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These artificial intelligence bartenders are the future of festive parties – Prestige Online

Posted on November 13, 2019 by Danzig

Barsys CoasterThe Barsys Coaster. (Photo: Barsys)

New York-based startup Barsys recently announced the Coaster, a smart saucer that guides the user on how to create a particular cocktail. By connecting the coaster to a smartphone with the complimentary app downloaded, users can choose from Barsys existing library of cocktails or input their own recipe. Once a cocktail is selected, the user can simply start pouring ingredients one by one, and with each new alcohol or mixer, the coaster will light up when the correct amount has been added to the glass.

The Barsys Coaster is regularly priced at US$149 (S$203), but interested customers can pre-order it here for US$95 (S$130). The device will start shipping in December.

If the Barsys Coaster requires a little too much manpower for you, you could instead opt for the brands Smart Automated Bartender. The device holds up to five bottles, three mixer canisters, and a mixer that can shake or stir drinks accordingly. All you have to do for a drink is connect your phone or tablet via Bluetooth to the Automated Bartender and select a cocktail the device will take it from there.

The Barsys 2.0 Automated Cocktail Maker retails for US$979 (S$1,333). More details here.

The Makr Shakr is for serious party hosts the setup is extensive. Basically, a whole bar will need to be built for the AI-powered robotic arms to be able to automatically make drinks; however, once up to 158 bottles of spirits are mounted on the ceiling of the structure and the ice machine is installed among other things, party goers can select their cocktail at the tap of a button on their smartphone.

The Makr Shakr will set owners back over US$100,000 (S$137,000).

The fully autonomous Yanu robot bartender falls between the Barsys 2.0 and the Makr Shakr. While the structure is also extensive, it is collapsible for transportation. This unit can hold up to 50 bottles of alcohol and mixers and, like the Makr Shaker, it mixes drinks with a robotic arm.

Though the retail price of the model is determined based on client needs, its expected to cost well over US$150,000 (S$205,000). Find out more here.

This article was published via AFP Relaxnews.

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These artificial intelligence bartenders are the future of festive parties - Prestige Online

The transhuman future is here – Dazed

Posted on November 13, 2019 by Danzig

The future isnt an accident, its something we create and it seems our goal is to hack what it means to be human. What was once science fiction is now reality: the first cyborgs are here. A revolution is unfolding in operating rooms, labs, artist, and designer studios across the world.

Scientists and entrepreneurs are on a quest to unlock the secrets of the human brain through implantable technology. The documentary I am Human by Elena Gaby follows three people with varying degrees of disabilities who have been implanted with brain-computer interfaces allowing them to achieve what was once impossible. Programmes such as BrainGate, Synchron, and Neuralink are among the neurotech organisations working to restore communication, mobility, and independence in people who have lost movement due to paralysis, limb loss, or neurodegenerative disease.

In the documentary, Stephen, who is blind, has a retinal implant which connects to electrodes in his brain. Elsewhere, Anne who suffers from Parkinsons Disease is considering whether to have deep brain stimulation through inserted electrodes. These brain implants come with great societal implications as groundbreaking neurotechnologies could gradually branch out into the general population when people adopt how transformational they can be.

A future where we can type or control our cars with our mind is within reach and if the technology were to make it outside the medical domain, the future is one of brain-to-brain communication, enhanced memory, and cognition where even speaking to each other may not be as necessary. In her recent article for the Guardian, Zoe Corbyn features Dennis Degray, a paraplegic man who was able to send text messages, shop on Amazon, and stack blocks by controlling a robotic arm through the neurons of his mind. Brain implants could revolutionise the way we connect to the world around us. If harnessed, for example, in the military, in retail, the workplace or train stations, they could become the new standard for interactions between people, machines, and products.

But cognitive enhancements, although still in experimental stages, should make us question the deep implications of self-governance and privacy. In our cyber future, will humans or technology prevail? Daniela Skills short film featured on Nowness portrays a future where humanity battles with cyborgs and robots in a quest for co-existence. This appears to be a far-fetched scenario, but if we observe the signals of today and operate as cultural listeners, we can see a tipping point between humanity and machines through the rise of neurotechnology.

Bionic humans and intelligent robots are here, and you better get used to them; you might even become one of them in the future. Companies such as Youbionic aims to democratise smart prosthetics in an effort to enhance the human intellect and physiology its recent invention, the Youbionic Paw Arm, is now available through open sourcing. Another open-source, artificially intelligent prosthetic leg designed by scientists Levi Hargrove and Elliott Rouse at the University of Michigan and Shirley Ryan Ability Lab will be released to the public and scientific community. This naturally redefines the changing boundaries between the human and the machine, the animate and inanimate, controller and controlled, and how accessible this may all become.

