to look beyond and imagine
near and far futures on this very line. And so
humans across cultures and times have sought to radically transform
(08:24):
their existence socially, bodily, technologically, etcetera, all as as a
ways to try and and better ourselves and better the
way that we live on this world. Yeah. I think
that's true. And of course, if you look at the
basic human project of civilization as one that tends towards
creating a better life for all of us, it's easy
(08:47):
to look at that and conclude, well, than a successful
execution of this project would end in utopia. Yeah. Yeah,
it's it's kind of like the it's it's the notion
that if a city is essentially engineering, engineering exercise, there
should be some idealized version of the city that we're
aspiring to and then eventually we can get there. Yeah.
(09:08):
In this case, you know, the city is not just
a literal city, but the city is the model for
the you know, all things civilization. Now, I would argue
I think that one reason we sense attention here, Like
you might say, well, I don't expect us to ever
reach utopia. But I do advocate civilization continuing to try
to improve the lives of everyone for as long as possible. Uh,
(09:30):
doesn't that seem a contradiction. I would say that the
main contradiction lies in the incoherence of the idea of perfection.
You can't create a perfect society because that idea doesn't
make sense. There are inherent tensions in society. People want
different things, and so there there is no such thing
as a perfect society for everyone. Yeah. I mean, you
could make this more or less idealized building in which
(09:54):
people are going to live and work, But then what
are you gonna set the thermostat to right? Because some
people are going to be who hot? Some people are
gonna be too cold? Some people what? People want to
wear a hoodie in the office. Some people want to
sit there and sweat. Now, one way you could get
out of this bind is by saying, you know, this
project of continually trying to improve human civilization is going
(10:14):
to be cut short, and it is going to be
cut short by supernatural forces. So you're talking about a
an apocalypse of spiritual apocalypse. Yes, And I think it
is very worth mentioning something about the etymology here the
word apocalypse. Now, the word apocalypse originally did not mean
mad max uh. It originally meant an unveiling or a revelation. So,
(10:36):
for instance, the Book of Revelation in the Bible, in
the New Testament is sometimes known as the Apocalypse of John,
means the same thing, the revelation to John John wrote down.
So it's a vision that he had all these cryptic
things that are playing out at the end of time exactly.
So a revelation it could reveal knowledge, visions, understanding, or
(10:58):
very often predictions of the future. And I think because
of associations with predictions about the future and the Book
of Revelation itself, the word apocalypse is a word that
has come to be associated with end to times events,
either the end of the world, the end of humanity,
or some radical change in station and the fortune of humankind.
(11:21):
And we should go ahead and say when you use
the word apocalypse that change is usually for the worst, right.
People don't usually say apocalypse in a positive way, like
there will be an apocalypse and we'll it will lead
to utopia, which is interesting considering the fact that the
the origin of the word stems from a story that
is supposedly about the the victory of the eventual victory
(11:41):
of all things good over all things evil. Right. Yeah,
there are a lot of different Christian visions of the
end times, and we'll talk about them in this episode today,
but they typically involve both very negative events and ultimately
a perfectly positive event. But so the popular version of apocalypse, yeah,
we we associate with kind of post apocalyptic movies again,
(12:02):
the Road Warrior perfect example, great movie. Human civilization as
we formerly know it has ended and everything has just
gone to hell. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold right,
and you need guzzoline. So it's also worth stressing here
that plenty of religions do not depend on such a
linear time frame and instead have a cyclical and certainly
(12:24):
we see this in the older religions, the pre Christian religions.
Plenty of religions are more concerned with cosmological origins underlying
everyday reality and less of any notion on ending. So
for in for example, for example, in Hinduism, the universe
is continually created, preserve, destroyed, and created again. It's an
endless cycle, and the process of creation moves and these
(12:45):
large overarching cycles, and each cycle has four great um
epochs of time. The concept of reincarnation works alongside this
is life flows into life, flows into life. I like
this because it mirrors some different hypotheses about the ultimate
nature of the universe. Now we don't know yet what
the ultimate nature of the universe is, but there are
(13:05):
some cosmological models in which, for example, our local universe
maybe a bouncing universe where it it collapses into a
singularity and then re explodes back into a universe with
distributed matter and energy all over the place, or even
like a bouncy house where it's it's inflated in the
morning and the nsipuke in it all day, described out
(13:27):
with chlorox bleach and deflated the evening. Yes, it is
kind of like that too. But there is another apocalyptic
spiritual event that I wanted to call attention to just
because it's so cool. I can't pretend to understand it
all that well because it's Norse mythology, and Norse mythology,
I feel like is is a more impenetrable to the
(13:48):
outsider type of mythology than things like Greek mythology or
do you find that too. There's I mean, I feel
like I can get it a lot more when I
listened to death metal. Okay, I think that's that's how
I tend to Ryan process it. Think of like extreme
survivalist situations. Uh, and the and the and the resulting
pantheon of gods, the resulting time frame of events that
(14:10):
would that would shape that and be shaped by that. Well. Yeah,
in that popular sense of apocalyptic Norse mythology has some
great apocalyptic events that they've got Ragnarok and it's this
epic eschatological battle involving God's monsters, chaos. There's this disastrous
(14:35):
cataclysmic winter, the mountains crumble, this giant sea serpent comes
up and spits venom over all the earth and poisons
the waters. And there's this huge slog down, bloody battle
where most of the gods get killed. Uh it's brutal,
but hey, it would be an extreme bummer of a
religion that just ends with a cataclysmic disaster for everyone
(14:59):
and has nothing positive to come of it. So so
many religions also sort of have spiritual utopias in their
eschatological framework, right that the end times will result in
some kind of very positive situation for many people at least.
That's right now. Obviously we're going to get to the
Christian models here in a minute, but before we get there,
(15:21):
I want to just touch base on on some Buddhist
ideas here. So there's a recurring theme in Hinduism and
Buddhism that one may escape the endless cycle of death
and rebirth, the wheel of sam Sara and attain liberation um.
And you can interpret such liberation as it's as its
own form of ending or perfection even but it's also
(15:43):
kind of a it's a form of escape, perform an
ending that can be acquired at any point along the line.
So there's not you don't have to wait till the
end times or some distant future to attain liberation to
reach nirvana. So the inner journey as opposed to a
physical world journey, yeah, asynchronous timelines. That being said, um,
(16:04):
there is a pretty cool um idea out there, and
that is the belief system within Buddhism that's a millennial
Buddhist in particular. Uh. They have this, uh, this character
known as my Trea, and my Trea is the Bodhisattva,
the being, an enlightenment of the future who will arrive
on Earth. Generally, I've seen some numbers thrown out there,
(16:27):
but just it's gonna be a long time in the future,
trust me. No, Robert, you have a number in our notes,
I can tell us. Okay, I have a number, and
this is a This one comes from a from my
belief Japanese model. There's a sect of Buddhist monks there
that are devoted to my trio and I and I
forgive me, I do not recall the Japanese name from
(16:48):
my trea off the top of my head. But it
is what five billion years in the future. My reading
that those are a lot of zeros. Uh No, that
would be five trillion, trillion, six seventy billion years. So
it's no way sixties seven, six and seventy billion years.
It's a colossal number. And it's from that this would
be this is gonna be like a far future time
(17:11):
when people live to incredible ages. I want to say
eighty thousand years old. So huge numbers involved here, and
my treo would be the ultimate successor to our current Buddha.
Um sidhard Gotama got him a Buddha and uh this
Buddha will achieve complete enlightenment and teach pure dharma here
(17:31):
on earth and I just want to read a quick quote.
This is from book of My Tree of the Future
Buddha by Alan Spenberg, says quote, the prospect of a
future Buddha, yet another in the long line of Buddhas,
offers an attractive possibility. Although liberation from suffering is possible
for anyone at any time, according to Buddhist those being
(17:53):
fortunate enough to live at a time when a Buddha
is active in the world are far more likely to
realize the arduous goal of ringing all craving to cessation.
Though perhaps initially a minor figure in the early Buddhist tradition,
my tread thus comes to represent a hope for the future,
a time when all human beings could once again enjoy
the spiritual and physical environment most favorable to enlightenment and
(18:17):
the release from worldly suffering. I think that's fascinating because
the very positive situation here, that the utopia that's being
brought about isn't one necessarily of material fulfillment, but one
of the realization of the lack of necessity for material fulfillment.
Very often, when you see like a heaven or just
(18:38):
any kind of very positive, spiritually imagined future situation, people
people speak of material comforts. Yeah, yeah, and indeed this, uh,
this particular idea, I guess would only entail material comforts,
and insofar as they enable you to seek inner enlightenment
(18:58):
and realize that you don't need material comes right. Okay,
So a lot of what we're gonna be talking about
in this episode is not just spiritual, religious supernatural frameworks
for eschatology, but actually secular and very often scientific or
technological frameworks for eschatology. And there are just like we
talked about religious apocalypses and religious future utopias, there are
(19:21):
secular apocalypses and secular future utopias. Yeah. And I think
the fascinating thing here and and and something prev going
to keep in mind as we we play with this
topic here today is that there's so much shared circuitry
involved with both ideas. So, you know, it's it's easy
for for for an atheist to stand on one side
(19:42):
and scoff at some of these spiritual ideas of utopia
and salvation and destruction. But when you break it down,
how different is the underlying experience of those ideas? How
different is that from some of these secular ideas we're
discussing now, well, that's a to question. I think we
should discuss them and explore. Well, as far as secular
(20:03):
apocalypses go, we really don't even have to to mention
many of them. I mean that they're pretty obvious. The
idea of nuclear annihilation, of global cataclysm green goo, greg goo. Um.
