Robert Kurtz

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Transfuminus log. Star date 2114. 130 for our non-science fi, our sci-fi neck beard geeks. That’s May 10, 21, 14.

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Whatever form the literature of history has taken, we read about a group so convinced they would not die at 70 or 80. So convinced that they would be the generation to bid unfawn farewell to death itself, that they invested money, time, careers, hope, influence. Even their Saturdays, attending meetings of rare, like-minded, twisted believers.

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To guarantee surviving to the most critical point in human history, oh, they had special diets. We were careful with the air we breathed, the water that we drank, stress in our lives, avoided foolish, life-robbing vices. Carefully arranged amount and quality of sleep and rest, scrutinized every lifestyle aspect. Wellness mattered in a way it had never mattered to any other group. Do anything necessary to just make it until we’ve really, really got it made.

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They promoted and invested in such shocking pioneering medical research that religionists were morally aghast and protested and demanded legislation to stop reckless mad scientists from tinkering with God-ordained Species barriers, and having the audacity to contrive dangerous tools of defilement to control even subatomic particles for use in the sacred temple of the human body.

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There were prominent, well-spoken men with huge beards. And they wrote convincing books. And there were prophecies and graphic descriptions of how the drama would finally play out, with vulnerable falsifiability rivaling much of what dared call itself science. They wielded mathematics in boldly forecasting that pivotal mid forties year of humanity’s transition.

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Well, according to one of Niels Bohr’s favorite clichés, Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. And we’ll read how that group was disappointed. On October 22, 1844.

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After their great disappointment, William Miller’s followers, who had been convinced that Jesus was going to visibly return, October 22, 1844, they eventually founded that group which would become the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

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Now I’ve been preaching Seventh-day Adventist Christianity in various forms for over 40 years. Yes, it does maybe look like I haven’t, but we are into life extension. I’m 113, actually. It’s our diet.

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Now I find myself drawn to transhumanism and the idea of the singularity. I’m a sucker for it for hope of not getting dead. Naturally, I’m evangelizing, and I’m so used to believing hopeful things that most people really consider violating common sense.

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Albert Einstein is one of my heroes. He said common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.

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I’m fond of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of prediction. One, when a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Two, the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Three, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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Thank you. I’m not here because I think this is some sort of ecumenical contest. I’m not here to try to convince all of you to become Seventh-day Adventists, and I definitely am not here. To become a Wiccan or a Mormon or a Buddhist. But I am here to celebrate with each of you some hope that we hold in common.

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And I’m betting no matter how we showcase our particular group, our subculture, I’m betting if we’re here today, daring to speak like we’re in favor of this, we probably are not fair representatives of where we come from.

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I know some Mormon people. You guys are weirdos for Mormons. I know Buddhist people. They haven’t been really open to this concept. I know people that are atheists. And they’re not in favor of getting together and rubbing elbows with a bunch of religious fanatics.

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But I would like us to put our heads together and see as maybe. People on the inside, I wonder if it’s possible that we could go back to our group and keep the group from screwing this up and getting in the way while we try to make this happen. I don’t know if that’s possible.

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I found myself, though I’m a theist, and I’m not ashamed of being a theist, but I found myself maybe a little more comfortable with the presentation. That we got on atheism than any other. Because my concerns were really similar.

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I don’t have an agenda to try to have the government Tell you you need to believe like me. I’m not in favor of that.

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I’m a transhumanist. And an Adventist, and a humanist, because I’m who I am, and vice versa. Vice versa.

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Well, was all that stuff I said that maybe some of you thought was about transhumanism, is that true of Seventh-day Adventism? It is. Every one of those things is true. And more that we have in common that makes it so that I can kind of watch this kata that this group as it is in formation. And I’m not.

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convinced completely that we’re not, as transhumanists, going to see at least some offshoot of us that might become bigger than any other, perhaps become a cult. I understand from being part of a group that started as a movement where people said, Oh, no, no, no, I’m not leaving my church. I just, they’re not talking about this phenomenon, Jesus coming back. I’m into that, and I’m not hearing that from the pulpit, so you teach us, we’ll go back. But then they all got kicked out of their churches, and they needed some place to go. They wouldn’t recant that heresy that Jesus was returning. I think that it’s possible that something from this could become very much a cult.

