Mr. Robert Moynihan: In modern times, the idea that the essential purpose of man is to glorify God has been shifted toward glorifying man. This is called humanism in some way. This is the central distinction between the Christian view of the world, glorifying God, and the modern, secular humanist view, glorifying man. Do you see it in those terms?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Of course, this is evident. As you mentioned correctly, since the so-called Renaissance, and then more strongly in the eighteenth century with the so-called Enlightenment, and then promoted officially and mainly by the Freemason societies in public life, the aim was to put man at the center. Man should be the judge of truth and of what is good and what is evil. Man should be adored instead of God. In modern society, God becomes an obstacle. Since God can be only an idea for someone, but God is concrete, and He incarnated Himself, God became man, visible, Jesus Christ, true God and true man.
Therefore, Jesus Christ as true God and true man is, for this anthropocentric, humanistic, and especially Freemasonic ideology, the main obstacle. Jesus Christ, as God and man, present on earth since His incarnation in the church, in the sacraments, in the crosses, and all the signs, had to be removed and replaced by a new religion, the religion of man, to adore man. This is the deepest wound of modern culture, the greatest danger, and the greatest sin. It was the core, the essence of the sin of the fallen angels, to adore themselves and not God, and then also the core of the sin of Adam and Eve, who wanted to decide for themselves what is good, not God, and to act independently of God. They were seduced by the serpent, but they accepted this thought, and then they repented, thanks be to God, and God gave them the sign of redemption.
Mr. Robert Moynihan: What you are really speaking about is what humanity chooses as its goal in being human. In recent years, it has become common to say we will transform humanity, we will become a new humanity, we will become Homo sapiens, 2.0, a new version, and that we will do this by certain additions to our brain, maybe some chips, and to our bodies, maybe some special technology. The question of the soul does not appear in this view because the soul is regarded as a myth. So we have a humanity that looks at one thousand or even two thousand years of Christian or Christocentric culture, and then one hundred or two hundred years of increasing distance from that, now reaching a kind of crisis.
In your very interesting book interview with Christopher Wendt, you said that pure technology is spiritually cold, and therefore, people are not happy. They are empty, continuously seeking pleasures to escape the inner void, to avoid ugliness and insanity. People are running after new pleasures and new technologies, and they become in their souls cold, egoistic, and cruel. What spiritual alternative do you see to this soulless technological culture, and do you think it is important?
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Of course. You mentioned these temptations and attempts of transhumanism, and this is really an expression of the greatest pride and the greatest sin against God, to put oneself in the place of God and to create something new as the human being. But they will never succeed because God will not allow this. God is the Lord and Creator of the human being. They can try to make technical additions, but they will not succeed in changing the nature of man. This is God-given and God created. They can maybe harm human nature, but they cannot change human nature. They will try, but this is an area God has reserved for Himself completely. They can only create something technological and cold, and this will not make a human being truly happy, because there is the soul, and the soul exists. The soul is created immediately by God at the moment of conception of a new human life. The soul is immortal, and they cannot kill the soul. As Jesus Christ said in the Gospel, do not fear those who can kill the body, but fear God who can condemn the soul for eternity. The soul remains immortal in the human being.
These attempts to advance a transhumanism agenda will not succeed. Maybe they will succeed for a relatively short time, and then it will collapse, because human nature will revolt when you violate nature. Nature will revolt against you, and this will happen because the soul is created by God. This gives us hope that after these horrible attempts of transhumanism and what we are now witnessing in this culture of cold technology and egoism, God will again give humanity the sense of longing for true human values, to have a heart, to have a soul, to have relationships marked by the heart and the soul, not by cold intellect and technology.