The Neon God (paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-neon-god) - excerpts:
typefully.com/IbnMaghrebi/q3WhY4z
"What I learned from that experience is that my belief in the profanity of technology is not widely shared, and that even people who I imagined would have a serious critique of technology often simply donāt.
You might expect religious leaders to be clued up about the dark spiritual aspects of the technium, but while there have been astute religious critics of the Machine
Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul, Philip Sherrard and Marshall McLuhan have all made appearances in these essays - most religious leaders and thinkers seem as swept up in the Machineās propaganda system as anyone else.
They have bought into what we might call the Myth of Neutral Technology, a subset of the Myth of Progress. In my view, true religion should challenge both. But I think, as ever, that I am in the minority here."
"the gushing, uncritical embrace of the Machine, even in the heart of the temple. The blind worship of idols, and the failure to see what stands behind them. Someone once reminded us that a man cannot serve two masters - but then, what did he know?
Ilia Delio, a Franciscan nun who writes about the relationship between AI and God, has a better idea:
gender-neutral robot priests, which will challenge the patriarchy, prevent sexual abuse and tackle the fusty old notion that āthe priest is ontologically changed upon ordination.ā AI...Delio, āchallenges Catholicism to move toward a post-human priesthood.ā "