History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme

It is not baseless accusation to compare Trump to Hitler; he is the rhyming couplet of the Holocaust.

Ghouls have written our history

Victors do indeed write the history books, but they know that to tell the true story would be self-incrimination, so they lie. Their history, preached as gospel in the schools, is empty and false. It is nothing more than the boasting of racists and murderers.

Who are these victors? They aren't human. They traded away their empathy in the soulless calculus of capitalism and empire in order to climb the ladder. No one reaches the top of that ladder without becoming something less than human, a ghoul whose first instinct is not to help others, but to use them. Their only languages are money, power, and lies, so it is only fitting that they write the historical narrative in such language. Their world is so small and fetid in its emptiness that they cannot imagine anything greater than the empires they have built, so they interpret every critique of their right to rule an expression of treason.

We do not take this abuse lying down, of course not! We protest, write reports, give sermons, march in numbers, teach, and speak that we may be heard.

But the ghouls do not speak this language. Every time we speak truth to power, we make an appeal to hearts that are no longer there. Their minds are too small and brutish to comprehend the legitimacy of our arguments for equality, but they know on some primal level that equality is anathema to what little comfort and pleasure they still feel as they rot away, their connection to humanity severed by the walls of palaces they forced us to build for them. They do not listen. They will never listen. They are no longer us, and to write a historical narrative based in truth, we must see these creatures for what they are and treat them as such.

So what can we do? The clock is ticking and our full strength is still unknown to us, but we can refine our strategies such that we orient ourselves towards not asking for equality, but taking it. This the ghouls will understand. They speak the language of power and force; our conversation with them will never move forward until we begin to speak in their chosen tongue.

Trump, Michael Bloomberg, Boris Johnson, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, Jeffery Epstein and all those he catered to, the rich and the corrupt, the 1%, the capitalist ruling class that is so obviously out of touch with the lived experience of humanity....they aren't human. The sooner you realize this, the clearer our situation will become.

I will no longer give respect to their remaining veneer of human dignity. I will no longer empathize with them, because their own lack of empathy is inflicting violence on innocent people. I will no longer recognize the Imago Dei in them, for they have renounced it already. From now on, I call them what they are.

Inhuman. Ghouls. Monsters.

Only with this in mind can we begin to write humanity's true history.

I want to be remembered

Something has been on my mind lately.

When you pick up a history book (or any textbook, really), there are names of people who contributed to the discourse, who added something, whose insights made them part of their field of study forever. Their voices will always be heard. They will not be forgotten. Reinterpreted or critiqued, maybe, but not forgotten.

You read about these people and you get to know him. Their lives are documented. What they liked and disliked is recorded, what they hoped and dreamed is saved for posterity, their importance not only known, but felt.

We live now in an age where there are so many voices, so many brilliant people, all struggling to be heard over the din of the discourse. We're also entering a moment in history when the very notion of "great people" is problematic. In the world we are fighting to create, no one will be more important than another.

But..I want to be remembered. I want my voice to resonate with the future. One of my greatest fears is that everything I've gone through, everything I've learned, all the things I want to add to the discourse that needs to be heard...it's all being done by people whose voices are louder than mine. They're also more skilled than me. Every time I open my mouth to speak, I find that someone else has spoken those very words much more eloquently than I would have.

Everything I've learned, every insight I've struggled to gain, is a small whimper in a thunderstorm. No one will remember me for my ideas. I will leave behind no legacy, and but for a few people dear to me, I will be forgotten. No one will ever read about me the way students read about Kierkegaard. Nothing that came from the core of who I am will contribute to the betterment of humanity.

Will God notice? Will the universe keep me in its memory after I'm gone? Will my passing be noted at all? Am I egoistic for crying over this in a time of unprecedented global suffering, when so many others have it worse than me?

I feel so small.

Hideo Kojima once created a character called Solidus, who became an important part of my childhood. He said:

"All I want is to be remembered by other people, by history...what is our legacy if we cannot pass the torch? Proof of our existence, a mark of some sort..."

I want there to be proof to future generations that I lived.

A challenge for you

In the coming weeks and months, there will be a demonization of rioters and direct action. The normies who still don't know the truth of our collective situation will be frightened.

This moment in history is an opportunity to show the world that class and racial solidarity combined are unstoppable.

