Cyborg and Religious? Technonature and Technoculture (original) (raw)
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The Cyborg and the Human: Origins, Creatureliness, and Hybridity in Theological Anthropology
2015
Are we cyborgs or humans? This question is at the heart of this investigation, and the implications of it are all around us. In Christian theology, humans are seen as uniquely made in the image of God (imago dei). This has been taken to mean various things, but broadly, it suggests an understanding of humans as somehow discrete from, and elevated above, other creatures in how they resemble God. Cyborgs mark a provocative attempt to challenge such notions, especially in the work of Donna Haraway, whose influential ?Cyborg Manifesto? (1991) elaborated a way of understanding cyborgs as figures for the way we live our lives not as discrete or elevated, but as deeply hybridised and involved in complex ways with technologies, as well as with other beings. Significantly, Haraway uses the cyborg to critique notions of the human rooted in theological anthropology and anthropogeny: the cyborg was not created in Eden. This assertion is the starting point of my investigation of cyborgs and huma...
To be a cyborg: towards the dialogue between science and religion
SHS Web of Conferences, 2019
The paper deals with the consequences of technological transformation of the biological nature of human beings. How will our religious and scientific worldview change? What arguments for and against human cyborgization do naturalists and engineers, philosophers and futurologists propose? Answers to these questions can be decisive in determining the future of humanity. The Russian philosophers-cosmists were the first to put their minds to this problem; nowadays, this dialogue is conducted on the border between science and religion. The image of cyborg is a kind of testing ground for discussing philosophical concepts about human nature and interaction of man with the external world, about the limits of historical development and the meaning of human existence.
Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture, 2014
' Cyborg Selves is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature on Christian theological engagements with posthumanism. Unlike many other texts, Cyborg Selves aims to highlight the varied and, at times, incommensurable perspectives of the entire gamut of posthuman discourses. Thweatt-Bates' premise throughout the text is precisely that in failing to distinguish between these often competing visions, theologians have obfuscated
Speaking cyborg: Technoculture and technonature
Zygon®, 2002
Two ways of self-interpretation merged in Western thought: the Hebrew and the Greek. What is unique, if anything, about the human species? The reinterpretation of this problem has been a constant process; here I am referring to Philip Hefner and the term created co-creator, and particularly to Donna Haraway and the term cyborg. Simultaneously, humans have been fascinated by the thought of transgressing the boundaries that seem to separate them from the rest of nature. Any culture reflects the ways it relates to nature. Our nature is technonature, and our culture is technoculture. Our reality can be best approached by the metaphor and symbol cyborg. Donna Haraway's cyborg is not just an interesting figure of speech, it is also a description-of ourselves and our culture. Also, contemporary fiction reflects the return of ontological questions: What is a world? What is the self? The cyborg acknowledges our mode of existence and destabilizes the traditional procedures of identity construction.
CHRISTIAN CYBORGS: A PLEA FOR A MODERATE TRANSHUMANISM
Should or shouldn't Christians endorse the transhumanist agenda of changing human nature in ways fitting to one's needs? To answer this question, we first have to be clear on what precisely the thesis of transhumanism entails that we are going to evaluate. Once this point is clarified, I argue that Christians can in principle fully endorse the transhumanist agenda because there is nothing in Christian faith that is in contradiction to it. In fact, given certain plausible moral assumptions, Christians should endorse a moderate enhancement of human nature. I end with a brief case study that analyses the theological implications of the idea of immortal Christian cyborgs. I argue that the existence of Christian cyborgs who know no natural death has no impact on the Christian hope of immortality in the presence of God.
A Cyborgic Christianity: Transhumanism and the Tacit Dimension
Anyone who carefully pays attention to the arc of western cultural thought and practice since the rise of modernity will discern a progressively intensifying and spreading pursuit of abstractions as the most trusted means of representing the realities of nature and accessing their truths. Modern science's rise out of the so-called " premodern age of Faith " was significantly propelled by epic acts of abstraction from the meaning-laden and quality-saturated medieval cosmos. By bidding farewell to the cozy and reassuring medieval cosmos** and embracing the cold and abstract world picture of an infinite universe, rife with inert atoms in mechanical motion, the West acquired unprecedented capacities of explanation, prediction, and control of the vicissitudes of matter's ceaseless permutations.** The increases in our power to intellectually grasp and materially control nature eventually brought with it stupendous gains in human standards of living for a good portion of Earth's growing population. Yet, in recent decades, it has dawned on many that these improvements in material standards of living came with an unanticipated price: viz., a rather steep and almost unbearable reduction of the existential meaningfulness of life. Interestingly, our contemporary response to this rising awareness of disenchantment is not to question the spirit of abstraction that has dominated the West since the rise of modernity, but rather to push modernity even further in the direction of abstraction and the quantitative. The idea seems to be that by further