Technology and the Bible

(Here is a bit from my sermon for this Sunday, April 23.)

Technology is using knowledge to impact our world in a consistent way. Today we have 2 stories of ancient technology – Exodus 7:14-24 and Acts 8:9-24.

The ancient world did not use the word technology, but notice that the staff that Moses and Aaron use a kind of technology. God gives them something to create a terrible wonder: the waters of the Nile will turn to blood. This is an impressive feat, but notice that it is not really a miracle. It is something that the Egyptian magicians can do as well. They are impacting their world in a way that can be reproduced.

But – Moses and Aaron use this technology of the staff for God’s purposes: God’s people must be free. In contrast, Pharaoh’s court magicians use their technology to keep people enslaved and resist God.

Here we can see that technology is not a new thing. We are surrounded by technology. Consider your shoes. Also your cell phone. God also gave us brains and the ability to create and innovate. We see this in the Bible: Cain built a city (Gen 4:17), God gives instructions on building the ark and the tent of meeting. The Jews will build Jerusalem and its temple. King Uzziah builds machines in Jerusalem to help defend the city (2 Chronicles 26:15).

The M1 MacBooks Make the iPad Obsolete, Unless You Really Love Apps

Why did I switch to the iPad Pro as my main computer device several years ago? Speed and battery, along with its natural portability. I was willing to accept its compromises for those reasons.

The MacBook Air is everything I love about the iPad on a true Mac. You get battery life that you forget about because it always has plenty of juice. You get instant wake and the actions are zippy. The screen is beautiful. But you also get a Mac: a file desktop, windows you can manage and work in simultaneously, the dock, and more control. I don't miss the weird compromises of iOS and iPad, such as trying to shift windows and things around, or trying to have something in SlideOver whatever.

I never really use the Apple Pencil, as cool as it is. It's really easy to pop the Pencil off the top when you carry the iPad under your arm. Because I keep my iPad docked in its Magic Keyboard case, it's not that much lighter and or smaller than the MacBook Air. The iPad is often smeared with fingerprints because it's a touchscreen.

If you love apps, or are a casual computer usual then the iPad is terrific. It's a great device for people less comfortable with computers, because iOS is so very intuitive.

So cheers to the M1 MacBook Air, which is as great today as the original MacBook Air was when it launched. It's revolutionary, and wonderful, and my iPad is now the mostly consumption device that it secretly always was.

There Isn’t Really a Religious Exemption for Vaccines

Is there a bona fide religious exemption for a mandated vaccine? Not really.

Here is a study paper of the topic from the National Institute for Health. The mainstream, dominant world’s religions are decidedly for health and the prospering of human life. “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full,” said Jesus (John 10:10), and Christianity has a long history of caring for the sick and founding hospitals. In premodern times, Buddhist monks often served as medical providers because Buddhism also seeks out health. The Qur’an states that Muslims have a duty to care for the sick, and Muslims were the first to scientifically investigate medicine and disease (after the Greeks). In Judaism, the Torah’s commandment to be fruitful and multiply implies health.

Some of the world’s religions object not to medicines and vaccines, but to their source material that they define as immoral. Muslims avoid vaccines that include gelatin from pigs or animals that were illicitly slaughtered (non-halal). Catholicism forbids vaccines rooted in cell lines derived from voluntary aborted fetuses. But these religions make allowances depending on the situation: there are no alternative solutions, to save the lives of children, for the greater good of the community and humanity.

The world’s dominant religious traditions are pro-health and pro-vaccine, with some notable exceptions. This is not surprising given the immense diversity of religions and religious experiences. Some Protestants have argued that vaccination interferes with God’s providential will, or that prayer and spiritual healing should be used instead of modern medicine; some non-Western religions have endorsed similar practices (for example, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, by Anne Fadiman). While there are always counter-examples, especially in the area of religious belief and practice, the point is that these sorts of anti-health religious practices are unusual. Religions have, for the most part, emphasized health and medicine.

Not discussed in the NIH paper is the complicated Christian apocalyptic fear of the mark of the beast (Revelation 13:17). This fear of an oppressive governmental control related to the end times dates from the 20th century, which imagined this mark of the beast to be a United Nations control system, the World Wide Web, Y2K, a tattoo, or an implanted biochip in the Left Behind series. This may be an overt or latent fear, but it is not uncommon in Christian cultures. The suspicion of evil coercive forces runs deep.

Some of the religiously identified anti-vaccination comes not from religion, but from culture. A 1988 Russian article led to massive vaccination hesitancy in Russia, despite the Russian Orthodox Church’s endorsement of vaccination. Vaccine hesitancy in Western cultures cites not religion but freedom of choice, autonomy over one’s body, and a fraudulent 1998 scientific paper. Yet religious groups can become infected with such beliefs, just as any group can. Ironically, it leads to a self-contradiction: religions that promote love of others, compassion, the good of the community, and self-sacrifice end up endorsing practices that harm the community when children and the immunocompromised get sick or die.

