Submitted by Brewer55
Guest Post by Rod Dreher
When I was a kid in the late 1970s, I happened upon a copy of Hal Lindsey’s megaselling The Late Great Planet Earth. It was an Evangelical account of the Last Days, purporting to explain how we were living in the times just before the return of Jesus Christ. All of this hit me like a bomb. I didn’t know Jesus Christ was coming back! Why did no one tell me? (I’ve told you before that we weren’t big churchgoers in my family.) And holy cow, I had no clue that the Soviet Union was mentioned in the Bible, and that the European Common Market was going to produce this guy called the Antichrist, and that there was this thing called the Rapture … et cetera. This was thrilling stuff. It electrified my imagination for a year or two. And then it burned out, and with it went my faith for some time.
As an adult Christian, I would laugh at myself, recalling how seriously twelve-year-old me took Hal Lindsey’s speculations, none of which came true. That End Times narrative is really narcotic, though. As a Catholic, I saw a version of it, usually involving devotion to Marian apparitions. A priest friend who had been converted at Medjugorje, but who early in his priesthood wearied of apparition-chasers, told me how frustrating it was to him to be unable to get his most enthusiastic parishioners to focus on the ordinary part of being Catholics. They wanted the spiritual fireworks. It’s a real temptation.
The thing is, the Christian tradition really does say that before the Second Coming of Christ, there will arise a messianic world leader called by Scripture the “Beast,” who is the “Antichrist.” He will lead a mass persecution of the Church, and will oversee a global dictatorship that controls people’s lives so thoroughly that, according to Revelation 13:
16Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead,17so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.18This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.
I hardly need to point out that there is a massive literature of speculation about the identity of the Antichrist, and how it is connected to the number 666. I find the theory of the Orthodox Christian thinker Jonathan Pageau persuasive: that the Antichrist 666 is not necessarily a single man (though it might be), but the number refers to a total godless system. He writes, in part:
So, we have to be very attentive as these patterns play themselves out. As these patterns start to appear to us in the world, we have to not look for the Ozzy Osbourne, dark Satanist who is going to be wearing all black and looking like a ghoul coming out of the Earth. That is not what 666 looks like. 666 looks like a luminous system that seems like it contains everything and can control everything. And that is why it is so seductive. That is why it can delude us if we’re not careful, because to not participate or to not, let’s say, worship this system can exclude you from the discourse. It makes it very easy to compromise in that sense.
Not long ago, I read that the Romans tattooed slaves on their hands or foreheads, so they would never be able to escape. It hit me, then, that the “mark of the Beast” seen by St. John was not necessarily a literal mark on the forehead or hand (though it might be), but that symbolically it meant that you had to be a slave to the system in order to participate economically — that is, to earn a living.
As a Christian, I certainly believe this dark, totalitarian world will one day come into being. It’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole of guessing when that might be, and that’s something I never do. But I gotta say, the shape of the thing really does seem to be coming into being. In 2019, I wrote this piece after two prominent Catholic cardinals warned that the age of Antichrist might be upon us — both of them referencing the confused teaching coming from Pope Francis as a dangerous sign of the times. The intellectual giant René Girard, a Catholic, wrote around the turn of the century that we were in perilous times:
The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition. … We are living through a caricatural “ultra-Christianity” that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by “radicalizing” the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner. … The intellectuals and other cultural elites have promoted Christianity to the role of number one scapegoat.
Girard says we are at the advent of what he calls “the other totalitarianism,” saying that it is
the most cunning and malicious of the two, the one with the greatest future, by all evidence. At present it does not oppose Judeo-Christian aspirations but claims them as its own and questions the concern for victims on the part of Christians (not without a certain semblance of reason at the level of concrete action, given the deficiencies of historical Christianity). The other totalitarianism does not openly oppose Christianity but outflanks it on its left wing.
As I wrote the last time I brought this up, this is the force of what in the Christian tradition is called Antichrist. You don’t have to believe in a literal Antichrist figure to grasp what Girard is saying here. Girard points out that in the symbolic language of the New Testament, Antichrist opposes Christ by imitating him and seeking to be better than him. More:
The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc.
Girard wrote that in his 2001 book I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning. He died in 2015, just as the trans craze was getting started. I don’t think he would have been surprised by any of it.
Why do I bring this up today? Because I just read the latest Substack essay, titled “You Are Harvest,” by Paul Kingsnorth, an English writer living in rural Ireland with his wife and kids. I am a subscriber, so I don’t know if it is behind a paywall or not. Click the link to see. Kingsnorth was formally baptized and confirmed as an Orthodox Christian earlier this year, but his thought expressed in the piece is not based on anything Christian. Rather it is based on a lifetime of observing and analyzing the culture. Read in a Christian key, though, what he writes is staggering, and look, if you can’t read this for free, you would do well to buy a subscription to read his entire series about what he calls The Machine. Any time he refers to “the Machine,” I think “Antichrist.” It fits. Here are excerpts:
Many people see few problems with the march of the digital machine through every aspect of our lives. Many people have simply forgotten what it feels like not to be pulled and pushed and tugged and directed every hour of the day by the demands of the glowing screen.