I don't even know if this one's a thing, but
I'm gonna go and say it, brown goo. Who knows? Um? Singularity? Um?
I I love our Scott Baker's idea of a semantic apocalypse,
(20:25):
which one is that semantic apocalypse is basically just the
death of meaning. Where we reached this point from where
we have a certain neuroscientific understanding of the human experience,
and uh, we realize that all human consciousness is a
coin trick, and we explain the coin trick. Oh, it's
kind of a Nietzsche in despair. Yeah, well, all of
(20:47):
those are possible things that people could predict happening, you know.
So you've got green goo, grey goo. You know, people
talking about nanotechnology or something that could take over the world.
We don't even have that kind of nanotechnology yet, and
maybe we never could. Uh, it could just be something
impossible that people are dreaming up. But on the other hand, ultimately,
if we assume that our current understanding of physics is
(21:10):
basically correct, and we think it probably is, I mean,
there's a lot we don't know, but what we do
know we're pretty confident about, and that the laws of
physics don't change with time. Our scientific picture of the
universe does very firmly predict one type of scaton that
is unsurvivable. Right, And I want to read a section
(21:31):
from a book I've been reading. Actually, it's a book
by the physicist Sean Carroll called The Big Picture, and
he's talking about the physical cosmological model of what's going
to happen to the universe after a while. So he
talks about the accelerating expansion of the universe, and that's
fueled by the pull of vacuum energy, you know, the
the energy out there that's causing the galaxies to expand
(21:53):
farther and farther apart. Uh, And that all tells us
more or less what's going to happen. He writes, quote,
it's possible, and in some sense would be simplest for
the accelerated expansion to simply continue without end. That leads
to a somewhat lonely future for our universe. Right now,
the night sky is alive with brightly shining stars and
(22:14):
galaxies that can't last forever. Stars use up their fuel
and will eventually fade to black. Astronomers estimate that the
last dim star will wink out around one quadrillion or
ten to the fifteen years from now. Okay, that's well,
that's well after the age of my Trea. Yeah, good
to know. Yeah, though, who knows how long my Treya lives.
(22:36):
Just throwing that out there. My Trea could could have
something to say about these stars burning up all their fuel.
But anyway, Carol continues. By then, other galaxies will have
moved far away, and our local group of galaxies will
be populated by planets, dead stars, and black holes. One
by one, those planets and dead stars will fall into
the black holes, which in turn will join into one
(22:58):
supermassive black hole. Ultimately, as Stephen Hawking taught us, even
those black holes will evaporate. After about one google or
tend to the one hundred years, all of the black
holes in our observable universe will have evaporated into a
thin mist of particles which will grow more and more
dilute as space continues to expand. The end result of
(23:21):
this are most likely scenario for the future of the
universe is nothing but cold empty space, which will last
literally forever. Well that's uh, that's nice and dark, literally
and figuratively. So then again, it sounds like that mist
of particles. That sounds kind of refreshing. Yeah, I mean,
(23:41):
but also it's you're dealing with such a long period
of time here, it's kind of it's kind of like
the idea of the humanless universal, lifeless universe. It's really
more just returned to normal normalcy universe, right, I mean,
we were not around for ages and ages and ages
for the vast major already of cosmological time. Yeah, so
(24:02):
what's it mattered that we're not going to survive in
the long run either. Well, I'm just trying to offer
an example of how you don't have to get far
out into left field with crazy technological predictions in order
to say that at some point there will be an end.
There will be an endpoint to humanity. Uh that you know,
it's it's hard to survive the energy evaporation death of
(24:24):
the universe unless in a post my Trea world we
have figured out ways technologically to escape into alternate universes.
So true, in those doors to alternate universes, maybe our salvation,
but you might not have to walk through a door
to reach a very different kind of world that might
be much better than the one we have. Because there
are also secular visions of utopias right there, most certainly are.
(24:47):
It doesn't have to be heaven. It can be we
can make heaven here on earth, according to some people. Yeah,
I mean, in a way, a lot of these remind
me of the my Trea vision, the idea that you're
gonna you're gonna have a world where people are going
to be able to find peace. Um. So we have
various models from this, I mean some of the ones
that are more scientifically based. We have various ideas about
(25:09):
what a post scarcity society might be. Transhumanist existence, um,
the the the essential Star Trek model of life on
Earth right where everybody's gotten to the point where we
get along. We have technology that we have holio decks,
and we have machines that will just create whatever food
we need on demand, new ages of human consciousness, uh,
(25:31):
and various positive spins on the technological singularity Yeah. Now,
if you don't know that much about the singularity, or
even if you do, we're gonna be talking about that
at more length later on, and how that fits into
ideas of religious eschatology. And then, of course, there are
so many different secular models of utopia that are that
are that are based on how we can build a
(25:52):
better society um, various utopian cults, various utopian mindsets that
have been thrown out air, new political models, ways of
organizing ourselves, ways of building that better city that rely
less on technology and more on simply the ordering of
ourselves and the ordering of the inner self. All right,
(26:14):
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we will explore the Christian rapture. All right, we're back
to rap about the Christian Rapture. I wonder if there
has been any Christian hip hop that has expressly concerned
itself with the rapture. I would love to hear about it.
(26:36):
Quite sure that has happened. Well, you know there's that
Blondie song, right ra sure? No, is that about the rapture? No?
I don't think so. But it's very weird, is that
the one? I think that's the one about the man
for Mars. He's eating cars, and now he goes out
and needs guitars. I'm not sure which which part of
the back Book of Revelation she's referring to. There. The
(26:58):
Book of Revelation is full of wonderfully strange imagry, and
that would that would fit right in actually, But okay,
so the Christian rapture. I wanna just put you in
a scenario. You're on a plane. There may or may
not be snakes on the plane, doesn't matter either way.
Suddenly many people on the plane have disappeared, possibly including
(27:20):
the pilot and co pilot, but thankfully for you this time,
not the pilot and copilot. Is this a lingual ears thing? No,
But I am describing a scene from a popular novel,
and we'll get to that in just a minute. So
the people are gone where you would have normally found them. Uh,
instead of people sitting in their seats eating bags of
peanuts watching Terminator Genesis. Uh, you find little piles of
(27:43):
clothes and a friend of mine. This is a funny.
Once actually told me that he watched a low budget
Christian apocalypse movie in which there's this this scene happens,
people disappear and their clothes are left behind. But he
says that the clothes were not only empty, but neatly
starched and folded, and in some shot you could see
that they still had price tags attached to them. But anyway,
(28:04):
people start screaming, wailing where did their loved ones go?
And at first it's a mystery, but then, uh, it
gradually becomes a parent that what the people who disappeared
had in common was their firm belief in Jesus Christ.
And this is this is a scene from Left Behind,
a popular work of Christian schatological fantasy fiction by Tim
(28:25):
Lahay and Jerry B. Jenkins. You've probably heard of this before, Robert,
I assume you're pretty familiar with Left Behind, right, Yes,
I am familiar with Left Behind, though though I have
to say I don't think it really picked up steam
in the church community I was a part of as
like as a as a kid and junior high in
high school student. Until after I was kind of, um,
(28:47):
you know, after I was less active in that community
where we were more into uh, this present darkness by
I think it's frank and that essentially was kind of
the whole series of books that had to do a
viiritual warfare. So it was more concerned with the idea
that kind of a a screw tape scenario was always
playing out all around us. And then there are angels
(29:08):
and demons like duking it out for your mind and yeah,
so that was big. I think those came out in
like eighty five initially, and Left Behind the first Left
Behind book came out in nine, so I think it
was out, but it was just really beginning to build steam.
Huh Okay. Well, so this scenario I've described and Left
Behind this is it is part of a work of
(29:30):
Christian fantasy fiction. But the idea is not just something
that the author's dreamed up. It's been a popular element
of Christian eschatology for many years. So where does this
idea of the rapture come from? That this is the rapture?
People are are they disappear? They've been raptured up. So
I would say it's a complex doctrine with varying theological interpretations,
(29:53):
but the general rapture belief is usually linked most directly
to a passage in First Thessalonians chapter four, where where
the author of the letter, presumed to be Paul, writes
for the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout,
with the voice of the archangel and with the trump
of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first.
(30:16):
Then we which are alive and remain, shall be caught
up together with them in the clouds to meet the
Lord in the air. So shall we ever be with
the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words. So
technically the rapture is actually people often use the rapture
as a term to signify the Christian escaton that you know,
(30:36):
the end of days, but it's actually just one event, uh,
sort of a moment from this whole complex system of
Christian eschatology. But the idea is that upon the moment
of the earthly return of Christ, dead Christians will be resurrected,
and living Christians will be miraculously sucked up into the
sky to meet the Lord, who is presumably descending from
(30:58):
above at the same moment. But there are some elements
of Christian eschatology that match very much what we were
talking about earlier with the idea of of apocalypses and
and utopias. So I mean, because that sounds like an
apocalypse for for pretty much everybody, Like that's going to
end the workday, no matter no matter what. Yeah, it's
always It's always played for horror in the Christian Apocalypse movies, right,
(31:22):
you know, people people start screaming, they don't know what's happened.