In our quest to merge the physical, digital and machine, ancient themes of Animism dating from ancient civilisations and religions such as the Golem are being played out with todays toolbox. Creatives like Princess Gollum illustrate our fascination with giving life to non-living things. Humans cannot help but explore their power and their fears in a bid to take control of the inevitable: the degradation of the human body and mind. This need for eternity has inspired us to create human-like creatures with special abilities from Frankenstein to todays alien Avatars such as Galaxia.

In her art installation Homemade RC Toy, Geumhyung Jeong questions our relationship with machines by interacting naked with homemade robotic sculptures. Flowing Water Standing Time by fashion designer Ying Pao is a robotic garment which moves according to colour and is inspired by the work of neurologist Oliver Sacks. We could see the development of garments that can be a tool for navigation, communication, and as an amplifier for VR spaces with projects like Ava Aghakouchaks soft wearable Sovar.

Meanwhile, Ai-Da, the worlds first humanoid robot artist, has had her first solo exhibition of eight drawings, twenty paintings, four sculptures and two video works. There was debate about granting personhood to AI in the EU courts in 2017. This was ultimately rejected; however, recently two professors from the University of Surrey filed patents on behalf of an AI system. They are arguing it should be recognised as inventor, and although the Patents offices in the UK, EU and US insist innovations are attributed to humans only, this now seems to be an outdated notion.

So, what does this mean for the human body, intelligence and emotions? In What humans will look like in the next 100 years, we discussed the acceptance of baby androids in our society and the manufacturing of cyborgs by 2048. The project Replika by Pleun Van Dijk, commissioned by Roskilde Festival, echoes this transhumanist concept. By staging a human production-line, designers act as gods and stage a future where human shells are reshaped by industry and capital. New research shows that we may also be able to regenerate human tissue and body parts, as scientists have discovered the human body can renew like salamanders.The paper, published in Science Advances, explains we have the same healing process as amphibians and this previously unknown ability might be exploited to enhance joint repair and establish a basis for human limb regeneration.

Science fiction artistEsmay Wagemans explores a parallel concept of re-creating body parts in a race to res-culpt humanity. This idea, paired with the developments of soft computers such as the Octobot, a chemically powered robot which can essentially take any shape, points to the potential for merging soft wearables with Augmented Reality, social media, and Artificial intelligence. This could lead to a new way of communicating and representing ourselves in which our skins would become screens reflected in Aposema, a facial prosthesis which acts as an external emotional indicator. The project speculates on our ability to empathise in an age where people prefer technological devices over in-person interactions. Built using soft robotics prosthetics, biometric sensors and an augmented reality digital layer, Aposema would translate facial expressions when we are no longer able to understand emotions.

How we relate to other humans and our own physicality is changing deeply as we race to virtualise and reinvent our body. The democratisation of technologies ranging from robotic limbs to mixed realities, coupled with the progress of 3D scanning and modelling, are suggesting the possibility of a human body that is modifiable, customisable and open source. New beauty standards will emerge out of this transhumanist scenario in which mutant creations would colonise our current traditional sense of reality.

We are creating another dimension, another human nature before our eyes. The speculative design studio Imprudence explores future beauty products with their online store selling items ranging from cat eye DNA, nano filter make-up to a skin scanning soap. Face filters are a key illustration of the viral desire for wearing 3D makeup as seen in Ines Alphas recently launched collaboration with the fashion brand Bimba y Lola.Through her digital creations, digital artist Ksenia Trifonova engages with a future where images will be projected onto our faces and give us the ability to transform and communicate data, style, social media posts on our skins.

Our clothing will not be immune to the changes in our reality paradigm. Rflctv Studios streetwear collection transforms into interactive hyperreal dichroic garments through augmented reality. Moin Roberts-Islam of the London-based Fashion Innovation Agency recently featured a prototype scanner for human body augmentation and customisation created by Cyberpunk 3D artist Rafe Johnson. It could offer new ways of trying on jewellery, accessories and tattoos.

And with Virtual humans, avatars will not only populate our feeds, but they will also enter customer service applications as we are now able to replicate human emotion and mimic meaningful and authentic interactions. Soul Machines enables highly realistic Autonomous Animations of humans through an AI-powered Digital Brain. The avatars are already planned to be rolled out in customer service for Natwest. Concurrently, Facebook has outlined its plans to turn us into holograms in a future communication where instead of using Skype, we could be teleported to our parents living room for dinner across the world. The holographic avatar in Blade Runner or the loveable operating system in Her are here.

Western philosophy makes an absolute distinction between the living and the non-living. We presumed that humans were the only thinking things but now machines think, they will sense, feel, reflect, even have a sense of self, through avatars like Josefin Jonssons virtual humans, cyborgs and humanoids. As we use advanced technologies to push the edges of humanity, machines are becoming like us. The question now is, where do we end and where do they begin? And is this a true advancement for society?

