The Transhumanist Agenda (A Conversation with Emilio Ramos)

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This transhumanist agenda that I believe is increasingly being integrated into a globalist agenda.

00:11

I think we're going to start hearing this language of how humanity is going to be advanced.

00:17

This is how it's going to happen economically.

00:19

This is how it's going to happen spiritually.

00:22

The issue of transhumanism is so much more comprehensive than people even can fathom.

00:51

Welcome back to Conversations with a Calvinist.

00:54

My name is Keith Foskey, and I am a Calvinist.

00:58

I am excited today to welcome my guest, Pastor Emilio Ramos of the City View Church in Frisco, Texas.

01:08

He is also the leader at Red Grace Media.

01:12

You can find that at redgracemedia.com, as well as a host of a podcast, Christ and Kingdom.

01:19

Emilio, thank you for being on Conversations with a Calvinist today.

01:24

It's good to be with you, Keith.

01:25

I'm delighted to be here.

01:27

Absolutely.

01:28

Before we dive into the main topic, I do want to at least be able to introduce our audience to you.

01:34

Some of them may know you because you were featured in a film which is very popular in circles that I run in, and that is the film American Gospel.

01:43

How did you become a part of that? Through Brandon Kimber, of course.

01:52

Brandon was at Matt Chandler's church, The Village, which was down the street from us.

01:59

He just reached out to me.

02:01

I forgot how he found me.

02:03

Obviously through Red Grace Media.

02:05

It could have been through the film I made with James White and Paul Washer, Unpopular.

02:11

I can't remember exactly how we connected, but he called me up and said, Hey, I'm with Matt Chandler, and I'd like to come and interview you next if you don't mind for a film.

02:20

He explained it to me, and of course I said, Sure, absolutely.

02:24

He filmed me in my home library.

02:28

It worked out really good.

02:30

Now I've done several media projects for American Gospel Television, and I'm actually on the board of AGTV at this point, so it's worked out.

02:41

I really appreciate Brandon and American Gospel and everything that's going on there.

02:47

Excellent.

02:47

We're thankful for everything that you're doing and putting out great content for people to be able to enjoy and learn from and proclaim the gospel.

02:56

We're really grateful for that, and I'm grateful that you've taken the time to be on the program today and to talk about a subject that honestly, until just a few weeks ago, I had not even heard of the term transhumanism.

03:13

In fact, if someone would have asked me what is transhumanism, my answer probably would have been that I don't know.

03:20

It sounds like transgenderism, and that's not what we're talking about today.

03:26

I have learned by listening to you, listening to some podcasts, and getting involved with what you are doing by listening to your lessons, I've learned more about what transhumanism is.

03:38

One specifically that you did with Ray Comfort and the guys out at Living Waters was very helpful for a primer, an introduction to the subject, and if anyone wants to go listen to that, I would encourage them to do so.

03:52

Today, I'm going to get you to give us the basics of what transhumanism is, and then we're going to dive into maybe a little bit of the deeper waters than you were able to get on that show, just so that our audience can really get an idea of what it is we're talking about.

04:08

What is transhumanism? When we use that term, what are we talking about? The easiest way to define the term transhumanism is the idea that through technology, human beings, our lives, our bodies, and our existence is going to be augmented and is going to be enhanced and is going to be changed.

04:36

Transhumanism is ultimately committed to this idea that through technology, human beings can basically better themselves.

04:44

At the very heart of transhumanism is the idea that we will modify our lives through technology, and eventually, transhumanism is a stepping stone into an integration between technology and biology to the point where human beings can literally evolve, as it were, to the next level of our humanness.

05:11

For some transhumanists, transhumanism is just one step along the path to a more radical worldview, which is known as post-humanism, which basically looks at transhumanism as only part of the equation.

05:29

Post-humanism suggests that ultimately, transhumanism will get to the point where the idea of a homo sapien or a human being is no longer a fundamental philosophical idea.

05:45

In other words, it's an anti-fundamentalist worldview.

05:49

There is nothing ultimately fundamental.

05:52

Even the essence of mankind can change through radical integration into technology.

05:59

Something like that.

06:01

There could be incipient forms of transhumanism that we all kind of understand even now in terms of wearable technology, technology that we use to make the things around us smarter, whether it's an Apple Watch or whether that's a smart speaker or smart television or a smart car or a smart house.

06:22

In those ways, we are essentially cyborg to some degree or transhumanist to some degree.

06:31

That's sort of, I guess, a basic notion of what transhumanism is.

06:36

For some of the proponents of transhumanist, like Max Moore, he would refer to transhumanism ultimately as a philosophical movement.

06:46

I don't know if that's not enough or too much to start out.

06:52

Well, that's a lot to digest.

06:55

Right away, something that was helpful that you said to me when we were on the phone a couple weeks ago preparing for tonight, you said that your study has been in the area of primary sources where you have been reading and studying, and I believe even you said preparing to write on the subject of this because this is what's happening and this discussion is happening in the academy, meaning in the universities and places like that.

07:29

The reason why I'm bringing that up is my fear is that someone would hear what you're saying and they would have some type of aversion to it thinking that it's the next conspiracy theory because it sounds so fantastic what we're talking about.

07:48

When I say fantastic, I don't mean in a good way.

07:50

I just mean it sounds so otherworldly to talk about cyborgism.

07:56

You didn't say cyborgism, but you used the word cyborg, and people hear that and they think, is this even real? So if you would for a moment just sort of speak to where you're getting your information from because I think that's going to be very helpful for people who are adjusting to this idea of the reality of transhumanism.

08:19

I think that's a really good question.

08:20

I think it's a fair question and I think it's a fair concern.

08:25

Probably like a lot of people, I was exposed to the big idea of transhumanism by thinking about films like Terminator and other sci-fi films that depict a future where through technology we're going to enter into some dystopian future where the robots rule the world and all of that.

