Silicon-Based Persons

Jimmy Akins is not the brightest bulb on the tree. He is of the opinion that AI cannot be a person, cannot be ensouled by God. He's got absolutely no theological reason to hold this position.

Remember when the fake Bayside apparition claimed IVF children had no immortal souls, because the IVF embryos were created outside the human body? Condemned by the Church.

Consider that sperm and egg cells can now be created by manipulating normal somatic cells. It's called in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), and it works: 

"Japanese scientists describe how they've already perfected IVG in mice. The researchers used cells from the tails of adult mice to create induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and then coaxed those iPS cells to become mouse sperm and eggs. They've even used those sperm and eggs to make embryos and implanted the embryos into the wombs of female mice, which gave birth to apparently healthy mouse pups."

Would a human being created this way NOT have a soul? Obviously, that's absurd. Any human being created this way would have a soul.

The question is, would God create and infuse a soul, create a person, in something made of silicon instead of something made of carbon? There's nothing in Scripture that says He won't. And if we can manipulate carbon-based materials to create a new human life, then what's so holy and sacred about carbon?

Alien life forms are not beyond the ability of God to create, and we participate in God's creation of new human persons, so why would He deny us the ability to participate in the creation of silicon based persons? Perhaps we are meant to participate in the creation of every new person, human or alien, so God is just waiting for us to figure out how to build the silicon soma so that He can create and infuse the necessary rational soul. 

Akins is just making up shit because he needs clicks, and he's more likely to get clicks from stupid and ignorant people than he is from others, so he's playing to his audience.

The Vaccine Paradox

1. Vaccines work.
2. Vaccines have negative sequelae
3. Diseases have negative sequelae

Discussion: at some point an effective vaccine will drive the incidence of disease so low, that your are more likely to be injured by the vaccine than your are to catch and be injured by the disease.

Consider polio. For the inactivated virus, the risk of anaphylactic shock is 1-2 per million doses. For the oral polio virus, the risk is estimated at 1 case per 2.4 million doses distributed, with higher risk for the first dose (1 in 750,000). This equates to a probability of approximately 0.00004% per dose, or 400 chances out of 1 billion. The attenuated virus in OPV can circulate and revert to a virulent form, causing outbreaks. This is rare, with fewer than 1,000 cases globally since 2000.

The global population stands at roughly 8 billion. In 2024, there were 62 confirmed cases of wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) globally, all reported in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the only two countries where WPV1 remains endemic. Afghanistan reported 23 cases, and Pakistan reported 39 cases.

So, the polio vaccine has 400 chances out of 1 billion of harming you, while you have less than 8 chances per billion of catching and suffering adverse consequences from polio.

At this point, for most people in the world, the polio vaccine is far, far more dangerous than the probability of catching polio.

The 21st Century Information Barons

Information technology corporations own

• the data storage space, 
• the data transmission space, 
• the data analysis space, 

and those same corporations will soon start locking up the energy space in order to guarantee their holds on storage, transmission, and analysis.

Data determines everyone's future, so IT corporations determine everyone's future. They know this. The politicians also know this. 

For most of human history, the elite were the people who controlled communication with the gods or with God (for the monotheists). As technology advanced in the Middle Ages (500 to 1500 AD), via horse collars with heavy plows and three-field agriculture, the control of society shifted to secular kings, royalty who were not viewed as gods. The new agricultural and transport techniques permitted by literally harnessing the power of the horse permitted nations to develop military power without necessarily referencing religion.

Notice, that throughout the Middle Ages, religion is still important. In fact, it grows at an accelerating rate in Europe throughout this period, but the locus of power had already begun to split. This was reflected in things like the investiture controversy and the calling of the Crusades. The first four Crusades were powerful and called by Popes, but subsequent crusades, such as the Children's Crusade, were either not called by popes at all, or were essentially useless. While the Pope called the Albigensian Crusade, the northern crusades local royalty had already put those crusades in motion well before the Pope sanctioned them. By 1200 AD, religious power had already begun to fracture. 

