Death and Transfiguration
By William Sims Bainbridge
Ethical Technology
Posted: Jul 15, 2016
In a remarkable 2012 IEET blog, “The Praxis,” Dirk Bruere introduced a quasi-religious conception of Transhumanism that not only foresaw the possibility of technological immortality for selfish individuals, but notably suggested that we have the obligation to help each other achieve eternal life, even using advanced technology as best we can to provide salvation to people who have already died:
Know then that the purpose of our fellowship is to seek eternal life and reunion with those who have passed before us. To seek knowledge and perfection of spirit and soul that we may become worthy to resurrect the willing dead and in turn be judged worthy to be resurrected into the worlds beyond. Such powers may lie in our past or in our future. Meanwhile we shall remember those who have passed and we shall speak for them as family so that come the Awakening none will be forgotten. We shall be the calm in the storm, the eye of the hurricane, the refuge in the night, the hope for tomorrow.
In a famous poem about death, Dylan Thomas repeatedly proclaimed: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” This advice is the opposite of that offered by many religious faiths: Pass peacefully into the better world God has prepared for you. Yet Thomas himself ceased raging in 1953, and in another poem he quoted St. Paul, saying “death shall have no dominion.” Paul asserted the fundamental principle of Christian belief: “Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him” (Romans 6:8-10). Jesus, Paul and Thomas are now as dead as doornails, and to modern Atheists there is no life hereafter. How, then, can modern doubters deal with death? Perhaps they can take heart from the fact that the writings of Paul and Thomas have become immortal.
Paul wrote his faith-inspired words in a letter to the Romans, who had already experimented with other responses to death. Jesus himself said: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s” (Luke 20:24-26, cf. Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17). By Caesar, he meant Tiberius, as a symbol of the Roman state rather than a living individual person, and caesar came to mean king. Yet the origin of the term was the name of a specific person, Gaius Julius Caesar, about whom Shakespeare has Mark Anthony say: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones; so let it be with Caesar.” By the time Octavian renamed himself Caesar Augustus, Caesarism had become the model that defined the Roman state for the next five centuries. Thus, for better or worse, Julius Caesar became effectively immortal not by submission to a humble faith like Christianity, but through deeds that dominated other people.
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/Bainbridge20160715
"Quasi-religious" is an understatement.