08:45

But then when I started noticing that there were YouTube videos and other media that were being produced where the idea of not just robotics, but the idea of nanotechnology, technology that is essentially robotic but at the microscopic level in a sense, was actually something that was seriously being studied and developed in major universities across the world and that major proponents who are scientists who have degrees in these kinds of things and authors who are calling for a new digital age, a new digital world, and then of course just through a process of investigation that anybody would have went through, not only watching YouTube videos, but then ultimately beginning to buy books on the subject of technology.

09:40

Really, Keith, we can talk about transhumanism, but the bigger umbrella is the category of futurism and futurism kind of will incorporate all of these different categories, transhumanism, posthumanism, the singularity discussion.

09:58

And so I started sort of boiling down the authorities on all these subjects, guys like Ray Kurzweil, Max Moore, Vita Natasha Moore, Vernon Vinge, who coined the term technological singularity back in the 60s as he presented some papers in front of NASA.

10:17

That was taken by Ray Kurzweil much later and technological singularity there took on a very sort of focused definition to speak about how through technology human beings can actually begin to tamper with our essence, with our nature as human beings.

10:38

For Ray Kurzweil, for example, who probably is the most renowned transhumanist in the world, Ray Kurzweil would obviously, and not only has he published on this, but he's done videos, you can watch them on YouTube, where he's talking about that through technology we can achieve radical life extension.

10:57

And just recently, because I have my eye on these sorts of articles and news headlines that come out, but Ray Kurzweil just recently, again, doubled down on the idea that by 2030 and certainly for him 2045, we're going to be able to achieve radical life extension through technology.

11:17

Now, for people that might hear those kind of claims, to understand Ray Kurzweil is not just a guy that is sort of in the shadows, right? Ray Kurzweil for a time was the leading engineer at Google.

11:31

He was a head of a department called Calico.

11:35

Calico is a department of Google.

11:38

And for Calico, they had one simple mission statement, and that mission statement was to end death.

11:45

You can find this also substantiated by the historian Yuval Noah Harari.

11:51

Yuval Noah Harari has written a trilogy of books that have to do with not only the historical development of our world and things like globalism and technology in general, but also transhumanism.

12:06

And he cites Ray Kurzweil extensively in these sections that deal with transhumanism and technology and these kinds of things.

12:15

Matter of fact, Yuval Noah Harari in his famous book, Homo Deus, says that we don't need to wait around for the resurrection of Jesus for eternal life.

12:24

He says a couple geeks in the lab can do it.

12:28

And so it's not just the Ray Kurzweils of the world, the Damien Brodericks of the world and others, but it's also the globalist-type authors and thinkers that are putting a lot of stock into transhumanist technology in the hopes that through transhumanist change, we can short-circuit the evolutionary process.

12:57

And so for these guys, Keith, they are talking no longer about evolution in the Darwinian sense.

13:04

Now they're talking about short-circuiting evolution, that evolution, that we're in a sense, we're in a post-evolutionary world now, that we're in the kind of world now where we self-evolve.

13:16

And so maybe the most important book that I found on this entire subject would be The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, written in 1989, I believe, or 1999, I believe it is.

13:30

No, no, 1989 is when that book was written.

13:34

So think about that.

13:34

Back in the 80s, these discussions are happening and the books are being written.

13:41

Later in 2005, Ray Kurzweil wrote a book called The Singularity is Near, where he doubles down on his predictions.

13:48

And so maybe we can get into some of those, but those are some of the fundamental aspects in terms of research.

13:55

And ultimately, I got a library card from SMU and I began to look into a lot of the primary literature that deals with the leading proponents of transhumanism.

14:08

And that led me to a book by Max and Avita Natasha Moore, husband and wife, called The Transhumanist Reader.

14:21

And in The Transhumanist Reader, there you have a collection of all the leading transhumanists, pretty much in the world, converging together, writing articles or collecting their articles and trying to set forth their comprehensive transhumanist worldview.

14:37

Now, maybe we can discuss the matter of how realistic is this? How much of this is gonna actually happen? How much of this is just a pipe dream and a joke, especially in light of biblical revelation? Yeah, and I'm curious about that.

14:53

I'm curious what your thoughts are on that, having studied it the way that you have, I'm curious what you think is really possible versus what may be a pie in the sky, pipe dream kind of thing.

15:05

But also, going back, you've mentioned this term singularity, and these are things that I have heard in pop culture.

15:19

And it's almost like these things are being fed.

15:21

Like when you and I first talked, you said singularity, and I had heard the term singularity in a pop culture sci-fi realm.

15:32

And I began to think about the book, 1984, one of my favorite non-biblical books.

15:38

And I think about what the author of that book sort of foresaw in his writing, as it were, it was fiction.

15:49

But to him, he was looking forward in the future and saying, this is what I think could happen, and there's going to be cameras everywhere, and there's going to be no privacy, and there's going to be no way to really do anything that Big Brother can't see or control.

16:05

And then we turn around now, and we have homes where if you say something, your house is listening to you, and all this thing.

16:16

So it's like, whether it's life imitating art or art imitating life, it's a reality that 50 years ago, when it was written about, when 1984 was future, and he was writing about the future then, and now that's our past, but we see these things happening.

16:35

And so it really is the idea that this is coming in one way or another.

16:45

And that's why I'm curious as to all of the things that you've learned and all the things that you've heard.

16:50

And again, I'm not given to wild-eyed conspiracy theories, but what you're talking about is reality.

16:59

These are things that people are...

17:02

And for just one idea, you mentioned the idea of eliminating death.

17:07

Isn't that the human dream for all eons, right, is that we don't have to die, that we could go on forever? And that's what this man said, or what you said, that group, what was the name of the group again? It was a division of Google called Calico.