It is, uh, I guess it is assumed to be
a very positive event for the people who have been raptured,
but for those left on earth it is not a
very positive event. Now this is my own two sense,
but I wonder, I wonder if that the rapture narrative
as it's been popularized, uh in current society, if it
(31:44):
speaks to a desire for the kind of public, passive,
aggressive rectification of faith, you know, in an age of
perceived marginalization of traditional ridgious beliefs. So you get, you
get liberation from a weary world with just a hint
of a middle finger to those that are left behind
it didn't who didn't believe in what you believed and
didn't have the same faith that you had, which you know,
(32:06):
is arguably a better moral stance than fantasies of hell
fire and an eternal torment for those who don't agree
with you. But still, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't try
to psycho and I'm sure everybody's got different attitudes toward it,
but I'm sure for some people there is an element
of that is kind of like I'm out of here.
So yeah, you know, And today we're gonna be focusing
(32:26):
on what would be called Christian futurists. These are people
who think biblical prophecies are going to be fulfilled sometime
in the future. There are also other types of people
who interpret the Bible differently their pretors, who believe that
these prophecies were fulfilled during the events described in the
New Testament, or in the early years of the Church,
or sometime in the past. Uh. They're also those who
(32:48):
believe it's all a bit metaphorical. Really, But there are
very few broad concepts and distinctions in Christian futurists eschatological
thinking that that we can relate to in this episode.
So one is this big, the big event, the main show,
the second Coming of Christ. So Christians believe that that
Jesus Christ was martyred, rose from the dead, ascended to heaven,
(33:10):
and at some point after his ascension as described in
the Bible, Christ will return to Earth, or perhaps in
some sense has already returned literal or metaphorical. But in
any case, he comes back, and he's not here just
to visit. There's some schatological purpose to his return, and
there are different views on what that is, but usually
(33:31):
it involves some sort of putting the hammer down, like
there is an act of final judgment. Jesus is back
in this time. It's personal. Yeah, But then there's this
concept of the tribulation. So many Christians also believe that
immediately before the second coming of Christ, there will be
a time of great suffering. You know, it's often described
as war, persecution, hardship, hunger, pain, disease, destruction, and this
(33:57):
very bad period, this road warrior periods, as you might
want to associate it is known as the tribulation. This
is your apocalyptic aspect. And in the pop culture since
the term it's it's about as close as Christianity gets
to full road warrior. In a way, you can think
of it as kind of like the fattening of the
pig for for for slaughter. Right, If you think of
(34:17):
of hardship and warfare and human suffering is kind of
like the fertile soil from which you know, faith and
especially like strong faith can emerge, then that's Uh, that
that's kind of how I sometimes interpret this vision. Yeah,
and I think that's actually a concept you see throughout
the theological history of Christianity. There there's very much emphasis
(34:38):
on hardship causing people to strengthen their their faith or
their or their religious character. But so where does this
idea of the tribulation comes from. It comes from the
preaching of Jesus, essentially in the Book of Matthew, for example,
and he's talking about right before the Son of Man returns.
He says, for then shall be great tribut relations such
(35:00):
as was not since the beginning of the world to
this time, no nor ever shall be And except those
days should be shortened. There should no flesh be saved,
but for the elect sake, those days shall be shortened.
So something's gonna gonna cut off the tribulation. What's going
to happen? What will it be shortened by? Well, perhaps
it is the millennium. This is another concept from Christians chatology,
(35:24):
and it's a period of utopian rule on earth where
Christ himself or Christian Goodness generally will rule over the
earth for one thousand years. So sometimes this is interpreted
as a long period of time represented metaphorically by the
idea of a thousand years. Sometimes it's literally a thousand years.
But this comes primarily from the Book of Revelation, chapter twenty,
(35:45):
in which it said that those who have been martyred
for not having taken the mark of the beast on
their hands or their foreheads will be resurrected and rule
with Christ for a thousand years. Now, there are tons
of different ways that you can put all these can
steps together. They're there are different ideas about in what
order they come. Their pre millennialists who think that Christ's
(36:06):
second coming will happen right before the millennium begins. There
are post millennialists who think that Christ's second coming and
final judgment will happen at the end of the millennium.
And they're also among the pre millennialists. Some who think
the rapture is going to happen before the tribulation, in
the middle of the tribulation, or that the rapture won't
literally happen at all. So so there's a great diversity
(36:28):
of opinion. I don't want to represent them as all
thinking the same thing, And of course I should also
stress that there are plenty of Christians who don't really
buy into any of this in times framework. You know,
they're a millennialists that they're not they're not looking forward
to any kind of apocalypse or utopia on earth in
any sense. Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously it's going
(36:49):
to vary from from sack to sack, from individual to individual,
but it's I think it's definitely hard to argue that
at the at the end of the date is anything
that occurs and like a book of refel relation, does
anything concerning the end times really affect your day to
day that much? You know? Yeah, well I don't know,
it might, it might, And I want to make a
(37:10):
case actually why some people would say that belief in
the end time, whether religious or secular, does actually affect
the way we live our lives. Well, I guess it
depends on when you were you're throwing out that end time,
when you're throwing out that cataclysmic event, when you're throwing
out that utopia, if you think it's gonna occur near
enough in the future that you can actively structure your
(37:33):
life in accordance to it, I mean, that's one thing.
Well that that is a point that will be echoed
by somebody. I want to quote in a bit. Okay, So, Robert,
we we've talked about utopias, apocalypse is the end times,
the s chatological views of of what's coming down the road,
how soon it's coming, and is it going to be
good or is it going to be bad. But these
(37:55):
ideas are not, of course limited to religious believers, right right, Yeah,
We've had plenty of concepts that have been thrown out
there in terms in terms of uh, you know, secular utopia,
even a scientific utopia. I mean you can, if you
you can trace fictionalized versions of this journey all the
way back to the epic of Gilgamesh, humanity's earliest surviving
(38:15):
piece of literature, dating back to the second millennium BC,
in which which are our hero wants the secret of
immortality and failing that, realizes that the greatest aim is
to just build a city, just build an awesome city instead,
and then that's even you know that that's also really
hard work. Well, there's that project of civilization, right yeah.
But but even in just the epic Goodogamesh, we see
(38:35):
that quest for more life and a better system for
living as a people. Now, um I was reading a
wonderful two thousand twelve article from James J. Hughes titled
the Politics of trans human Humanism and the Techno Millennial
Imagination sixty six through uh and he traces trans humanism
(38:58):
and trans humanist thought back to and to the European
Enlightenment in the sevent hundreds. Now, sorry to interrupt, but
you and Christian did an episode about trans humanism recently, right, Yeah,
we we may have done a couple of them, now
that I think about it. Um, well, it's kind of
been a summer of trans humanism, if you will. So
we've you know, talked that we did an episode that
was devoted to just the general idea of trans humanism
(39:21):
and some of the different sects of trans humanism that
are present in the world. But can you give us
a one sentence digest basically that through science and technology,
we can create a better expression of the human form
and or human society, so we can we can live longer,
we can live happier, we can And this is where
(39:42):
the definition varies, because you have you have some people
whose idea of trans humanism is far more individual based.
So it's like, hey, some people are gonna live forever
and have spaceships and that's great. Other people are gonna say, well,
we're not really trans humanist unless everybody can live forever
and everybody has access to to spaceships, and you've solved
some of these other problems. So it gets it gets
(40:06):
it turns into a mire rather quickly, right. But it's
the idea of transcending the human animal. And well, so
do you want to transcend into the species level or
just modify your own body to transcend your birth nature. Yeah,
it's kind of the same idea that you see with
your topian models in general, where people will say, hey,
this is where we are, now, this is where we
(40:26):
would like to be. And then in addition to squabbles
about where you want to go, there's the inevitable problem
of how you get there. Okay, but back to James Hughes,
what's his argument. Okay, So he says that a lot
of transhumutism dates back to the European Enlightenment of the
seventeen hundreds, which allowed the same millennialist dreams we've discussed
(40:48):
in religious terms, Uh, these aspirations to grow, to grow
who we are, but instead of doing it on you know,
based on faith, based on the divine intervention or some
other model. It's it all has to do with reason
and science and technology. So machines will free us from
our labor, medicine will rid us of disease, and peace
will wash across the land. It's a basic Enlightenment tenants there. Um.
(41:12):
And of course somehow also acknowledged that we might have
some of the enlightenment. Thinker said, okay, we might have
to also fight a whole bunch of awful wars there. Yeah,
so we might have to go through a tribulation. Yeah,
exactly to the millennium. And in generally the details of
the ascension, the science of the rapture, if you will,
is ever varied, argued, and sometimes glossed over all altogether. Um.
(41:35):
But Hughes says, quote, it was in this stew of
often contradictory ideas about the nature of progress that modern
technomillennialism was forged. And you have a number of individuals,
early individuals who are getting involved in these ideas. Um.