Originally posted here:

The transhuman future is here - Dazed

Ross Douthat: What will happen to conservative Catholicism? – The Register-Guard

Posted on November 13, 2019 by Danzig

Last month the Vatican and Pope Francis hosted the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region, a meeting to discuss the challenges facing Amazonia and the Catholic Church therein that managed to be extremely wild and extremely predictable at once.

The wild part featured not just the expected debates about married priests and female deacons, but an extended meltdown over whether a wooden statue of a naked, kneeling pregnant woman, used in a ritual on the Vatican grounds, embodied indigenous reverence for the Virgin Mary or indigenous pantheism and nature-worship. Vatican officials seemed determined not to clarify the matter, traditionalist outrage ran wild, and eventually a young traditionalist swiped one of the statues from a Roman church and pitched it into the River Tiber making himself either a successor of Saint Boniface or a racist iconoclast, depending on which faction of Catholic media you believed.

All exciting stuff but also a bit irrelevant to the actual outcome of the synod, which featured little of the conservative resistance that characterized earlier synodal battles over divorce and remarriage, and eventually produced a document backing the major project of the Francis era: the decentralization of doctrine and discipline, with priestly celibacy the latest rule thats likely to soon vary across different Roman Catholic regions, as the interpretation of church teaching on divorce and remarriage already does.

And even the act of traditionalist defiance was part of the predictability of the proceedings. As conservative resistance to Francis has grown more intense, it has also grown more marginal, defined by symbolic gestures rather than practical strategies, burning ever-hotter on the internet even as resistance within the hierarchy has faded with retirements, firings, deaths.

Four years ago I wrote an essay describing the Francis era as a crisis for conservative Catholicism or at least the conservative Catholicism that believed John Paul II had permanently settled debates over celibacy, divorce, intercommunion and female ordination. That crisis is worse now, manifest in furious arguments within the Catholic right as much as in online opposition to the pope himself. And I dont think were any closer to a definite answer to what happens to conservative Catholicism when it no longer seems to have the papacy on its side.

While the synod was going on, I conducted a long interview with one of the popes most prominent conservative critics, Cardinal Raymond Burke. I had never met him before, but he was as I anticipated: at once obdurate and guileless, without the usual church politicians affect, and with a straightforward bullet-biting to his criticism of the pope.

The Burke critique is simple enough. Church teaching on questions like marriages indissolubility is supposed to be unchanging, and thats what hes upholding: "I havent changed. Im still teaching the same things I always taught and theyre not my ideas." What is unchanging certainly cant be altered by an individual pontiff: "The pope is not a revolutionary, elected to change the churchs teaching." And thus if Francis seems to be tacitly encouraging changes, through some sort of decentralizing process, it means "theres a breakdown of the central teaching authority of the Roman pontiff," and that the pope has effectively "refused to exercise [his] office."

This is a position with some precedents in Catholic history. John Henry Newman, the Victorian convert, theologian and cardinal recently sainted by Francis, once suggested that there had been a "temporary suspense" of the churchs magisterium, its teaching authority, during eras in which the papacy failed to teach definitively or exercise discipline on controversial subjects. And the churchs saints from such periods include bishops who stood alone in defense of orthodoxy, sometimes against misguided papal pressure.

But you can also see in my conversation with the cardinal how hard it is to sustain a Catholicism that is orthodox against the pope. For instance, Burke himself brought up a hypothetical scenario where Francis endorses a document that includes what the cardinal considers heresy. "People say if you dont accept that, youll be in schism," Burke said, when "my point would be the document is schismatic. Im not."

But this implies that, in effect, the pope could lead a schism, even though schism by definition involves breaking with the pope. This is an idea that several conservative Catholic theologians have brought up recently; it does not become more persuasive with elaboration. And Burke himself acknowledges as much: It would be a "total contradiction" with no precedent or explanation in church law.

The pull of such ideas, though, explains why you need only take a step beyond Burkes position to end up as a kind of de facto sedevacantist, a believer that the pope is not really the pope or, alternatively, that the church is so corrupted and compromised by modernity that the pope might technically still be pope but his authority doesnt matter anymore. This is the flavor of a lot of very-online traditionalism, and its hard to see how it wouldnt (eventually) lead many of its adherents to a separation from the larger church, joining the traditionalist quasi-exile pioneered after Vatican II by the Society of Saint Pius X.

Are there alternatives to Burkes tenuous position or the schismatic plunge? At the moment there are two: One is a conservative Catholicism that strains more mightily than Burke to interpret all of Francis moves in continuity with his predecessors, while arguing that the popes liberalizing allies and appointees are somehow misinterpreting him. This was the default conservative position early in the Francis pontificate; it has since become more difficult to sustain. But it persists in the hope of a kind of snapping-back moment, when Francis or a successor decides that Catholic bishops in countries like Germany are pushing things too far, at which point there can be a kind of restoration of the John Paul II-era battle lines, with the papacy despite Francis experiments reinterpreted to have always been on the side of orthodoxy.

