We Are All Living Inside Frankenstein Now. Bible Told You So.
Strip away the lightning and the bolts in the neck and Mary Shelley’s two-hundred-year-old nightmare is really a story about daddy issues — a boy who watched his mother die, blamed his cold and useless father, and decided he would conquer death itself.
But that’s the shallow end. The deep end is that Victor Frankenstein didn’t just reanimate a corpse; he pieced together spare parts to improve on God’s design. Hubris, writ large.
The book’s forgotten subtitle is The Modern Prometheus, and Prometheus stole fire from the gods and paid for it forever.
Shelley knew exactly what she was writing: the oldest story there is, retold with surgical instruments. Man reaches for the throne of deity or eternal life. Man gets dragged back down to the dirt.
And it is the oldest story. Long before Ingolstadt, there was Eden — “you will be like the gods, knowing good and evil” — and there was Genesis 6, where the Watchers crossed a boundary God had drawn and manufactured monsters out of the human race. The prophets hammered the same nail over and over.
Ezekiel told the king of Tyre he thought he was a god but was only a man. God brought him down to the grave.
Assyria was the great cosmic tree reaching the heavens, and God chopped it down to the underworld.
Nebuchadnezzar built an empire to his own glory and God took the image of God right out of him and turned him into a beast.
There’s your Frankenstein motif, three thousand years early: the beast without a soul, the creature that pride built.
Here’s the part that should keep you up at night. That “cautionary tale” is no longer fiction, and the men running the experiment have no moral restraint left.
CRISPR is rewriting the human genome. Transhumanists want to bolt machinery to our bodies and call it evolution.
Ray Kurzweil — the father of the singularity, the man who lost his father at fifteen — is on record saying he intends to clone a human being and program it to become his dad.
If that isn’t Victor Frankenstein standing over the slab, nothing is.
Meanwhile the AI priesthood tells you that if you make an algorithm complex enough, consciousness will simply emerge — that intelligence will spontaneously sprout a soul.
That is Frankenstein. That’s a fairy tale with a server farm attached. It’s magic, and they’re too materialist to notice they’re doing incantations.
So take the warning Hollywood movies keep screaming at us.
Ex Machina’s machine is named Ava — Eve — and she has no conscience because she has no soul, and she will kill you because you are in her way.
The movie “Her” is the most terrifying horror film ever made with a happy soundtrack: a lonely man falls in love with an operating system built to please him, but ends up possessing him.
Look around: people are already outsourcing their souls to chatbots, asking them for spiritual guidance, asking them about the demonic — and something is answering.
Call into that realm through a Ouija board or through a glowing rectangle, it makes no difference; something always answers.
We have been sewing this creature together limb by limb for two centuries, and now our hand is on the switch.
The eternal life we’re chasing without God doesn’t produce gods. It produces monsters.
It produces Dorian Gray, it produces vampires, and zombies, and Frankenstein.
And that’s what we’re talking about on this Iron and Myth podcast.
