Cyborg idea runs against Christianity

Moscow, May 6, Interfax - A Russian scientific movement for developing a cyborg in a bid to make humans immortal beings runs against Christian teachings, a theologian has argued.

"According to the Christian doctrine, the soul is a substance that separates from the body after death but does not cease to exist," Alexey Osipov, a professor at Moscow Spiritual Schools, told Interfax-Religion in comments on the Russia-2045 movement. "And we are not authorized to separate the soul from the body and place this soul where we like to."

Moreover, the human being is "a unity of body and soul, and separating one from the other is unthinkable from the point of view of Christianity and is vicious," Osipov said. Creating cyborgs means "radical interference in human nature," he said.

Russia-2045 initiator Dmitry Itskov, president of the New Media Stars company, said those professing the cyborg idea do not see it as "running against anyone's religious ideals or values."

"The movement sees it as one of its objectives to develop a new scientific and philosophical paradigm that incorporates intellectual values and scientific theories and represents a single harmonious world view that can unify the future mankind," Itskov said in a statement on the Russia-2045 website.

The site carries the manifesto of the movement and says more than 2,500 people have joined it, among them physicists, chemists and biologists.

A prosthetic arm or a leg doesn't offend anyone's beliefs, a far as I know. So if one artificial arm is OK, why not both? If one artificial leg is allowed, why not two? Then, do anyone's beliefs place the soul in someone's stomach? I doubt that. This way most of the body could be replaced with artificial parts and still one can say that he is a human.

In general, the question is "what makes someone a human?" and once you answer that you can replace everything else with any parts you wish - robotic, or artificial flesh, or animal parts if you want - that wouldn't make you any less of a human.

As I understand, the current theory says that the mind makes a human. The mind is presumably executed on the brain. Setting aside the far-fetched science fiction of replacing the brain itself, one can say that a cyborg with a human brain would most likely be a human.

There is of course one little catch. If cyborgs have some unique abilities that mere humans don't have then such cyborgs, being humans, will form their own tribes and eventually set themselves apart from the rest of the humanity. So if you start making cyborgs, be aware that they will eventually form a mini-society - unless they are a majority; if they are, then it's unmodified humans who would be hanging together.

“Star Trek” has explored the moral and philosophical implications, as did “Space: Above and Beyond” and “Stargate: SG-1.” It will be interesting, if one lives long enough, to see how reality comes to resemble fiction.

Certainly nobody can say that they didn’t realize (fill in the blank) could happen, because it has ALL been explored in fiction.

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