Burdensome bodies?

". . . .technology regards the very terms of our bodily existence as burdensome."  Rebecca Solnit in River of Shadows.

I do like this observation, but oddly I had not thought about it in terms of mind (or spirit)-body dualism until Mary asked me about the religious context for the view.  Perhaps that is because those Christians who advocate such a dualism would put the tension in moral terms and I take Solnit to be pointing toward another sort of issue.  Nonetheless, Mary's question was a fair one that I'll keep thinking about for some time.  I suppose that those Christians who hold to a spirit-body dualism do regard bodily existence as burdensome and a barrier to living a pure, spiritual life.  And they may even devise 'technologies' to escape their bodies: ways of fostering mystical experience, for example.   However, as I said in class, there is a wider, more mainstream tradition within Christianity that values bodily existence as part of divine creation and in recognition that in Jesus God took on human flesh.  Indeed Jesus himself displayed the burden of bodily existence and its related awareness of mortality in that he ate, and rested, and wept.

This morning, on Studio 360, I heard a set of STORIES that recalled all of this to me: its topic was genetic engineering and other enhancements of human bodies.  These technologies before birth and after accidents or disease aim to remove the limits of human bodies in ways that are like electric lights and the telephone and so forth.  And here I realize that my reluctance to embrace some of these technologies is theological because they seem to me to be denying the goodness of bodies that are limited.  I'm unwilling to allow that needing to sleep and eat, for example, are so burdensome that we should overcome them rather than tending to them.