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And not everything that I consider a cult. Is something that, even though the definition has evolved in the wake of Jonestown and David Koresh and everything, and I have a connection to those things too. My father was a member at People’s Temple before they went to Central America, and he got out of there when he saw that there was some sort of dual agenda. And I understand a little bit about the people at Waco, Texas. I went to school with some of the people that died there, and that some of the ones that got out of there before there was catastrophe.

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I believe that not every movement that could be labeled a cult, at least in the broader, older version of that word, not everything has a big charismatic leader. Things just come from a movement that then crystallizes into a religion. And I think there may be religions that are formed. From this.

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And we’ve seen an example today of somebody who’s reporting on a religion that was formed with intentionality. I appreciate that. I think that’s going to happen. That’s going to happen more. In fact, rather than joining that particular group, I think people may be inspired to form their own religion. Approximately, I think, seven billion religions in the world right now.

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I know that when I have pastored in various places as a Seventh-day Adventist minister. The different congregations, even though this is one of the most denominational-centric, real doctrinally centered, top-down kind of groups in terms of their dogma. I found that every one of the congregations really had some theology in common more with whoever founded that congregation than they did with the denomination as a whole. That’s probably true in Most groups.

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I don’t think that we have to be negative in order to be a cult. I think that there have been cults that have been very positive and there are today. But the word has been hijacked to represent dangerous cults that won’t let you leave and your families are worried about you when you when you get into them.

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I I think some of your families are worried about you for getting into this. And in fact, what about the medical technologies that I refer to in the life extension?

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Seventh-day Adventists were the first in the world’s history that we know of to bring you xenotransplantation. We were the ones who put a baboon heart in a baby. Do you think that was popular among most Christian groups? No, that was violating the sacred temple. Well,

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Do we do things to mess around with subatomic particles and invade and defile this temple of God? Absolutely. We had the first Proton Accelerator Oncology Center. In an Adventist institution in the United States. It was the second in the world, and it opened just like that after the other one did. Now they’re all over the place.

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We were the ones who corrupted C. Everett Koop so that we told everybody this big propaganda Adventist agenda that smoking might not be good for you. Doctors should stop prescribing it. So that in 1962, the Surgeon General determined that smoking was hazardous to our health. That was administered.

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Stick a patch on or go to a group or whatever. We were the way that people quit smoking. Adventist five-day plans, breathe-free groups. I have conducted countless of those, and there’s I don’t know. There’s thousands of people that do not smoke because I conducted just the ones that I did. We’re into making you live longer.

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A third of us are vegetarians or vegans. There is this idea, we heard earlier today Hank said, well, there’s some research that suggests that religious people live longer.

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That would be good to promote religion, but in honesty, it appears that might be a complicated assertion. On the February 27, 2013 issue of Psychology Today, there was a discussion of just how that plays out. It’s true in countries like the US where religious people are really among the favored group. But you go some places where religious people are not among the privileged or the most socially accepted and prominent, and it’s reversed. So that’s a little complicated. But I do know this much.

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Seventh-day Adventists, they do live longer. Seventh-day Adventists live about a decade longer, it’s true. And in Seventh-day A Buddhist enclave communities To have people pass 100 is very much more common. You can have that happening in a very small Seventh-day Adventist concentrated village than you would have in some major cities that have few Adventists.

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We really do for some reason, and we’re not sure why. It might be consuming a lot of soy products, it might be A lot of nuts. Believe it or not, the most recent installment of the Seventh-day Adventist health study from Loma Linda suggests that. We might not have identified any single factor you could do to make yourself live longer, not die of certain diseases. You know, all you have to do is eat walnuts. And we are grateful to Blue Diamond for sponsoring that study. I’m not kidding. Yes, those things are true of Seventh-day Adventism.