17:25

And their mission statement was eliminate death? End death.

17:31

See, that's almost scary to think about it, to think that that was the goal.

17:41

It's funny because it seems like the same idea or the same people, and I don't know that it's the same people necessarily, but the same mindset is the mindset that's trying to reduce population or population control.

17:54

So not everybody's going to get to live forever, right? Well, everybody will live forever, whether in heaven or hell.

18:05

But yeah, I mean, so I think you're starting to connect certain dots and you're thinking as a Christian, you're thinking responsibly along the Christian worldview.

18:15

Something like the end of death, obviously, is the very essence of the gospel.

18:19

It's the promise that through Jesus Christ and through his redemptive work, a person can have eternal life.

18:26

As Jesus says, he that believes in me, although he dies, yet shall he live.

18:32

And so eternal life is what they're after because this is what we were made for.

18:38

This is what we were born for.

18:40

This is what we were created for.

18:42

Every man has the sense of the desire for life, the desire to live.

18:50

And something that we need to reckon with as we approach this whole subject of transhumanism is the literature that I've read, the dozens of books that I have investigated is saturated in eschatological language.

19:06

It is filled with language of paradise, language of a new creation, language of a new man, language of humanity 2.0, a new humanity, a new creation again, a semi-heavenized world.

19:23

These are actual terms that are found in the transhumanist literature.

19:29

Now, we understand it from the biblical perspective.

19:33

You know, a lot of this stuff is bombastic.

19:38

It is sensationalism.

19:39

It is a pipe dream.

19:41

The futurist dream is ultimately a vaunted dream by people that completely reject the eschatological program of Scripture and are trying to, in a sense, have a counterfeit to that.

20:00

And through technology, they believe that they can achieve it.

20:03

And now the question then becomes how much of this can actually be realized, whether in our lifetime or in the next.

20:11

I mean, Keith, you've got to understand, in Ray Kurzweil's book, where a lot of sci-fi films, quite frankly, a lot of sci-fi films are based off of the writings of Kurzweil and others who, through their technical textbooks that are very, very scientific, that they engage in high-level mathematics.

20:34

These are brilliant engineers and computer scientists and such.

20:38

And these men are, in their writings, writing about things, be it at a technical level that most people can't even understand, but they're writing at such a level about things that concern radical life extension, radical post-human robotic worlds, nanotechnology terraforming the biosphere that we live in so that eventually we will be in a post-human world.

21:03

And where do you think movies come from? With their ideas, they don't come out of thin air.

21:08

It's not just the wild imagination of some Hollywood producer somewhere.

21:14

Part of that comes from reality in the sense that they're getting that from real scientists, real engineers, real computer scientists and futurists who have long written about these things.

21:28

And so, yes, there is that angle where we need to be careful not to become conspiratorial, but we also need to be careful not to become gullible into thinking that they won't actually attempt to do these kinds of things.

21:43

I personally believe that we are right on the cusp of implantable technology.

21:49

Let's just start there.

21:51

I believe that we are right on the cusp of being in a place, Keith, very, very soon, where I think every family, probably in the world, if not beginning, let's say, in developed countries like America, the West, and other places like China or whatnot, where we will actually have to have that conversation as to whether or not to get some form of implantable tech.

22:18

Now, I think after COVID, I would say before COVID, we may have thought, oh, I don't know about that.

22:24

That sounds kind of crazy.

22:26

How can that actually be rolled out globally? How is that possible at a macro level? But I think after COVID, we saw very, very quickly that we're living in the kind of world where overnight, all of society could be put in a position where you're literally being told to stand six feet apart from one another, to wear a face diaper all day long, and in many instances, that you need to get a vaccine or else.

22:53

And so in a very, very short amount of time, our world changed drastically.

23:02

And what happened at the COVID level pales in comparison to what these people are writing about concerning the intrusion of technology into our lives beyond our wildest dreams.

23:17

Absolutely.

23:18

I've told this story before, but I remember the day very vividly.

23:25

We were doing some work on the sanctuary at the church, and I had had some helpers there with me, and I decided to take them out to lunch.

23:33

And this was right at the beginning of the COVID lockdowns.

23:37

And I remember we went to an Arby's.

23:40

We were going to get a sandwich, and we walked into the restaurant, and it was one o'clock in the afternoon on like a Tuesday or whatever.

23:50

And all the chairs were up on the tables, and it was locked down.

23:56

And I looked at my friend who was helping me do the work on the sanctuary, and I said, our world just changed.

24:04

I said, for a business to say, you can't come in here, you can't sit in here, you can't be around other human beings.

24:13

And then we saw the six-foot markers, what you were talking about, being six foot apart from people and people expecting you to wear a mask all the time and all these things, and people capitulating, people doing it, people obeying, and angrily responding when other people didn't obey and calling the police.

24:31

I remember somebody calling the police on someone because they weren't wearing a mask.

24:36

I think you're right.

24:38

I think there is a danger in the willingness of people to go along with whatever we're told and without any question.

24:49

And implantable technology, I don't know where you are eschatologically.

24:54

We've not talked about that.

24:57

And I'm one of the guys who, I'm not super dogmatic about that.

25:02

So we could disagree and still be friends.

25:05

But I know that when I was younger, the idea of putting something in my body, that was, everybody saw that as the mark of the beast, that the mark of the beast was going to be an implanted chip that could be used to purchase things and all that.

25:21

And I remember so many people saying, I would never do that.

25:23

I would never do that because that's taking the mark of the beast.

25:26

And again, I don't agree with that theologically now, but I wonder how many people are going to be, it's no problem.

25:37

We wore the diapers on our face, like you said.

25:39

We stood six feet apart.

25:42

We took an injection of an untested medicine into our body.