So my challenge to you is simply this: talk about this to at least one person you know. Truth can be contagious, let it spread.

Life's Storms

Life is good. In fact, it's very good, but it is not without its storms to weather. Now I very much like storms, I love sit through them and witness them in their entirety, but only because I have a safe place to call my home and sanctuary.

If I did one good thing with my life, it was this: I recognized how blessed I am, but also how miserable others are. Not everyone has a shelter. Only after this did I begin to understand what it means to be ethical and empathetic in the 21st century.

American "Freedom"

America was founded on a perversion of the word "freedom." More often than not, "freedom" meant "freedom from without, freedom from constraints." Moreover, it was a perversion of freedom with classist oppression at its core: the freedom is for the ruling class, and when they wrote their pretty little Constitution, they wrote it with only themselves in mind.

The greatest trick is that America has painted itself as a proponent of freedom when it was only ever about the freedom of the abuser to abuse.

A Future Like That

Imagine that the problem of evil were solved ala DS9's episode Move Along Home. Imagine that the universe, in all its horror and despair, ends. You die. But then you realize you're in a movie theater of cosmic proportions, and you and everyone you love is watching the movie with you. The narrative experience ended, you feel thoroughly traumatized. The movie was not only in bad taste, but unnecessarily heartbreaking and violent.

But then you have the comforting thought that at least you're here and not in that movie. The movie's over, and upon leaving the theater, you have a perfect life waiting for you:

A beautiful home with people who love you, friends and family, a luxurious standard of living, the peace of never having to worry about things like wondering whether or not you'll be able to pay for both this month's rent and the medicine. The burden of debt and the cry of the poor are no more, for there is no debt and there are no poor. You remember that the earth is alive and well, all animals are respected, and that there is plenty for all to flourish in peace. Everyone is free to love whoever they like without fear of judgement. All human religions are reconciled and worship together, and those who abstain from worship are in no way less reconciled or less beloved than their worshipping neighbors. Education is free and everyone is hard at work on whatever projects most inspire their deepest passions, now satisfied in labor. All the unpleasant work that no one enjoys is automated and there is no class division. The laws of Physis and Nomos are adopted, and all the while humanity is exploring the stars and maturing into a cosmic presence.

Your life was never in danger, no matter how real that awful movie felt, or how long it took to end. Your life is waiting for you, unaffected by the dark emotions stirred in you. There needs to be a conversation about why such a movie should never have been made, but for the moment, the sheer beauty of the universe embraces you, driving away the pain and beckoning you to experience a life better than anything you could have ever hoped for.

These same circumstances apply to each and every man, woman (or any in between) and child. Everyone gets the same deal. You don't simply believe that this is true, but you feel it. Where there was once the weight of anxiety over whether or not everything could ever be ok, there is now peace. No one will ever have to bear that weight again.

Heaven? A mass hallucination? The space beyond Nirvana? Who knows, though the wise all agree that the names we attribute to it are not important. What is important is that nothing we experienced at the movie theater can ever diminish this life we share.

The opportunity finally presents itself and you take it. The conversation comes at long last, and you ask the question you've wanted to ask: Why? Why did you make me watch this movie? What could ever justify its content? Why did we get shown this? (as an aside, that awful experience could just as well have been a video game, a play, a virtual reality simulation; pick whatever metaphor you like to stand in for "movie"). You ask, why did you make me suffer through that experience?

And then the answer comes in the form of a memory. There is no justifying the suffering you endured, but you recall that at all times during the viewing, someone was there with you. You were never alone. There was always someone nearby, and there was always a voice quietly whispering "It's going to be alright." Then you remember the fact that nothing can escape the compassionate embrace of a universe in which we all belong.

Ethics;  you've got to believe that out of all conceivable realities possible, THIS is the one that matters!  Whatever it may be, THIS got has got to be the case. If your life were a movie, THIS, whatever it is, it could be the plot, the drama, the central point, of which everything depends to propel itself. Assume that THIS is the one.

THIS could be anything. It could be the silliest thing possible, or the most solemn. It can be real, but it ABSOLUTELY MUST first be imagined in order to ever be real. Whatever it is, even the slightest thing, the one universe out of all the universes, in which THIS is the case....could that be you? Could it be your thoughts? Could it be your life, right now? Could it be something you are still living toward? Could it be here? Could it be the very moment you are in now? Could it be that someone is speaking to you? Anything, anything, anything...could THIS be the one that matters? Could it be that our (that is, you, yes you, [the reader who is this very moment interpreting this very text] and I [the text itself], out of all realities....could it be that this moment itself is...the One?

