From the Vault: Transhumanist Rapture War, Part 1

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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

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. 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

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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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,

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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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.

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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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.

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