25:50

What's the problem with getting a microchip? So yeah, I see that as a danger for sure.

25:57

Well, Keith, if you don't mind, let me talk about eschatology for a moment.

26:01

No, please.

26:02

I'm amillennial.

26:04

And actually, technically speaking, I've created a new category called anomillennialism.

26:09

So the Greek preposition, anom, means that the millennium is above.

26:14

The millennium is not down here, never will be.

26:17

But anyway, that's just my position.

26:21

But it's not so much the eschatology that's most relevant here is not so much the kind of stuff that we tend to fight about, the nature of the millennium, the timing of the return.

26:32

Is there a rapture? These kinds of things.

26:35

The future of Christian apologetics, I've said this for years now, and some folks that know me know this, that I've been saying for years now that the future of apologetics is eschatology.

26:46

And the reason why, Keith, is because this transhumanist agenda that I believe is increasingly being integrated into a globalist agenda.

27:00

You talk about reducing everything to sameness, sort of a neo-Marxist socialist approach to the world.

27:08

But as that becomes more and more of a reality, I think we're going to start hearing this language of how humanity is going to be advanced, how humanity is going to move forward, how humanity is going to go to the next step, how we're going to evolve to the next level of our humanness, and that ultimately, this is how it's going to happen sociologically.

27:30

This is how it's going to happen economically.

27:33

This is how it's going to happen spiritually and psychologically and emotionally and sexually.

27:39

The issue of transhumanism is so much more comprehensive than people even can fathom.

27:47

In the book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil has three important time stamps that he's developed.

27:55

2029, 2045, and 2099.

28:01

In each one of those time stamps, Ray Kurzweil predicts, and when Ray Kurzweil makes predictions, he actually logs these predictions.

28:10

In his book, 2005, he wrote a book called The Singularity is Near.

28:16

In that book, he actually catalogs all the predictions that he has made that have come to pass in the technological sense.

28:26

Ray Kurzweil is the one that predicted things like talk-to-text, certain uses of smartphone abilities and tablets and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities.

28:40

He was talking about these things in the 70s.

28:43

I want you to think about that.

28:46

Here we have a guy in the 70s and 80s talking about the language you and I talk about all the time now.

28:52

Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, talk-to-text, tablets.

28:57

No one was talking about that when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.

29:01

This guy had long been writing about it.

29:04

Ray Kurzweil makes these predictions.

29:07

By 2029, implantable technology will be ubiquitous.

29:14

The kind of technology that's going to exist at that point is that we are going to see a society where brain implants are going to absolutely be everywhere.

29:27

By 2029, computers will have an instantaneous knowledge of all written material written by humans or written by machines so that a $1,000 laptop from Walmart will know more than 1,000 human brains combined.

29:50

By 2045, he suggests that even more so, through nanotechnology, through artificial intelligence that has gone to artificial general intelligence, we are now tampering with the genetics of human beings such that it can begin to really...

30:09

We can begin to now create the kind of technology to give ourselves radical life extension.

30:17

By 2099, according to Ray Kurzweil, if you are not neurologically augmented, you will not be able to meaningfully interact with people that are because they're going to be that far advanced from you.

30:33

By the end of this century, according to Ray Kurzweil, the idea of longevity will no longer even be a viable category because we will live so long, if we wish, we will live so long that it's not going to matter what your longevity is.

30:54

Now, brother, this is where eschatology, we need to believe what the Bible teaches and sure, when we get into the details, we tend to fight about all that, but we must believe that God is going to bring an end to this world, that God is not going to allow humanity to fundamentally tamper with the essence of man.

31:19

I don't believe they can achieve it, and I don't believe that God will allow it.

31:24

And so these kind of things, we are not good at thinking about, and we need to become better at thinking about these things because I tell you, I don't know how old you are, Keith, but I'm in my mid-40s now, we'll see a great deal of it, but our children, what they will see, I can't even fathom, to be quite honest with you.

31:48

Yeah, I'm 43, and we just had our surprise baby, number six came, and so he's six months old now, and my wife and I were talking about this the other night, we're sitting in the living room, we're looking at him, sort of just beholding the child, looking at him, and we thought to ourselves, and we said, it is possible that he will live, if he lives a normal lifespan, that he will see the next century.

32:19

He's born at a time where, if he lives to 80 years old, he's going to see 2100, which is amazing, to consider that that's possible.

32:32

And what you just said, if those predictions that the gentleman made are correct, then for him to function in the world would require him to essentially take on a part of himself that's not human.

32:49

And that's where the idea of the term transhuman comes from.

32:52

Part of you is not a human being.

32:57

Yeah, that's right.

32:58

Through technology, the technology becomes so integrated that we are, in a sense, interdependent.

33:04

We can't live without it.

33:05

In one sense, Keith, we're already there to some degree.

33:09

I don't know about you, but I can't live without this.

33:12

If I go a few hours without this thing, how do you communicate with anybody? How do you do anything? How do you bank? How do you work? How do you communicate with your wife or your kids or your family without a cell phone? It is tethered to us.

33:29

But right now, all of that is external.

33:31

It's above the skin.

33:34

Yuval Noah Harari is a very important thinker.

33:37

Some people have referred to him increasingly as more and more videos of Yuval Noah Harari come out.

33:44

Yuval Noah Harari is a historian from the University of Jerusalem.

33:50

why he's important is because he is an advisor to a lot of these globalist-type entities like the World Economic Forum and that kind of thing.

34:01

As recent as last year, Yuval Noah Harari has declared that human beings are now hackable animals and that where we're going next is that technology will begin to increasingly go beneath the skin.

34:15

And so, where is that happening? Well, it's happening.

34:18

It's happening actually all over the world right now.

34:22

There are different people that are testing different models.

34:25

I just sent an article to a friend of what's going on in Sweden, for example, or in Canada, in other places.

