Postfreaky Part 2

I've decided to go forward with the Theology and Technoculture class, despite its freakiness, because I want to be in a Ph.D seminar.  Also, I don't know a lot about medical or biological ethics, so it would be good to learn.  I received some of the books from my dad as a birthday present (Jan. 25th, mark your calendars), including God and Embryo and the Age of Spiritual Machines.

Flipping quickly through God and Embryo, I saw that the appendices are official denomination position papers on human cloning and/or stem cell research.  Here is the breakdown:

Against stem cell research and cloning: Catholic, Orthodox Christians, Southern Baptists, a coalition of British theologians from the Catholic, Anglican and Reform traditions

Against cloning, no mention of stem cell research: United Methodist Church (although I found this link later)

For stem cell research: Presbyterian Church USA, United Church of Christ, Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America

Sidenote:  each paper begins with some official sounding language, as in "Whereas" or "The position of" blah blah.  The Orthodox Christian paper begins, "Dearly beloved in Christ."  I like that.

Then I looked at the Age of Spiritual Machines and freaked.    This is from the table of contents page of Chapter Six:

"Evolution has found a way around the computational limitations of neural circuitry.  Cleverly, it has created organisms who in turn invented a computational technology a million times faster than carbon-based neurons.  Ultimately, the computing conducted on extremely slow mammalian neural circuits will be ported to a far more versatile and speedier electronic (and phontic) equivalent."

Chapter Seven: "A disembodied mind will get quickly depressed.  So what kind of bodies will we provide for our twenty-first century machines?  Later on, the question will become what sort of bodies will they provide for themselves?"

In other words, download our brains into a computer and put them in a new body.  As a friend said, sounds like idolatry to me.