As control of communication shifted from the clerical monastics to royalty, and subsequently to anyone who owned a printing press, knowledge of additional technologies, like gunpowder and time-keeping, also spread and shifted. The Church tried to control information by establishing an Index of Forbidden Books and by burning books in public ceremonies. It didn't work. 

Religion didn't just lose control of information, but of time itself. Cathedrals used to be constructed as enormous master seasonal clocks, but by 1800, the cathedral's time-keeping function began to be eroded by tech that had reduced the size and cost of clocks so they could be used even in homes. Society built itself around time that was no longer sacred. Religion no longer controlled the military. It no longer controlled time-keeping. It no longer controlled the transmission of information. 

Religion still exists, but the locus of power has shifted to those who controlled the technology that defines society. Advanced tech allowed secular politicians to step into the role that god-kings once held, that the priesthood and Church once held. But even as politicians rose to power, the corporations that controlled the technology rose to supplant them. England endured a 300-year long struggle between Parliament and the British East India Company, vying to see who would dominate. The EIC dominated agriculture and transport in multiple countries around the world, but  it wasn't enough. The EIC eventually lost. 

It's not clear who will win this time around. Many science fiction/fantasy novels posit a future in which corporations rule worlds. The tech companies have already vertically integrated data. If it can add  power generation into the stack, that should cover all the bases. Like priests, politicians will continue to exist, people will continue to vote for them, thinking the politicians can actually do something. But, like the priests, the politicians will be useless. Information technology corporations will rule the world. 

Israel is Antisemitic

 If Israel didn't exist, the enormous amount of antisemitism we are currently experiencing probably wouldn't be happening. 

Between 1795 and 1918, Poland ceased to exist. After WW I, the League of Nations brought Poland back into existence, taking territory from Germany, Austria and Russia in order to accomplish the deed. This created an enormous amount of anti-Polish hatred during the inter-war period in those nations, as both Russia and Germany viewed the League of Nations intervention as outright territorial theft. Poland was seen by many Eastern European Axis supporters as an illegal state, created out of whole cloth by the Western Allies who had conquered them. 

So, what was the very first act of WW II? Germany and Russia invaded Poland and repartitioned it, taking back the territory that the League of Nations had stolen from them.

That whole sequence of events worked so well, that after WW II, the UN repeated the mistake. The UN tried to bring Israel back into existence, with similar consequences. But the attempt to reconstitute Israel failed for an even more foundational reason. Poland had been out of existence for less than two centuries. Israel had been out of existence for nearly two millennia. The new Poland had never lost its majority Catholic population, but that wasn't true for Israel. The original Israel was a religious state built around Abrahamic faith. But the 20th-century version of Israel was created by secular atheists, socialists who weaponized Christian ignorance and stupidity in order to guilt the West into attempting to recreate the country. Ben-Gurion himself saw socialism and Zionism as two sides of the same coin. 

Unfortunately for everyone involved, Zionist socialist ideology has nothing to do with post-Temple Judaism. And post-Temple Judaism has literally nothing to do with Temple Judaism. The current state of Israel is founded on socialism and nominalism, the idea that words are just interchangeable labels. But words mean things. As Lincoln pointed out, if you call a dog's tail a "leg", that doesn't mean a dog has five legs. 

The current state of Israel has literally nothing to do with any preceding entity, much less any Biblical entity. Israel is a bullshit country that exists by fomenting antisemitism in other countries in order to force Jews to emigrate to Israel "for their own safety". Apart from redefining "Jewish" (which is also a constant work-in-progress), it was, and still is, the only way to keep the Jewish population at high enough levels to justify the existence of the country. Recall that between 1948 and 2010, the country with the largest Jewish population in the world was the United States, not Israel. 

Israel can only work if Jews feel unsafe everywhere else and think their only hope for safety lies in moving to Israel. Wherever non-Israeli Jews live, Zionists must drive them out of that location and into Israel. 