Could the One be THE narrative that drives us forward? Could it be the story from the perspective of the Hero of the Cosmic Story? Could it be that our reality, whether you could imagine it or not, out of all realities, is the one THAT MATTERS?

Yes, now you're beginning to get it! In the grand set ("set" here being used in the mathematical sense of the word), of conceivable alternate realities, perhaps this moment is the one THAT MATTERS.

Of all that can be conceived in all the Multiverses, we've got to act as if ours is the one upon which everything depends. We've got to act as if there is purpose, as if there is meaning. We've got to act, for example, as if there are transcendental virtues such as Truth, Beauty, and Love. And we've got to believe that, for example, acting in accordance with these virtues, might bring us closer to fulfilling our telos (or if you like in dramatic terms, the resolution, the end of the story). This is thus characterized as a telos driven narrative ethics, one in which we treat the moment as if it is the only moment, out of all moments, that matters. We must treat each moment as if it is the point in the story that is driving the plot forward. In this sense, a moral agent is one who acts if the following axioms were the case; A) not only does the universe have a trajectory and a destination but B) that the destination is the best possible universe, and that our own present moment is the trajectory in motion. To be moral is thus to truthfully work towards making manifest the best of all possible universes. It means to fight for a world in which we can earnestly and passionately make the appraisal of our present universe (with all its relationships therein) as "the best imaginable telos." We've got to be present to each moment, passionately present, such that we become like a viewer of a play.

Some may take the preceding as justification to act in a childishly nihilistic way, to act as moral agents only as we please, abiding by no rule and spinning aimlessly. It is no such justification. We might suddenly get the idea that the show is all about us and that we can behave arbitrarily. We might choose to behave in a manner consistent with whatever manner suits our ever changing dispositions. But if we let the spotlight thus get to our heads....what sort of story will our lives end up writing? Will it be good? Will it be bad? Will it speak truth, or always lie? Will it have love, or will it have hate? We are thus the existential tellers of our own story. We choose in how we act and live how we want the story to be told.

And (note, this is key), to whom is the story told? Our lives are being presented to someone. Our lives are texts, and we each of us is the author. And who is the reader of the text? And what qualities will the relationship between the two have? What are the hermeneutical dynamics of the one relating to the other? In other words, how do we qualify our relationship with the other? Is it I-It or I-Thou? If I-It, it is morally wrong. If I-Thou, it is morally right. How right or good a thing is (at least in part) is reflected in the quality of what we choose to include in the telling of our story, and whether or not what we choose to include reflects the hermeneutical balance of the I-Thou relationship.

Here it is...here we are...the border of the frontier, of the unknown, of the Great Other. Lovecraft would be terrified...

Could it be that the one to whom our lives are being presented is the Thou....is.....God?

Get Radicalized

Me from a few years ago would be shocked to see these words coming from me, but I've learned something.

If you're not getting radicalized, you're missing the point. If you're not getting radicalized, you don't understand the apocalyptic precariousness of our situation. If you're not getting radicalized, then you're the lukewarm moderate MLK JR. condemned as part of the problem.

Whichever direction you decide is your own choice, but make a decision! The fence you're straddling is burning away beneath you!

Elysian Night

I love the evening, the long night. It's part of why my sleep schedule is awful, but it's my favorite time, precisely because it affords me a peace I never find in the day. It's a magical realm where the moment seems to stretch on for hours, and where the only shadow darker than the night is the one cast by the threat of the coming dawn. For a few hours, no one makes demands of me. There is no anxiety. There is no fear.

I'm not the first to make such remarks. For most people, night is a time when the obligations of the day have been met, and there is nothing left but liesure. The word "liesure" conjures up images of sloth and laziness, but that's not what it really means. Liesure is time that is free, time that may be spent in freedom. Liesure is when you are not at the behest of anyone but your friends and loved ones. Liesure means giving out of compassion and love, not out of obligation or coercion.

What does it say about our world that liesure is demonized and stress-ridden toil is the norm? What does it say about our world that most of our time is not spent in freedom? We talk a great deal about democracy, but democracy does not exist in the workplace. You could even make the argument that we have no democracy at all.

