Playing God

God has been in the news a lot lately.  According to endless war enthusiasts in Congress, the current administration, the various lobbyists, and the profitable weapons industry, God is cool with killing lots of people in his name. Schoolchildren, religious leaders, and ordinary citizens. If you have a major platform and beg to differ, you can find yourself taken out of “circulation.” For those of us with no platform, we’re reduced to hoping, demonstrating, or simply tuning out.

There is an unholy abundance of wannabe gods who justify messing with human life in a variety of ways.  I’ll list four of them here: the military/industrial complex, the technocrats with billions at their disposal to do whatever, the obedient media, and the bioterrorism “scientists” always looking for a new virus.  All of them seem to want to destroy or improve on God’s creations and ignore the ultimate cost to the rest of us. Here’s the latest from you-know-who cheered on by the likes of Netanyahu, Sen. Lindsay Graham, and Bible-quoting enthusiasts, mostly from the Old Testament.

The Military gods

Let’s start with the military. The U.S., Israel, Ukraine, Russia and others have bombed schools, churches, hospitals, entire neighborhoods, sacred sites, and life-essential resources. Leaving in their wake rubble, toxic air, countless dead civilians and soldiers making manifest President Eisenhower’s famous statement:

“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” He must be spinning.

The Military/Private/Government/NGO gods

• “Apple made headlines last week when it basically erased Southern Lebanon from Apple Maps,“  according to a report by Kei Pritsker of The Grayzone.  If you go to Lebanon on Apple Maps, you’ll see that the names of the villages in the South are gone. And this is obviously the region of Lebanon that Israel is currently invading and trying to annex. Apple’s second largest research and development facility in the world, second only to their headquarters in Cupertino, California, is in Israel. Apple quite literally wouldn’t exist without the Israeli tech sector. It’s a massive campus in Tel Aviv that employs 2,500 people. “Many Israeli tech companies are founded by Israelis who come out of elite military units, and since we subsidize the Israeli military, we’re the ones funding Israel’s tech sector and our own surveillance for that matter.”

• In 2016, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI) was formed, primarily by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum. The “Preliminary Business Plan” not only described the challenge of viral outbreaks but left out any mention of treating emerging infectious diseases.

Now ten years later, and for the first time, a Dutch court is hearing arguments that the COVID-19 mRNA injections may qualify as military-grade biological weapons. Defendants are Bill Gates, Albert Bourla of Pfizer, and Mark Rutte, a Dutch politician who served as the 14th secretary general of NATO. Attorney Peter Stassen has taken on the so-called “Architects of the Great Reset” on behalf of citizens allegedly harmed by the COVID injections. Stassen cited testimony by the late Dr. Francis Boyle, a globally recognized expert in biological weapons law. Boyle died unexpectedly after agreeing to testify under oath in this case. Before his death, Boyle described the COVID mRNA injection as: “…a bioweapon… conceived by the U.S. Pentagon.”

The Techno gods

• Bill Gates is not alone on his various god-like missions that impact human life. Here’s another god who wants into the baby business.  If you thought only the fertilized egg decides things like eye color, sex, and personality, you are old-fashioned. Now, a new biotech company, Nucleus Genomics, wants to help parents design their children and have the perfect baby. That means using technology to customize their sex, height, potential inherited flaws, and other innate characteristics. Nucleus Genomics CEO Kian Sadeghi insists his company does not seek to take the role of God, even though he acknowledges that it is tampering with life’s formula. Not everyone is buying Sadeghi’s claims including this recent article header from New York Magazine: Silicon Valley-backed companies are selling $50,000 genetic  tests to anxious parents, despite shaky science.

• Transhumanism is also a frequent item on the bio-tech gods’ agendas. While it might be that they are simply afraid of two things – aging and death – they claim otherwise. The technologies of transhumanism include genetic enhancement, cybernetic augmentation, artificial intelligence, and mind uploading. These guys, when they’re not building bunkers to survive what they are creating, simply sneer at developing concerns. If you strip away the chrome and the coding, what remains are the same ancient tensions: power vs. consent, fairness vs. exploitation, identity vs. community.

Concerns that transhumanist technology can create greater social inequities are among the most voiced criticisms of the movement. In an article published in the journal Foreign Policy in 2004, the American political theorist Francis Fukuyama called transhumanism “the world’s most dangerous idea,” warning that biotechnology’s offerings might come at a “frightful moral cost” to human rights. Fukuyama pointed out that wide economic disparities between countries may further encourage “enhanced” individuals to claim superior rights to “those left behind.”

State-Sponsored gods

• The group Dying with Dignity Canada is now recommending that “mature minors” aged 12 and older be eligible for assisted death. Their proposal even suggests that 16- and 17-year-olds should be able to request euthanasia without parental consent, with eligibility determined by “maturity” rather than chronological age. Since Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying’s (MAiD) creation, euthanasia deaths have surged dramatically. In 2023 alone, more than 15,000 Canadians ended their lives through the program—roughly 4.7% of all deaths nationwide, or about one in every twenty. Critics say this proves long-standing warnings about a “slippery slope” were justified. “Once you cross the line of allowing doctors to kill patients, it becomes very hard to argue for limits,” said Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a psychiatrist and bioethicist at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “You’ve accepted the premise that some lives are not worth living.”

Working on this post, I was reminded of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus. In the novel, the Swiss German doctor named Victor Frankenstein applies his laboratory knowledge to create a living creature out of the dead. Note to those bio-tech billionaires–Frankenstein’s creation was a monstrous failure.

“Capitalism is a social system owned by the capitalistic class, a small network of very wealthy and powerful businessmen, who compromise the health and security of the general population for corporate gain.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

Photo Credits: Glory – Gabriel Lamza, The pentagon – Getty Images, Transhumanism – Jacob Owens.