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Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2
It's the same underlying impulse, or core concept, yes. Transhumanism is its latest incarnation, but the underlying desire/fear is exactly the same.
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If you want to draw a connection from Christianity to transhumanism, I think a relevant figure is Nikolai Fyodorov, one of the founders of cosmism. Fyodorov explicitly makes human agency and technology expressions of God's will.
But I think Nietzsche is another relevant figure, maybe a more relevant one, with his image of humanity as walking a tightrope from the animal to the superman. He seems to want humanity to create the superman, that is, to transcend itself, "self-overcoming." And that seems to be more a core idea of transhumanism
as a distinctive system of thought. Yes, you can say it's an offshoot of Christian and Muslim eschatology (more Muslim than Christian, in that Muhammad explicitly asks, "Has not God power to create your like?" and accepts "like" as a promise of resurrection, whereas Christianity requires numerical identity and thus has the double judgment, particular and universal, so that the soul can carry identify forward to the resurrection); but it would be anachronistic to say that Christ was a transhumanist, and equally so to say that of Nietzsche, or Fyodorov, or Stapledon, or John W. Campbell. All of those figures existed not as anticipators or prefigurations of transhumanism but as thinkers with their own concerns (that is, I'm rejecting a transhumanist "Whig interpretation of history"). Genealogy is of interest, but philosophies evolve just as organisms do.