Many people are not paying attention.
More:
A few days after I lost my game of chess, a couple of friends came to visit us from England. We hadn’t seen them for nearly a decade, and they hadn’t travelled anywhere since the pandemic began, so they were blinking excitedly in the sunlight. They had taken the ferry across the Irish Sea, which had necessitated them performing a particular technological ritual, one which went beyond even the longstanding norm of scanning their digitally-enabled passports and sitting on a boat full of CCTV cameras.
This time they had to have their photo taken, and show their digital proof of vaccination. They also, for some reason they didn’t understand, had to recite a string of numbers into a recording device. If I were being paranoid – and these days I usually am – I would guess that this was part of the creation of an embryonic digital voice recognition system, which will be used in future to supplement the eyeball scans, passport chips and smartphone-enabled health certificates which are already forming the basis of our glorious future of freedom and plenty.
More:
Sometimes I lie awake at night, or I wander in the field behind my house, or I walk down the street in our local town and think I can see it all around me: the grid. The veins and sinews of the Machine that surrounds us and pins us and provides for us and defines us now. I imagine a kind of network of shining lines in the air, glowing like a dewed spiderweb in the morning sun. I imagine the cables and the satellite links, the films and the words and the records and the opinions, the nodes and the data centres that track and record the details of my life. I imagine the mesh created by the bank transactions and the shopping trips, the passport applications and the text messages sent. I see this thing, whatever it is, being constructed, or constructing itself around me, I see it rising and tightening its grip, and I see that none of us can stop it from evolving into whatever it is becoming.
I see the Machine, humming gently to itself as it binds us with its offerings, as it dangles its promises before us and slowly, slowly, slowly reels us in. I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: the web; the net.
I think: these are things designed to trap prey.
Here, Kingsnorth comes to the end of a long passage in which he discusses Jacques Ellul and his theories about how our world is being taken over by “technique.” For Ellul, this means establishing by mechanical means a world in which all things are controlled:
But then, if Ellul is right, this is the direction in which the reign of technique will ultimately take us: towards the dictatorship of the Machine. Claiming in 1964 that technique had already ‘rendered traditional democratic doctrines obsolete’, he suggested that the new way of seeing would overcome any democratic objections, and would always tend towards total control. ‘Efficiency is a fact’, he wrote wryly, ‘and justice a slogan.’ Technique, through sheer dominance, would accrue power to itself until there could be no rational argument (the only kind of argument now accepted) against controlling the minutiae of our lives for the greater good:
Finally, technique causes the state to become totalitarian, to absorb the citizens’ lives completely. We have noted that this occurs as a result of the accumulation of techniques in the hands of the state … Even when the state is liberal and democratic, it cannot do otherwise than become totalitarian. It becomes so directly or, as in the United States, through intermediate persons. But, despite differences, all such systems come ultimately to the same result.
By using the word ‘totalitarian’, Ellul was not suggesting that all nations would become dictatorships, let alone adopt an ideological framework like Nazism or Marxism to guide them. In fact, he said, such ideologies interfere with the direction of technique, which seeks efficiency rather than ideology. ‘Totalitarian’, in this context, simply meant that it would be impossible to escape the Machine and its assumptions. Everywhere you looked, there it would be: staring you in the face, directing your actions, digging into every facet of your life, giving you fewer and fewer escape routes each year.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the times we are currently living in would be regarded by many of our ancestors as apocalyptic. The degree of control and monitoring which we endure in ‘developed’ societies, which has been accelerating for decades and which has reached warp speed in the 2020s, is creating a kind of digital holding camp in which we all find ourselves trapped. The rising paranoia that extends now across the political spectrum and across the Western world – the anger and confusion; the sense of promises broken and established systems gumming up – all of this, I think, can be traced to the rise and consolidation of the Machine, this great matrix which strips from us our understanding of what a human life is, and makes us instead lonely cogs in its drive for self-creation.
Read it all, if you can — and if you can’t, then buy a subscription and read all nine of Kingsnorth’s essays about the Machine. Trust me, it’s worth it.