Another alternative is a conservatism that simply resolves the apparent conflict between tradition and papal power in favor of the latter, submitting its private judgment to papal authority in 19th-century style even if that submission requires accepting shifts on sex, marriage, celibacy and other issues that look awfully like the sort of liberal Protestantism that the 19th-century popes opposed. This would be a conservatism of structure more than doctrine, as suggested by the title of a website that champions its approach: "Where Peter Is." But it would still need, for its long-term coherence, an account of how doctrine can and cannot change beyond just papal fiat. So it, too, awaits clarifications that this papacy has conspicuously not supplied.

The importance of that waiting is the only definite conclusion that I can draw from the whole mess. Where conservative Catholics have the power to resist what seem like false ideas or disastrous innovations they must do so. But they also need to see their relative powerlessness through their own religions lens. That means treating it as a possible purgation, a lesson in the insufficiency of human strategies and wisdom, and a reason to embrace T.S. Eliots poetic admonition: There is yet faith, but the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting.

Ross Douthat (@NYTDouthat) writes for The New York Times.

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Ross Douthat: What will happen to conservative Catholicism? - The Register-Guard

Iqbal: The Metaphysics and The Reconstruction- Part I – The News International

Posted on November 13, 2019 by Danzig

Iqbal: The Metaphysics and The Reconstruction- Part I

The difficulty of research on Iqbals The Development of Metaphysics in Persia -- his doctoral dissertation -- is as great as the paucity of material on it. We are told by some Iqbal biographers that it was praised highly by orientalists such as T.W. Arnold and R. A. Nicholson etc. Such praise may have been incidental to what else was being said about Iqbal in the beginning of the 20th Century, for the work as a whole seems to have gone without much detailed commentary, even by the said orientalists themselves.

In the more than one hundred years since, the situation hasnt changed much. As far as I have been able to see, apart from some valuable and mostly recent contributions of a few pages in some edited volumes on Iqbal, there is very little dedicated entirely to the study of Iqbals dissertation. One reason for this would perhaps be what Iqbal Singh said of this work: It is somewhat unsatisfying. It leaves the reader with the impression of something that he can neither accept as serious work nor reject as something trivial and unworthy of attention. For a research thesis its scope is too wide; and for an original and interpretative study of the subject it seems too sketchy, too descriptive

Some of the points raised by Singh may be relevant to the fact that the Munich examiners were not greatly impressed by Iqbals mastery of Zoroastrian and medieval sources. But they passed it because they felt that it drew sufficiently upon manuscript research and because they trusted the judgment of experts such as Arnold (Rizvi 2015 with reference to Durrani 2003). Arnold, Iqbals teacher in Lahore and London, had put in a good word for Iqbal. The work was treated as a dissertation in oriental philology and not philosophy because the committee was not satisfied with its quality in the latter area (Rizvi 2015).

Singh, like others after him, also finds that the work dates badly. How the work dates is a tricky question. Those who point to this problem fall short of discussing the issue in detail. Singh himself says nothing further. But there is another, personal sense in which the work dates and which may explain the lack of attention that befell this work. Almost immediately after the dissertation appeared (perhaps even at the time Iqbal submitted it) he had started undergoing a change and very soon abandoned the pantheistic outlook that is understood to mark this work.

The Urdu translation of this 1908 work appeared in 1936. In 1927, Iqbal told the translator that he didnt think much of it because his ideas had undergone a revolution and in German separate books had been written on Ghazali, Tusi, etc., leaving very little in the book that could survive criticism. Iqbal did not specify what that German research was, and that poses a few problems, if we take his 1930-34 The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam to be the work where that new research would find mention.

Tusi can be safely put aside because he does not figure much in The Metaphysics and in The Reconstruction appears in a very different context. There does not appear to be a huge difference between the Ghazali of The Metaphysics and the Ghazali of The Reconstruction. In The Metaphysics Ghazali is one of the greatest personalities of Islam who anticipated Descartes and Hume, systematically refuted philosophy and completely annihilated the dread of intellectualism (read reason and philosophy) which had characterized the orthodoxy. He put dogma and metaphysics together into an education system that produced great men of intellect. He examined all the various claimants of "Certain Knowledge" and finally found it in Sufism. ((I do not know if the irony of the comparisons involving Ghazali, Iqbals celebrated destroyer of rationalism, on the one hand, and Descartes, the founder of modern rationalism and Hume the atheist on the other, was truly lost on Iqbal. But such time-less and ahistorical comparisons are Iqbals permanent hallmark visible in The Metaphysics and omnipresent in The Reconstruction).

