[tt] Meme 131: How Mormonism Mandates Transhumanism

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Meme 131: How Mormonism Mandates Transhumanism
by Frank Forman, sent 8.1.27
(introduction 2008.1.22)

In a nutshell: The evolution of Mormonism is that of increased emphasis 
upon AGENCY, of men and of supernatural beings. This is a very American 
idea, as the conquest of a continent in New World demanded a far greater 
exercise of agency than in the Old World. Mormon churches do not have 
crosses, as they believe that Christ's passive suffering was not so 
important as his active assumption of the sins of the world, which they 
assert took place the night before in the Garden of Gethsemane the night 
before. God himself exercised agency in his progressive glorification from 
man to god. In the afterlife, men can continue to exercise their agency 
and potentially become gods themselves. The next step in the evolution of 
Mormonism will be to mandate that men not wait until death to improve 
themselves and use transhumanist technologies to make themselves more like 
gods. Doing so should be one's spiritual calling.

These thoughts need to be developed by a Mormon public theologian, who 
will make Mormonism more respectable, preferably a Mormon counterpart of 
the liberal Protestant Elaine Pagels, who is beautiful, brilliant, and 
believing. This Mormon must be a staunch conservative, as transhumanism 
needs to win them over. (Liberals and libertarians are already at work in 
their respective camps.) Besides, Mormonism is the world's fastest growing 
religion.

*************

What follows is a letter from me to Sarah Clayton (geb. Sarah Elizabeth 
Jensen on 1980 February 21), laying down my thoughts about Mormonism after 
having read, at her encouragement, the Book of Mormon the previous August. 
I offered to read the Book of Mormon and write her a 20K character long 
letter describing my intimate thoughts and reactions to it, provided she 
would first read Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and write me 
a long letter. I had wanted here to discover what a world without god 
would be like and how her life would change, and I would do the same. She 
hadn't done so, but with the encouragement of Lynn Johnson, another Mormon 
and fellow participant on an Internet group founded by Howard Bloom and 
devoted to discussing paleopsychology, or how our psychologies were formed 
in the Old Stone Age, I went ahead.

Long before I ever met Sarah a couple of years ago where I work, I had 
stated many times that, we I to regain my Christian faith I would become a 
Mormon. With little idea of what Mormon doctrines added to Christianity, I 
thought it wholly admirable that Christianity need not be frozen but that 
revelations continue in modern times. When she told me she attended 
Brigham Young University I held out my hand and shook hers. The few 
Mormons I had known were all admirable people, so there must be something 
quite right about the religion, even as I had become an atheist at age 14 
and remain so at age 63 today. I had by this time accepted David Sloan 
Wilson's ideas, expressed in his Darwin's Cathedral, that a religion that 
benefits the survival of the group of its believers will prosper. We had 
several discussions about Mormon ideas, and I encouraged her to follow an 
earlier inclination to become a Mormon theologian, in fact, the Mormon 
equivalent of the liberal Protestant Elaine Pagels, a woman who is always 
*there*, appearing on shows that deal with religious subjects. Both are 
highly beautiful, brilliant, and believing. If Mormonism is to gain 
acceptance, having Sarah be always *there* will raise the respectability 
of Mormonism no end and gain it a seat at the table, along with 
Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Today, more and 
more, Mormonism is being mentioned but still nowhere nearly as often as 
the other three. Sarah could change this, with her brilliance and beauty. 
Far better, I said, for her to take this path rather than work for a 
government agency that her strongly conservative politics rejects.

Little did I anticipate the direction my thoughts would take! Rather than 
argue for my conclusions all over again, I am going to present this 
essentially autobiographical process of discovery, an evolution, if you 
will. Mormons are rare among conservative Christians in not rejecting 
evolution. Unlike evangelical Protestants, they do not reach beyond the 
Bible and uniformly reject (this is groupthink, really) stem-cell research 
and other transhumanist technologies.

A word about transhumanism: This is a movement advocating the use of 
science and technology to advance the human condition to what eventually 
may move beyond humans altogether. Transhumans lie between humans and what 
are called post-humans. Robots are post-human; someone with a chip in his 
head (and my cochlear transplant is the most advanced one today) is a 
cyborg. Its advocates range from those who just want to keep going in 
making better things for people to use and put inside them to 
science-fiction fans who want to upload brains, abolish death, and replace 
us all with robots. The Wikipedia article is a good one.