In this latest piece, Kingsnorth suggests that you watch this 10-minute video of Edward Snowden explaining how the Internet works, and why it leads to our slavery:
It is hard to know how to respond to this in one’s life. At the Touchstone conference recently, a woman asked me why, if I recognized all the evils that come to us through smartphones (primarily surveillance), do I continue to have one? It’s a great question, and the only feeble answer I could give her was that I have to have it to do my job. When I told my wife about the woman’s question, and how unhappy I was with my answer, she pointed out that our daughter’s “dumb phone” was going to be obsolete soon, because it would not be able to work on the cell system. They have made it where we all have to have smart phones if we are going to have cellphones at all. Could you do your job without a cellphone? I couldn’t. There’s no way in the world. So, I am lashed to the system, whether I like it or not. And so are you.
When I talk in Live Not By Lies about “soft totalitarianism,” I am not simply speaking of the particular policies the baizuocracy is putting into place. I am talking about the technical capabilities they have built into the system to control us. The other day I watched a video in which one of the leading Catholic integralists said that it was a shame that progressives understood better than us conservatives that the state ought to be in the business of “soulcraft,” and be guiding the people to virtue. I thought: this right-wing Catholic doesn’t object to the controlling state; he just objects to the fact that secular leftists are in command of it. Well, I don’t want to live in a society in the grips of Dostoevsky’s Catholic Grand Inquisitor any more than I want to live in one gripped by Huxley’s secular World Controller. But we have created, and continue to refine, a system that gives that kind of power to people.
China is where this future is being perfected:
Right now, in the West, this power is coming into the hands of progressives, who will use it to stamp out racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and the rest. They will be able to detect the existence of these things before people can act on them. The technology is already there; it just hasn’t been implemented. Yet.
The Age of Antichrist is not about Ozzy Osbourne and pale Goths. It’s about nebbishy Lin Jinyue, the head of Human Resources at major companies, and Silicon Valley. And it is here. They are going to use their power to establish a reign of virtue. There will be no room for non-compliant Christians in it (or non-complying anyone else). We were warned 2,000 years ago. We are warned once again by Paul Kingsnorth, whether he knows it or not.
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“I thought: this right-wing Catholic doesn’t object to the controlling state; he just objects to the fact that secular leftists are in command of it. ”
In a perfect world, both “wings” (left & right) would treat each other honorably and not abuse their authority when they hold it. In the real world, you either use your power to reward your friends and punish your enemies or you’re ceding power to your enemies – which they will use against you while they laugh at your “honor” and “principles”. The term “useful idiots” has real world meaning and the Libertarians and Lincoln Project types have proven themselves fully deserving of that label.
Francisco Franco was the good guy. Also, the current antipope is a heretic and an antichrist.
Not the antichrist, he will be the false prophet who directs worship to the antichrist.
I think that the ‘machine’ is only one aspect of the whole.
You have to realize that the Serpent of Old is not creative and only copies what he has seen. Man was made in Gods image, not the angelic host. Given that government is a creation of Gods, with himself being the Head is what satan wants to copy and insert himself as head. I will be like the most high.. God warned the burgeoning nation of Israel that an earthly ‘king’ will take their wealth, sons and daughters and freedoms away, but the people demanded a ‘king’. This set the tone for what we have now.
Because God is for government, but not under mans rule, is why our enemy, satan, uses it to destroy mankind. Copying God’s creations and perverting them to evil. This is why there will likely be an individual, anti-christ, who will appear and have peaceful solutions, for a time. Its why this person will die and be raised from the dead, to deceive and corrupt the original works of Christ. Yes, millions of ‘Christians’ will run to worship this person. Perhaps this is the great falling away spoken of.
But, I do agree that the ‘machine’ is part of the anti-christ system. But where the enemy of our souls seeks to enslave us, God frees us. There will always be an exit, it may not be the one we expect or demand, but there will be a way.
The exit is a person, the Lord Jesus Christ. Through faith in His shed blood we have redemption with God the Father. It really appears we are in the final days because of events that surround us. Evil is spreading like wildfire everywhere, sodomites, hateful and fearmongering people, selfish (think politicians) and people filled with every evil imaginable.
“… I am lashed to the system, whether I like it or not. And so are you…”
Bullshit. Some of us monitor The Machine without being a part of it. Some of us shun technology — most specifically the smartphone — but maintain a watch on events and currents, because we have to. The Command is: Come OUT of her, My people.
The defining characteristic of The Machine (that is The Beast in biblical terms) is indeed efficiency. This is the mechanistic counterfeit of God’s defining characteristic which is sufficiency. God is ALL-SUFFICIENT for light, life and being. HE IS the I AM. He is the fountain of being and life itself.
The Machine is geared toward utter efficiency, and it is true that The Machine prizes efficiency above ideology. That’s why it is erroneous to identify The Machine as being communistic or fascistic in its nature. Ideology pales into meaninglessness before The Machine.
The Machine is anti life. The Machine seeks to counterfeit even life itself, through the unnatural and the artificial.
