Next Stop? The Not-So Final Frontier
If the category of "the human" is not sui generis, what does that mean for scholars moving forward?
Personally, I think it can only broaden our horizons. By acknowledging that the categorization of the human is an active process, we can begin to dissect and understand who is doing the categorization and to whom.
In as much as it applies to media, such as Battlestar Galactica, it also applies to how humans are categorized theologically, as shown with the Mormon Transhumanist Association. Both data sets exemplify social theory in different ways, as they both imagine the human to mean different things.
The stakes of this game is the Tesla Trolly Problem. As humans become more embodied with technology, how are we to understand how humans are categorized? Where will the line be drawn, if it is drawn at all? What does it mean to be human when we become more technology than human?
Moving forward, as scholars we can begin to ask important questions for religious studies. For example, how do the authors of religious texts signify the category of the human? What does this signification illustrate in connection with the text at hand? Do the authors of the texts illustrate a "post-human"? If so, who is this post-human and why is the author illustrating them as such?
