Sound The Trumpet : The Nightmare World of 'Trans

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“The Nightmare World of 'Trans - Humanism'”
by WND - Joseph Farah
August 29th, 2011

Ever since I became a newsman, I've researched events, developments and trends that are so bizarre, so frightening, so twisted and so unbelievable that they are nearly impossible to cover without being dismissed for "sensationalism."

That's the problem with a story earlier this week in WND about something called "trans-humanism."

It sounds like science fiction, but tragically it is science fact.

You've heard of bio-engineering or genetic engineering. Well, it doesn't just involve crops and animals any more. Now there are active efforts under way to "improve" mankind – even to achieve immortality through science.

It involves altering human bodies – genetically, mechanically or both – to make them "better" than they've been for thousands of years, even affording them Superman-style abilities in both brains and brawn.

Some scientists involved in this practice refer to it as "the next step in the evolutionary process."

Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosophy professor and director of the Future of Humanity Institute, is at the forefront of the transhumanist movement.

"They (transhumanists) yearn to reach intellectual heights as far above any current human genius as humans are above other primates," he says. They want "to be resistant to disease and impervious to aging; to have unlimited youth and vigor; to exercise control over their own desires, moods, and mental states; to be able to avoid feeling tired, hateful, or irritated about petty things; to have an increased capacity for pleasure, love, artistic appreciation, and serenity; to experience novel states of consciousness that current human brains cannot access. It seems likely that the simple fact of living an indefinitely long, healthy, active life would take anyone to posthumanity if they went on accumulating memories, skills, and intelligence."

It might sound exciting. It might sound promising. But there's a darker side to what's going on.

Author and researcher Tom Horn lays it all out in "Trans-Humanism: Destroying the Barriers," an hourlong DVD exploring the radical transformation of humanity.

Imagine, for instance, the ways the Defense Department – and the militaries of foreign countries – are trying to use this new science to create new weapons and even indestructible "soldiers."

Horn cites concerns by the likes of Stanford political scientist and author Francis Fukuyama, who reviewed emerging fields of science and the philosophy of transhumanism.

"He wrote a white paper in which he considered the combination of those two to probably be the most dangerous science and technological and philosophical concepts in the history of mankind which he believes could very quickly lead to an extinction-level event," Horn says.

Horn claims the effort to transform humans into a different style of being is now being fast-tracked with billions of dollars – in both government and private funds.

"One of the first things that President Obama did at the executive level as soon as he became president," he says in "Trans-Humanism," "[is] he overturned restrictions that had been put in place by President [George W.] Bush which would have prohibited federal dollars, American taxpayer money, flowing in to pay for experiments to be done on human-animal chimeras (combinations) and other forms of science such as stem-cell sciences – which is also important to the transhumanist movement.

"But what most of the public doesn't realize is when we're talking about stem-cell sciences, we're almost always talking about the creation of a human-animal chimera from which those stem cells are being derived. But now, tax dollars in the United States from the federal level are flowing into thousands of laboratories."

As Joe Kovacs wrote in last week's WND report on trans-humanism, "In 2006, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services even provided $773,000 to Case Law School in Cleveland for a two-year project to develop legal standards for tests on human subjects in research involving genetic technologies to enhance ‘normal' individuals – to make them smarter, stronger or better-looking.

As researchers have focused on blending animal attributes with human characteristics, the Reuters news agency published a report in 2009 in which scientists admitted their comfort with a "50/50 mix."

"The public mostly is still under the impression that this is being done at the embryonic level, and that the amount of human DNA in a transgenic animal is so minute as to be excusable," says Horn. "But where they want the debate to go now is, 'Can we raise these to full maturity in the public's knowledge and experiment on part-humans, part-animals that are fully grown?' And by admitting that that's now where they want the public to be comfortable with this research, they also said that they knew that there are some rogue scientists out there that are not operating with federal dollars, and they're getting ahead of them in this technology and it could even become a new kind of a weapon of mass destruction. It could, at a minimum, become a molecular biological nightmare."

Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13