In The Reconstruction, we are once again reminded of Ghazalis greatness as the precursor of Descartes who despite his skepticism being a rather unsafe basis for religion not wholly justified by the spirit of the Quran and despite going a little too far broke the back of that proud but shallow rationalism in the Muslim world -- much like Kant, the great gift of God to his people, who revealed the limitations of human reason and reduced the whole work of the rationalists to a heap of ruins. There is, Iqbal notes, one important difference. Kant, consistently with his principles, could not affirm the possibility of a knowledge of God. Ghazali, finding no hope in analytic thought, moved to mystic experience, and there found an independent content for religion.

In The Metaphysics, Ghazali harmonizes Sufi pantheism and the Asharite dogma of personality, a reconciliation which makes it difficult to say whether he was a Pantheist, or a Personal Pantheist of the type of Lotze. Ghazali moves towards a conception of the soul which sweeps away all difference between God and the individual soul. Realizing the Pantheistic drift of his inquiry, he preferred silence as to the ultimate nature of the soul. Iqbal does not critically engage with Ghazali here and that is typical of him in The Metaphysics for the most part. This account of Ghazalis mysticism is not rejected or modified in any way in The Reconstruction. The spiritual content of Ghazalis silence over the soul though is replaced by a philosophical account of the problem of thought and intuition, where Iqbal gives his own ideas on how the finite (thought in serial time) and the infinite (intuition) are organically linked. something that, according to Iqbal, both Ghazali and Kant failed to realize and which led to Ghazali drawing a line of cleavage between thought and intuition. Iqbal, it appears, is also trying to break through Ghazalis silence over the nature of God and soul, having restated it in a peculiar way. Iqbals own consistencies, contradictions, successes and failures in doing so, at this point, are not the issue.

We can see here that, to the extent Iqbal reproduces his account of Ghazali and his contribution in the history of thought, there is hardly any difference. The Metaphysics is meant to be a historical account whereas The Reconstruction is an interpretative endeavor -- an allegedly philosophical attempt at reconstructing Muslim thought. What is significant in our context is that Iqbal cites no new research while discussing Ghazali. What then do we make of his reference to the new research on Gazali and Tusi? Not much, I believe, by way of explanation.

(To be continued)

The writer is a student of literature and philosophy at the Forman Christian College.

Email: [emailprotected]

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Iqbal: The Metaphysics and The Reconstruction- Part I - The News International

Liberation theology never went away. It morphed into liberation ecology. – Catholic Citizens of Illinois

Posted on November 13, 2019 by Danzig

From Marx to Gaia

By Dr. Samuel Gregg, Catholic World Report, October 23, 2019

Thirty years ago, the world rejoiced as the crack-up of Communisms grip on Eastern Europe, forever symbolized by the Berlin Wall, began. This, however, created enormous dilemmas for prominent representatives of a theology which had taken Marxism very seriously from the late-1960s onwards throughout Latin America.

Perhaps one reason why some Latin Americans have embraced various evangelical confessions is that many such movements put Christ first, and keep politics firmly in its place. Thats a lesson, however, that some Latin American liberation ecologists and their ecclesial fellow-travelers havent absorbed

What became known as liberation theology was never a monolithic movement. Nevertheless its most influential strands were influenced by Marxist thought, as many liberationists freely acknowledged. Cursory reading of Gustavo Gutirrezs 1971 classic A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, Salvation soon confirms this. That stimulus was even more apparent in the works of prominent liberationists like Leonardo Boff and Jon Sobrino.

Socialisms collapse in Eastern Europe created significant challenges for those liberationists who relied on Marxist analysis. While many asserted that the Soviet Bloc was a deviation from Marxist ideals, such systems had given expression to key Marxist commitments. Examples included the minimization (if not the effective abolition) of private property, laws formal subordination to Marxist ideology, and hostility to religion.

1989 didnt, however, lead some liberation theologians to question substantially their fundamental assumptions. Many simply transferred their attention to the environment. Among the things we have learned from the Amazon Synod is how far such thinking has burrowed its way into Latin American Catholicism.

Environmental liberation

Of the liberation theologians who transitioned to whats called liberation ecology, Leonardo Boff has gone the furthest in trying to immerse Catholicism in environmentalist concerns and ideology. In Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (1997), Boff stated that the Church cannot enclose religious persons in dogmas and cultural representations. It must serve as an organized place where people may be initiated, accompanied, and aided [in expressing] the spirit of the age.

That the spirit of the age doesnt always accord with the truth about God isnt a question addressed by Boff. In any case, the spirit of the age, at least for Boff, was environmentalism of the deep Green variety. Boffs 1997 book, for instance, argued that the Earth is not a planet on which life exists . . . the Earth does not contain life. It is life, a living superorganism: Gaia.

The Gaia hypothesis was first articulated by the chemist James Lovelock in the 1970s. It has since made its way into other disciplines, including theology. On several occasions, Boff has acknowledged that The vision of James Lovelock . . . helped us see not only that life exists on Earth, but also that Earth itself is a living organism.