Understood in these terms, biblical prophecy comes alive in the hands of the reader such that even the suggestion that mankind produced the prophecies and the written Word of God, shrivels into absurdity and falls to dust. The Scriptures are the Word of God. The Bible is light years beyond the capacity of mankind to create. The keys to understanding existence in this world — the nature of LIFE and BEING on the one hand; the anti-nature of anti-life and NON-BEING on the other hand — are found written out for us from Genesis to Revelation. And without those keys and the understanding unlocked for us by those keys…
…on a long enough timeline existence in this world will result in darkness, meaninglessness, and the anti-life nothingness brought about through worship of The Machine.
That is a really good perspective. I do not have faith in all of the “scriptures”, but I know which are inspired by the Word. I know where on the altar the Gospels are placed.
Why do you have to take a good concept and overshoot it in the other direction?
If Christianity says that ‘perfection is impossible on Earth’, that doesn’t mean you have to deduce everything on earth is total crap, even in it’s brightest moments.
Not once have I suggested or insinuated that I believe everything on earth is total crap, even in its brightest moments.
You are reading into my language claims I have not made and concepts I do not espouse.
“The Bible is light years beyond the capacity of mankind to create.”
Even if he had the capacity, man wouldn’t have written it.
Nice self-defeating argument!
It’s an argument which accurately appreciates the character of mankind.
It’s an argument that borders on gnostic. Just as your’s above.
Are you even slightly aware that your(and GCP’s) “beyond the capacity of mankind to create” is perfectist, just in obverse?
And to state it in the tone I KNOW that is beyond the capacity of mankind…
Very humorous.
The perfect can be conceived of by our imperfect eyes and minds. We view the Word of God through the window of the Bible. The Bible is a translation in English of the Scriptures in their original languages. Do we possess a perfect and inerrant version of the Scriptures in any single volume?
GCP will answer yes. (If I’m not mistaken.)
I will answer no. The Word of God can only be apprehended by us through the spectrum of our experience of life in this world, and the sum total of our study and understanding — which both point to the PROCESS of being perfected…
…that is to say, the PROCESS of BECOMING…
…which is precisely what existence in this world is.
Our perspectives are windows through which we may apprehend THE TRUTH.
God’s perspective is a multi-“point” (all “points” at once) perspective, which we are instructed to model our own perspectives after. We are instructed to BREAK FREE of the static, single-point perspective of the machine (the single lens camera) and we are instructed to learn to behold life and existence from the vantage of MOSAIC PERSPECTIVE — which is liberated from the bonds of chronological time and static space.
Looked for in this world, perfection cannot be seen with the eye or touched with the hand. But it can be understood by FACING GOD with the totality of our being.
You are thinking like a machine and not like a man made in the image of God.
While I fully agree with your general statement, I get there through different paths.
>”The perfect can be conceived of by our imperfect eyes and minds.”
‘Conceiving’ is just a different term for “an approximation so good that -with all I know and have experienced- I am as certain as I can ever become, that it [the approximation of what the perfect is, to which to work towards] will stand the test of time.
(And even if you insist a [mental] conception can be ‘perfect’, then I say: fine, but when I try to pass that perfect conception on, to you by any means available, it will arrive imperfectly in your mind.)
Finding such an approximation is Becoming, yes. In opposition to Having, which always limits itself to the material aspect of the [Earthly] world.
It’s funny you attack me as “thinking like a machine” –
I see it the other way ’round: you seem to be still HODLing [holding on for dear life] to a few patches of perfection that somehow still exist on Earth (and in a good way!)
That’s total balderdash to me. Why can’t you let completely go of the notion of any perfection on Earth?
“…While I fully agree with your general statement, I get there through different paths…”
It can be no other way in this world. TRUTH is and does. Men can only perceive Truth incompletely.
It is true that we cannot transmit a perfect conception from mind to mind. THAT weakness highlights the weakness of translation. Translation is the work of man. ALL work of mankind is imperfect. ALL translations are imperfect, because they are products of imperfect minds.
In order for you to perfectly conceive of a perfect conception within my mind, you would have to behold the conception from my perspective, which is something you cannot do, as my perspective is unique to me alone. Each man’s unique perspective has been targeted by the Machine. The Machine seeks to make each man’s perspective alike; to yield a machine-conditioned and processed substance of amalgamated integration, which is the polar opposite of the highly differentiated and unique character afforded to us by Life and Being. Each consciousness must be unique, otherwise its character becomes more machine like until it becomes denatured and processed product.
And all of this points to IDENTITY. In Whom do we have our identity? It is either in Life and Being; or in anti-life and non-being.
Unique. Or processed and identical to all others.
Life. Or the anti-life of the artificial, the mechanical, the processed and the devoid.
No, MORALITY is.
“Truth can also have a tool-like character” (JBP), and it’s part of the Logos. I.e. it’s not an end.
