Religion and the new technology

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. I'm interested in spirituality and tech.

For me, the Nexus between the two comes not in the tech itself, not from my smartphone itself, but from the ramifications of it. The tech abstracts to math, which abstracts to philosophy, which abstracts (for me) to spirituality.

The real breakthrough of this information age is the concept that information is real, the idea that a *real thing* can be in two places at once, like a picture on your smart phone. I mean people always had books and paintings, but the new trend is toward the vanishing of the media, the canvas and the paper book as being the real thing, toward the representation as reality. The Mona Lisa is no longer a painting in France, now its the backdrop to a million ads, its digital image, its part of a TV show: its primary existence is as a non-local phenomenon, its physical existence in France is secondary to its non-local existence as information in the human mind.

So in one sense, spiritually, the world has made a huge step away from materialism. But in another sense, its gotten itself into a new mess, amoral non-materialism, and the old models of faith are breaking down in response. Its much harder to define right and wrong in terms of a partially non-physical world, where things have distant effects through tech. And when I read half the things I am just blown away by the evil that's going on in this world, passing under the radar because its wrapped in a technological complexity or some manipulation of public opinion. We're increasingly in a world of obfuscation and created "reality", as human focus moves from manipulating matter to manipulating information.

To me though, God is what is beyond the wall of illusion. Its the Rock. (Luke 6:48) So I think increasingly, the role of faith is to give people a way out of the madness, that open door when the information dream becomes the information nightmare. My two cents anywho.