34:35

Elon Musk recently, in Michigan, had a trial run for an implantable Tesla key.

34:42

It's a computer chip that goes in your hand.

34:44

It's for your Tesla.

34:47

It opens the door.

34:48

It starts the vehicle.

34:50

It also functions as a smart key for your home.

34:54

And a hundred people conducted this trial and Tesla said that they are preparing this to scale so that now everyone that buys a Tesla will have the option at checkout, as it were, whether or not you're going to get a computer chip in your hand to start your car.

35:13

But then the question becomes what other applications of this implantable technology is there going to be? Well, right now we're hearing all sorts of news about the emergence of CBDC technology, Central Banking Digital Currency, and how even now there are people in Europe who are doing trials of getting implantable technology so they can pay for things through NFC technology.

35:42

NFC technology is the same technology that you use for your credit card that you can tap it at the register at the counter when you check out and all it does is scan it and boom, you're through.

35:54

Whole Foods just started their system where they scan the palm of your hand and they sort of save your data.

36:01

And this is what you all know Harari is arguing, is that we as human beings have become hackable.

36:07

We are being, in a sense, data mined.

36:11

I don't know if you've noticed here lately, Keith, but have you noticed that the recent Apple events, let's say for the last five years or so, is really not about here's the new gadget.

36:26

We're going from a smartphone to a hologram phone.

36:30

That hasn't happened.

36:32

But what's happening in the last several years is that the technology that we do have is becoming more and more and more integrated into every single aspect of our lives.

36:46

And that is something that we really, really need to keep an eye on because there are many who are raising alarm.

36:55

I mean, I have all sorts of books and literature, but a book like this, written by James Barrett, who used to be an enthusiast when it came to artificial intelligence, for example, he has now become a complete alarmist.

37:10

Just as recently as last week, an article came out that a high-level artificial intelligent engineer who used to work for Google has now left all of that and is now sounding the alarm that he got technology rolling such that now he's frightened by it, of what it will do, how it will get out of hand.

37:33

Of course, we've all heard Elon Musk recently talk about the fact that he's afraid of open AI, the very company that he began, the very technology that he started with a group of guys at Silicon Valley, and now that's out of control, and Elon Musk is saying that if you try to raise the alarm for these guys, he did an interview with Tucker Carlson where one of these gentlemen called him a specious, because he has some sort of preference for the human race.

38:02

Can you believe that this is the language that's being utilized? You're a specious? How dare you prefer the human race among other species? I mean, this is what these people are thinking, and this is how they're talking? It's alarming.

38:19

Yeah, and not to go too far afield, but the secular world has for a very long time been trying to reduce the value of humanity to eliminate the image of God that makes us unique, and one of the groups that we see, of course, are the animal rights groups like PETA and others that try to equivocate human life and animal life and basically say they are the same and that we shouldn't see any difference between the two.

38:52

This is, again, just something that continues and continues, and now, as you're saying, it's nothing unique about human life.

39:01

And it's not only looking from an eschatological perspective, but also looking from a creationary perspective, looking at it and saying, we are not special.

39:15

We are not made in the image of God.

39:17

We are not unique in this world.

39:20

We are just, as the professors say, just stardust, and don't really have any intrinsic value.

39:29

Well, it's amazing to me how out in the open this is, Keith.

39:33

It's amazing to me how you can watch TED Talk after TED Talk after TED Talk of transhumanists who are actually on the stage in front of a live audience, literally championing this cause of becoming post-human, of becoming cyborgs.

39:51

I watched a TED Talk that was conducted in China, and the gentleman was on stage practically preaching.

39:58

There was something wrong with his microphone.

40:00

He had to yell of his voice, but he's on stage literally yelling, I want to be a cyborg, to resounding applause of people cheering this on, that it is better to fundamentally change your humanness to where you're mostly machine now.

40:26

It's just unbelievable.

40:29

The issue of eschatology becomes so important because we cannot ever forget our eschatological hope.

40:35

Our eschatological hope, brother, is not in technology.

40:39

It is not for the Tower of Babel.

40:41

It was not in the brick and mortar of building a tower that can reach into heaven for the 21st century generation.

40:51

Technology cannot be our Babel 2.0.

40:54

We cannot erect another tower.

40:56

We cannot believe that we as a civilization are going to, in a sense, spiritually advance.

41:03

If you read the transhumanist literature, read the Transhumanist Reader by Max Moore.

41:09

They explicitly say, transhumanism is rooted in post-Enlightenment humanism.

41:16

It is a humanistic, anti-Christian, evolutionary idea.

41:21

The idea is this, that we are to pursue progress at all cost, and that human progress in a sense, progress becomes the idol.

41:35

Everything is about progressing, making progress, no matter what the cost.

41:42

All of these transhumanists are bowing down and worshiping at the altar of progress in that name, in that sense, and that to not dream in this way, for them, becomes almost immoral.

41:57

Almost immoral.

41:59

When you do apologetics, I'm sure you can agree with this, but when you do apologetics, one of the things that we try to do, I know for me as a presuppositionalist, one of the things I try to do is I try to put the person in a place where they see the ultimate conclusion of their argument, I bring them to the end of their reason so they can see, okay, where does this all lead, right? And then you can see, okay, well, this person is committed to relativism, and if relativism is true, then why pursue anything, why do anything, why believe in anything? If nothing is true, then the statement you just made is not true.

42:38

And so you bring it to an ultimate conclusion in the hope that you will see how absurd your worldview really is.

42:45

Well, there's some transhumanists who have taken it to the ultimate conclusion.

42:50

One of those guys is Hans Marovitch.

42:52

Hans Marovitch goes back as far as Ray Kurzweil.

42:58

Hans Marovitch, back in the 80s, wrote a book called Mind Children, and the book is all about robotics and super intelligent robots.