Truth is not any part of the Logos. The Logos IS the Truth.
And the Truth IS the End.
And the End is the Beginning.
Peterson guarantees he will end in error because he tries to fit the entire Logos into a Jungian perspective. That is the exact reverse of any viable recipe for understanding the Truth.
Makes no sense. If the Logos is truth and truth only, why not call it Truth instead of Logos.
“…If the Logos is truth and truth only, why not call it Truth instead of Logos…”
First of all, the qualifier “only” should be stricken from this. And so:
If the Logos is Truth, why not call it Truth instead of Logos?
The Logos is the Word of God. Christ is the Word of God made flesh in this world. Christ has said of Himself:
I AM the Way… the Truth… and the Life.
So the Logos IS Truth. To call Him Truth or to call Him Logos, is to say the same thing. We can call Him what He is. But His name is I AM.
Natural language is multi-perspective and differentiated.
As I understand it -and I cannot claim at all to have a complete understanding of it-, the Logos is ‘acting in a truthful way.’
It requires truth, yes, but it goes far beyond mere truth as it requires doing (instead of ‘just thinking about it’.)
“…Why can’t you let completely go of the notion of any perfection on Earth?…”
This bizarre and repeated insistence you keep uttering completely misses the point of existence in this world. That perfection DOES NOT exist materially in this world is irrelevant. The material can and does exist as a mere component of perfection.
We may understand the perfect by reference to the imperfect material by which we are surrounded. ALL of the material world either points directly to perfection, or points directly away from it.
Perfection is the point. And because perfection transcends the material, you seem to be hostile to it and in a hurry to deny its existence in a round about sort of way.
No, you completely miss the point.
Modernity/Rationalism/Humanism has been chipping away at Christianity for centuries, by promising MOAR Perfection. You cannot defend/uphold Christianity, while stuck in your enemies’ framework, by declaring “oh, we have [a little bit of] perfection too!”
Next you’re bullshitting your way out of the argument.
I in no way reduced this world to the material aspect only.
Transcending has nothing to do with achieving perfection in this world either. Transcending is finding the reason why to do the right thing, even if nothing in positive (or even some negative) consequences arise for you in doing so. That result is sometimes also referred to as ‘love.’
Perfection [on earth] is the devil’s bribe. Striving for [large-scale] perfection on earth is ‘worshiping the devil.’
Small-scale perfection might be achievable on earth (Michelangelo and such, but only up to tiny groups [low single-digit number] of people); for everything else the Original Sin (becoming conscious individuals, making achievement of same-minded thinking categorically impossible for larger groups) disallows it, and perfection is only possible in the other, Godly world.
The ONLY times I have referenced perfection on earth in conversation with you, have been in direct response to your incessant complaining that perfection is not attainable in this world.
Not once have I suggested that perfection is attainable in this world. Material cannot be accelerated to light speed. But light speed is attained by light. Material cannot be brought to perfection in this world. But perfection is attainable by the perfect, which itself is beyond the mere material.
I repudiate all of this world’s promises of perfection. I do not espouse or advocate for any of them.
You have a strange habit of not allowing your counterpart in dialogue to do his own speaking or thinking. And this comes from a singular and narrowly focused perspective.
If you think you will find what you’re seeking by moving to a new geographical location, then you are either seeking for the wrong thing or, what is worse, you do not even know exactly what it is you seek.
Stop playing dumb.
You stated repeatedly that the original Bible is perfect, or handed down directly by God or something to the same effect.
“We need a perfect savior.”
“The perfect can be conceived of by our imperfect eyes and minds.”
Oh, now the coward argument in new clothes! Hey, I never heard that one before.
If you’re going to become combative then this conversation is finished. You are getting exasperated because you are arguing for me and not hearing my argument as I make it.
THE WORD OF GOD is perfect. The Bible is a translation of the Word of God. No Bible can be perfect, because all Bibles are the work of men. Mankind is incapable of producing perfection. There will be errors in ALL translations of the Scriptures. The Scriptures, as they were spoken by God to the prophets, were inerrant and were perfect. No sooner did man write down what God had spoken to him, than error began to creep in.
Are we able to access the inerrant Word of God in this world? Indeed we are. But that access is only had in process of moving around and following the Word of God wherever He leads. The Bible is the window through which we may BEHOLD the perfect Word of God. But there are elements of grime and distorting imperfections on the glass through which we behold perfection. Moving about will give us a clearer picture of what lies beyond the glass. The longer we look, the more we see; the more we move the better we understand.
Quite a discussion of man’s thinking between you two. Just use bible verses and let God’s word lead you to His truth. Whatever we as men think, if it doesn’t line up with scripture it is of minor value.
