(LifeSiteNews) — Openly homosexual tech billionaire Peter Thiel will give a four-part lecture series on the Biblical Antichrist beginning September 15.
Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir, the company behind tools used by intelligence agencies and law enforcement for surveillance and predictive policing, will comment on the Antichrist from a “science and technology” perspective, according to the event website.
The lecture description notably describes Thiel as a Christian despite the fact that he openly embraces sodomy, a sin that “cries out to Heaven for vengeance” and despite Thiel’s hopes to be revived after death through future medical technology. He has said he is registered to be cryonically preserved, which means he would be frozen upon his legal death.
In 2011, Thiel said he believes Christianity is “true” while describing himself as “somewhat heterodox.”
The tech entrepreneur will incorporate the “theology, history, literature and politics of the Antichrist” in his upcoming lectures, and draw upon the thoughts of René Girard, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Carl Schmitt, and John Henry Newman.
Thiel’s talks on the Antichrist will be hosted by The Acts 17 Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society,” at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The lectures will be “off the record.”
The powerful investor has opened up in interviews over the past year about his unconventional views on the Antichrist. In a June New York Times interview with Ross Douthat, Thiel dismissed the idea that the Antichrist would be “some evil tech genius,” proposing that, instead, he would be fanning fears over world crisis.
“The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate,” Thiel told Douthat, suggesting that the Antichrist would promote regulation of technology.
“It’s the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that,” Thiel opined.
He went on to declare it is not technological development that draws broad public support but scientific, technological “stagnation.”
“In our world, the thing that has political resonance is the opposite. The thing that has political resonance is: We need to stop science, we need to just say ‘stop’ to this,” Thiel said.
He believes that in today’s world it is “far more likely to be Greta Thunberg” than a “Dr. Strangelove” who takes over the world.
Douthat challenged him on this take, beginning by pointing out to Thiel that due at least in part to his involvement in Palantir he is “heavily invested in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare,” as Douthat said in a video clip posted by journalist Jim Stewartson.
“It just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would be maybe using the tools that you are building,” Douthat noted.
“Wouldn’t that be the irony of history that the man publicly warning about Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?” Douthat said.
Theoretically, both the creators of AI and other advanced technologies and the government regulators of these technologies could facilitate the oppression of humans under a “beast” system of the Antichrist.
This beast system has been widely speculated to be an AI system with centralized access to intimate information about ourselves as well as the power to manipulate or control our behavior.
Palantir has already rolled out the system infrastructure that would enable such manipulation, while government regulators have the power to use these technologies to target citizens, or withhold technology that provides access to basic necessities like money or food.
Catholic theologians and mystics agree that the Antichrist will be a single man who will present himself as the true Messiah and suppress the true, Catholic religion and the Mass while promoting a false one-world religious system.