Benjamin Franklin, William Godwin, or just too that argued that
humans would eventually conquer oppression, inequality, disease, and death. Um.
(41:59):
What about ditto? Ditto is interesting? Um, seventeen sixty nine.
Uh in his work, uh De Almbert's Dream proposed that
human brains might be taken apart and then put back together,
that intelligent animals and animal human hybrids might be possible.
And this one's the big kicker. Sophisticated machines might have mine. Oh,
(42:21):
I'm going to talk about that in a minute, because
there is plenty of artificial intelligence eschatology right now. The
post Enlightenment quest for better life, for utopia even um,
obviously we could spend multiple podcasts if we wanted to
just talking about that, all the the individual expressions of this,
(42:44):
uh of this, this this grasping. But in short, you
see a number of different social movements, right, you see
you see everything from anarchism and liberalism, social democracy, Marxist lenin, Leninism, fascism.
It's right, all these different models of this is what
we need to do. This is how we need to
reorganize ourselves, cast out that the old, embrace the new,
(43:08):
and we're gonna be better for it. And of course
none of them really worked out quite as intended, even
the ones that arguably worked right, Well, what's your beef
with social democracy? No? I love social democracy. But uh,
let's just say that we're done always we're still working
out the kinks. Yeah, I can see that. And of
(43:32):
course we would be remiss if we didn't mention eugenics, right,
I mean, that's a utopian vision that's now widely regarded
as a as an utterly bankrupt and evil idea. Yeah,
it's and it's fascinating because in a post it's like
a postar in a post oar winning world eugenics. If
you strip away all the horrible things that came out
(43:53):
of it, if you just like basically, if you stripped
the meat off of the carcass of eugenics and you
just look at the bones, you can say, well, that
seems to make a certain amount of sense, right, treat
you know, basically selectively breed humanity to improve the expression
of the human species. It's something that that that sounds
(44:15):
fine until you think about process. You know, so what
is the process of doing that? Well, that requires either
killing people who you think harbor less desirable genes or
not allowing them to breed, or not allowing them to
breed at the same rate as people who you think
possessed desirable genes. Also, in the process is the idea
(44:36):
of selection. Who gets to pick which genes are desirable.
Some people might think, well, it's not just genes that
prevent certain diseases and make people live longer and stuff
like that. Some people might think that certain uh, you know,
continental origins are more preferable than others, and so you
get into really nasty territory. But I think what's interesting
(44:57):
here is that eugenics is really not that different from
the idea of the Christian rapture, right, because then in eugenics,
it's basically this idea that selected races and gene lineages
are going to be lifted up and essentially the rest
are doomed. So it's an it's an an elevation. It's
an ascension of certain models of humanity in the same
(45:18):
way that a Christian rapture means the elevation and survival
of certain very particular modes of human thought, faith, and reason. Well, yeah,
this does sort of highlight that they're There are very
different ways of thinking about the idea of of utopia
and apocalypse at the end of times. Is is it
egalitarian in nature? Like does does the destruction that's coming
(45:40):
or the great blessing that's coming apply to everyone or
does it only apply to some One person's utopia is
another person's apocalypse, right, It could be very much and
often within the same system. Is now fast forward a bit,
skip over a lot of stuff, and you kind of
get to our current Can we condemn eugenics and move on? Yeah? Yeah,
Having condemned eugenics and moving on, we get into another
(46:02):
area here. Uh, certainly into more of our current transhumanist
ideas and a lot of the fascinating material that we've
even discussed on the show about genetic engineering, genetic manipulation
UM that are in many ways not that different from
some some some of the goals and aspirations of eugenics,
but achieved or potentially achieved through you know, far less
(46:28):
morally reprehensible. Means the idea of simply selecting how genes
are expressed in our children, creating genetically modified UM expressions
that are more ideal without actively harming anybody. Okay, so yeah,
it's essentially taking the core nut of eugenics but applying
(46:52):
it in an individual consent level and saying we're not
killing anybody or telling anybody they can't breed. Yeah, And
on top of this we have of, you know, various
other models of trans humanist um ascension, right, technological augmentation, cyborgs,
virtual worlds, space exploration, colonization because let's remember, you know
a lot of the ideas of exploration and particularly colonization
(47:15):
of other worlds. It's about the long term survival of
the human race, right. And in fact, there's a there's
a two thousand twelve book that came out from Corey
dr Ow and Charles Stross titled The Rapture of the Nerds,
which which I have not read, uh my first and
interesting things about it, but it is in effect that
term is referring to a trans humanist elevation of at
(47:37):
least certain individuals and some of the problems that occur there. Yeah, well,
I mean, I certainly I don't know to what extent
this makes the idea of trans humanism religious in nature.
And that's something we can talk about, is you know,
to what extent does a similarity to a religious idea
make an idea of religious I don't know if I
(47:58):
would say trans humanism is a religio gen or not.
You might be able to make that argument, but in
any case, I I do see parallels to, for example,
the idea and Christianity of resurrection bodies. You know, the
idea that the those who are dead in Christ, upon
Christ's return will be resurrected in in bodies made of
like a like a better spiritual material. It sounds a
(48:19):
lot like trans human body modification to me, Like you
have your body remade in a way that will never age,
will never die, will somehow still be you, but won't
be that crappy body you had before. Yeah. I don't
think it's so much that the trans humanism is religious
in nature, but some of these religious models we've been
discussing they share the same energy as as trans humanism,
(48:40):
Like they're similar fears, similar aspirations about who we are
and where we're going. All right, everybody, We actually have
much more on this topic, but we went so long
we're splitting it into two episodes, So come back next
time and we will continue this discussion of of rat sure,
trans humanism, utopianism, and then of course, how we as
(49:03):
humans deal with these these prophecies, both secular and spiritual,
when they do not come to pass. In the meantime,
reach out to us on all the normal platforms you'll
find us a stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
You'll find us on Facebook and Twitter as well as
Tumbler and Instagram, and if you want to email us,
you can do so as always, that blow the mind
(49:24):
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com? Poor Moor p
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
It's vault time. What's in the Vault today? In the
Vault today is going to be part one of a
two parter that we did back in August of This
one originally aired August, and it's The trans Humanist Rapture War,
(00:26):
Part one, The trans Humanist Rapture War. I remember this one, Yeah,
I mostly remember. This one's kind of a blur for me,
but I remember we we got to get into a
lot of cool trans humanist territory and also discuss UH
ideas of the Christian rapture and some of the overlap
between these two ideas about our future. Yeah. I think
(00:48):
a lot of it had to do with UH, with
parallels between sort of technological utopianism and ideas that are
contained in popular world religions. Yeah, so this one will
be an exciting one to re air. This will actually
be an exciting topic if we want to, we may
be able to revisit because I feel like, even though
it's uh, you know, it hasn't even been two years
(01:08):
since this one aired, we've we've covered a lot of
additional ground. Uh that that is, that is in this
topic area. Oh heck, you could do a whole podcast
itself on on like techno utopianism and this whole cast
of thinking. Yeah, all right, well let's dive in. Welcome
to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works
(01:30):
dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and my name is Joe McCormick.
And Hey, Robert, I've got a question for you. Any
time in your life have you ever had the feeling
the things are about to come to a very serious conclusion.
(01:53):
And I don't mean like the meeting you're in right now,
I mean the world. Did you ever get that feeling
like you're living in the end times? This has got
to be the last of days? No um. Sometimes I
feel I sometimes I wonder what if the next moment
is going to be the last moment? Like, but it's
(02:15):
always there's always going to be some sort of harbinger
of destruction, right, So I don't I look up into
the sky and think, Hey, what would it be like
to see the you know, civilization busting near earth object
entering the atmosphere? I think about things like that, But
even then I'll have like a few more minutes to
process it. It all does have to come to an
(02:36):
end at some point, so it makes you wonder if
that end is near. And in fact, I think some
people have made statistical arguments that if you assume, okay,
I'm a random observer not a privileged observer. Uh, the
the statistical argument is that humanity has got to be
ending pretty soon because if human if the human population
(02:57):
continues to grow, that any many more randomly selected observers
will be among those born in the future than those
that are living you know, right now or have lived
in the past. And so if we you assume that
you are the middle of the road random observer and
not one of the tail end, then humanity has got
(03:18):
to end pretty soon. I don't really huh, because I
always would think, well, I'm not a privileged observer, why
do I get to live in the end times, Like,
surely I'm at least living in like the penultimate age
and not the ultimate age of man. Well, that instinct
of yours is I would say, fairly unique, because it
is very common for people to think that they are
(03:39):
living in a very privileged time. Have you noticed that. Yeah, well, no,
I think I'm living in a privileged time. I mean
compared with before. I don't mean materially privileged. I think
that's true too. I think we are some of the
luckiest people and the golden age of television, Joe, have
you seen these shows? Yeah, I'm assuming you're referring to
the fact that we can still get quantumly pre run
every now and then. But but yeah, we're materially privileged.