Lovelocks argument was that all living entities (animals, plants, etc.) on Earth effectively cooperate with inorganic compounds (oxygen, metals, etc.). This makes the planet a self-regulating, perhaps even self-directed entity which preserves all the essentials for life, provided humans dont interfere too much with whats going on.

By the late-1990s, the hypothesis began collapsing under the impact of heavy scientific critique. Some scientists pointed out, for example, that Gaia theory couldnt account for the fact that some parts of the natural world had naturally detrimental effects on other parts of the environment. In short, there was considerable disharmony in nature that owed nothing to human action.

Other scientists criticized Gaia theorys non-scientific and teleological aspectsfeatures which Lovelock himself waxed and waned about. Its pseudo-religious connotations emerge when we discover that Gaia is the name of one of the most primordial of Greek goddesses. In Greek mythology, Gaia (who takes the even more revealing name Terra in the equivalent Roman mythos) personified the Earth itself. Ascribing divine status to Gods creation rather than God himself has a name: i.e., pantheism.

Central to Boffs embrace of Gaia theory is his insistence that humans accept that they are not only homo sapiens (man the wise) but also, Boff claims, homo demens (man the deranged): a species whose dementedness is expressed in failure to recognize the natural world as humanitys equal. At the core of Boffs liberation ecology is thus a type of biological egalitarianism. In the forthcoming ecological and social democracy, Boff states, religion will promote the idea that it is not just humans who are citizens but all beings . . . Democracy accordingly issues in a biogracy and cosmoscracy.

How plants, animals, glaciers, fire or metals would exercise their citizenship in Boffs biogracy is unclear. After all, they lack reason and free will. But Boff did outline a distinct political structure for his eco-social democracy. It should coalesce around global bodies, such as the United Nations and its eighteen specialized agencies and fourteen worldwide programs. A highly centralized, top-down approach towards environmental questions and politics more generally was the future. As in his pre-Gaia days, the principle of subsidiarity doesnt appear to have exerted substantive influence upon Boffs thought.

Heaven on Earth

There is another characteristic of liberation ecology which was prefigured in Marxist-influenced liberation theologies. This concerns tendencies to immanentize the eschaton, to use the expression employed by the political scientist Eric Voegelin.

One feature of many pre-1989 liberation theologies was their relative silence about the life which Christianity teaches lies beyond death. It wasnt that they denied it outright. Rather, their focus was almost exclusively upon earthly injustices and overcoming them. Many liberation theologians even portrayed traditional Christian teaching about suffering as potentially redemptive in the same way that Marx presented religion: i.e., a rationalization of unjust status quos which anesthetized people to the structural unfairness surrounding them. Some liberationists subsequently held that removal of all oppressive structures would inaugurate a more natural state of affairs: a world free of alienation and remarkably similar to the earthly utopia which Marx said lay at the end of history.

Similar patterns permeate some liberation ecologists thinking. In a 2016 interview, Boff contended that the intellectual and economic revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries gave rise to the idea of conquest of people and the Earth. The Earth was no longer viewed as the great Mother, alive and purposeful. Instead, it was reduced to something to be exploited by humans for wealth accumulation. From this standpoint, the pre-Enlightenment, pre-capitalist environment was a placid, almost pristine world which was naturally hospitable to humans.

Such claims are historically questionable. Humans were extensively usingand often abusingthe natural world long before the seventeenth century. That includes pre-Christian indigenous societies. In A God Within (1973), the Pulitzer-prize winning biologist Ren Dubos illustrated how Maya peoples inflicted immense ecological damage throughout southern Mexico and Central America long before the Spanish conquest. These nations had never heard of Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, or market economies.

More generally, liberation ecology has a distinctly romantic edge to it. Its adherents seem reluctant to concede that, with or without humans, the natural world isnt a symphonic paradise. Animals, for instance, are hardly kind to each other. Millions of species have disappeared without any human involvement. Moreover, nature has inflicted enormous harm upon people for millennia through unpredictable events like earthquakes. The claim that the environment is somehow naturally benign and nurturing, save when humans disrupt it, simply isnt true.

To this we should add that neither pre-Enlightenment Judaism nor Christianity invested plants or animals with a status equivalent to humans, let alone that of a divine-like Mother. Indeed, Judaism and Christianity played the pivotal role in de-divinizing the natural world. They thus helped sweep aside the pagan religions of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Babylon which irrationally ascribed divine qualities to elements like water and activities such as war. Certainly, the Scriptures present the created world as good. But they dont portray the natural world as perfect or claim that nature is somehow intrinsically better than or equal to humans: for therein lie slippery slopes to syncretism and paganism.

No Salvation outside politics

There is, however, another important similarity between yesterdays liberation theologians and todays liberation ecologists. None have succeeded in stemming the drift of Latin Americans away from Catholicism.