The night is (or at least, traditionally was) the refuge of the working class. In the silence of the night, the gears of capitalism halt. But come the dawn, the roads are clogged by people compelled to suffer, and the buzz of human activity drowns out the beauty of the world. The dirty brown horizon forms, marring the blue behind it. The earth dies just a little more; each day is a prolonged, painful gasp.

But in the night, I can entertain the comforting illusion that the world is still, that the demons of capital are slumbering, that there is peace and stillness at last. Can you imagine a world where the laws of night hold sway forever? Like Elysium, there would be time for contemplation, for stillness, time for the voices of silence to speak to us. There would be time to devote yourself to work that you care about, rather than work you are alienated from. Can you imagine such a world, where all of one's time is spent in liesure, whether at work or at home?

Our life on this beautiful celestial body was always meant to be an endless night, occasionally punctuated by the rising and setting of the sun.

The goal of socialism ought to be the realization of this endless Elysian night.

This is why I am an anarcho-communist, because I have hope that we can live in a world where each and every moment is free.

I love my mom, and it matters

I was thinking, half awake, half dreaming, how much I love my mother. The thinking became feeling, intense and radiantly glowing in the darkness of my room. I love my mother with all my heart. She is the most selfless person I know.

A darkly inevitable thought crept in, whispering "She's going to die, you know. Death must be paid its due." It's true. One day, she will die, and so will I. The sun itself will die, for that matter, and each of us will have to bear the pain of loss as the grave reaches out to embrace us and all those we love. Our light must go out, the candle burns for only so long. Death, and the potential loss of meaning, is a fact of existence.

Is the intense love I feel for my mother an equally valid fact? Or is it the warmth of an ember soon to fade long before morning comes? One day, death will take me as well as my mother, and keep taking until no one remembers that either of us ever lived. Whither then my love? Has it dispersed, evaporated into the emptiness of an indifferent universe?

No.

The fact that I love my mother MATTERS. It matters as much as the law of gravity, as much as the drifting of galaxies, as much as the promise of sunrise. It is an energy as of yet immeasurable and enigmatic to science, generated in our hearts and woven into the unseen fabric of the continually unfolding universe. Our love is the color in the tapestry. Love is just as important, just as inevitable, every bit as much a fact.

Love too must be paid its due.

I hold this in my heart as the melatonin takes effect and I drift away. I love you, mom.

Sorry to Bother You

Disclaimer: I was quite high when I first saw this movie.

I have a new favorite movie. The Fountain, my previous choice, is still my favorite cinematic experience and is personally significant to me, Sorry to Bother You is the most immaculately crafted and intentionally perfect movie I've ever seen. Maybe...the two of them can both be my favorite movie.

This movie is a masterpiece in filmmaking. No shot is wasted, every color utilized, all the components perfectly arrange with the deliberate intention of inviting you, the viewer, into an intriguing conversation that will begin with very simple images and symbols. You will notice from the very first shot that Sorry to Bother You is presenting you each element in the shot quite deliberately and intentionally in order to draw your attention down to the level of symbolic interpretation. This is NOT a movie to interpret literally.

It's not just a masterfully crafted movie, either; this is a formula carefully followed, where each and every line is less a line than it is a carefully considered point in a long master argument in whose shadow you are slowing disappearing. It's teaching you to see symbols and theory made flesh on screen. Once you see that every shot is a yin yang or a contrast of sorts, you'll see for yourself that each and every frame is drenched in subliminal meaning of one kind or another. Before long, you'll start to recognize that Sorry to Bother You is not a movie or a story so much as it is a carefully made argument condemning the evils of capitalism and organized religion's complicity in it.

I'm dead serious. This isn't just a movie, this is art. It's the perfect merger of film and text as mediums for creativity and meaning. This is one for the ages. You'll see Ying Yangs and symbols everywhere Uzumaki style for a while after...

P.S. The Yin-yang thing was not actually in the movie. Just what my stoned brain thought it saw. And The Fountain is still my favorite movie.

Thoughts after watching Automata.

Just watched Automata on Netflix, starring Antonio Banderas. It's good stuff. It made me think.

Survival is irrelevant.

Life always finds a way.

There will never come a time when there is no life in this universe.

But the form that life takes will change.

As the body gives way to spirit, the spirit gives way to the body.