(04:03):
But uh, but I also mean privileged in terms of
I happen to be the person who's of the generation
that's alive when it all comes to the end. So
today's episode is going to be about the field of eschatology,
which is both theological and ostensibly secular, but it's the
(04:23):
study of the end of times. What what happens when
there is a conclusion to it all the either the
end of the human species or a very significant transition
of the human species into another kind of being, or
a very significant transition of the human species into a
very different kind of situation or station, either ushering in
(04:46):
a utopia that brings happiness and prosperity for all, or
you know, an apocalyptic vision. Uh. And we can get
into what these words mean in a minute, but that
brings destruction and calamity and uh, you know road warrior
kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's so much of
it hinges on this feeling that we're talking about, where
it just it seems like something's gotta give, something's gotta break,
(05:09):
something's gotta change for better or worse. It it always
takes me back to to the Yates poem. Right, surely
the second coming is at hand, like, surely something is
about to get the falcon cannot hear the falcon? Or man,
something's going wrong. Yeah, passionate enthusiasm among the worst, right,
passionate passionate intensity intensity? Yes, that's even better. Yeah, what's
(05:32):
the exact line. The the best lack all conviction, and
the worst are filled with passionate intensity. I very often
find that's true. You know, some of the some of
the best people I know with the best opinions don't
speak up that often. But man, people who have bad
opinions are allowed as heck, well, they don't have to
(05:52):
worry as much about saying the wrong thing, do that. No, Well,
I mean it helps when you're never wrong. Yeah, So
let's let's let's get into it here. Um, first of all,
let's just talk a little bit about basic human utopianism.
You know, I want to share a fact with you, Robert. Yeah,
I always assumed that the you in the word utopia
(06:12):
comes from the Greek prefix meaning good, as in uh,
you know, euphoria, the good feeling. But that is not
actually where it comes from too. So the title Utopia,
of course, can be traced back to Thomas Moore's book
Utopia and the sort of fictional but also philosophical treatise
on what a perfect society might look like. You could
look at it as a sort of update to Plato's
(06:34):
Republic in a way, or a laying out of the
groundwork of you know, how could we achieve a perfect world?
And so if utopia and that since had meant it
had been the way I understood it, it would have
meant good place. You know, you utopia a good place.
But the U is not actually eu as in good place,
but it's you as in no place, because it didn't exist, right, Okay,
(06:59):
Well that makes sense. Yeah, so I think that's something
that we should keep in mind. Going all the more reason,
I guess that microsoft word is always telling me that
dystopia is not a word, really, yeah, or at least
I get that. I get that correction all the time.
I mean, obviously, dystopia has come to have a meaning
for us. It's the opposite of utopia, as this dissident
(07:19):
vision of the future. Right. But well, before we get
to dystopia, walk me through utopia, Robert. All right, So,
and really, intofining utopia, we essentially define dystopia human experiences.
Of course, you can think of it as the spark
on the line right between the expanse of the past
and the expanse of the future. It's like, you know,
it's like like a cartoon fuse to a bomb, right,
(07:41):
and we're just sparking along. And humans have thrived in
large part by their ability to perceive and mold that future.
All right. We developed new ways of doing this doing
the things we always did, hunting, farm and crafting, as
what was the ways we think about the world, cosmology, society, etcetera.
And so we ink of human existence, if we think
(08:01):
of human existence has to spark upon the fuse of time.
We judge the soon to ignite, and the igniting based
on the charred and flaming remnants of what proceeded is
and we we we come to look beyond and imagine
near and far futures on this very line. And so
humans across cultures and times have sought to radically transform
(08:24):
their existence socially, bodily, technologically, etcetera, all as as a
ways to try and and better ourselves and better the
way that we live on this world. Yeah. I think
that's true. And of course, if you look at the
basic human project of civilization as one that tends towards
creating a better life for all of us, it's easy
(08:47):
to look at that and conclude, well, than a successful
execution of this project would end in utopia. Yeah. Yeah,
it's it's kind of like the it's it's the notion
that if a city is essentially engineering, engineering exercise, there
should be some idealized version of the city that we're
aspiring to and then eventually we can get there. Yeah.
(09:08):
In this case, you know, the city is not just
a literal city, but the city is the model for
the you know, all things civilization. Now, I would argue
I think that one reason we sense attention here, Like
you might say, well, I don't expect us to ever
reach utopia. But I do advocate civilization continuing to try
to improve the lives of everyone for as long as possible. Uh,
(09:30):
doesn't that seem a contradiction. I would say that the
main contradiction lies in the incoherence of the idea of perfection.
You can't create a perfect society because that idea doesn't
make sense. There are inherent tensions in society. People want
different things, and so there there is no such thing
as a perfect society for everyone. Yeah. I mean, you
could make this more or less idealized building in which
(09:54):
people are going to live and work, But then what
are you gonna set the thermostat to right? Because some
people are going to be who hot? Some people are
gonna be too cold? Some people what? People want to
wear a hoodie in the office. Some people want to
sit there and sweat. Now, one way you could get
out of this bind is by saying, you know, this
project of continually trying to improve human civilization is going
(10:14):
to be cut short, and it is going to be
cut short by supernatural forces. So you're talking about a
an apocalypse of spiritual apocalypse. Yes, And I think it
is very worth mentioning something about the etymology here the
word apocalypse. Now, the word apocalypse originally did not mean
mad max uh. It originally meant an unveiling or a revelation. So,
(10:36):
for instance, the Book of Revelation in the Bible, in
the New Testament is sometimes known as the Apocalypse of John,
means the same thing, the revelation to John John wrote down.
So it's a vision that he had all these cryptic
things that are playing out at the end of time exactly.
So a revelation it could reveal knowledge, visions, understanding, or
(10:58):
very often predictions of the future. And I think because
of associations with predictions about the future and the Book
of Revelation itself, the word apocalypse is a word that
has come to be associated with end to times events,
either the end of the world, the end of humanity,
or some radical change in station and the fortune of humankind.
(11:21):
And we should go ahead and say when you use
the word apocalypse that change is usually for the worst, right.
People don't usually say apocalypse in a positive way, like
there will be an apocalypse and we'll it will lead
to utopia, which is interesting considering the fact that the
the origin of the word stems from a story that
is supposedly about the the victory of the eventual victory
(11:41):
of all things good over all things evil. Right. Yeah,
there are a lot of different Christian visions of the
end times, and we'll talk about them in this episode today,
but they typically involve both very negative events and ultimately
a perfectly positive event. But so the popular version of apocalypse, yeah,
we we associate with kind of post apocalyptic movies again,
(12:02):
the Road Warrior perfect example, great movie. Human civilization as
we formerly know it has ended and everything has just
gone to hell. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold right,
and you need guzzoline. So it's also worth stressing here
that plenty of religions do not depend on such a
linear time frame and instead have a cyclical and certainly
(12:24):
we see this in the older religions, the pre Christian religions.
Plenty of religions are more concerned with cosmological origins underlying
everyday reality and less of any notion on ending. So
for in for example, for example, in Hinduism, the universe
is continually created, preserve, destroyed, and created again. It's an
endless cycle, and the process of creation moves and these
(12:45):
large overarching cycles, and each cycle has four great um
epochs of time. The concept of reincarnation works alongside this
is life flows into life, flows into life. I like
this because it mirrors some different hypotheses about the ultimate
nature of the universe. Now we don't know yet what
the ultimate nature of the universe is, but there are
(13:05):
some cosmological models in which, for example, our local universe
maybe a bouncing universe where it it collapses into a
singularity and then re explodes back into a universe with
distributed matter and energy all over the place, or even
like a bouncy house where it's it's inflated in the
morning and the nsipuke in it all day, described out
(13:27):
with chlorox bleach and deflated the evening. Yes, it is
kind of like that too. But there is another apocalyptic
spiritual event that I wanted to call attention to just
because it's so cool. I can't pretend to understand it
all that well because it's Norse mythology, and Norse mythology,
I feel like is is a more impenetrable to the
(13:48):
outsider type of mythology than things like Greek mythology or
do you find that too. There's I mean, I feel
like I can get it a lot more when I
listened to death metal. Okay, I think that's that's how
I tend to Ryan process it. Think of like extreme
survivalist situations. Uh, and the and the and the resulting
pantheon of gods, the resulting time frame of events that
(14:10):
would that would shape that and be shaped by that. Well. Yeah,
in that popular sense of apocalyptic Norse mythology has some
great apocalyptic events that they've got Ragnarok and it's this
epic eschatological battle involving God's monsters, chaos. There's this disastrous
(14:35):
cataclysmic winter, the mountains crumble, this giant sea serpent comes
up and spits venom over all the earth and poisons
the waters. And there's this huge slog down, bloody battle
where most of the gods get killed. Uh it's brutal,
but hey, it would be an extreme bummer of a
religion that just ends with a cataclysmic disaster for everyone
(14:59):
and has nothing positive to come of it. So so
many religions also sort of have spiritual utopias in their
eschatological framework, right that the end times will result in
some kind of very positive situation for many people at least.
That's right now. Obviously we're going to get to the
Christian models here in a minute, but before we get there,
(15:21):
I want to just touch base on on some Buddhist
ideas here. So there's a recurring theme in Hinduism and
Buddhism that one may escape the endless cycle of death
and rebirth, the wheel of sam Sara and attain liberation um.