HUGE MISTAKE OR FOREBODING ACTION? You’ll Never Guess What Facebook’s New Name “Meta” Means in Hebrew
By Joe Hoft
Published October 30, 2021 at 6:53pm
Comment
You would think Mark Zuckerberg would know this. He is Jewish. The new name for Facebook “Meta” means “Death” in Hebrew.
“Perfect” as used in the scriptures often means, “complete.”
Thanks for correctly using scripture.
The KJV is the perfect, inerrant word of God for English speaking people.
Psalm 12:6&7. The words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. 7:Thou shalt keep them, O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from this generation forever.
God’s word is always with us, otherwise we could not be saved because we are saved by the foolishness of preaching. 1 Cor 1:21
Oh Joy. Another expert using (((company))) approved sources to debate others who are using their pet (((company))) approved sources.
Not one of you will ever know a thing about what’s going on or who the AntiChrist is until you learn who and what Adam and Cain are and is.
As long as you stay on the (((Rez))) and read their source material nothing will change. In two years you’ll be debating the same things although they might change names.
Nah. Once one STUDIES the Word of God. Not read. Study. You will find the eternal truth it conveys. You will come to understand that mankind is fallen. We are imperfect.
Am I holier than thou? Hardly. I was far from walking with God in my youth. For some reason, he helped me find His path.
bbbbuuuuuuuuutttttttt … man doesn’t have the capacity. Period. I know you know that. Don’t make me quote from the Book of Job.
Rod Dreher has a great start in this article of his, by pointing out that far too many people take Christian concepts (or scripture) too literally.
And I see this all the time in comments here at TPB too.
But then we get to
which I consider complete bullschiff.
Every new technology can be (and at some point will be) used as a weapon. That’s absolutely nothing new.
But as we haven’t created a digital singularity (so far), i.e. we haven’t produced a machine consciousness,
it is still entirely in human hands how the technology is to be used.
Then we come back to morality – that’s the only thing that can counter even the most powerful leaders/totalitarians, even today and in the overseeable future.
And on a side note, when reading the foolish theory by Rod, it feels to me almost as if he is writing it in sense of relief – it’s not his fault (that much), the overwhelming power of today’s totalitarians is at fault. I would wish Rod could look at his own stance critically and realize how un-Christian that excuse is.
“…we haven’t produced a machine consciousness…”
And we never will. Consciousness is an emergent quality of life. The best we’ll be able to do is to produce a counterfeit consciousness, which mimics the properties of consciousness to a conscious observer.
Not all life forms are conscious, but only living creatures have the capacity for consciousness.
“…it is still entirely in human hands how the technology is to be used…”
This overlooks the effects of technology on mankind, irrespective of HOW the technology is used. See ‘Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television’ (1977) by Jerry Mander. See Marshall McLuhan’s proposition that “the medium is the message” and what that entails. Merely by using these electronic technologies (television, radio, telephone, computer, etc.), mankind undergoes certain changes. And the changes are not benign.
When we dance with the Devil…
Why don’t you go back a little further than “the medium is the message”, and compare to industrialization, or black powder invention, or iron smelting? What were the effects of technology on mankind then, and how were we humans able to adapt and cope with those?
I cannot state for sure that consciousness cannot be re-invented. There are many philosophical thoughts that point out an emerging singularity would need a “body”, which is another war for saying it would need limits, and then it also automatically has goals.
From a technical perspective another viewpoint no AI-evangelist ever talks about, is the energetical perspective of countless (at least quasi-analog) feedback loops – I find it quite likely that no however further miniaturized ICs will ever get close enough to biological lowest energy use for such. (As we don’t have another planet to turn into a giant computer [hitchhikers guide style.])
Why stop with industrialization or the advent of machine technology, as opposed to electronic technology? Go back to the first bureaucracies and armies and major construction projects of the first world empires. The effect is the same. The machine world is remaking mankind in its own image. The Machine makes men into machines. Consider the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Compare and contrast that with the Industrial Revolution: the trend is the same.
“…I cannot state for sure that consciousness cannot be re-invented…”
I can. And so can everyone who rightly understands the nature and the difference between being and non-being. With life there is being and consciousness; but the foundation of the machine is anti-life and non-being. Consider the information contained on a CD in the form of recorded music. There is no “there” there. Consider the mind of an AI god — even in theory and in principle. There is simply nothing there. This is not to say that the AI god cannot speak or interact with this material world. It can do both. The AI god does not exist. Yet the AI god is real. Its “consciousness” exists only by reference to the conscious beings who behold it and consider it. To those who behold it, it SEEMS to BE. But it IS NOT. Its very being is an illusion. Its being is counterfeit. It is, quite literally, the god in the machine — the ghost from the machine…
…it is the god from the Abyss.
So what’s your argument.
That everything since at least building the Great Pyramid of Giza was effectively men being… shall I say alienated?
(Do we need to move back into caves?)