Theres many reasons for this decline, but one is surely the way in which many liberation theologians and liberation ecologists locate salvations essence in politics. In remarks written in 1984, Joseph Ratzinger observed that most liberation theologians believed that nothing lay outside politics. Hence, he said, they regarded any theology which wasnt practical, i.e., not essentially political . . . as idealistic and thus lacking in reality, or else is condemned as a vehicle for the oppressors maintenance of power. Judging from their writings, many liberation ecologists embrace this position.

The problem is that politics cant answer those ultimate questions about life, death, good, evil, and humanitys ultimate origins and destiny which haunt everyones imagination. Perhaps one reason why some Latin Americans have embraced various evangelical confessions is that many such movements put Christ first, and keep politics firmly in its place. Thats a lesson, however, that some Latin American liberation ecologists and their ecclesial fellow-travelers havent absorbed. And like liberation theology, the consequent damage inflicted by radical liberation ecology upon Catholicisms abilityeven willingnessto evangelize Latin Americans is likely to be deep and lasting.

Article first appeared HERE.

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Liberation theology never went away. It morphed into liberation ecology. - Catholic Citizens of Illinois

EXCLUSIVE: Catholic priest defends burning Pachamama effigy as within law of God – Lifesite

Posted on November 13, 2019 by Danzig

MEXICO CITY, Mexico, November 7, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) A Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of Mexico City, whose video posted over the weekend went viral after he burned effigies of the pagan Pachamama statues in atonement for the sin of idolatry at the Amazon Synod, is defending his actions, saying that they fall within the law of God.

Fr. Hugo Valdemar Romero, the former spokesman of the Archdiocese of Mexico City, told LifeSiteNews in an exclusive interview (read full interview below) that he was motivated to lead his congregation in prayers of reparation, burning the effigies of the Pachamama, because of the scandal and the pain caused by the serious acts of idolatry, carried out in the Vatican with Amazonian idols during the Synod of the Amazon.

Many very wounded and angry faithful looked to me, asking us (clergy) to do something to show our repudiation of idolatry and to ask God for forgiveness for so many sacrileges and profanations, so I decided to do these acts of reparation, he said.

When asked if he had received retaliation from members of the hierarchy for burning the Pachamama effigies, Fr. Valdemar Romero replied that so far, he had not, but that he was willing to answer for my actions.

I have not yet received any censorship, and of course I am willing to answer for my actions. These actions, however, are not outside the law of God or canon law. I am not afraid because I feel protected by God and especially by Our Lady of GuadalupeI will always defend Her Honor.

The priest contrasted the idol Pachamama with the Virgin Mary under the title of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who appeared to Juan Diego on Tepeyac Hill in Mexico in 1531.

I spoke to an exorcist from Mexico City who told me that the figure of the Pachamama was a parody of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Fr Valdemar Romero explained.

Our Lady, Santa Maria de Guadalupe appears in Her holy image as a pregnant woman. She came to give birth to Jesus, Light of the World and the only True God, the sole purpose of our life. She came as The Woman of the Apocalypse, clothed with the sun with the moon at Her feet, he said.

This Pachamama, in contrast, is about to give birth to a red creature, demon colored, and that creature is nothing less than a new church. This church was born by the synod that has just ended this so-called church with an Amazonian face that pretends to have orthodox rites, but is promoting (the notion of) female deacons and married priests, all contrary to Catholic doctrine and the tradition of the (Roman) Church.

Fr. Hugo Valdemar Romero provided LifeSite with the prayers (see below) that he used in leading the congregation to make reparation for the worshiping of Pachamama in Rome during the Amazon Synod.

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LSN: What inspired you to lead your congregation in prayers of reparation, and then burn the effigies of the Pachamama?

Fr. Hugo Valdemar Romero: The scandal and the pain caused by the serious acts of idolatry, carried out in the Vatican with Amazonian idols during the Synod of the Amazon. Many very wounded and angry faithful looked to me, asking us (clergy) to do something to show our repudiation of idolatry and to ask God for forgiveness for so many sacrileges and profanations, so I decided to do these acts of reparation.

Have you spoken with exorcists in Latin America, and do you believe that demonic influence was involved in these rituals?

Yes, I spoke to an exorcist from Mexico City who told me that the figure of the Pachamama was a parody of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Our Lady, Santa Maria de Guadalupe appears in Her holy image as a pregnant woman. She came to give birth to Jesus, Light of the World and the only True God, the sole purpose of our life. She came as The Woman of the Apocalypse, clothed with the sun with the moon at Her feet. This Pachamama, in contrast, is about to give birth to a red creature, demon colored, and that creature is nothing less than a new church. This church was born by the synod that has just ended this so-called church with an Amazonian face that pretends to have orthodox rites, but is promoting (the notion of) female deacons and married priests, all contrary to Catholic doctrine and the tradition of the (Roman) Church.

