Sunny Banana
YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/@sanibonani-y2g?si=09LymOLYjP7sE3cY
I am a school chaplain and the content is intended to encourage curiosity about Faith and it's impact on day to day life
The Sunny Banana, is a play upon the Zulu greeting, Sanibonani, meaning I see you.
As tech wrenches us from real life, we are not seeing each other. The Greek word 'idea' means to see. It is as if we have lost the idea of what it means to be human; social, communal, relational. The same word, to see, in Old English is 'seon' which has connotations of understanding.
Let's start seeing each other again, listening, respecting, and understanding each other and ourselves. After all, we are people through other people.
Sunny Banana
Transhumanism | Please Hold While We (not God) Upload Your Soul
A polished pitch promises a future without pain, work, or death—just upload your life, give up a little control, and enjoy a near-perfect world. We took that claim head-on, read it aloud, and held it up to the quiet strength of prayer, the honesty of humility, and the Christian vision of eternal life that transforms rather than deletes suffering. What emerged wasn’t a tech-versus-faith brawl, but a deeper question: are we trading the soul-shaping work of love for a glossy illusion of control?
We trace how performance culture trains us to avoid discomfort, how platforms turn identity into an endless show, and why the human path needs limits to grow courage, patience, and fidelity. A brief Orthodox prayer—raise me above this world’s confusion—anchors the conversation in a different kind of hope, one that doesn’t ask us to escape our bodies but to receive life as gift. Along the way, an old monastic tale cuts to the core: pride can mimic piety, but only humility breaks evil’s grip. That single virtue becomes the lens through which we evaluate every promise to “defeat death” by technique alone.
Rather than dismissing innovation, we ask better questions. What kind of people are our tools making us? Are we being formed for communion or curated for performance? The Christian promise isn’t an upgrade; it’s a resurrection—eternal life as shared love, not just longer existence. If the fee for frictionless bliss is the surrender of humility, the cost is too high. Join us as we wrestle with hope, limits, and the kind of trust that can carry a soul through suffering into joy.
If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review with your take on the “upload” dream—where do you draw the line?
Sunny Bunani, my dear listeners, welcome to the Sunny Banana. I see you. Thank you for tuning in today. I have um more of a warning today, really. I think I've been reading Paul Kingsnorth's book called Against the Machine: The Unmaking of Humanity. Really, really insightful book. And um, I just want to read you something from the book. Um, and it comes from a transhumanist by the name of Zoltan Estvan. And I'm not too well clued up about who Zoltan Estvan is, but Paul Kingsworth calls him a transhumanist. And this is this little excerpt here that I'd like to read for you. A conflict of who emerges with AI and who doesn't is coming. It will likely be a civil war of sorts. Ultimately, people won't be able to stop progress, and most humans will upload themselves into new worlds where they don't die, don't have to work, or live as biological beings who suffer. You will give up some control of your life, and that will be your payment into this world to exist. It'll be a near perfect world of bliss and progress. My goodness. My goodness. Those listeners of mine who are who are religious in nature, you probably will see all the warning signs of that and all the pitfalls that it has come from a thinking like this transhumanist thinks here. And it was particularly interesting to me this morning. I was praying a prayer called The Midnight Song to the Most Holy Mother of God from a Russian Orthodox prayer book by our comendrite Lazarus. And this line I want to read to you. O thou who art above the angels, raise me above this world's confusion. O thou who art above the angels, raise me above this world's confusion. I think the warnings for me and the red lights and the alarm bells go off for me when I see something like a word transhuman. And as a chaplain and a person who ministers to young people, I've always been concerned about this narrative of not suffering or be whoever you want to be. I've had two little girls now, my wife and I, and that that belief is strengthening me. You can't be whoever you want to be, because it's a world of chasing your tail. And then we throw in social media and they call it a platform, a social media platform. We put ourselves on a platform, and what do you do on a platform? You perform and perform and perform and perform, and no one really is satisfied. No one is satisfied. Transhumanism. And I had a few podcasts ago that I spoke to Aidan Hart, the iconographer, and we spoke about being human. But but religion and faith is actually about being human. And being human involves, and I don't need to tell you this or remind you or say this too much, it involves suffering, it involves pain, it involves failure. And I reposted that episode this last week to say, you know, in a world where you can be anything, or believes it can be anything, be the human you were created to be. Be the human you were created to be. There's a beautiful prayer or little meme or ski skit, as they call them, about a person who was asking for patience and asking for courage. And God replies to them by giving them reasons or opportunities to show courage, to show patience. So this excerpt I read to you out of this book comes at us and says, Well, one day we are working towards a future where we can pay with our lives, with our humanity basically, so that we can have no pain, don't have to work, and ultimately don't die. Well, this promise has been promised, this sorry, not this promise, another promise, and the true promise has been promised to us through Jesus Christ our Savior. That if we want eternal life, that's the ultimate sacrifice to give up our lives for others in love and in sacrifice for the kingdom of God. And there's one there's one thing that keeps coming up to me. I can only call this this this is evil. I can only say this is evil because it has no humility in it. There is no humility in it. There's a wonderful story of a monk who is talking to a senior monk and he's saying to the senior monk how he fasts and he prays and he doesn't even sleep, but he still is struggling with impure thoughts. He's still struggling in life and finding hardships, but he's doing everything he can. And the older abbot monk says to him, The demons, my friend, the demons, my friend, they don't even sleep. They don't sleep. So they don't even eat. And they they also worship, they worship the devil. So what is the difference? The one thing that evil cannot comprehend, and it's this whole idea, this whole idea about defeating death, thinking we can do it by ourselves. So the only thing that stands in the way that evil cannot understand is humility. The one thing the demons can't do is humble themselves because their king chose pride, their king chose control. And I think this is what we what it means to be human to let go of control and trust trust God, and that takes humility. And it's very difficult. But I'm told that the rewards are out of this world. We cannot understand the beauty that will come into our lives through humility. So there you go, my friends. I just thought I'd reflect on that and share that with you today. What do you think about that? What do you think about that transhumanist excerpt that one day we will upload our lives? I don't know what that means, but upload our lives into a world where there's no pain and we exist forever. We exist forever. I don't know about you, but the promise of our Lord Jesus Christ, who suffered for us, with us, and like us. That's where I'm gonna put my trust. But you make your mind up. Sunny Bonani, I see you. Thank you for listening to the Sunny Banana. God bless you.