William Wildblood just posted a reflection on “soulless entities” or unspiritual persons. This is my comment, suggesting some connections to Scripture and our tribulations in these later days.
I have always been fascinated by the Nephilim, or “giants,” that are said to have sprung from the union of fallen angles and the daughters of men (Genesis 6:4). Swedenborg is a very mixed bag, in my opinion, but he says interesting things about the Nephilim, and about their mulatto progeny, the Anakim and Rephaim.
“The Nephalim signify those who from a persuasion of their own loftiness and preeminence, make nothing of all things holy and true . . . . that with their most dreadful fantasies, which are poured forth by them as a poisonous and suffocating sphere, they so deaden and stifle every spirit, that spirits know not the least how to think, and seem to themselves half dead” (Heavenly Arcana [1749]).
Swedenborg believed that the Nephalim, Anakim and Rephaim were in his day chained in Hell, but, when he wrote his Heavenly Arcana in the middle of the eighteenth century, we now know the great jailbreak was already underway. Humanism is clearly the creed of the Nephalim, as it is of all modern men who are under “a persuasion of their own loftiness and preeminence,” and humanism certainly pours forth “dreadful fantasies” in a “poisonous and suffocating sphere” that “stifles every spirit,” making them “seem to themselves half dead.”
I find it very easy to see the tribulations of today as a conquest of the earth by these “giants.” Looking at today’s global elite, a dissident will be reminded of Numbers 13:33.
“And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”
Grasshoppers, deplorables, dirt people, insurrectionists, etc., etc. It may be significant that much of today’s environmentalist-overpopulation doctrine views ordinary human beings as destructive “grasshoppers.”
One last thing I would note is that Nimrod is described as a “mighty hunter” (Genesis 10:9), which I take to mean a “giant,” and that it was Nimrod who built the Tower of Babel. It seems to me obvious that the Tower of Babel is a symbol of the Humanist global empire in which the “giants” rule, and frequently step on, the “grasshoppers.”
The Orthosphere 
Exactly! For Christians (Orthodox, at least) the Tower of Babel, which introduced demonic rule on earth, is the third and final event in the fall of man.
The first was the introduction of death in the Garden of Eden, and the second was the introduction of sin with Cain and Abel.
This is the subject of Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick’s recent book, “Arise, O God.”
Their enthusiasm for what they claim to be ‘artificial intelligence’ will probably lead to attributing equal dignity to their machines. That will be the beginning of our replacement.
The intelligence of the people who look forward to the age of artificial intelligence is itself more artificial than human. They are right to feel more kinship with computers than with men of flesh and blood (“meat-sticks” they sometimes call us).
Well, it either took an omniscient God or, according to their own narrative, several hundred millions of years of evolution to produce the meat-sticks; yet they claim to be able to do as good or better in a few decades. They sure are the boys…
I think you’ll find that the Nephilim (gigantes), grammatically speaking, were already present, when the sons of god took the daughters of men and had offspring, and were present after this event, too. Therefore, there seem prima facie, to be 4 types of “human”: the Nephilim; the sons of God; the daughters of men (and, therefore, men, tout court); and their offspring.
Having studied much René Girard, Thomas Aquinas, Julian Jaynes et al and biblical exegesis, it is my view that the Nephilim and the “[men and] the daughters of men” are essentially the same people, i.e. non-Adamic, sacrificing hominins, where the Nephilim are the proto-pagan heroes and divinities of of the archaic sacred, of ancient battles and sacrifices remembered in the myths of pre-Adamic culture and down into Antiquity. Therefore, the sons of God are likely to be the descendants of Adam (we are permitted to interpret according to Ireneus’ doctrine of recapitulation and a plain reading of Jesus’ universal message), whose genealogy (not genetics) begins with God and whose descendants, from Seth, “begin to call on the name of the Lord”.
S Joshua Swamidass, an evangelical Christian and microbiologist, has written an interesting book “The Genealogical Adam and Eve”, which outlines with solid scientific and exegetical foundations an understanding both the *de novo* creation of Adam as a new telos in an “old” body, the possibility of a recent Adam qua universal *genealogical* ancestor, his *genetic* or bodily descent from prior species (“from the dust” or mere matter, ultimately), and therefore the existence of non-Adamic hominin people *outside the garden* with whom Adam’s descendants likely married and interbred with. This is a complex theory that I am working out, but suffice it to say that such fertile interbreeding within a genus is not bestial, notwithstanding the claim that Adam is uniquely different. Nor is this claim likely to lead to racism; Swamidass leaves the possibility open that the Adamic covenant, the divine intellectual/spiritual gifts and of course original sin pass to the offspring where only one parent is Adamic. A cursory appreciation of mathematics and an understanding of human population migrations, suggests that we – even the Tasmanian Aborigines – would have Adam as an universal genealogical ancestor if he lived as recently as 6-10,000 years ago, and this, before any consideration of the meaning of the Flood as an event that destroyed all but Adamic people, i.e. all but Noah and his passengers (Swamidass has the maths in his book).
This whole hypothesis lends itself to the Thomistic/Aristotlean biology of origins and challenges Darwinism directly. It also agrees well with René Girard’s general anthropological theory (mimetic desire / the generative victimage mechanism), if we ignore his own conceptualisation of Adam and the Fall at the beginning of “hominization”, as it is congruent with this genealogical hypothesis, especially with the existence of people, i.e. hominins, outside the garden. We can now guess who these people were: homo sacer, the man of archaic sacrifice, Adam’s biological forebears. Out of these people, a new type and telos was formed by God: Adam, homo misericors. The difference is spiritual, psychological and teleological, *not genetic.* Perhaps Adam’s Fall was, in part, to doubt his own new mind and mistake himself (under the influence of Satan) with his cousins, by joining in their bloody sacrifices to the heroic gods of good and evil, and eating of its fruits, which is death, and for Adam, double-mindedness.