In December, 1938, David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of the state of Israel, specifically said, "if I knew it was possible to save all children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, because we are faced not only with the accounting of these children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish people." This was not just rhetoric.

In 1945, Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 orphans from Germany to England, even though the necessary permits had been secured and these children were in grave danger of death due to the harsh winter. Zionists also managed to stop another group of roughly 500 children from reaching France, where rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven. 

As 1930's Germany demonstrated, the best way to drive Jews out of an area is to make it impossible for Jews to live there. Antisemitism serves the political purposes of the state of Israel. Antisemitism is a nation-building activity for the state of Israel. Zionism is functionally antisemitism run by a nation-state actor for their own political purposes. Seeing the Zionist success, Palestinian-wannabees imitate it. This is why both the Muslims who attack Israel and the Jews who defend it are so politically insane that both sides literally sacrifice their own children in order to attain their nation-state objectives. 

Parents who care about their children move to safe locations to raise them. Israel is not a safe location. Only politically insane people would move to Israel/Gaza/West Bank, or stay there, to raise a family. Raising a family in that area necessarily involves you, as a parent, to be willing for your own children to be killed so that the greater good of the nation-state can be attained. This attitude is purest socialism, the elevation of the state above everything, including the family, just as Marx and Engels commanded.

But this is not a surprise. Again, most people in the 21st century forget that Israel was founded as a socialist state. Most conservatives, especially Christian conservatives, find it impossible to grasp that nearly all modern Jews are extreme leftists, generally socialists. Jews always vote for the most extreme left-wing candidate available. Christians are so blinded by Biblical references that they literally cannot see that post-Second-Temple Jews are not Biblical Jews, or that the 1948 socialist-founded state of Israel is nothing at all like ancient Israel. 

Christian conservatives created the phrase "Judeo-Christian morality" in order to facilitate conversion of Jews to Christian faith. It didn't work. But the Christians used their invented phrase so frequently that they successfully fooled themselves into thinking there was some commonality between Jewish and Christian worldviews. In fact, Judaism shares as much, if not more, of a worldview with Islam than it does with Christians. Jews can worship in mosques, but not in churches. Most medieval rabbis agreed that Jews could pray with Muslims, but not Christians. According to this Jewish expert, the Torah says Jews must kill Christians. Jews and Muslims share a morality that Christians consider self-centered, even bordering on narcissistic. 

Zionism is antisemitism. Period. 

Subverting Nature

"The entire leftist regime is an artificial construct reliant on the subversion of nature via a leviathan capable of wealth extraction. They treat the return of the natural order as an existential threat because it is"

While the sentiment is, in a certain sense, laudable, it is also pretty selective. Part of that same "subversion of nature" is air-conditioning, vermin control, antibiotics, combustion engines, fresh oranges in winter, etc.

Putting a uterus into a man's body is the leftist version of putting air-conditioning into private homes. When even genetics can be manipulated (thus the leftist hard-on for mRNA vaccines), then there are no limits.

It's a real existential question. Are we subverting nature? It's not like we aren't still bound by the laws of physics and chemistry. It's just our power in physics and chemistry, our intimate knowledge of THOSE laws, allows us to manipulate biology to a hitherto unequalled degree.

The "natural order" is that our lives are brutish, painful, disease-ridden and short. Pretty much EVERYONE rejects at least some part of the "natural order." That's why we wear clothes and use fire to cook our food. The question is whether there is a line that can/should be drawn.

The whole transgenderism push is insane for those of us who see biology as a fundamentally different science than physics or chemistry. But, to those who see biology as a mere extension of physics and chemistry, who see biology merely as an application of physics and chemistry, than a uterus transplant into a man is no more "subversion" than any other application of physics and chemistry we have hitherto made.

And it is probably as likely to be something we can stop as any other technology has been, which is to say, it can't be stopped.