Author: Lawrence Terlizzese

I believe it was Saddam Hussein who said that the Palestinians were “popcorn” by which of course he meant they were pawns in Iraq’s goal of domination of the Middle East. They were an excuse to attack Israel. The same policy is being carried out by the Iranian regime. The Iranians do not want a peace settlement in Gaza or Lebanon, nor do they want to see the creation of an independent Palestinian state. They want to fan the flame of tension and hate between the Arabs and Israelis to provide an excuse for war, to keep the wounds open indefinitely until they have prevailed in ousting Israel from the holy land. A Palestinian state would of course mean an end to Iran’s moral justification of liberating the Palestinians. Their goal is not freedom for an oppressed people but a worldwide Jihad against Israel that will eradicate them entirely. Palestinian nationhood will never be accomplished so long as Iran remains a major player in the region, even if the Arabs and Israelis reached an agreement the Iranians would still interfere. In a tragic sense both the Israelis and the Palestinians are caught in the crossfire between the Modern Western world and the Ancient Islamic one that goes back to the rise of the Iranian Republic in 1979. They are the true culprits here. Until the radical Jihad ideology is abandoned by Iran and her proxies the war will continue for generations to come and may bring us to the brink of World War Three, perhaps even the use of nuclear weapons. You can’t run a tank over an ideology. The people of the Middle East especially Palestinians must be shown that Jihad or holy war will only create further chaos and that the best path to peace and independence is to purse a policy of reconciliation with their enemies, the Israelis must also be willing to make concession and establish peace. Israel already has made peace with Jordan and Egypt. They can do the same with the Palestinians. Those who convert their enemies into friends make themselves twice as strong while does who kill their enemies make themselves twice as weak. We should show both sides a future where close relatives live in peace and recognize each other’s right to co-exist. “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity” (Psalm 133:1).

The Western world is composed of those who derive their roots in Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian or Hellenistic and modern culture, which includes Christianity as the predominant religion, democracy and is technologically advanced. By now almost the whole world is westernized to some degree. The rest of the world accepts Western technological ideology and practice, uses the Gregorian calendar and wears blue jeans, once a symbol of rebellion and banded in the Soviet Union. Y2K panic in the late 1990’s was a good example of how dominate and integrated Western culture is with the rest of the world and how dangerous it could be. Another defining characteristic is that the Western world in many ways hosted and defended the Jews. The Italian word “ghetto” described the Jewish people living in isolated − tolerated by the powers that be − sections of the city apart from the Catholic Italians. However ambiguous the relationship, it was through this arrangement that Jewish culture was preserved for posterity. In return for this tolerant reception Jewish society produced great thinkers, scientists, philosophers and comedians: Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Teller, the Marx Brothers and Oppenheimer all came from Jewish backgrounds, albeit, secularized.

Today the Jews still thrive in Gentile cities in education, academics, the arts business, as well as medicine and the legal profession. We can think of the stereotypical Jewish rabbi, lawyer or professor. The Jews are good with money and have lent funds to kings, with interest, to pay for their wars. These are stereotypes, but they are images that have resonance with Gentiles and they are not all negative. The Jews have prospered in Western society. Contemporary historian Niall Ferguson notes the Jewish contribution to American society,

The Jewish role in Western intellectual life in the twentieth century − especially in the United States – was indeed disproportionate, suggesting a genetic as much as a cultural advantage. Accounting for around 0.2 per cent of the world’s population and 2 per cent of the American population, Jews won 22 per cent of all Nobel Prizes, 20 per cent of all Fields Medals for mathematics and 67 per cent of the John Clarke Bates Medals for economists under the age of forty. Jews also won 38 per cent of the Oscars for Best Director, 20 per cent of the Pulitzer Prizes for non-fiction and 13 per cent of Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards.

Jews have in fact outperformed Protestants in the United States over the past century, with significantly higher earnings and rates of self-employment. Of the chief executive officers of Fortune magazine’s 100 largest companies in 2003, at least 10 per cent were Jews as were no fewer than 23 per cent of CEO’s of the Forbes 400. Not only have Jews been disproportionately successful in starting financial firms; they were also founders or co-founders of some of the world’s biggest technology companies, for example Dell, Google, Intel and Oracle.[1]

The Western world was, at least in part, founded upon the idea of tolerance for minorities, namely, the Jews, who we may say represent all minorities. The Romans were by no means hostile to older traditions. The Jews were a protected people under Roman law, because of their predominate place in Roman society and ancient history. They were devout supporters of Rome, albeit, including slavery. They paid for foreign wars and were exempt from hailing Caesar−instead of praying to a false god−they prayed for the well-being of the emperor. This was how they circumvented saying, “Caesar Is Lord!” They affirmed their allegiance to Rome without hailing Caesar, nobody else was able to do that. We can add to this that these ancient people were also the progenitors of the Christian faith and have given us the founding document of our culture: the bible, which stresses the value and responsibility of each individual person.