And you can interpret such liberation as it's as its
own form of ending or perfection even but it's also
(15:43):
kind of a it's a form of escape, perform an
ending that can be acquired at any point along the line.
So there's not you don't have to wait till the
end times or some distant future to attain liberation to
reach nirvana. So the inner journey as opposed to a
physical world journey, yeah, asynchronous timelines. That being said, um,
(16:04):
there is a pretty cool um idea out there, and
that is the belief system within Buddhism that's a millennial
Buddhist in particular. Uh. They have this, uh, this character
known as my Trea, and my Trea is the Bodhisattva,
the being, an enlightenment of the future who will arrive
on Earth. Generally, I've seen some numbers thrown out there,
(16:27):
but just it's gonna be a long time in the future,
trust me. No, Robert, you have a number in our notes,
I can tell us. Okay, I have a number, and
this is a This one comes from a from my
belief Japanese model. There's a sect of Buddhist monks there
that are devoted to my trio and I and I
forgive me, I do not recall the Japanese name from
(16:48):
my trea off the top of my head. But it
is what five billion years in the future. My reading
that those are a lot of zeros. Uh No, that
would be five trillion, trillion, six seventy billion years. So
it's no way sixties seven, six and seventy billion years.
It's a colossal number. And it's from that this would
be this is gonna be like a far future time
(17:11):
when people live to incredible ages. I want to say
eighty thousand years old. So huge numbers involved here, and
my treo would be the ultimate successor to our current Buddha.
Um sidhard Gotama got him a Buddha and uh this
Buddha will achieve complete enlightenment and teach pure dharma here
(17:31):
on earth and I just want to read a quick quote.
This is from book of My Tree of the Future
Buddha by Alan Spenberg, says quote, the prospect of a
future Buddha, yet another in the long line of Buddhas,
offers an attractive possibility. Although liberation from suffering is possible
for anyone at any time, according to Buddhist those being
(17:53):
fortunate enough to live at a time when a Buddha
is active in the world are far more likely to
realize the arduous goal of ringing all craving to cessation.
Though perhaps initially a minor figure in the early Buddhist tradition,
my tread thus comes to represent a hope for the future,
a time when all human beings could once again enjoy
the spiritual and physical environment most favorable to enlightenment and
(18:17):
the release from worldly suffering. I think that's fascinating because
the very positive situation here, that the utopia that's being
brought about isn't one necessarily of material fulfillment, but one
of the realization of the lack of necessity for material fulfillment.
Very often, when you see like a heaven or just
(18:38):
any kind of very positive, spiritually imagined future situation, people
people speak of material comforts. Yeah, yeah, and indeed this, uh,
this particular idea, I guess would only entail material comforts,
and insofar as they enable you to seek inner enlightenment
(18:58):
and realize that you don't need material comes right. Okay,
So a lot of what we're gonna be talking about
in this episode is not just spiritual, religious supernatural frameworks
for eschatology, but actually secular and very often scientific or
technological frameworks for eschatology. And there are just like we
talked about religious apocalypses and religious future utopias, there are
(19:21):
secular apocalypses and secular future utopias. Yeah. And I think
the fascinating thing here and and and something prev going
to keep in mind as we we play with this
topic here today is that there's so much shared circuitry
involved with both ideas. So, you know, it's it's easy
for for for an atheist to stand on one side
(19:42):
and scoff at some of these spiritual ideas of utopia
and salvation and destruction. But when you break it down,
how different is the underlying experience of those ideas? How
different is that from some of these secular ideas we're
discussing now, well, that's a to question. I think we
should discuss them and explore. Well, as far as secular
(20:03):
apocalypses go, we really don't even have to to mention
many of them. I mean that they're pretty obvious. The
idea of nuclear annihilation, of global cataclysm green goo, greg goo. Um.
I don't even know if this one's a thing, but
I'm gonna go and say it, brown goo. Who knows? Um? Singularity? Um?
I I love our Scott Baker's idea of a semantic apocalypse,
(20:25):
which one is that semantic apocalypse is basically just the
death of meaning. Where we reached this point from where
we have a certain neuroscientific understanding of the human experience,
and uh, we realize that all human consciousness is a
coin trick, and we explain the coin trick. Oh, it's
kind of a Nietzsche in despair. Yeah, well, all of
(20:47):
those are possible things that people could predict happening, you know.
So you've got green goo, grey goo. You know, people
talking about nanotechnology or something that could take over the world.
We don't even have that kind of nanotechnology yet, and
maybe we never could. Uh, it could just be something
impossible that people are dreaming up. But on the other hand, ultimately,
if we assume that our current understanding of physics is
(21:10):
basically correct, and we think it probably is, I mean,
there's a lot we don't know, but what we do
know we're pretty confident about, and that the laws of
physics don't change with time. Our scientific picture of the
universe does very firmly predict one type of scaton that
is unsurvivable. Right, And I want to read a section
(21:31):
from a book I've been reading. Actually, it's a book
by the physicist Sean Carroll called The Big Picture, and
he's talking about the physical cosmological model of what's going
to happen to the universe after a while. So he
talks about the accelerating expansion of the universe, and that's
fueled by the pull of vacuum energy, you know, the
the energy out there that's causing the galaxies to expand
(21:53):
farther and farther apart. Uh, And that all tells us
more or less what's going to happen. He writes, quote,
it's possible, and in some sense would be simplest for
the accelerated expansion to simply continue without end. That leads
to a somewhat lonely future for our universe. Right now,
the night sky is alive with brightly shining stars and
(22:14):
galaxies that can't last forever. Stars use up their fuel
and will eventually fade to black. Astronomers estimate that the
last dim star will wink out around one quadrillion or
ten to the fifteen years from now. Okay, that's well,
that's well after the age of my Trea. Yeah, good
to know. Yeah, though, who knows how long my Treya lives.
(22:36):
Just throwing that out there. My Trea could could have
something to say about these stars burning up all their fuel.
But anyway, Carol continues. By then, other galaxies will have
moved far away, and our local group of galaxies will
be populated by planets, dead stars, and black holes. One
by one, those planets and dead stars will fall into
the black holes, which in turn will join into one
(22:58):
supermassive black hole. Ultimately, as Stephen Hawking taught us, even
those black holes will evaporate. After about one google or
tend to the one hundred years, all of the black
holes in our observable universe will have evaporated into a
thin mist of particles which will grow more and more
dilute as space continues to expand. The end result of
(23:21):
this are most likely scenario for the future of the
universe is nothing but cold empty space, which will last
literally forever. Well that's uh, that's nice and dark, literally
and figuratively. So then again, it sounds like that mist
of particles. That sounds kind of refreshing. Yeah, I mean,
(23:41):
but also it's you're dealing with such a long period
of time here, it's kind of it's kind of like
the idea of the humanless universal, lifeless universe. It's really
more just returned to normal normalcy universe, right, I mean,
we were not around for ages and ages and ages
for the vast major already of cosmological time. Yeah, so
(24:02):
what's it mattered that we're not going to survive in
the long run either. Well, I'm just trying to offer
an example of how you don't have to get far
out into left field with crazy technological predictions in order
to say that at some point there will be an end.
There will be an endpoint to humanity. Uh that you know,
it's it's hard to survive the energy evaporation death of
(24:24):
the universe unless in a post my Trea world we
have figured out ways technologically to escape into alternate universes.
So true, in those doors to alternate universes, maybe our salvation,
but you might not have to walk through a door
to reach a very different kind of world that might
be much better than the one we have. Because there
are also secular visions of utopias right there, most certainly are.
(24:47):
It doesn't have to be heaven. It can be we
can make heaven here on earth, according to some people. Yeah,
I mean, in a way, a lot of these remind
me of the my Trea vision, the idea that you're
gonna you're gonna have a world where people are going
to be able to find peace. Um. So we have
various models from this, I mean some of the ones
that are more scientifically based. We have various ideas about
(25:09):
what a post scarcity society might be. Transhumanist existence, um,
the the the essential Star Trek model of life on
Earth right where everybody's gotten to the point where we
get along. We have technology that we have holio decks,
and we have machines that will just create whatever food
we need on demand, new ages of human consciousness, uh,
(25:31):
and various positive spins on the technological singularity Yeah. Now,
if you don't know that much about the singularity, or
even if you do, we're gonna be talking about that
at more length later on, and how that fits into
ideas of religious eschatology. And then, of course, there are
so many different secular models of utopia that are that
are that are based on how we can build a
(25:52):
better society um, various utopian cults, various utopian mindsets that
have been thrown out air, new political models, ways of
organizing ourselves, ways of building that better city that rely
less on technology and more on simply the ordering of
ourselves and the ordering of the inner self. All right,
(26:14):
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we will explore the Christian rapture. All right, we're back
to rap about the Christian Rapture. I wonder if there
has been any Christian hip hop that has expressly concerned
itself with the rapture. I would love to hear about it.
(26:36):
Quite sure that has happened. Well, you know there's that
Blondie song, right ra sure? No, is that about the rapture? No?
I don't think so. But it's very weird, is that
the one? I think that's the one about the man
for Mars. He's eating cars, and now he goes out
and needs guitars. I'm not sure which which part of
the back Book of Revelation she's referring to. There. The
(26:58):
Book of Revelation is full of wonderfully strange imagry, and
that would that would fit right in actually, But okay,
so the Christian rapture. I wanna just put you in
a scenario. You're on a plane. There may or may
not be snakes on the plane, doesn't matter either way.