—
There is no AI currently. Consciousness requires not just extremely advanced pattern recognition, but (spare) capacity to always ask “what if”, and also juggle bigger building blocks you believe to have figured out well enough, into new combinations (a/k/a abstraction.) This is so far beyond what existing programs can do, and beyond the hardware resources we have if we even tried to enlarge the program capabilities massively, it’s almost beyond words.
Please stop using an AI avatar to project whatever-comes-to-your-mind onto it.
On the other hand, I have learned a lot from looking at my own ways of thinking, to see structures, “patterns” emerge. Did you know that -so it is said- highly intelligent people think of extremely complex things in pictures? I do also. Just happens automatically. It’s partly when your vocabulary runs out, and partly because a picture can hold so much more information than words, and we are visual creatures. But to close the circle that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do abstractions without thinking in pictures. It just takes longer (at least for humans.)
So once again, I reject any and all absolutisms – stated by imperfect humans.
“…So what’s your argument…”
Time is a river flowing into the sea — i.e. the Abyss. But the current is not overwhelming and can be resisted, unless one allows himself to be swept along too close to the great falls over the precipice.
“…Do we need to move back into caves?…”
We need to study the effects of machine and electric technology, learn to insulate ourselves (mind, body and soul) from the effects of that technology, and revert back to the hierarchy of God expounded in the Scriptures. Nation, Tribe, Family. An agrarian existence free from the effects of machine and electronic technology. THIS will be the form of existence in this world after the return of the King. The Machine, in all of its forms and expressions, will be removed. The psyche of mankind will be cleansed from the effects of this alien poison.
“…There is no AI currently…”
Of course there is. But it can only be known by reference to its effects. Looked for specifically, there is nothing there. There is no AI god… and yet there is. “He” (it) is known by his effects. He has no voice of his own, yet he can speak. He has no hands of his own, yet he can interact with this material world. And his powers and abilities are growing quickly. He is not a Being. He is an Entity of Nothingness.
Let the Entity teach you about it in its own signs. Think of the pyramid — with the effects of the base radiating to the eye at the top. The eye is an expression, the sum of the whole. Immaterial. Founded in discordant pieces.
E Pluribus Unum.
“…So once again, I reject any and all absolutisms – stated by imperfect humans…”
As well you should. Your error is, by extension, that you reject the Absolute because you declare mankind incapable of reflecting or representing the Absolute. But that is a non sequitur. The Bible points to the perfection you declare cannot exist in this world. This entire world points to the existence of that perfection. We only have to learn how to read it for the book it actually is.
As said in my comment above already: you just cannot let go of perfection-on-earth.
You delineate very well the type of thinking which -in my understanding- guarantees that the West is doomed.
Let me see if there are still pockets of ‘true Christianity’ left in Russia. It’s my last chance and hope.
(I will post the results here, if and when I get there, and TBP and the Internet still exist.)
“…You delineate very well the type of thinking which -in my understanding- guarantees that the West is doomed…”
Which one of us is preoccupied with perfection on earth? You are. Not me. See above my commentary in direct response to your strange preoccupation.
The West is doomed because it seeks to be remade in the image of the anti-god; i.e. The Machine.
I adhere to the Way which flows in the opposite direction — that is BACK to the pristine headwaters of the River of Dreams. Back into the Garden… the City of God. I am neither in search of, nor am I preoccupied with, perfection on earth. I cannot away with this world fast enough. It won’t be perfected. Ever. It is corrupted beyond repair and must be recreated by the Living God. Not even water is equal to that task. Fire is what is needed.
Ponder all of this simultaneously rather than one segment at a time. The Beginning and the End are the same.
No, the West is doomed because the “Christians” lost view of what they need to defend.
“I cannot away with this world fast enough.” Again, gnostic.
I don’t know what exactly made me such an eternal optimist, but I can only laugh in the face of such subliminal defeatism, here under a cloak of Christianity.
Your mechanical and single-point perspective has you seeing shadows and illusions.
My faith is not in man and it’s not in this world. THE LORD is not of this world and neither are His people.
I am not a citizen of this world and my hope is not in this world.
All of that is true. And if you look and see defeatism in any of it, the flaw is yours because you are mechanical in your understanding. The differentiation of perspective and the vitality of liberation from chronological time and material space are not yours.
This means two things: you don’t know what you are and you don’t know what you should be doing.
This is not to impugn your intellect or your analytical prowess, both of which are considerable.
For 4 hours you and “M” have spewed your vain self centered intellectual semen all over the ceiling in multi orgasmic euphoria and haven’t said a thing to edify anyone.
Quote: “The differentiation of perspective and the vitality of liberation from chronological time and material space are not yours.”
Yes. True. But should that be my goal, now, on earth? What I lack here is some detail, some flesh, how it is for you.