I am well aware that Western culture has been guilty of empire, genocide and slavery around the world in the past 500 years, religious wars, Anti-Semitism and intolerance of primitive, less advanced, indigenous peoples, and people of color, but such a track record should not detract from the fact that today in most Western cities minorities of all faiths and races live side by side. However, uncomfortable at times this maybe. This would not be the case if the Axis Powers won the Second World War or if the Soviet Union won the Cold War. The West has also given us the novel concept of civil rights, equality, democracy, freedom of religion, free speech, the discovery of the individual and technological progress, ideas latent with the seeds of pluralism. What other civilization has allowed its young people to openly criticize the government, or allowed for free speech, certainly not China, Russia or Islam. We can compare the Tiananmen Square massacre (1989) to the anti-war protest movements in the 1960’s, most of which were peaceful. Kent State was an exception (1970). We should give credit where credit is due and blame to where blame is due. We can think of Iran’s brutal crackdown on student protest movements or the Chinese Communist Party’s repression of civil rights in Hong Kong, which is a Western stronghold in the heart of Asia. China, Russia and Islam are just as guilty of oppression and slavery in their long histories as anyone else. It is estimated that Genghis Kahn murdered up to 30 million people in his conquest across Asia. Today all three Eastern powers remain antagonistic to the West. Islamic countries do not allow freedom of conscience or recognize the equality of women, which is perhaps the linchpin of the entire system and makes it woefully inadequate as a world religion and alternative society. Democracy means majority rule but also minority rights. The triumph of one political faction over the other does not lead to the loser’s eradication; winners share power with losers. Martin Luther King, Jr. appealed to The Declaration of Independence (1776) as a defense for minority rights; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

When we speak of a bi-polar world between East and West, “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” as Rudyard Kipling has said we are not simply referring to geography, although it certainly began that way. In the ancient world the West was defined by Alexander the Great bringing Greek culture to the Eastern world namely by defeating Persia and making his way as far East as India. The Romans held back the Parthians who were limited by the Euphrates River, the traditional boundary line between East and West. The bible even mentions the Kings of the Rising Sun or the East pouring across the Euphrates River in great hoards to invade the Roman Empire (Revelation 9:13-19; 16:12). The Romans held a deep dread that the Parthians would attack from the East in the same way today we fear a Russian or Chinese invasion. The enemies of Israel, beyond the Euphrates, such as Assyria and Babylon always threatened to invade the holy land. Today East and West represents something more than geography, race or even religion, but is defined by ideas, namely democracy verses totalitarianism. The famous German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) defined Oriental Despotism as the knowledge that only one man is free: the Emperor, Tsar, Sultan, Kahn or Mogul. “Orientals do not yet know Spirit − Man as such − is free. And because they do not know it, they are not free. They only know that one is free; but for this reason, such freedom is mere caprice . . . This one is therefore only a despot [a ruler with absolute power], not a free man.”[2] The notion that the Emperor was divine best exemplified by Japanese Shintoism only entered the West when Alexander conquered the Persians and imitated their style until then the West was little inclined to the idea including the Roman and Greek Republics. Some emperors were embarrassed by it, even down played it, such as Tiberius. The kings of Israel were not considered absolute but limited by the prophets and the Word of God, such as when Samuel confronted King Saul for not annihilating Amalek and keeping the best of his flocks for himself (1 Samuel 15:10-23) and when Nathan rebuked King David for his sin of adultery and murder (2 Samuel 12:1-12). In the days of Samuel the prophet the Israelites rejected the rule of the Judges because it was akin to anarchy, where everyone did what was right in his own eyes and desired a king who would tell them what to do. The desire for an absolute monarch was an affront to God who said to Samuel that the people had rejected him as their king. Samuel warned the people that a king would reduce them to penury, slavery and war (1 Samuel 8:6-22; cf. Judges 17:6; 21:25). Jesus likewise rejected the temptation by Satan to kingship (Matthew 4:8, 9; Luke 4:5-7; John 6:15). The text makes it perfectly clear that the kingdoms of the world are ruled by the god of this age. This leads us to suspicion and mistrust of authority. This position allows us to put limits on the state’s power, such as with a Constitution and Bill of Rights. Jesus introduced the notion of the separation of church and state when he said “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and render to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:15; Mark 12:13-17; Luke 20:20-26). The government cannot tell us what to believe. This is diametrically opposed to Islam and dictatorship.

