Transcendentalism
The desire for immateriality and disembodiment saturates all of western culture. And its obsession is manifest in religion, metaphysics, weaponry and information theory.
RELIGION
The transcendence of materiality is expressed in the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. According to the Gospel account, Christ dies on the cross only to be raised from the dead three days latter. This resurrection does not consist in a mere transmigration of the soul from the body. For, as Mary Magdalene discovers, the corpse of Jesus no longer rests in the tomb. The Christian resurrection, therefore, is originally formulated as a material transformation of the body. The resurrected or glorified body, however, is no longer limited or encumbered by its materiality. It has the ability to walk through walls and to appear from out of nowhere. The resurrection, therefore, consists in a dematerialization of the body. On the third day, the bodily form of Jesus the Christ becomes uploaded as immaterial information.
METAPHYSICS
Western metaphysics distinguishes a material domain from an immaterial one. The name Meta-physics, literally indicates that which lies beyond or after the physical. Metaphysics, therefore, concerns itself with the immaterial and its concourse with materiality. In its classical formulation, the immaterial is that which in-forms material things. This immaterial form, however, is nothing but the extraction of all the information contained in the material of the particular. In its modern articulation, this schema is recoded as the distinction between the mind and the body. In this dualistic formulation, the immaterial mind is granted privileged over the corruptible material of the body. This privileging of the immaterial constitutes what Nietzsche had called the "despising of the body."
WEAPONS
The purpose of nuclear weaponry is total and complete annihilation. The bomb does not merely incapacitate the enemy. Rather, it vaporizes him. In the blast of Little Boy, inhabitants throughout Hiroshima were instantaneously disintegrated and dematerialized. They dissolved into thin air. At ground zero, the atomic bomb literally makes the enemy disappear. The same teleology has been expressed in the weapons of science fiction--the disintegration ray of mid-twentieth century comic books and the phaser of Star Trek.