43:08

The opening of that book, Hans Marovitch, who's still going, still teaching at Carnegie.

43:16

Hans Marovitch is suggesting that we as a human race, I almost memorized the quote, that we must be prepared, like proud parents, to see the robots who are our mind children, to see them off into the future as they leave us in the proverbial dustbin of history.

43:38

And that the future of the universe, this is literally the way he talks, the future of the universe belongs to the artificially super intelligent robots.

43:52

And that we are passing the baton of evolution to them.

43:58

That is where all of this, for some people at least, that's where it leads.

44:07

I think your mic is off.

44:10

Yes, thank you.

44:11

Thank you.

44:12

When I think of the Tower of Babel, and I think about God allowing man to build a tower, but once that tower reached the point where God said, this far and no further, he brought about the separation of languages and made it to where the tower could not continue.

44:41

Emilio, where do you see this ending? And I know you're not a prophet, I know you're not the son of a prophet, but how far do you think they're going to get, I guess is maybe the better question before God brings about this is as far as I'm going to let this go.

45:02

Or do you think Christ's return is going to happen before that? And again, I'm not asking you to set a date here.

45:11

Because a lot of post-millennialists, I'm a non-millennialist too, you said you're a non-millennialist, a lot of post-millennialist guys are saying, we've still got 2,000 or 3,000 years, maybe 10,000 years of history left before Christ returns, and I'm just wondering what are your thoughts as we consider that? I think the biblical worldview always believes in the near return of Jesus.

45:32

I don't think you can make a case in the Bible that the attitude or the disposition, certainly not the apostolic disposition, was ever that we believe that Christ's return is thousands of years away, or even as one preterist argued, partial preterist, argued, that the return of Christ is maybe a million years away.

45:52

I've heard Doug Wilson advance this idea that we need to be prepared for hundreds of thousands of years.

45:59

I personally don't subscribe to that.

46:01

I oppose post-millennial theonomy, for example.

46:04

I think it's a false hope.

46:06

I don't think that's the way forward, and I think it's wishful thinking.

46:11

I do believe that Babel is a paradigm for the world, and the world order, and the way the world ends.

46:17

I think God has given us those paradigms in the past.

46:20

God brings it to a cataclysmic close.

46:23

Same thing with the flood of Noah.

46:25

The flood of Noah is a two-step, two-age eschatology.

46:29

It's the world that was before Noah, and then the new creation that emerged after Noah.

46:36

And that, of course, is a template, I believe, of the coming of the final eschaton, and the final upheaval of the end of the age.

46:48

And so no, I believe that this is where your eschatology really becomes important.

46:54

What is this entire transhumanist, technocratic system being built for? What is it all being constructed for? It's not for your Bible software, I'll tell you that right now.

47:06

It's not an algorithm to help you search paradigms and Greek syntax.

47:11

This is all for global control.

47:16

And if you believe in Dominion theology, that somehow Christians at some point in history will take control of the global order or the present evil age, basically is to deny the evil age, the present evil age.

47:32

And so I think, you know, Keith, if I may be so controversial to say, there's a reason why amillennialism, I believe, is the best position, because not only does it kind of fit the Biblical paradigm and the Biblical model for two ages, but it also reminds us that, like premillennialism, we do believe the world is headed towards tribulation.

47:57

We do believe that what we're witnessing is a spirit of antichrist.

48:01

I've tried to share that with some of my postmillennial friends.

48:04

Many of them laugh at me, many of them don't take it serious.

48:07

But, you know, what's interesting is if you go back to some of the older postmillennialists, like B.B.

48:12

Warfield, I don't know, Jonathan Edwards, and others, many of them still believed in a coming antichrist, for example.

48:19

And so there was some inconsistency there, you know.

48:22

But for me and my eschatology, I take assurance and I take confidence, not in the idea that God is going to rapture me out of here.

48:32

I don't believe in the rapture in that sense.

48:34

But I do believe that what all of this forces us to do is to put our faith and trust in Jesus Christ and His appearing, His coming, like never before.

48:46

We cannot trust and hope in political rationalism, not even in political rationalism of our own making.

48:54

We need to trust that Christ, like God in the Tower of Babel episode, that Christ will put an end to it, that you're right.

49:03

At some point, God is going to say, once again, this far and no further.

49:10

You may tamper and tinker around with implantable technology, you might put a brain chip in your head, you might begin to alter your organs, and you might even achieve some levels of life extension, give yourself abnormal life.

49:28

Let's say, fast forward 50 years from now through nanotechnology.

49:32

Perhaps.

49:34

But you will not achieve any semblance of immortality any more than Nimrod and those at Babel who desired to ascend the gateway of heaven, which was the ziggurat structure of Babel, and essentially, eschatologically and spiritually advance into another world.

49:58

It gets that weird even when you read the transhumanist literature.

50:02

I mean, you begin to read people that are actually accusing each other of believing in some sort of pagan spiritual portal that they're going to create through technology.

50:13

I mean, it's just wild.

50:14

And we as Christians can firmly rest in the hope that a new world is coming, and it's not going to be terraforming the biosphere through microscopic technology.

50:29

There are those that believe that if we don't put an end to this, or if we don't legislate some sort of restriction to how fast all of this can accelerate, we will arrive at some point at what they call ecophagy.

50:49

Ecophagy literally means eating the environment, because the idea is that technology will get so advanced that it will need the atmosphere for energy, and will therefore turn it into usable and renewable energy.

51:07

It's just wild.

51:09

Some people have called it the gray goo.

51:11

Ray Kurzweil actually talks about it.

51:13

It's a real thing.

51:14

It's not conspiracy, but they all believe, yes, this can happen, but it probably won't.