Jewish culture may well guide Western life, such as Moses, Maimonides, Mendelssohn, the bible, the 12 Apostles, Mary and Jesus Christ, were all Jewish. Zionism is therefore central to Western thinking. Ferguson makes an other pertinent comment, “For some reason, beginning in the late fifteenth century, the little states of Western Europe, with their bastardized linguistic borrowing from Latin (and a little Greek), their religion derived from the teaching of a Jew from Nazareth and their intellectual debts to Oriental mathematics, astronomy and technology, produced a civilization capable not only of conquering the great Oriental empires and subjugating Africa, the Americas and Australasia, but also of converting peoples all over the world to the Western way of life – a conversion achieved ultimately more by the word than by the sword.”[3] 

The West either protected the Jews or conversely tried to destroy them, agreed! History is ambiguous, it does not proceed in a straight line and is full of contradictions, we can all admit to that. Hegel called this process “the cunning of reason” where the opposite ends of intentions are established, such as instead of saving democracy by dictatorship it destroys it, the best examples being Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte. The holocaust gives us the State of Israel. Today the West continues its support for the Right of Israel to exist in the Promised Land or at least part of it.

Islam believes in the reverse principle, the total destruction of the Jews; not only dissolving the Israeli State, but the liquidation of all Jews as a race: genocide, even though they too were the forebears of the Islamic faith. Their Anti-Semitism should alarm us because it shows that Islam, at least as it appears today, is Anti-Semitic; this may be far from the Prophet’s original vision, and is only held by a minority, if this is not the case, his followers should prove otherwise. It expresses no neutrality or objectivity in the matter. The Modern Western world is opposed to the Ancient Eastern world. I appeal to Spengler’s ponderous tomes The Decline of West where he someplace says the non-Western countries wish to throw off the yoke of the West, as a prelude to its downfall. We see this dynamic being played out in the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

Technology offers another hallmark of the triumph of the West; technological innovation is Western in nature and will eventually destroy the East by undermining faith in its own values and traditions. The internet and mass media exposes closed societies to Western ideas. The East unlike the West hates the Jews and soon they will have an equal amount of technology and fire power to destroy them. Their worldview is founded on intolerance − the Jews must go − not only all the sons of Jacob occupying the land, but the Jews as a race should be exterminated and the rest of the world converted. The East sees itself as saving the world from Zionism, which wants to show the Jews in power or at least in control of the holy land. Ancient Islamic belief holds that the Jews are not entitled to the land, but Esau is, namely themselves, his descendants. The world spins around an ancient blood feud or vendetta between the sons of Abraham, struggling over a relatively small piece of real estate the size of New Jersey.

By Zionism, I mean the Western, Christian Democracies, Post-Christian is a misnomer, since it argues for the predominate place of Christianity in Western history. We cannot escape our heritage. How else are we to judge ourselves without the value of freedom and reason we learn from the past? The West is guilty of atrocity, all well and good we know this, but we can only recognize that injustice by the same sense of morality we inherited from the West from our upbringing in Judeo-Christian values. Marxism, Feminism and Critical Race Theory are all critical of Western power structures, perhaps as they should be, despite the fact that this outrage comes from a Western value of individual freedom and human dignity. Just as Postmodernism uses critical analysis begun in the modern world to liberate oppressed people – Critical Modernity may be a better epithet for this movement, in the same way secular criticism uses Christian categories of right and wrong to judge traditional religion. They may accuse Christians of hypocrisy that is not living up to its own belief system, but they are not presenting anything fundamentally new. In their judgments they reaffirm those ancient beliefs. Christianity is the conscience of the West providing the tension that moves history forward. French historian Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) gives us a reasonable balance; “the history of the West is not a history of unrelieved criminality, and that what the West has given to the world weighs infinitely more in the scales than what it has done to societies and individuals.”[4] The barbarism of the past has left the modern West with a bad conscience or “white guilt” which if not soon resolved will end in madness then suicide.

The modern world, at least from 1948, has in part protected the Jews from ancient prejudice. Other great powers, such as Cyrus the Great made Judea a protectorate of the Iranian Empire. The same people in modern world want to turn Israel into an ash heap, effectively destroying their own heritage. This is a Cold War principle in effect throughout the non-Western world. Any move against Israel means an attack on the modern Christian world. The secular West is another form of Christianity, albeit disfigured, as I already pointed out; it wants the same goal of Judeo-Christian values without its Jewish metaphysics and mysticism. Secularism represents a society that wants the ethics of religion but not God.