Ultimately, religions are complicated things. They instruct people what to eat and not eat, when to eat, what to wear, and how to live. They have led to violent crusades and to pacifism. It is not surprising that religions would interact with ideas about vaccination. What is surprising is during a worldwide catastrophe (4 million people dead, and more dying every day), and given the weight of the world’s religions being pro-vaccine during such a pandemic, we still imagine a religious objection to vaccines.

Lisey’s Story – A Review

Should I start this by saying that I love Stephen King? Because I do. He’s an old friend, going back to 1985 when my eighth grade teacher read us one of his short stories and I went and bought Night Shift (the one with the cover of the terrifying windup monkey with cymbals on it), and then I consumed King regularly. I read Pet Sematary and didn’t sleep for a week.

I stopped reading King somewhere in high school/college because I guess I was too grown up and cool. King was a popular writer, right? And so I drifted away. And then somehow I came back 20 years later. I forget why, exactly. In part I came to see the snobbishness of categories like “popular literature,” thanks to Terry Eagleton and C.S. Lewis (Lewis has some lingering snobbishness, but was a wide ranging reader and writer). I found out that many PhD students find inspiration in his nonfiction book On Writing, which is about the writing process. I read the The Green Mile and loved it even more than the movie (which is saying a lot, it’s a wonderful film), and then became enthralled with The Gunslinger series. King was a comfort for a GenX’er; he was someone I had grown up with, in a sense, and reading him always had a bit of nostalgia. During the nightmare of COVID I found myself drawn to horror stories and movies of all types. I guess compensating with deeper horrors is one way to deal with the drudgery of everyday fears like masks and correctly washing your hands.

King says that Lisey’s Story is his favorite of his own novels. Like many of King’s works, it is about writing itself – The Green Mile includes Edgecombe’s written account of his prior life as a guard on death row, The Gunslinger has many meta moments where King is the creator of that world who meets his own characters, “Rat” from If It Bleeds (one of my favorites of King’s works, it’s just excellent all around) is about a writer and a magic rat. It’s a story about mental illness, and damaged people, and mortality. There’s a bogeyman and a scavenger hunt to solve, and a fantasy reality. It’s also a love story.

I’m not a big fan of Lisey’s Story. Is it a story of empowerment, grief, childhood trauma, or the magic of writing? A book doesn’t need to have a single theme, but you do expect some sort of cohesion. Why does King connect imagination, escapism, writing, and cutting/self-harm? The book toys with the fantasy world being fictional, but then swerves into it clearly being real. The hellish childhood of Scott Landon is also real, even though you wonder if some of it is fictional since he is a writer. Scott is someone who took Flannery O’Connor’s idea – that anyone who survives childhood has something to write about – literally. The book has monsters, infection, sister-bonding, and a shovel. Scott can see the future somehow, and leaves Lisey a scavenger hunt to find after his death to help her. But why not just tell her? It doesn’t hang together in a satisfying way.

At times I anticipated something more interesting happening. I thought maybe Scott was Paul, or there was no Paul, or the fantasy world of Boo’ya Moon was not literally real. I thought maybe the father would explain more about the fantasy world, or would become the monster of Boo’ya Moon. Anticipation while reading is part of the fun. But not when the anticipation is better than the work itself.

Is it just me? Maybe. King likes it, as did the Bram Stoker Award and World Fantasy Award. HBO likes it. I did listen to the audiobook, which is always a different experience than words on a page. Different strokes for different folks, and all. The HBO series is an alternate version written by King with various changes he has made to the story. I like that King likes the story so much and wrote the teleplay. I like King. I just didn’t like this as much as I thought I would.

This is nihilism

Nihilism is the belief that nothing matters.

A result of nihilism is pure power plays. If you need examples:

  1. Criticizing your predecessor of playing too much golf, and then going on to play golf all the time.

  2. Lying repeatedly and not caring.

  3. Getting your followers to also not care about your lying.

  4. Having your inner circle convicted of numerous crimes, and then pardoning many of them.

  5. Creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in your own political party, and using that atmosphere to control legislators.

  6. Doing the above while claiming the opposition should be locked up.

  7. Venerating law and order while committing many crimes and breaking laws yourself.

  8. Having sworn to uphold the Constitution while profiting from it.

  9. Having been impeached but convincing your followers that it doesn’t matter.

  10. Not taking steps to control a pandemic because it will make you look bad, or weak, or wrong, and hundreds of thousands of Americans died and you don’t really care, and hospitals are now failing because of the overflow of COVID patients that many of your followers don’t believe in because you have constantly downplayed it.

  11. Inciting a mob takeover of a nation’s Capitol building that puts lives at risk and delegitimizes legislators and government, when your primary job is to protect the nation and people, and to uphold the Constitution.

  12. Failing to address the nation or the situation after the insurrection that controlled the hallowed halls of Congress.

  13. On the day following a ransacking and control of the Capitol building, when legislators and staff feared for their lives and hid under their desks with gas masks on, you give out the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 2 golfers that you like, because golf is great, and golf is just as important as anything else. Unless your predecessor does it, then it’s terrible.

This is nihilism.