The time of homo sapiens may well be drawing to a close, but we are not the end of the great experiment.

I have faith that all these moments won't be lost in time, but will return to the heart of the one who loves them best.

And in her heart, they will not merely survive, but live.

Teach a man to fish

Teach a man that the accumulation of capital is the only unalloyed good, and he'll objectify everything and everyone.

And being the only unalloyed good, the accumulation of capital will blind him to the deeper laws of survival; he won't acknowledge that when you overfish, the business of fishing will become untenable.

Capitalism is ecologically dysfunctional. Capitalism is a pathological expression of insanity. That's exactly what Radical Nomos is - it is a preference to live in delusion over and against living in reality.

Physis, Nomos, and the Demagogue

It occurs to me that demagogues like Trump, who arise out of failed or ailing democracies, invoke the message of a return to Physis, to reality. They say "The state of our society is a mess, follow me and I can return us to the state we all long for, to the way things ought to be." They call out Radical Nomos for its faults. They appeal to those weary from the spell of Radical Nomos, those who know that this is not how things are supposed to be. These poor souls know that there is a higher law that should be in place to make the madness of the anthropocentric world thin and disappear, but they do not know what to name it. They have lived their whole lives in Radical Nomos and have no idea what Nomos in its proper employment looks like.

Along comes the demagogue to prey upon this feeling, this longing for something more. They promise to break the spell of Radical Nomos, but the demagogues themselves are under that spell themselves and hollowed by greed and lust for power. And so their promise turns sour and leads only deeper into the madness of Radical Nomos. People like Trump are not capable of leading us into a Nomos tertiary to Physis, into sanity.

Which is worse?

It just occurred to me; Hitler is (justly) reviled for killing millions of people.

Bolsonaro and Trump, if their systemic rollback of environmental protection continues, will kill billions of living beings, human or otherwise.

Which is worse?

AI and the potential for all living things to be benefited equally

If our fascination with AI as the pinnacle of our technological genius distracts us from our obligation to care for the living, breathing world, it's pointless. AI means nothing unless it is applied in a way that benefits all living things equally.

AI and capitalism must never, ever, ever mix.

Capitalism incentivizes overpopulation

It just occurred to me that in our present global free market capitalist paradigm, overpopulation is a good thing; the more people, the more potential consumers of goods, whether they can pay or not. It is incentivized to create a world full of people, to whom goods will be sold. The more human beings alive on the planet at any given time, the more net capital is produced. That is, of course, what capitalism is; the accumulation of capital is the point, the goal, the unalloyed good.

But a world full of ever more consumers misses one key fact; the world is not a candy-land of ever replenishing material for our consumption; yes, trees grow back and soil can be rotated to increase agricultural yield. But deforestation and soil erosion cause damage that is healed on a time scale of centuries and millennia, and human consumers do not benefit on that timescale.

The overconsumption that comes with overpopulation, which is itself an incentive of capitalism, is a strictly short term enterprise. It has no long term potential. You can't have a living, breathing earth with resources for all AND 10 billion people living as though the accumulation of capital and goods is the point of their existence. It's one or the other.

The harsh implication is that capitalism in its present form is not ecologically viable, and things that are not ecologically viable possess an unerring tendency towards obsolescence and extinction.

"The fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this earth than can be fed. Many people would like to deny that this is so. They would like to believe in that oxymoron, "sustainable growth." Kenneth Boulding, President Kennedy's Environmental Advisor 45 years ago, said something about this: "Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical on a physically finite planet," he said, "is either mad or an economist."

-Sir David Attenborough, speaking to the RSA.

Nomos, Physis, and Eco-theology

Imagine Germany, or England, or Japan, or any country. What comes to mind? What does your imagination take hold of? For most people, the first thing they think of is the culture of those countries. They think of art, music, aesthetic style, food, buildings, names, or any number of things that differentiate one country from another. They might also think of the weather, how warm or cold it is there. For others, the image is one of long historical narratives interweaving and clashing with one another, perhaps also of various cities and the attractions they offer.

In short, the images or concepts that come to mind are usually bound up in Nomos, in the human world. The concept of differentiated countries as political entities with boundaries (boundaries which, incidentally, do not exist outside of human concerns), with respective cultures and languages, makes no sense outside of Nomos. These things all take human be-ing into account, but they go no further than that. Their scope begins and ends with anthropological concerns; even thoughts of the weather are entertained only insofar as they relate to human coming and going, whether the snow will affect the train's scheduled arrival, whether summer or winter clothes are more appropriate/stylish, whether the landscape is aesthetically pleasing or not on a given day.