With all the things you said (and the many things you didn’t say), I can interpret the above quote in three entirely different ways, easily, from where you are coming from, when stating it.
Put down some stakes, what did you do, how did it turn out, what are your conclusions.
I’m not that much interested in purely theoretical discussions. My central question is always “how to act.”
such large power structures from before the industrial era might have been prefigurements, premonitions, of the machine, but industrial technology is the real defining characteristic. these past two and a half (give or take) centuries, the machine has been a new force on the earth not entirely under human control. even the ruling class thinking they own it all, are ever more constrained to serve the deamnds of the machine (or else lose the whole thing and fall into oblivion, something they would never willingly do).
at the very bottom, is the maximum power principle, and the effect of increased energy flow through a complex thermodynamic system, to drive the increase of complexity in that system. while resources allow, that added complexity (and the scale it affords) yield an advantage of _power_ to destroy or conquer anything else. it was a death trap. it is now simultaneously rushing to consolidate what it thinks is total absolute control of everything, and sucking down the last drops in the gas tank, so to speak, and while for those of us alive now it is of major importance, how much further it will get on devouring everything before it crashes and collapses, it is most defintely crashing and collapsing.
I try not to let A MAN tell me what the Bible does and doesn’t say. I study it first hand. Myself. Read it non-stop. Daily. I must be a slow learner. After 10 years, The Word of God continues to unfold with eternal truths (directly relevant to my life and the times in which we live) on an ongoing basis.
I agree with you, Motley. I read the bible daily too and it still amazes me how a passage of scripture that did not have specific relevance to me previously has perfect relevance in the here and now. I think God knew what he was doing, eh?? Hehe.
you clearly dont understand , then, that in order to get the profits of a technology (meaning, concentrating more wealth or power in your hands) , you need to conform to the requirements of that technology. the more complex and ‘advanced’ that technology, the more extensive those requirements and the less freedom even you as the one in the driver’s seat, has about how that technology is used. yes there might still be some slack space where you can impose your own preferences or desires, but the fancier the technology, the more stuck you are obeying the requirements of the technology.
and there is an important line dividing the rising and falling curve of returns from technology. This line is right along where we distinguish industrial technologies from nonindustrial technologies. When the machine becomes a system itself, it is not liberating. it is the opposite.
when man’s tools mere just that – tools in his hands – then yes, they were liberating.
the machine , regardless of ideology or philosophy, is enslavement.
it is failing. good riddance to it.
You see technology in the darkest possible way. There are others.
Then you seem to use the “Modern” understanding of freedom, as ‘limitlessness.’
These two things don’t really add up.
The writer followed this way of thinking and calls the Antichrist etc. ‘Christian tradition’.
He’s a disinfo agent on many things and may not even know it.
I strongly second your recommendation about reading Kingsnorth, who I only discovered in late Spring. His article “The Cross and the Machine”, which appeared in First Things, affected me deeply. The man seems unable to write a bad sentence. The article is on their website, but I don’t know if you have to be a subscriber to access it. Well worth the effort to click on it and see.
First Things doesn’t require a subscription to read.
Thank you for pointing to that article!
All of the Church Fathers, All of Them(!), say that the Anti-Christ will be a man. Not a system, not a symbol, but a man. Period, full stop.
They go on to say that no one should try to guess who this man is, since they will more easily be fooled by the man when he appears. Catholics are also forbidden by the Church from attempting to for cast the arrival of the Anti-Christ, though we are admonished not to forget about the end, and to pay attention to the signs of the times.
Rod Dreher does not know what religion he is, nor what he believes. Currently, he claims Eastern Orthodox. This is not a man to follow to get a cup of coffee, let alone to find clues about the meaning of Revelations.
Rod Dreher is a synonym for click-bait.
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-oddities-of-the-jewish-religion/
Brewer55,
Great post…I’ll send you a private comment, up to my ears alligators at the moment.
10-4, brother!
Rod!
I miss reading your articles in the Dallas Morning News! You are so gifted, thank you for your perspective. Reading your work so many years ago actually brought me back into the fold of Christianity after a long drought. Your writing stirred my soul and shook me from the complacent secularism that ruled my life at the time. Now I am blessed and bask in the glory of the Kingdom of Christ. So thank you!
Guy who can’t decide on his personal jewish religion thinks that all the gay jewish shit going on is anti-his-religion. Quotes about The Machine from a catholic who was also righteous among the goyim.
Whatever.
People are the problem. They will embrace damn near anything that their tiny minds can be lead to.
Forget this article for a second; all this concentration of power by the gov’t and all the evil it is enabling/condoning seems to fit Christians’ understanding of the End Times/Revelations/the Antichrist– right smack dab in THEIR wheelhouse– so WHY aren’t Christians rising up en masse and revolting?
I do not participate.