51:24

I mean, you know, and to me, Keith, I don't know what direction you'd want to take with this interview, but to me, it really reminds us that as Christians, we need to be prepared with the right doctrines and with the right theological emphasis to teach to our kids, to teach to our church, to equip them with what it means to be created in God's image.

51:51

What is the image of God? What is the image of God for? What does the image of God mean? The image of God is not just so that we believe that life is sacred, and therefore you don't commit abortion.

52:05

Of course you don't commit murder, you don't kill babies in the womb, but the image of God is much, much more comprehensive as a theological idea than just we're created in God's image, therefore we have dignity.

52:21

The image of God is telling us something about our ultimate purpose and goal as well, so it's ultimately telec, it's teleological.

52:30

It's telling us what is our ultimate purpose in this life, and in the next life.

52:36

Part of my fear of what has happened lately with the doctrine of eschatology is that a lot of Christians have become sort of agnostic, believing that because eschatology is at the end of the systematic theology, at the end of the book, that it must be last in importance.

52:56

And of course, the deeper you study theology, especially Reformed theology, the more you start understanding, no, actually eschatology is primary in the Bible.

53:07

The Bible begins with the eschatological program of God, with Adam, in the garden, in protology, as Adam there, through the covenant of works, has the potential to advance, not only himself, but the whole human race to a higher form of life.

53:27

That's all eschatology, and so I think we need to, as a church, just get ready, be prepared, don't have an aversion to eschatology, and for pastors, you need to be able to teach your people eschatology in a way that shows them the wonder of eschatology, not just the controversy of eschatology, but how useful and practical and how important it is for apologetics, for worldview, as you look out into the world and you try to interpret the culture and the world and science and technology and everything that's coming, we have to be really prepared.

54:06

So, I hope that's useful for some folks.

54:09

Yeah, absolutely, and I'm was, you actually preempted my question that I was going to begin to draw us to a close, and my question was, what can we do? And you just sort of answered that with the eschatological emphasis to focus on eschatology, and because I do fear that people hearing this may come to the conclusion, so what? I can't do anything about it.

54:38

I can't change anything.

54:40

You know, I'm not going to let them put a computer chip in my brain, but who cares, right? And I'm not saying that that's the way people should feel.

54:47

I just, sometimes people hear these things and they say, I can't fix it.

54:53

I can't change it.

54:55

This is, you know, the car's already careening off the cliff.

54:58

Nobody's pressing the brake.

55:00

It's going that way.

55:01

So you're saying that, one, if I understood you correctly, one, we need to be firm in our doctrine and what we teach, and particularly about the things of Christ and knowing who God is and those things, but also about understanding that the true eschatology, the real eschatology that the Scripture teaches, is not that we're going to find our eternal life through technology or that we're going to find even a greater or more a better existence through these things, but rather that we have our hope in the work of Christ, not in these technological marvels.

55:46

Am I picking up on what you put down? No, yeah, I think that's really good.

55:50

I think if there's a Scripture that I would refer people to, you mentioned this, but I don't want us to mention it in the spirit of fatalism, or in the spirit of some sort of hopeless kind of defeatist attitude, right? 2 Corinthians chapter 2, verse 16 and 17, Christ always leads us in triumph.

56:15

We are already, mystically, positionally, spiritually, we are already sitting with Him in heavenly places.

56:23

We are seated with Him.

56:24

We are already to be identified with His victory, His vindication, right, and His lordship.

56:30

But at the same time, we also can't forget the fact that there's a real history that's going to unfold in front of us.

56:38

And that history is teleological.

56:40

It's going somewhere, someone controls it, and it's not the mighty men of this earth.

56:46

So if you go to Revelation chapter 17 verses 15 through 18, there's a word there, purpose.

56:55

God has put it in them to have this purpose.

57:03

And now, we can debate all day long, what is that referring to? And I know that my post-millennial preterist friends will argue what that was referring to, 70 AD, destruction of the temple, destruction of Jerusalem, and understand that, and I think there may have been a symbolic prefiguring of what happened at 70 AD.

57:20

I don't doubt that.

57:21

But like John Owen, in his exposition of 2 Peter, not the one that most post-millennialists refer to, that he tries to argue for the destruction of the temple, but there's another sermon where John Owen says the destruction of the temple is paradigmatic.

57:40

It's a paradigm for the way the world ends.

57:44

And actually, in Revelation 17, this purpose, guess where John the Revelator is pulling that word from? He's pulling that word from Genesis chapter 11 in the Tower of Babel.

58:00

And so just like God put that purpose into the heart of Nimrod and the kings of the earth and the mighty men of the earth at that time to build this pagan tower for all mankind, inevitably resulting in judgment, John is telling us there's going to be another iteration of that at the Eschaton.

58:23

I mean, isn't it amazing, Keith? Wouldn't you just agree? Well, I hope you agree, but wouldn't you agree? I think a lot of people would just agree.

58:29

There seems to be some kind of purpose.

58:33

In other words, there seems to be some kind of controlling force, a power, a spirit of the air that is somehow moving all of this.

58:42

It seems too orchestrated.

58:45

It seems way too by design.

58:48

And when you read the transhumanist literature, even if it's written in the 80s, this is what's crazy, even if it's written in the 80s, it coalesces with everything that we're watching going on right now with globalism and transhumanism and this push for just one-ism and all of that.

59:11

A very important theologian, apologist, that people need to read is my friend Peter Jones.

59:17

His book, The Other World View.

59:20

I sat down with Dr.

59:21

Jones in his home, and I told Dr.

59:23

Jones, I said, Dr.

59:24

Jones, I love your books.

59:25

I got all your books.

59:27

And I said, but you got half of it right.

59:30

It is paganism.

59:31

It is the fact that we are watching the paganization of our culture, but that's half of it.

59:39

The other half is this transhumanist agenda.

