The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

One of the most productive industries in the US is the porn industry. An oddly ironic industry dedicated to sexual satisfaction that isn’t satisfying through being exploited while exploiting others while producing ejaculations and creating nothing. Woody Allen actually offered a  prophetic send-up of that industry in the movie  Sleeper,  featuring a future that would offer humans a new machine: the “orgasmatron.” The existence of the vast non-reproductive production industry called porn will no doubt extend into the age of smart machines. It already has - moving from mere mechanisms to increasingly sophisticated forms of AI and virtual reality. It is another reminder of how the 2nd machine age will make mere production trivial at best and dehumanizing at worst. For Christians this begs us to ask the difference between mere production and true creation.   I noted in an earlier blog that it isn’t machines that make our era different from the past. It is the...

Contemporary Christianity has been long sense seduced by the machine age. And this can be seen most clearly in those settings where evangelism has become a form of production: a machine for making disciples of Jesus Christ. In this post I’m going to assert that this understanding of evangelism is not warranted by the teaching of Jesus, and represents a mis-reading of his commands to his disciples.  To see this we need to first look at the evolving relationship between Jesus and his disciples. Initially they are called to follow him. Their first (and as it happens final) vocation is to be witnesses to him; his teaching, his miracles, and his person. What they witness is this: Jesus never produces anything.  This doesn’t mean that Jesus doesn’t exercise power. He heals, he casts out demons, he changes water to wine. But even when his miracles are of abundance, such as when he feeds the 5000, they aren’t characterized as production. He feeds the five thousand. He doesn’t produce ...

There is a heresy at the heart of American Christianity: the belief that the production of disciples of Christ is what gives Christians and Christian churches their value.  In the last post I pointed out four challenges to the way in which we value our humanity posed by the 2nd Machine Age we are beginning to live in.  First , machines will increasingly take over the intellectual tasks that were markers of human distinctiveness.  W h at we believed marked us as unique will first be shared, and then we will be surpassed .  Second , machines will become moral agents, making decisions of the type heretofore limited to humans.  This will attack the assumption that human uniqueness lies in our being conscious moral agents.  Or more properly, the nature of our moral agency will change. As creators of moral agents who determine the parameters of their decision making ours will be a kind of super-morality - taking on a role more like that tradit...