It is slowly dawning on me that questions of spirit relate to ends, not means, and that the ideal spirit to esteem is that which never changes: life itself. To worship something is to edify it with all your might, and we see many people offering their entire mental faculties as well as their own bodies on the altar of transhumanism. The claim is that we can create “better life” than life itself through the application of genetic engineering, nanotech, and machine learning.
The Book of Genesis talks of taking the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and unfortunate things happening if you consume it. That is an allegory to me — it says that when we try to tinker with the force of life itself, and substitute our own minds for the spirit of life, then disaster is inevitable. If we are the product of higher-order beings — “elohim” — then the warning not to tinker with the genetic operating system we were given, and to stay at the application layer, makes more sense.
We are not the only sentient creatures around, and the horses and dolphins are doing just fine without owning laboratories performing gene therapy experiments on their own offspring. It is not that the technology is wrong in itself. Rather, it is how it is applied in the “spirit of our own mind’s warped logic and false morality”, which is different from the absolute truth of the “spirit of life”. The difference is subtle, but is everything, since all deviations from reverence for the invariant “spirit of life” result in… variant levels of collective death.
The spirit of life always wins in the end