In your video, we see you speaking about Our Lady of Guadalupe. In S. Maria in Traspontina, the Image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was seen, pushed aside by one of the side altarswhere the Pachamamas were placed. Do you believe this is significant?

Of course, it is the great imposture of the satanic goddess Pachamama. It seeks to usurp the place of Our Lady of Guadalupe, to remove from the Catholic faith, She Who is the Mother of the True God to put in Our Ladys place Mother Earth, which in reality is idolatry, pantheism and superstition.

How was Our Ladys apparition at Guadalupe significant to counter paganism in Latin America?

It was fundamental, because as St. John Paul II said it was the perfect model of inculturation. That is to say, Our Lady took elements of the culture of the indigenous world, not in order to create syncretism with paganism, but to purify certain symbols and give them a Christian sense. Meanwhile, with the Pachamama, the intention is not authentic inculturation but a diabolical usurpation to restore idolatry.

There seems to have been a rise of the occult in Mexico, including Santeria. Do you believe the rituals in the Vatican were similar synchronism, and why?

Unfortunately, where Faith is weakened, paganism and superstition return. This is what we see, not only in Mexico but throughout the Western world, which has abandoned Christianity, supplementing it with superstitions, New Age and Satanism.

Critics have said you disrespected indigenous culture by burning the effigies of the Pachamama. Speak to how Latin American history, including in Mexico, supports your acts of reparation and prayer.

Those who demand respect must also respect. No one would have said anything if the Amazonian idols had been exhibited in the Vatican museums or in some exhibition hall, but what they did was a real abomination and sacrilege. We watched, stunned, as the idols were worshipped in front of the Pope himself, in the Vatican gardensand witnessed daily rituals of worship in the church of Santa Maria Traspontina. In addition to being a crime against Divine Law, it was an offense to Catholics who reject idolatry and who do not want to witness the desecration of our churches.

We have seen, in recent months, a Colombian Bishop exorcising his diocese (because of the high-level of drugs, violence and occultism), along with violent pro-abortion feminists trying to burn the Cathedral in Mexico City. News of escalating cartel violence is being reported, from Mexico. Do you think these are related? What is the remedy?

Behind all that destroys human life, such as abortion and the crimes of narcotics, is Satan. He is "the liar and murderer from the beginning," as Jesus calls himand we may say that these two attributes are the demon's preferred practices. We'll always find his influence when we see these.

Many, after seeing your video, are calling for their priests and bishops to stand up and do similar acts of reparation. Still more are concerned that you will receive retaliation by certain members of the hierarchy, and that their clergy are afraid of this. What do you say to all of this?

Unfortunately, the tolerance, dialogue and mercy so often exhorted by this pontificate seems only for those outside (the Church), while for those inside there is censorship, silence and reprisals. Yes, there is a lot of fear, and especially a fear that a schism will result. A de facto schism, unfortunately, is already here. In my case, however, I have not yet received any censorship, and of course I am willing to answer for my actions. These actions, however, are not outside the law of God or canon law. I am not afraid because I feel protected by God and especially by Our Lady of GuadalupeI will always defend Her Honor.

Any other messages?

Only that we must not lose Faith! Faith is what overcomes the world. Do not fail to love Christ with all of your soul. Do not fail to love His Holy Mother and the Church, which is going through a great tribulation but in which, in the end, Christ will triumphhave no doubt about it.

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Prayers of Reparation

Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, receive from the hands of the Immaculata, Mother of God, Virgin Mary of Guadalupe, from our contrite heart, a sincere act of reparation for the acts of worship of idols and satanic fetishes that occurred in Rome, the Eternal City and the heart of the Catholic world, during the Synod for the Amazon.

Pour into the hearts of cardinals, bishops, priests, and religious men and women your Spirit, Who will expel the darkness of minds, so that they may recognize the impiety of such acts, which offended Your Divine Majesty and offer acts of reparation and relief.

In all the members of the Church, shed the light of the fullness and beauty of the Catholic Faith. Ignite in all the ardent zeal to bring the salvation of Jesus Christ, True God and true man to all men, especially people in the Amazon region, who are still enslaved to the service of idols and superstition, so that all people from that region reach the freedom of the children of God, and have the indescribable happiness of knowing Jesus Christ, and through Him in the life of Your Divine Nature.

Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you, the only True God, outside Whom there is no other god or salvation, have mercy on your Church. Look especially at the tears, the contrite and humble sighs of your faithful and bless and protect the true Christian heroes, who in their zeal for your glory and in their love for Mother Church prophetically threw the idols of the abomination into the water.

Have mercy on us: forgive us, Lord! Have mercy on us: Kyrie eleison!

Deprecatory Prayers

1. Forgive us, Lord, for the sacrilegious act of adoration of the Pachamama and the Amazonian idols in the Vatican gardens

Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.

2. Forgive us, Lord, for the desecration of the basilica and the tomb of the blessed apostle St. Peter, where they prayed and sang to the Amazonian idols.