Suddenly many people on the plane have disappeared, possibly including
(27:20):
the pilot and co pilot, but thankfully for you this time,
not the pilot and copilot. Is this a lingual ears thing? No,
But I am describing a scene from a popular novel,
and we'll get to that in just a minute. So
the people are gone where you would have normally found them. Uh,
instead of people sitting in their seats eating bags of
peanuts watching Terminator Genesis. Uh, you find little piles of
(27:43):
clothes and a friend of mine. This is a funny.
Once actually told me that he watched a low budget
Christian apocalypse movie in which there's this this scene happens,
people disappear and their clothes are left behind. But he
says that the clothes were not only empty, but neatly
starched and folded, and in some shot you could see
that they still had price tags attached to them. But anyway,
(28:04):
people start screaming, wailing where did their loved ones go?
And at first it's a mystery, but then, uh, it
gradually becomes a parent that what the people who disappeared
had in common was their firm belief in Jesus Christ.
And this is this is a scene from Left Behind,
a popular work of Christian schatological fantasy fiction by Tim
(28:25):
Lahay and Jerry B. Jenkins. You've probably heard of this before, Robert,
I assume you're pretty familiar with Left Behind, right, Yes,
I am familiar with Left Behind, though though I have
to say I don't think it really picked up steam
in the church community I was a part of as
like as a as a kid and junior high in
high school student. Until after I was kind of, um,
(28:47):
you know, after I was less active in that community
where we were more into uh, this present darkness by
I think it's frank and that essentially was kind of
the whole series of books that had to do a
viiritual warfare. So it was more concerned with the idea
that kind of a a screw tape scenario was always
playing out all around us. And then there are angels
(29:08):
and demons like duking it out for your mind and yeah,
so that was big. I think those came out in
like eighty five initially, and Left Behind the first Left
Behind book came out in nine, so I think it
was out, but it was just really beginning to build steam.
Huh Okay. Well, so this scenario I've described and Left
Behind this is it is part of a work of
(29:30):
Christian fantasy fiction. But the idea is not just something
that the author's dreamed up. It's been a popular element
of Christian eschatology for many years. So where does this
idea of the rapture come from? That this is the rapture?
People are are they disappear? They've been raptured up. So
I would say it's a complex doctrine with varying theological interpretations,
(29:53):
but the general rapture belief is usually linked most directly
to a passage in First Thessalonians chapter four, where where
the author of the letter, presumed to be Paul, writes
for the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout,
with the voice of the archangel and with the trump
of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first.
(30:16):
Then we which are alive and remain, shall be caught
up together with them in the clouds to meet the
Lord in the air. So shall we ever be with
the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words. So
technically the rapture is actually people often use the rapture
as a term to signify the Christian escaton that you know,
(30:36):
the end of days, but it's actually just one event, uh,
sort of a moment from this whole complex system of
Christian eschatology. But the idea is that upon the moment
of the earthly return of Christ, dead Christians will be resurrected,
and living Christians will be miraculously sucked up into the
sky to meet the Lord, who is presumably descending from
(30:58):
above at the same moment. But there are some elements
of Christian eschatology that match very much what we were
talking about earlier with the idea of of apocalypses and
and utopias. So I mean, because that sounds like an
apocalypse for for pretty much everybody, Like that's going to
end the workday, no matter no matter what. Yeah, it's
always It's always played for horror in the Christian Apocalypse movies, right,
(31:22):
you know, people people start screaming, they don't know what's happened.
It is, uh, I guess it is assumed to be
a very positive event for the people who have been raptured,
but for those left on earth it is not a
very positive event. Now this is my own two sense,
but I wonder, I wonder if that the rapture narrative
as it's been popularized, uh in current society, if it
(31:44):
speaks to a desire for the kind of public, passive,
aggressive rectification of faith, you know, in an age of
perceived marginalization of traditional ridgious beliefs. So you get, you
get liberation from a weary world with just a hint
of a middle finger to those that are left behind
it didn't who didn't believe in what you believed and
didn't have the same faith that you had, which you know,
(32:06):
is arguably a better moral stance than fantasies of hell
fire and an eternal torment for those who don't agree
with you. But still, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't try
to psycho and I'm sure everybody's got different attitudes toward it,
but I'm sure for some people there is an element
of that is kind of like I'm out of here.
So yeah, you know, And today we're gonna be focusing
(32:26):
on what would be called Christian futurists. These are people
who think biblical prophecies are going to be fulfilled sometime
in the future. There are also other types of people
who interpret the Bible differently their pretors, who believe that
these prophecies were fulfilled during the events described in the
New Testament, or in the early years of the Church,
or sometime in the past. Uh. They're also those who
(32:48):
believe it's all a bit metaphorical. Really, But there are
very few broad concepts and distinctions in Christian futurists eschatological
thinking that that we can relate to in this episode.
So one is this big, the big event, the main show,
the second Coming of Christ. So Christians believe that that
Jesus Christ was martyred, rose from the dead, ascended to heaven,
(33:10):
and at some point after his ascension as described in
the Bible, Christ will return to Earth, or perhaps in
some sense has already returned literal or metaphorical. But in
any case, he comes back, and he's not here just
to visit. There's some schatological purpose to his return, and
there are different views on what that is, but usually
(33:31):
it involves some sort of putting the hammer down, like
there is an act of final judgment. Jesus is back
in this time. It's personal. Yeah, But then there's this
concept of the tribulation. So many Christians also believe that
immediately before the second coming of Christ, there will be
a time of great suffering. You know, it's often described
as war, persecution, hardship, hunger, pain, disease, destruction, and this
(33:57):
very bad period, this road warrior periods, as you might
want to associate it is known as the tribulation. This
is your apocalyptic aspect. And in the pop culture since
the term it's it's about as close as Christianity gets
to full road warrior. In a way, you can think
of it as kind of like the fattening of the
pig for for for slaughter. Right, If you think of
(34:17):
of hardship and warfare and human suffering is kind of
like the fertile soil from which you know, faith and
especially like strong faith can emerge, then that's Uh, that
that's kind of how I sometimes interpret this vision. Yeah,
and I think that's actually a concept you see throughout
the theological history of Christianity. There there's very much emphasis
(34:38):
on hardship causing people to strengthen their their faith or
their or their religious character. But so where does this
idea of the tribulation comes from. It comes from the
preaching of Jesus, essentially in the Book of Matthew, for example,
and he's talking about right before the Son of Man returns.
He says, for then shall be great tribut relations such
(35:00):
as was not since the beginning of the world to
this time, no nor ever shall be And except those
days should be shortened. There should no flesh be saved,
but for the elect sake, those days shall be shortened.
So something's gonna gonna cut off the tribulation. What's going
to happen? What will it be shortened by? Well, perhaps
it is the millennium. This is another concept from Christians chatology,
(35:24):
and it's a period of utopian rule on earth where
Christ himself or Christian Goodness generally will rule over the
earth for one thousand years. So sometimes this is interpreted
as a long period of time represented metaphorically by the
idea of a thousand years. Sometimes it's literally a thousand years.
But this comes primarily from the Book of Revelation, chapter twenty,
(35:45):
in which it said that those who have been martyred
for not having taken the mark of the beast on
their hands or their foreheads will be resurrected and rule
with Christ for a thousand years. Now, there are tons
of different ways that you can put all these can
steps together. They're there are different ideas about in what
order they come. Their pre millennialists who think that Christ's
(36:06):
second coming will happen right before the millennium begins. There
are post millennialists who think that Christ's second coming and
final judgment will happen at the end of the millennium.
And they're also among the pre millennialists. Some who think
the rapture is going to happen before the tribulation, in
the middle of the tribulation, or that the rapture won't
literally happen at all. So so there's a great diversity
(36:28):
of opinion. I don't want to represent them as all
thinking the same thing, And of course I should also
stress that there are plenty of Christians who don't really
buy into any of this in times framework. You know,
they're a millennialists that they're not they're not looking forward
to any kind of apocalypse or utopia on earth in
any sense. Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously it's going
(36:49):
to vary from from sack to sack, from individual to individual,
but it's I think it's definitely hard to argue that
at the at the end of the date is anything
that occurs and like a book of refel relation, does
anything concerning the end times really affect your day to
day that much? You know? Yeah, well I don't know,
it might, it might, And I want to make a
(37:10):
case actually why some people would say that belief in
the end time, whether religious or secular, does actually affect
the way we live our lives. Well, I guess it
depends on when you were you're throwing out that end time,
when you're throwing out that cataclysmic event, when you're throwing
out that utopia, if you think it's gonna occur near
enough in the future that you can actively structure your
(37:33):
life in accordance to it, I mean, that's one thing.
