ESSAY #4: The Gods of the Future Will Be Machines

Part 1: Transhumanism and a New Christian Irreligion

“Today, sitting here in the sun, I can’t see anything of God in my mobile phone, but He, She or It seems to be dancing all over the buttercups and red clover in the meadow before me. Watching the dance, I think we have far less control over the world than Ray Kurzweil believes we do, and that the future is less ordained than Kevin Kelly wants it to be. I don’t know what’s coming, but I just saw a heron fly past my open window on its way to the river.”

– Paul Kingsnorth, Planting Trees in the Anthropocene

In the second century, a pagan philosopher, Celsus, gave Yeshua's ragtag band of followers a scathing review from the ivory tower:

They cannot tolerate temples, altars, or images. In this they are like the Scythians, the nomadic tribes of Libya, the Seres who worship no god, and some other of the most barbarous and impious nations in the world...

Uncouth, irreligious, impious, and barbaric—anarchic desert scum, more or less. This was apparently supposed to have been a devastating critique, but his Christian opponent of the next century, Origen of Alexandria, couldn't have agreed more. Totally, he said, this was all true—and even worse, because Christians

not only avoid temples, altars, and images, but are ready to suffer death when it is necessary, rather than debase by any such impiety the conception which they have of the Most High God.

The Fountainhead of Life disclosed by Yeshua's way of life was and is beyond religion—beyond human thought, beyond human control: the wild and untamable Living One—the Lion of Judah: Once you get a taste of that, there's no going back. Yeshua's companions had seen in him the face of the Eternal, the origin and destiny of nature itself; they had seen the future, that the kingdoms of men are dust, a passing breath—that the whole complex of human thought and human values upholding the construction of our artificial world on top of the living one had been overturned, exposed as mere filaments of nothing, destined to vanish: “He has brought down rulers from their thrones,” sang the peasant-girl, Mary of Nazareth,

and exalted humble ones

He has filled the hungry with good things

and sent away the rich empty-handed

—and this at the moment of his inconceivable conception; he hadn't even been born yet, much less touched the leprous outcasts with his life-giving hands, praised the birds of the air and lilies of the field for their king-surpassing beauty, healed the eyes of the blind with spit and clay, like a new Adam, paid his temple taxes with coins from the mouths of bewildered fish, broken bread with prostitutes, demoniacs, and taxmen—nor had he upbraided the super-religious for playacting as spotless and radiantly gleaming whitewashed tombs—then coasted into Jerusalem on a brown donkey instead of a white horse, donned a crown of thorns instead of a crown of gold, ascended an execution stake instead of the throne of his ancestor David, and gushed blood to rescue his enemies instead of annihilating them—nor had he blossomed forth yet from his garden-tomb alive again (and even more so), or walked through walls of rock as if they were piles of air, or ascended into the sky as a life-giving Breath for everyone (2 Cor. 3:17), or taken up a throne of rest at the right hand of God, an everlasting human who was and is “the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23).

As for the early Christians, who had seen, heard, and touched the Way, Truth, and Life for themselves—they couldn't take the Roman empire seriously anymore as something real: “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here too!” a Thessalonian mob complained to the city's administrators, “They are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying there's another king, Yeshua!” (Acts 7:6-7)

In Celsus' day, the temples, altars, and images that Christians would rather die than surrender to were projections of Roman power; he was talking about the imperial cult—burning incense before icons of the emperor, et cetera, as a way of acknowledging the order of the cosmos flowing down through the Roman hierarchy, and that it shouldn't be messed with.

In our day, it's becoming the same story again, but with a couple swaps: the devouring Machine takes the place of the Roman empire; transhumanism—once just the dream of a few philosophers and computer heads, but now the dominant religious ideology of our time—takes the place of the imperial cult.

But what about those of us who wish to be unruly, anarchic, refractory wilderness-dwelling barbarous Messianic scum as usual?

Since the gods of the future will be machines, it means we Christians will get to be atheists again.