Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn might be useful too.

This minister might also want to check out the Greek Stoics.

“Transhumanist” intellectual lightweight non-entities may think they’re reinventing the wheel……..but they’re squatting in the kiddie pool.

You could use Google translate to translate from Italian the article linked. From the article linked there are links to the single talk or writing sent there (one of them mine).

In fact, transhumanism is not about “avoid suffering whatever the cost”. It is about make individuals better using technological means. And technology is about doing things, not contemplating. People with greater IQ, will, emotional control, empathy, etc. is better. And at the end, you will know what is good by its fruits.

http://transfigurism.org

whatever the cost and effort that project requires

In the parlance of Wikipedia… [citation needed].

In a wholly democratic religion the popular will makes up its own God on its own terms (or, as under Communism or Ayn Rand Libertarianism, the church is thrown out and man/state declares itself God). This is happening within the church in the West today, as Edward Norman discusses in Secularisation:

Thus a secularised version of the love of neighbor is released from the constraints of an articulated moral system–least of all from one claimed to be of divine origin–and elevates human need as a sovereign principle. Once Christ is represented as primarily concerned with justice and welfare, rather than with sin and corruption, the equation of his religion with the leading tenets of modern Humanism is easily effected. Humanism, however, in whatever guise it presents itself, is about the sovereignty of humanity and its imagined needs, and not about the demands of God at all. It is not only inherently an enemy of authentic Christianity, but also its probably successor.

…Once humanity and its needs have been elevated to sovereign determination of public and private action, anything that can be represented as an affront or an impediment to the painless existence of men and women is made to seem morally unacceptable–an outrage. Morality then appears as self-evident: it is the palliation of whatever humans themselves regard as the cause of their suffering or deprivation.

Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ in my flesh, for his body, which is the church.
– Colossians 1:24

Must Jesus bear the cross alone, and all the world go free?

“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life, shall lose it; for he that shall lose his life for my sake, shall save it.”

There is redemptive value in uniting our sufferings with the sufferings of our Elder Brother. His was a very hard and painful labor of love that His adopted brothers and sisters are asked to join Him in. When it is all said and done we will feel very foolish if we didn’t, much like we would feel if an arduous group effort of which we were a part was being highly praised upon its completion, and many members of the group were truly heroic in their sacrifices for the cause, and we knew we didn’t really put that much effort into it.