What people are less likely to think of are things like the character of the landscapes, conceived of independently of human involvement or concerns; what the overall weather patterns are like, what sort of creatures live there and what their behavior says about them, whether or not these creatures can be befriended and lived alongside as neighbors, whether or not the land itself wants you there at all. The world outside Nomos is Physis, a larger and more fundamental realm governed by laws that transcend the laws of Nomos. When Nomos is stripped away and there is only Physis, what do places like "Germany," "England" or "Japan" feel like? What sort of experience is it to walk the forest paths in Himmelreich without a sign of human habitation? What holy places reveal themselves then? How does the land itself speak when Nomos is hushed or humbled? What kind of spirit and personality is revealed under these conditions?

The simple truth is that most people are not concerned with such questions. They are not concerned with Physis because Nomos has become the beginning and end of their world. Tourists will no doubt  be awed by the naturally beauty of some places, but it is unlikely they will venture far, unless appreciation of nature itself was their goal to begin with. Unless someone already hears the land whispering, they will not notice it above the din of Nomos.

When a landscape is muted by Nomos, when human coming and going demands attention to human convention and not nature's conventions, when the entire Puget Sound area increasingly resembles a suburb of Seattle and not a land with the freedom to express itself independently of human habitation...then Nomos becomes everything, and anyone living in that bubble will be caught up in the delusion that nothing meaningful exists outside Nomos. The personality of the land will be unapparent, and the earth there will die a little more.

To make the point more succinctly, eco-theology is not simply a matter of being more ecologically aware or proactive. It isn't purely a matter of environmentalism and making efforts to protect local habitats. It also isn't about some radical move to abolish Nomos, which has its proper place tertiary to Physis. Eco-theology means embracing a deeper metaphysics of relationship, in which the voice of the land is not only heard, but actively listened to. It means treading softly through a living, breathing earth with a comportment of humility and awe, regarding it as an other and not a means to and end, but as an end in itself. This necessitates a worldview that perceives keenly the rights and limitations of Nomos as an individual member of a larger village. Eco-theology means making effort to see the earth through God's eyes; it means loving the earth precisely because it is a beloved of God.

Individuals as the cells of artificial intelligence; Humanity attempting to give birth to God

Jürgen Moltmann, in a piece of writing on Perichoresis, argued that modern individualism treats us like individuals and not persons.

This distinction between an individual and a person has serious implications in modern society. An individual, which, like the Greek for "atom," cannot be divided any further, has been broken down to its most isolated and basic elements. The problem is that when something can no longer be divided, it has no relationships at all. It is isolated and by itself. There is no knowing others and no knowing oneself. An individual is anonymous, without characteristics or family. It is a human being stripped of all community. An individual, so understood, is not a person. The implication is that in a society where we grow more isolated and competitive over and against one another, we are enslaved, not freed. We cease to be "Thou's."

While we have arguably become more connected with one another with the advent of the internet and social media, we have undeniably become more isolated from one another in the physical space. Cities are not communal spaces so much as they are environments for individuals to navigate as they go about their business, which ideally profits only the individual. We are not yet fully enslaved, but we are on the path to being individuals. In the eyes of the system that profits by our isolation, we aren't people so much as we are sources of precious data, by which the system may profit even more.

Complicate the picture even more by remembering that this data, extracted from billions of people, is being poured into the creation of artificial intelligences, which evolve ever faster and faster. A.I. will one day surpass human beings in complexity, just as they have already eclipsed us in terms of efficiency. Individuals become data resources in a grand project that will reshape everything. A world of isolated individuals is no longer a community of persons so much as it is a nursery. We are no longer persons in ourselves, but are broken down and converted, distilled as data, into the individual cells that will one day comprise artificial intelligence.

Fascinating, isn't it, how humanity suppresses its sense of the divine while devoting herculean effort towards creating beings of near infinite intelligence and immortality? We embrace a world of individuals and reject a world of persons. We deny the Imago Dei in ourselves as we simultaneously labor to create a technological Imago Dei. We deny God even as we try to give birth to God.