59:44

And he just sunk into his chair, and he said, I gotta have you come and speak at my symposium.

59:49

And I did.

59:49

As a matter of fact, you can go on YouTube.

59:51

I did a YouTube message for him entitled The Metaverse, Personal Identity, and the Image of God, where I talk about some of these issues.

01:00:02

So I just wanted to lay that verse out there to say, don't be fooled by the leftist agenda, the LGB agenda, the globalist agenda, the central digital banking agenda, the medical agenda.

01:00:18

Don't be fooled by all of this.

01:00:20

There is one central spirit behind it all, and we know that in the end, God will cast it into the fire.

01:00:28

And that's an eschatology that we cannot ever let go of.

01:00:33

So I hope that encourages folks.

01:00:36

But no, we won't create our alternate civilization and begin a whole new intercontinental Christian type movement.

01:00:46

That's not going to...

01:00:47

I personally don't...

01:00:49

Never has been one, never will be one.

01:00:53

The kingdom of God has always been alive and well, always been here.

01:00:56

The city of God has always been here.

01:00:58

God's chosen people, chosen race, royal priesthood.

01:01:02

We've been here from day one and we'll be there to the very last day.

01:01:06

It has never ended.

01:01:07

It's always been here.

01:01:08

We don't establish that geophysically through our political rationalism.

01:01:15

Amen.

01:01:16

Amen.

01:01:17

As we draw to a close, Emilio, I know you've pointed to a few books.

01:01:22

You held up one book earlier, and you just mentioned another book that you think people should read.

01:01:26

If people want to go deeper into this subject, and I know you said you have a library card from a university.

01:01:34

Not everybody's going to be able to do that, but what are some books on the popular level that people would be able to read, maybe get from Amazon or their local library that you think would be helpful? Well, you know, I'm actually working on something myself right now.

01:01:52

I'm right in the middle of it.

01:01:54

I've written two books.

01:01:56

This is the hardest book I've ever written.

01:01:59

It is also the darkest book I've ever written in terms of spiritual warfare, but this brings up a big issue here, Keith, and I know you want me to give a quick reference here, but believe it or not, there's only two.

01:02:13

There's a book by Jacob Schatzer, who is a Calvinist guy, IVP.

01:02:21

It's called Transhumanism and the Image of God.

01:02:24

Very good book.

01:02:26

And the other book is by Ronald Cole Turner called Transhumanism and Transcendence.

01:02:34

The problem with Cole Turner is that it's liberal.

01:02:38

I don't want to recommend liberal stuff to my church or your church, but if you just want the data, those are two good books right there.

01:02:48

If you want to get it from the horse's mouth, you do need to read The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Careswell.

01:02:58

But that comes with a caution.

01:03:01

Yeah, that's diving into an entirely different worldview, for sure.

01:03:08

Yeah.

01:03:09

Absolutely.

01:03:10

Well, Emilio, I want to thank you for coming on to the program today and sharing just a wealth of information, and there's a thousand questions I'd like to ask you, but our time has come and gone, so I want to ask maybe if you might be willing to come back in the future and have an even deeper conversation.

01:03:28

If that's possible, I'd love to set it up sometime.

01:03:32

Absolutely.

01:03:32

Anytime, Keith.

01:03:33

I appreciate you, and this was a lot of fun, so thank you.

01:03:37

Absolutely.

01:03:38

And one last time, tell everyone how they can get a hold of you, if people want to reach out to you or see your videos or be a part of your podcast.

01:03:45

Yeah, absolutely.

01:03:46

Well, obviously, the Church, they can go to cityviewchurchfrisco.com, or they can go to redgracemedia.com, and I've done several videos on what I call the New Apologetics, and I do a whole bunch of this content there.

01:04:05

But also the podcast, Christ in Kingdom, I've done some stuff there, and I'm going to be doing more stuff there.

01:04:13

I just appreciate you, and I think things like this are super important.

01:04:19

We need to start raising awareness.

01:04:21

My prayer is that as time moves forward, some of the big Christian ministries, the big conferences—you and I were just talking about G3—I'm hoping that the issue of apologetics and transhumanism and these issues will not be in the back somewhere at a breakout session in Room 201 or something like that, but that we will actually wake up to some degree as a church.

01:04:43

To some degree, wake up and say, we need to bring this into the keynote message, and we need to deliver a very powerful, prophetic ...

01:04:54

I'm just saying how relevant the Scripture is to this issue, and be not afraid to tackle and address this issue, because it needs to be addressed.

01:05:05

I don't know if I'm the one to do it, but someone needs to.

01:05:09

Amen.

01:05:10

Amen.

01:05:11

Well, Emilio, again, thank you so much for being a part of the program today, and I'm very grateful for you.

01:05:17

God bless you, brother.

01:05:18

Yes, sir.

01:05:19

I want to thank you again, listener, for being with us for the last hour and listening to Emilio's amazing information that he's been giving out to us.

01:05:28

Please look him up.

01:05:29

Please find out more information.

01:05:31

Please look into this and beef up your eschatology, as he was saying.

01:05:35

That is going to be one of the things that we need to know more about and have more of a robust information to draw from, more robust information to draw from.

01:05:44

But again, I want to thank you for listening to the conversation with the Calvinist.

01:05:47

If you have a question that you would like for me to address on a future episode, you can send me an email at calvinistpodcasts at gmail.com.

01:05:55

You can send me also a message through Twitter.

01:05:58

I'm on Twitter, at yourcalvinist.

01:06:00

And if you want to find all of our videos, including our short videos, which are humorous, you can go to calvinistpodcasts.com.

01:06:07

It will take you straight to our YouTube page.

01:06:09

I want to thank you again for listening to Conversations with a Calvinist.

01:06:12

My name is Keith Foskey, and I've been your Calvinist.

01:06:15

May God bless you.