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In fact, there’s something that we might be able to offer to transhumanists. It’s possible. That we might be able to help some people get part of that 10 years with some of these things. I don’t think you need to become a Seventh-day Adventist, although. It might be better, more politically correct within Seventh-day Adventist circles if I’d suggest to you that it’s magical. And yes, if you join the church, I promise you 10 years longer. And then you might make it to the magical date of the singularity. You won’t have to get dead. So you pick. Fact is, we might be able to do something to help the world to live a little bit longer.

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Adventist and. Transhumanists. I put some information on that back table straight in the middle. There’s a few kind of random brochures. I haven’t even looked at them, but I got this big packet from the Weimar Institute. The Weimar Institute, not far above Sacramento, on the way to North Shore Lake Tahoe, just above Auburn.

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The Weimar Institute has lifestyle programs where people come there and they are sick to the point of circling the drain, and they leave healthy. They can be diabetics and then and they’re not when they leave. They can have major, major cardiovascular disease and they can li leave ready to start an a a mild athletic program. It does turn it around.

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There’s stuff that you can get there, the brochures. Honestly, the people that we mar tend to be the people that might be more fundamentalist Seventh-day Adventist than some people who are a little bit more ecumenical Seventh-day Adventist. But, you know, not getting dead is not getting dead. So you might want to pick up some of those things.

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Reactions to transhumanism among Seventh-day Adventists? Well, some of the elements They’re all good with that. If you want to replace parts as they break, I wouldn’t be surprised if Loma Linda did some of those things first.

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Loma Linda, I’m sure, would be happy to put pieces of electronic equipment in to replace what you lost with a stroke. Or I don’t think a Seventh-day Adventist physician typically Would be opposed to giving you something that enhances. I mean, there is a Seventh Adventist physician here today, but I don’t think she’s going to do that kind of surgery. She’s a psychiatrist. I don’t think there’s any crazy Adventists, so she’s probably going to have to work outside of Adventism indeed. But I think that.

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There’s going to be some things that are a challenge for Seventh-day Adventists in terms of the transhumanist movement. No, I’m not a typical Seventh-day Adventist coming here to say I’m proud of my transhumanism. I think there’s going to be some struggle in terms of acknowledging another modification of the imminent literal visible second return. Of Jesus. Anything that stalls that off is bad for the Seventh Adventist agenda. I mean, it’s just, we’re into Jesus’ coming. That’s.

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I need to be able to speak, I suppose, as a philosopher, as a citizen of the world, with some sort of objectivity about the group of which I am a part and love very much. I this is my belief system, and I need to model some sort of intellectual humility where I can identify and implement the difference between beliefs. and knowledge. That dichotomy is important and it’s rare. We need to all do that, whatever group we came From.

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We need to do that whether we’re agnostics or well, agnostics are probably a little better at doing that. I’ll tip my hat to the agnostics, but we need to be a little agnostic about our knowledge. But that doesn’t preclude having some beliefs and understanding the nature of human beliefs.

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I love my Adventist family, my life. I don’t know if I’d be here today without what Seventh-day Adventism did i in my life. And I owe it. And I’m fond of even the kooks, not my kind of kook, you know, all the others who are kooks.

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But you know, we all have families. You have family and sometimes there’s Thanksgiving or there’s Passover or there’s Christmas and you and you whatever you kill something to eat or you make something in the image of the beast to put on your table, if you get together And you know, some of the people that sit around that when you start getting the uncles and everything, you got funny uncles. Some of you have funny uncles, and you have people that believe and vote in some really heinous ways, don’t you? And then they want to talk about them when you want to have stuffing and sweet potatoes. They want to into this and they’re, oh, they’ve got a bumper sticker parked on a car in your driveway that your neighbors are going to see.

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They voted for You know what I mean? But you love them. You don’t want to not be part of the family. They can think you’re an infidel if they want to. They can think what they want. But you love them.

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And I feel very loyal to Seventh-day Adventists, but I’m not here to try to make you a Seventh-day Adventist. If you have an interest, great. We have some special things going for us. For one thing,

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And man, I so own this agenda. Seventh-day Adventists maintain a special army of angry attorneys. to try to and lobbyists to try to prevent people from bringing their belief system in terms of religion into government at any level.