Well that that is a point that will be echoed
by somebody. I want to quote in a bit. Okay, So, Robert,
we we've talked about utopias, apocalypse is the end times,
the s chatological views of of what's coming down the road,
how soon it's coming, and is it going to be
good or is it going to be bad. But these
(37:55):
ideas are not, of course limited to religious believers, right right, Yeah,
We've had plenty of concepts that have been thrown out
there in terms in terms of uh, you know, secular utopia,
even a scientific utopia. I mean you can, if you
you can trace fictionalized versions of this journey all the
way back to the epic of Gilgamesh, humanity's earliest surviving
(38:15):
piece of literature, dating back to the second millennium BC,
in which which are our hero wants the secret of
immortality and failing that, realizes that the greatest aim is
to just build a city, just build an awesome city instead,
and then that's even you know that that's also really
hard work. Well, there's that project of civilization, right yeah.
But but even in just the epic Goodogamesh, we see
(38:35):
that quest for more life and a better system for
living as a people. Now, um I was reading a
wonderful two thousand twelve article from James J. Hughes titled
the Politics of trans human Humanism and the Techno Millennial
Imagination sixty six through uh and he traces trans humanism
(38:58):
and trans humanist thought back to and to the European
Enlightenment in the sevent hundreds. Now, sorry to interrupt, but
you and Christian did an episode about trans humanism recently, right, Yeah,
we we may have done a couple of them, now
that I think about it. Um, well, it's kind of
been a summer of trans humanism, if you will. So
we've you know, talked that we did an episode that
was devoted to just the general idea of trans humanism
(39:21):
and some of the different sects of trans humanism that
are present in the world. But can you give us
a one sentence digest basically that through science and technology,
we can create a better expression of the human form
and or human society, so we can we can live longer,
we can live happier, we can And this is where
(39:42):
the definition varies, because you have you have some people
whose idea of trans humanism is far more individual based.
So it's like, hey, some people are gonna live forever
and have spaceships and that's great. Other people are gonna say, well,
we're not really trans humanist unless everybody can live forever
and everybody has access to to spaceships, and you've solved
some of these other problems. So it gets it gets
(40:06):
it turns into a mire rather quickly, right. But it's
the idea of transcending the human animal. And well, so
do you want to transcend into the species level or
just modify your own body to transcend your birth nature. Yeah,
it's kind of the same idea that you see with
your topian models in general, where people will say, hey,
this is where we are, now, this is where we
(40:26):
would like to be. And then in addition to squabbles
about where you want to go, there's the inevitable problem
of how you get there. Okay, but back to James Hughes,
what's his argument. Okay, So he says that a lot
of transhumutism dates back to the European Enlightenment of the
seventeen hundreds, which allowed the same millennialist dreams we've discussed
(40:48):
in religious terms, Uh, these aspirations to grow, to grow
who we are, but instead of doing it on you know,
based on faith, based on the divine intervention or some
other model. It's it all has to do with reason
and science and technology. So machines will free us from
our labor, medicine will rid us of disease, and peace
will wash across the land. It's a basic Enlightenment tenants there. Um.
(41:12):
And of course somehow also acknowledged that we might have
some of the enlightenment. Thinker said, okay, we might have
to also fight a whole bunch of awful wars there. Yeah,
so we might have to go through a tribulation. Yeah,
exactly to the millennium. And in generally the details of
the ascension, the science of the rapture, if you will,
is ever varied, argued, and sometimes glossed over all altogether. Um.
(41:35):
But Hughes says, quote, it was in this stew of
often contradictory ideas about the nature of progress that modern
technomillennialism was forged. And you have a number of individuals,
early individuals who are getting involved in these ideas. Um.
Benjamin Franklin, William Godwin, or just too that argued that
humans would eventually conquer oppression, inequality, disease, and death. Um.
(41:59):
What about ditto? Ditto is interesting? Um, seventeen sixty nine.
Uh in his work, uh De Almbert's Dream proposed that
human brains might be taken apart and then put back together,
that intelligent animals and animal human hybrids might be possible.
And this one's the big kicker. Sophisticated machines might have mine. Oh,
(42:21):
I'm going to talk about that in a minute, because
there is plenty of artificial intelligence eschatology right now. The
post Enlightenment quest for better life, for utopia even um,
obviously we could spend multiple podcasts if we wanted to
just talking about that, all the the individual expressions of this,
(42:44):
uh of this, this this grasping. But in short, you
see a number of different social movements, right, you see
you see everything from anarchism and liberalism, social democracy, Marxist lenin, Leninism, fascism.
It's right, all these different models of this is what
we need to do. This is how we need to
reorganize ourselves, cast out that the old, embrace the new,
(43:08):
and we're gonna be better for it. And of course
none of them really worked out quite as intended, even
the ones that arguably worked right, Well, what's your beef
with social democracy? No? I love social democracy. But uh,
let's just say that we're done always we're still working
out the kinks. Yeah, I can see that. And of
(43:32):
course we would be remiss if we didn't mention eugenics, right,
I mean, that's a utopian vision that's now widely regarded
as a as an utterly bankrupt and evil idea. Yeah,
it's and it's fascinating because in a post it's like
a postar in a post oar winning world eugenics. If
you strip away all the horrible things that came out
(43:53):
of it, if you just like basically, if you stripped
the meat off of the carcass of eugenics and you
just look at the bones, you can say, well, that
seems to make a certain amount of sense, right, treat
you know, basically selectively breed humanity to improve the expression
of the human species. It's something that that that sounds
(44:15):
fine until you think about process. You know, so what
is the process of doing that? Well, that requires either
killing people who you think harbor less desirable genes or
not allowing them to breed, or not allowing them to
breed at the same rate as people who you think
possessed desirable genes. Also, in the process is the idea
(44:36):
of selection. Who gets to pick which genes are desirable.
Some people might think, well, it's not just genes that
prevent certain diseases and make people live longer and stuff
like that. Some people might think that certain uh, you know,
continental origins are more preferable than others, and so you
get into really nasty territory. But I think what's interesting
(44:57):
here is that eugenics is really not that different from
the idea of the Christian rapture, right, because then in eugenics,
it's basically this idea that selected races and gene lineages
are going to be lifted up and essentially the rest
are doomed. So it's an it's an an elevation. It's
an ascension of certain models of humanity in the same
(45:18):
way that a Christian rapture means the elevation and survival
of certain very particular modes of human thought, faith, and reason. Well, yeah,
this does sort of highlight that they're There are very
different ways of thinking about the idea of of utopia
and apocalypse at the end of times. Is is it
egalitarian in nature? Like does does the destruction that's coming
(45:40):
or the great blessing that's coming apply to everyone or
does it only apply to some One person's utopia is
another person's apocalypse, right, It could be very much and
often within the same system. Is now fast forward a bit,
skip over a lot of stuff, and you kind of
get to our current Can we condemn eugenics and move on? Yeah? Yeah,
Having condemned eugenics and moving on, we get into another
(46:02):
area here. Uh, certainly into more of our current transhumanist
ideas and a lot of the fascinating material that we've
even discussed on the show about genetic engineering, genetic manipulation
UM that are in many ways not that different from
some some some of the goals and aspirations of eugenics,
but achieved or potentially achieved through you know, far less
(46:28):
morally reprehensible. Means the idea of simply selecting how genes
are expressed in our children, creating genetically modified UM expressions
that are more ideal without actively harming anybody. Okay, so yeah,
it's essentially taking the core nut of eugenics but applying
(46:52):
it in an individual consent level and saying we're not
killing anybody or telling anybody they can't breed. Yeah, And
on top of this we have of, you know, various
other models of trans humanist um ascension, right, technological augmentation, cyborgs,
virtual worlds, space exploration, colonization because let's remember, you know
a lot of the ideas of exploration and particularly colonization
(47:15):
of other worlds. It's about the long term survival of
the human race, right. And in fact, there's a there's
a two thousand twelve book that came out from Corey
dr Ow and Charles Stross titled The Rapture of the Nerds,
which which I have not read, uh my first and
interesting things about it, but it is in effect that
term is referring to a trans humanist elevation of at
(47:37):
least certain individuals and some of the problems that occur there. Yeah, well,
I mean, I certainly I don't know to what extent
this makes the idea of trans humanism religious in nature.
And that's something we can talk about, is you know,
to what extent does a similarity to a religious idea
make an idea of religious I don't know if I
(47:58):
would say trans humanism is a religio gen or not.
You might be able to make that argument, but in
any case, I I do see parallels to, for example,
the idea and Christianity of resurrection bodies. You know, the
idea that the those who are dead in Christ, upon
Christ's return will be resurrected in in bodies made of
like a like a better spiritual material. It sounds a
(48:19):
lot like trans human body modification to me, Like you
have your body remade in a way that will never age,
will never die, will somehow still be you, but won't
be that crappy body you had before. Yeah. I don't
think it's so much that the trans humanism is religious
in nature, but some of these religious models we've been
discussing they share the same energy as as trans humanism,
(48:40):
Like they're similar fears, similar aspirations about who we are
and where we're going. All right, everybody, We actually have
much more on this topic, but we went so long
we're splitting it into two episodes, So come back next
time and we will continue this discussion of of rat sure,
trans humanism, utopianism, and then of course, how we as
(49:03):
humans deal with these these prophecies, both secular and spiritual,
when they do not come to pass. In the meantime,
reach out to us on all the normal platforms you'll
find us a stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
You'll find us on Facebook and Twitter as well as
Tumbler and Instagram, and if you want to email us,
you can do so as always, that blow the mind
(49:24):
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
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