[Wesley Smith is an author and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. This article was published August 22, 2022, on National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com). ©2022 by National Review. Reprinted by permission.]

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Jared Kushner might have used “The Transhumanist in the White House” as the title for his new memoir. Apparently, he has bought into the transhumanist idea— also embraced by the likes of Ray Kurzweil and Zoltan Istvan—that through the wonders of applied science he can live forever, telling Richard Grenell in a recent podcast interview:

From the last year, the one thing I’ve tried to put a priority on since I left the White House was, you know, getting some exercise in. I think that there is a good probability that my generation is, hopefully with the advances in science, either the first generation to live forever, or the last generation that’s going to die. So, we need to keep ourselves in pretty good shape.

Transhumanism is a dangerously Utopian, materialist social movement that worships technology, and believes that a point in time is coming at which the crescendo of scientific breakthroughs—known as the Singularity—will enable us to live forever. How? The most popular idea is to upload one’s mind into a computer and live the good eternal life in cyberspace. But what happens if there is a power outage that shuts down all the servers?

It’s fun to make fun, but there is a darkly serious side to transhumanism, a deep nihilism that seeks to replace hope lost when God is rejected, and when we are believed to be nothing more than carbon molecules.

To hear more details about this philosophy, you might want to listen to my Humanize podcast interview of Istvan, who ran for president in 2016 on the Transhumanist Party ticket promising to end death—and made international headlines by campaigning in a bus converted to look like a coffin. Yes, he’s a great self-promoter, but he is also—pardon the pun—deadly serious about this. And, apparently, he now has Kushner joining the great transhumanism cause.