"I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?"/"Uh............"/"You’re hesitating"/"Well, I don’t know. I would....... I would....."

"There’s so many questions implicit in this"/"Should the human race survive?"/"Yes.... but I also would like us to radically solve these problems. And so it’s always, I don’t know, yeah — transhumanism. The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And there’s a critique of, let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context, or, I don’t know, a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, penis into a vagina. And we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But we want more transformation than that. The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural, it’s: Man, it’s so pathetically little. And OK, we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body. And then Orthodox Christianity, by the way — the critique Orthodox Christianity has of this, is these things don’t go far enough. That transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self. And so............................"

It's Peter Thiel, responding to what one might think were easy questions from Ross Douthat, on the new episode of Douthat's podcast, here, at Podscribe.

Go to 00:37:32 to experience Thiel's freakishly long hesitation when Douthat has just asked if he'd like humanity to survive. And I love how he takes the concept of "trans" and runs with it.

Even though Thiel's cogitations wander into Christianity, he doesn't mention The Transfiguration, in Matthew 17. There, Jesus is "transfigured": "His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light," and a voice from behind a cloud says "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!"

***

To what extent is Peter Thiel a Christian?

I asked Grok. Answer here. Short answer: He openly identifies as Christian.

And here's a Vanity Fair article from last April: "Christianity Was 'Borderline Illegal' in Silicon Valley. Now It’s the New Religion/Believers like Garry Tan are flipping the script in the venture capital world, making faith matter just as much as the ability to turn a fortune. Says one entrepreneur, “There are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel." Excerpt:

You don’t need to do much guesswork to see why smart Christians in Silicon Valley are growing more emboldened. After all, there are billionaires among their ranks. One of them is Peter Thiel, who has spoken about his evangelical leanings for more than a decade and who has lately shared his views on his faith with increasing frequency. “I believe in the resurrection of Christ,” he said in a 2020 talk. “The only good role model for us is Christ.” (In watching talk after talk of Thiel speaking about his faith, I found myself genuinely puzzled, not because Thiel lacks conviction but because his thoughts on the subject are so galaxy-brained that it seems like he’s playing a game of 3D chess that the rest of us are only catching up to: “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief, you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.”)...