A word about what Mormonism is: In 1820 Joseph Smith prayed to find out 
which of various Protestant denominations held the truth. He had a vision 
of an angel who told him that none of them did and that, in time, he would 
be directed to some ancient writings that chronicled a group of Jews, 
learning of the coming destruction of Jerusalem in 600 B.C., were induced 
to hightail it to the New World. Joseph was directed to gold plates 
containing these writings, translated them with the help of supernatural 
stones, and published them in 1830 as the Book of Mormon. These books 
making it up chronicle the voyage to the New World, the repeated falling 
away from the true path, with the predicted disasters, the regaining of 
the true path, and on and on down to an appearance of Christ after his 
resurrection in the New World. Things got much better for a while, but, 
humans being what they are, fell away from God's word, resulting in wars 
that killed off nearly everyone in 421 A.D.

(The odd thing is that those in the New World learned about the coming of 
Jesus, though the Book of Mormon is frustratingly weak in detail, and even 
odder, given man's impulse to evangelize, there is no record of any New 
Worlders making the trip back to the Old World to inform those there of 
the good news. In later revelations, contained in the Pearl of Great 
Price, we learn that Adam and Moses themselves knew about Jesus but that 
this information got lost.)

In his vision, Joseph learned that the true church of Christ had fallen 
into apostasy after the death of the last apostle and that it was his job 
to restore it. The Book of Mormon itself is more important as just being 
there, being a later revelation, rather than for its theological 
innovations. It rejected infant damnation, but it would take a re-reading, 
and a much deeper familiarity with Christian doctrines developed during 
what Mormons call the Great Apostasy than I have (and which Sarah would 
get, were she to pursue religious studies) to discern just what the 
innovations there are in the first work of Mormonism. The major 
innovations came later, mostly during the next fourteen years before 
Joseph was martyred, but also by Brigham Young and later prophets. I am 
not at all clear about what beliefs are warranted by holy writings and 
lesser and lesser degrees of officialness. But certainly Joseph's King 
Follett sermon of 1844, while not held to be *as* sacred as the Bible, the 
Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrines and Covenants 
(these comprise the Standard Works), will give the reader a very good idea 
how far Mormonism departs from what they call Creedal Christianity, which 
rests upon the creed established at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 
A.D. Suffice it to say that Mormons reject the Trinity, the creation of 
the world out of nothing, and original sin, dogmas not to be found in the 
Bible but developed only during the Great Apostasty. It is frequently 
charged that Mormons are either heretical Christians or not Christians at 
all.

I am not going to offer criticisms of Mormonism, nor of other kinds of 
Christianity or of theism in general. Nor am I going to argue that Creedal 
Christian criticisms of Mormonism are valid, inasmuch as their doctrines 
are simply full of older difficulties. I add only that most of the Creedal 
critics of Mormonism simply fail to understand what a latter-day 
revelation is. Much to my surprise, I wound up telling Sarah not to worry 
about them. (Read on!)

I doesn't look like Sarah the Mormon will be undertaking the study of 
theology anytime soon, so she has given me permission to circulate my 
letter to her, which does not reveal any great intimacies between us (for 
the simplest of reasons) not libel anyone. I am simply spreading them in 
hope that someone else will undertake the serious study of both Mormon and 
Creedal theology, as well as the religions of the rest of the world (which 
do not seem to have theologies of the systematic sort we find in the 
Occident, though religious writing is voluminous everywhere there is 
writing). I urge that this not be undertaken by a "liberal" Mormon. 
Liberals have a tendency to put their liberalism (which is not a coherent 
ideology but rather is an eclectic mix of justifications for various 
rent-seeking groups, not that conservatism is exactly coherent, if you 
just ask what it is that conservatives are trying to conserve) ahead of 
everything else.

Now transhumanism can just be something you are enthusiastic about. It can 
also be a program for political action. Its political thrust is to 
neutralize the opposition. Libertarian transhumanists, who hang out at the 
Extropy Institute, crank out standard libertarian rhetoric, namely that 
everyone has the right to employ transhumanist technologies, but everyone 
has the right to do pretty much as one pleases, except initiate force 
against someone else. Liberal transhumanists, whose hang out is the World 
Transhumanist Association, seek to neutralize opposition from (20th 
century) egalitarian leftists by demanding that everyone be able to share 
in these technologies, though not completely equally. What is needed is to 
neutralize conservatives, and it is conservative Mormons who are the ones 
to appeal to. I think I have developed ideas in my letter that will prove 
useful.

So here's my letter to her. The other Sarah is my wife (geb. Sarah 
Stirling Banks). My excitement is that I found Mormonism to be, in a way, 
not just the first American religion, the first Darwinist religion, and 
even the first post-modernist religion but the first transhumanist one as 
well. Mormonism is not there yet, but it is a religion that can evolve. It 
is also the world's fastest growing religion

*************

Letter from Cyborg to Mormon
2007 October 21