Thinking about C.S. Lewis and today's emerging prophets of transhumanism

Are there any C.S. Lewis enthusiasts in the house?

How about people who, well, detest the famous Oxford don and Christian apologist?

It is my hope that this think piece (pounded out during a two-week road trip) will appeal to both.

Right now, I am about to finish reading — for the 10th time, or something like that — the Lewis “Science fiction trilogy.” It ends with “That Hideous Strength,” a head-spinning mix of science fiction, Arthurian legend and a blistering satire of stuffy, insular, corrupt, boring elites in British higher education (in other words, the world in which Lewis lived until his death in 1963). It’s the narrative fiction take on his prophetic “The Abolition of Man.”

I do not want to give away the plot, of course. But the big idea is that elite there’s that word again) scientific materialists, in a quest for their own brand of immortality and desire to modify the human person, turn to the occult and, well, the Powers of Darkness. You may never hear the term “head,” when used to describe the leader of a school or movement, again without thinking of this book.

So what would Lewis think of this haunting feature from Suzy Weiss at The Free Press? Here’s the double-decker headline:

The Tech Messiahs Who Want to Deliver Us from Death
They see death as a software error — and they have a plan for fixing it. But should they?

The overture:

Kai Micah Mills is going to freeze his parents.
“They’re both going to be cryopreserved, regardless of their wishes,” Mills told me.

When Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, decided to tell the world that the National Enquirer was blackmailing him with nude photos, he turned to the blog platform Medium to tell the world about it.

Everyone, from Mashable to USA Today asked why someone worth $150 billion would self-publish not in the Washington Post, which he owns.

Instead, he turned to a humble (but neutral) place that’s accessible to everyone and anyone. I joined Medium a month ago — after perusing it for over a year — because the writing was about unusual topics with unique angles. There isn’t an army of editors going over the prose; what you see is raw copy straight from the writer’s laptop.

As it turns out, I’m not writing about Bezos, but I am writing about a recent piece on Medium about Mormon transhumanists, whatever they may be. Fellow GetReligionista Dick Ostling has written about them before, but some things bear repeating.

Mormons are the opposite of cafeteria Catholics. Instead of a pick-and-choose religion of faith du jour, they inhabit a closed system with a unique holy book and scriptures; certain beliefs that only they own and a place as the preeminent American-founded religion. Its legends and history are uniquely that of the Western hemisphere.

Before we start, please note the author isn’t just any old pajama-clad writer wannabe. Erin Clare Brown has worked for the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. although her stint with the Times lasted only seven months. Whatever. (See here for a piece on Nordic Mormons she wrote for the WSJ three years ago). Her Linked-In account mentions she is a former Mormon missionary to the Russia, which explains her insight into these folks.

The piece starts with an anecdote by Michaelann Bradley, a young woman who was having a crisis of faith and had drifted from her Latter-day Saint roots.

In 2013, Bradley met her future husband, Don, at an academic scripture study group. He was a thoughtful historian 18 years her senior whose own faith in the LDS Church had been shaken years before. Many of their early dates were to “Mormon-adjacent gatherings,” Bradley said, so she hardly batted an eye when Don invited her to a meeting of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. He billed it as a group of thoughtful folks tackling slightly different ideas about Mormonism. “I thought he meant ‘transcendentalist,’” Bradley told me. “I came prepared to talk about Thoreau.”
The meeting was as far from Walden as the moon or a terraformed Mars. Held in a local tech entrepreneur’s basement, it was a philosophical free-for-all of ideas that were closer to science fiction than scripture. The 10 other attendees — all male, all white, all in their 20s and 30s, and mostly with backgrounds in computer science or the tech world — batted around theories that reframed deeply held Mormon beliefs, like the notion that “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become,” in terms of cryonics and the singularity. They quoted futurists in the same breath as Latter-day Saint Apostles and Carl Sagan. They asked whether we could become like God through technology — could we live forever now and not just after we die?

Taking certain Mormon beliefs to their logical conclusion, I’m guessing.