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We don’t care who you are. If somebody’s goofing with you because of your belief or lack of belief, we might help you with an attorney. We really believe that we need to keep people’s own private taboos out of legislation.

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I mean, that works for me a lot better than people trying to buy congressmen with money that came And the tithe and offering. That doesn’t get it for me.

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So, Seventh-day Adventists, we’re with you on not having people’s private agendas. In terms of bioethics, that sort of thing, we don’t fool around with telling the government that we’re uncomfortable with this, that, or the other thing. Now we also.

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We have some beliefs that I find, to me at least, I’m not embarrassed to myself about some of the concepts of the nature of humanity. For one thing, we don’t believe that we have a magic ghost living inside of us, a soul that ascends, and then we look at like weird late night cable T V programs to show that somebody weighed that on a Weight Watcher scale or something. After they trapped it in a cleaner’s bag. We’re not into that. We believe that when you die, you’re dead. That’s it. You don’t know anything. And

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So there’s nothing to we believe that the word soul as it as it is used in in scripture or in common discussion really would better be Viewed as the combination of components that make you a living person. So we would substitute the way people usually use the word soul, we would say person.

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So there’s a text that says that God breathed into man after forming him from the clay of the ground. So there’s the part that represents the physical body. Breathed into him the breath of life, and then he became a living soul. So you die, you’re gone. That’s it. However, we do believe that if you die, that’s not necessarily the end of you.

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And I think God is glad the Mormons are helping him remember just exactly who it was and where they come from, because maybe one giant genogram, and that, hey, use what you can get. But in a sense, when we die, The information exists because information is infinite.

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And information would then be seen. Now, I’m giving you my private new and improved. Telling of this doctrine, but you could you could stretch it and say it this way: that the information exists eternally, and that represents a part of the mind of God. That if I would say that if there’s an entity that is not completely transcendent, if it’s just the smartest dude or the scariest dude around in my neighborhood, I’m not going to pay homage. You know, that’s protection money. I can’t handle that kind of a theology.

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But if you tell me there’s an entity that exists that is utterly beyond, there’s an entity that For every parameter that you could put a quantity on, it’s infinity for that value. That you populate that parameter with infinity, including dimensionality. So that opens up a whole lot of things. That includes imagination and intellectual humility. I think that we

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We have a job to do, each of us. First, when we come together like this, if we don’t talk about our religion or what we do in our bedroom the next time we come together. Well, that’s another thing, the bedroom thing, that’s going to be a hard one for a Seventh-day Adventist.

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As technology m makes um as it makes it possible to kind of redefine some of the categories apart from the obvious ones, the the male and female. You know, I’ve known people that have had to struggle because they were Seventh-day Adventist or some other fundamentalist group that has very strong gender ideas. They’re unfortunate enough to be born with some sort of ambiguity of gender. And the word unfortunate is only really, maybe real within a social context or a religious context.

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There’s people right now that I know that I was their pastor. I was their youth pastor. And now they have had surgery to change their anatomical gender. I know a number of people like this. It’s a real growth opportunity, and there’s people going. Yeah, okay, well, yeah, I know I love that person. That’s what it really takes is a person with eyes and feelings and that you already love and they, you know, they have an issue, then you you become more open-minded. But you know

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Some of these issues that people like to make very concrete, and gender is just an example. They’re not as simple, and technology is going to force some of these issues. We’re able now to do a safe surgery so somebody can then become and function as the other gender when uh for whatever reason, I guess.

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And there’s concepts of coming up with Ideas of gender. I guess you could have a dual gender, or you could invent a fifth or sixth, or maybe there’s seven billion genders. Maybe there are. Just one of these things.

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But when we come together with our families, we all know at what level we’re going to discuss what with which family member. So you may have a way you speak when you’re among, you know, just us kind of people, and then just us kind of people. Fine. But right now, I’m going to just challenge each of you.

