Itinerant Church

Encouraging the church to move out, move on, and move over

Resistance Is Futile?

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The following is the text I prepared for my sermon Sunday, October 21, 2012, at Plainfield UMC. This sermon focused on the second part of our mission statement: “Equipping people for a growing relationship with Jesus Christ to serve all.” The thesis is that we can be extremely well equipped, but if we’re not standing for Jesus and resisting the “ways of the world,” i.e. “sin,” then we’re not building strong “faith muscles.” A “growing relationship” with Jesus / faith in Jesus grows and strengthens from “resistance training.”

“Resistance is futile?” Can anyone identify how this catch phrase was popularized in culture?

Wikipedia: “The Borg are a collection of species that have turned into cybernetic organisms functioning as drones of the collective or the hive. A pseudo-race, dwelling in the Star Trek universe, the Borg take other species by force into the collective and connect them to ‘the hive mind’; the act is called assimilation. The Borg’s ultimate goal is ‘achieving perfection’. The origin of the Borg is never made clear, though they are portrayed as having existed for hundreds or thousands of years. In the movie Star Trek: First Contact, the Borg Queen merely states that the Borg were once much like humanity, ‘flawed and weak’, but gradually developed into a partially synthetic species in an ongoing attempt to evolve and perfect themselves.”

Borg Queen: “Assimilation turns us all into friends. In fact, it brings us so close together we can hear each other’s thoughts.” Doesn’t that creep you out? Yet, we likely find the idea of “being friends” or at least “getting along” with everyone an appealing ideal. Remember Rodney King’s public appeal in the midst of the Los Angeles riots of 1992? “Can we all get along?” The Borg, however, want much more than just “getting along” with each other, and certainly much more than mere coexistence, they want “assimilation,” which has as its ultimate goal, “achieving perfection.” [Read more…]

Theology and Technology: Humanity in Process

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Like many people I am fascinated with Wordle. I thought it would be interesting to copy-and-paste my thesis into Wordle and play around with it to see how close I could get to a visual Wordle expression of the ideas in my thesis. The intriguing thing with Wordle is the dance between randomness and defined conditions and the resultant coincidences and correlations. After a few random selections and purposeful color selections I arrived at the following Wordle:

Wordle: Theology and Technology: Humanity in Process
Here we have a shape like an egg, an arrowhead, or a leaf, thus representing the interplay between creation, technology, and nature. On one end of the shape is the word “scientific,” and at the other end is the word “dualism.” These two words encapsulate the main themes of my thesis. I chose a simple two-color complementary color scheme to represent dualism but chose the “little variance” color option to reflect complexity.

If you have any interest in reading my thesis it is here. The following is a summary.

Using broad historical themes such as the Enlightenment’s focus on reason, individual autonomy, harmony, nature as mechanism, and the concept of historical progress I argue that anthropological dualism is responsible for both the West’s embrace of “human” progress, namely “technological” progress, and absolutist fears of such progress. I examine two broad theological camps who respond to the tensions in human technological and scientific progress and, specifically, evolutionary theory. I conclude Intelligent Design theorists perpetuate an un-reflective reliance on the dualistic tensions and the theistic naturalists (scholars related to Zygon Center in Chicago, Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in California, and European Society for the Study of Science And Theology) more diligently and fruitfully examine and promote the intersections between science and theology, often emphasizing a more monistic view of the human person. In the second to last chapter I examine two movies as cultural reflections on human nature and the delusion or promise, as the case may be, of technological advancement: The Matrix and A.I. Artificial Inteligence. In conclusion I suggest that the role of humans in the grand evolutionary epic of the universe is to “give birth” to or “replicate” the image of God within truly selfless / righteous / Christ-like beings–whether they are the continuation of humans fused with technology or “new” beings altogether.