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Could you please, whatever group you’re part of, get them out of our statehouse? And if there’s anything we can do to advocate or restrain or discuss or anything so that we don’t get in the way of not.

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Staying alive long enough so that we can maybe, I can argue with the atheists for 2,000 years. That’ll be great. I’ll enjoy that. I don’t have time to be arguing about that at all right now. I mean, the notion: can we all just get along? Well, yeah, just if we could get along until we get to that point, and then we can fight as immortals, I suppose. It will be delightful. You know.

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My talk and hearing each of you take my points all morning, it was glorious. It’s like, well, I don’t have to talk about that. Well, and not only do I not have to talk about it, that’s way better than what I would have dreamt of saying. My notes are kind of comedic. They’re scratched out and rewritten, and I’ve written angry responses and all of this. This is delightful.

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My hat is off to Hank. And if any of you want to talk about Seventh-day Adventism, we promise to stay out of your government. And if we’re tempted not to, I’m going to go complain to the proper Adventist authorities.

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I’ll ask you if you can do whatever it takes. To bring from your tradition, as I intend to, things we need within transhumanism that aren’t just That aren’t just apparent, or they’re not part of science. There’s a demarcation problem.

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Popper talked about it. Popper is probably the most important 20th-century philosopher of science. When Popper spoke of how difficult it is to just nail down what it means when you say the word science, you pick one thing, you.

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Exclude something. Oh, no, no, no, that’s a science. You say, okay, well, then give me a definition that includes what you think is a science. Okay, here it is. And they say, so astrology, yes? No, no, no, no, no, that’s not a science. Okay, well then, what okay, okay, then now you don’t have biology as a science. No, we got to keep biology.

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So it’s very difficult. What it comes down to is everybody really does have sort of a private dictionary. So we need to get our terms together.

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What does it mean to be religion? Not exactly the same thing that it means to be spirituality. There are Venn diagrams, and yeah, they overlap. It would be nice if they overlapped a little more, perhaps. But we might leave some spirituality out there for maybe if religion could exist within spirituality. I don’t know. But right now, it’s just sort of touching. But we need some things.

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that are possibly critical that we’re not going to be able to necessarily get with a Newtonian laboratory approach. And there’s an eagerness to develop an orthodoxy within the scientific and academic communities. And I think even it’s possible within the transhumanist community. There’s just some things, well, don’t say that, you sound like a kook. You know, we all have wa well di well, that’s just ridiculous.

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You know, I subscribe to I subscribe to Scientific American Mind, because I’m about to start a PhD program in consciousness studies, spirituality, and integrated health at Saybrook University. I gotta go see what the humanists have to say. Well, we’re passing through to being transhumanists. But there’s an article that I opened up and read in talking about consciousness.

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There were a couple of allusions to this radical reductionist materialism. You know, if part of what it means to be me or to be you happens to be something. That doesn’t function within Newtonian physics. It’s something, I’m not going to say magic. I don’t.

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I believe in things that we would all consider miracles. I’m not going to deny any miracles that a religious person or a holy book claims, especially the Bible. But I don’t believe in, for my own dictionary, I don’t believe in the supernatural.

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Because I think nature is just what is instead of what isn’t. And when we say the supernatural, I think we’re just betraying that those things are things we kind of agree to get together with when we’re speaking our religious ease at our church and then go away and say, but we know that’s not really, really true. True.

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And we see that even in the scientific community. We see that in the atheist community. In fact, there may be something we don’t really know yet. There might be something. A clue about which we could get from one or more spiritual traditions that we can’t put our finger on yet with consciousness

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Please fight orthodoxies within your university, within your laboratory, within this group, and within your church. Be very careful if they get in the way. It is never. Never the orthodox, unchallenged person who seems not to be a kook, who makes major paradigm shifts.

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But if you get to the point where you’re ready to upload the information that’s in my brain, or even the arrangement of physical stuff, and you haven’t figured out that there’s actually something that is perhaps maybe quantum mechanical. Maybe something like what Bohm suggested. Maybe something like what Roger Penrose celebrated. That we’ve got some sort of evidence now that in the microtubules of the human nervous system we find some possible quantum mechanical effect. I mean, now we’re talking, well, we think we saw that. No, you didn’t. Why didn’t you? Because we don’t believe in it.

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That kind of orthodoxy might cost us the ability to take what’s me instead of just like making an identical twin clone of me or a robot version of me that has that’s not me. I want to still look out through something. I still would like to experience being. And that might be something. Well, nobody has been able to nail it down. So don’t. Don’t close anybody out of the discussion yet. Any questions?

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Yes. Yes. I’m very interested in the Seventh-day Adventist longevity. So I’m a bit curious about

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I actually don’t think it’s diet because I talked recently about this phenomenon called the Hispanic paradox. And you caught me eating a chicken salad at lunch.

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I did. And you were aghast. I was appalled by that. You’re worse than some of my members.

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The Hispanic paradox is that Hispanic Americans live longer than. white Americans, even though they have higher obesity rates and higher rates of diabetes. And the theory is that they live longer because they have closer family ties. So and it isn’t because their diet is better either. They also have a lower income status.

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So I’m wondering about how elders are treated in Seventh-day Adventism. Do they go into nursing homes? Are they encouraged to exercise a lot? Do they, I mean, can you talk about that a bit?

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I think you do see more. quite old people that are Adventists, that are exercising and that are they’re healthy and they’re li living there’s more life getting packed in anyway. They tend to go down fast. Our neighbor Axel Nelson was it hundred

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When he died. 107. My kids enjoyed when he would come down, what is it, a quarter mile from his house. To see them on his walks and wanted to talk with them and reminisce about things that he remembered a century ago, which is glorious for my kids. But then he went really fast, three weeks. And he was gone. A lot of quality life.

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No, Seventh-day Adventists have been quite the capitalists. And I don’t think anybody’s as invested in rest homes as Seventh-day Adventists. Do you have like multi-generational homes? In Hispanic homes we do, but no. No, it represents a culture where it is. It’s not been an earmark of admittism. I wish it was.

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I suspect that maybe that question would be answered well by scientists, maybe even more than religionists, maybe measuring oxytocin levels or something. You know, you get a dog and you have higher oxytocin levels, and there’s some measurable, debatable, but measurable benefit from that. So I think it’s true, but it has nothing to do with us. Yes, sir.

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Uh uh my parents are Catholic. My parents are Catholic and they came over to my house

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And I’m like, I try to give them anti-aging pills. I try to give them Resveritol, and they shake their heads. They’re like, no, no, no, no, no.

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And I think their reason as As Catholics is that they would regard that as cheating God or being distrustful of God.

Speaker 1

You know, Seventh-day Adventists are We’re a little easier on technology than a lot of religious folk. F you know, we we believe actually that more or less that your your personhood So, to speak, begins when you draw breath.

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So, Adventist hospitals have been picketed for their unwillingness to get on the anti-abortion. bandwagon. Now individual Adventists, you know, of course, depends on who you talk to. They may be very much against it. They may be belong to organizations that want to you know, picket the Planned Parenthood and like. But but no, as an organization and our institutions, we’re we’re not really against that kind of thing. We would suggest, I think I can fairly say that if it is shown in research that risferatrol or whatever, everything that you can buy from Kurzweil’s vitamin Company.

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Adventists would, I think most of them would probably try to find a way to buy it in bulk for a discount and then sell it for a profit. I think they’re pretty good business people. For the body?

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Actually, historically, it came from a vision from the The major prophet that was one of the founders, not the original founder, but probably the most influential person up until 1915, L. N. G. White. There was a vision in the, I think it was 18. 1966, that she referred to as the Health Vision. And its motivation was not actually initially life extension.

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It was to have the clearest, most unclouded consciousness. And the belief was: if your body was the strongest, your mind was the strongest, and that’s how you could be communicated to by the Holy Spirit. You would be in touch with nature.

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God, we also, Seventh Adventists teach that nature is as significant a book as the Bible. The book Steps to Christ starts out: nature and revelation alike testify that God is love. He even puts the word nature first.