Zionism represents the triumph of the West in modern technological progress and the victory of Christ across the world. Ellul makes an interesting argument that the West was entrusted with the revelation of the gospel and is in danger of losing that privilege from subversive forces, for example those who use free speech to end free speech as we see with aspiring Fascist and Communist movements. By this he means that the Western world in its ancient form believed in Eros or the will to power and domination clearly demonstrated in the Roman Empire, especially with the persecution of Christians. This drive for world domination was countered by the introduction of the Christian gospel or Agape, a contradictory force that moves Western society forward to love and freedom. It is the absence of Agape in our times that leaves the West vulnerable, stranded in a spiritual no man’s land and liable to collapse or to morph into some sort of monolithic world government. The city on the hill will lose its light and this would be disastrous for the rest of the world. “The West represents values for which there is no substitute. The end of the West today would mean the end of any possible civilization.”[5] The greatest need of our times remains repentance, to reintroduce Agape in the contemporary world.

Islam wants to be the Caliphate, just as China wants to be the Hegemon with its control over the oil supply and bourgeoning population. Islam views the West as a form of Jewish oppression. The Jews control the West to do its bidding in the desecration of the holy land, especially, The Dome of the Rock one of Islam’s holiest sites. If the centuries old monument, mosque falls even in an earthquake, or by a stray missile, however ironic, it could mean World War III − despite favoritism shown to Israel − we should let the Arabs retain control of the temple mount where the mosque is located and create a Palestinian State for the sake of peace, which represents another Western value. 

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[1] Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 235, 262.

[2] Georg W. F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans., by  Robert S. Hartman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953 [1822]), 23.

[3] Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest, 5.

[4] Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal of the West trans., by Matthew J. O’ Connell (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978), 193.

[5] Ibid, vii.

Surveillance technology as we said before threatens human freedom and progress. Everything is watched and monitored. You are under control, “to watch is to control” resulting not in world peace but the Panopticon.  AC/DC sings, “I feel safe in a cage in New York City.” [1] We are all in a global prison system. The Chinese know this position very well. This represents the old paradigm of bad results, despite good intention, issuing from impartial means or assumedly “neutral technology”; instead of a more interconnected society of trust and value, from personal experience, speedy and efficient communications technology has produced an entire population under watch viewed from a central location. It is an anti-social environment. It cuts people off from their connection to their own individuality, each other and prevents bonding. Did we choose this arrangement or was it foisted upon us? More than likely we chose our own imprisonment. Freedom requires responsibility and self-control. This is the divine image. We can individually and collectively break free from our chains if we wanted to simply by hitting the off button. The West gives power and preference to the individual rather than the group. In the East it is the reverse. The dialectical struggle is being played out on the streets of Hong Kong where citizens press for the Sate to recognize civil rights and basic human dignity.

In addition, facial recognition technology wants to be able to predict the criminal archetype from composite photos and images. This technology is being used to predict character, reliability, habits, I.Q. as well as identify terrorists, gays, straights and pedophiles. Technological progress on this front is causing a regression in scientific knowledge. This technology is leading us back to the days of Phrenology, Physiognomy, and Eugenics, pseudosciences which were once used to support Race Theory in the 19^th and first half of the 20th century. The 21^st century appears to be going retro in an attempt to bolster the acceptance of surveillance technology and public safety. This technology cannot exist without support from Junk Science. This represents the idea that we can judge a person’s character, virtue or lack of it on stereotypes and criminal characteristics or facial profile according to anatomical features, such protruding jaw line, big nose, big lips, sloping forehead, color of the skin, size of the cranium and the like. Certainly, technology will attack what it perceives to be negative types with the same vigor that embolden the Nazi’s hatred for the Jews. It puts institutional racism on an empirical or scientific bases, making it legitimate in the popular mind and academic venues. Facial recognition will change the way people apply for jobs, become a church member, or join the college faculty; instead of a personal interview employers will study facial patterns that will judge an applicant’s honesty, thrift, to see if they are a good fit for the job. This should concern us deeply, as we move forward with these new technologies, let’s not resort to the mistakes of the past. How may they compromise civil rights, such as privacy and personal liberties? Everyone will be assigned a mug shot with physical measurements in the background, and of course, a profile this is already the case for those imprisoned. Physiognomy or the art of “face-reading” an occult science really, is making a comeback through facial recognition technology.

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[1] AC/DC “Safe in New York City” in Stiff Upper Lip (Australian Music Corp. Pty, LTD), 2000.

Technology creates more physical need, and government obstruction to prevent disaster; now we must come up with the money to pay for innovation that requires regulation and taxation for public safety. Before their invention there was no need for electricity, automobiles, smart-phones, fossil-fuel and computers. People have no need for technology that does not yet exist. The desire for it must be invented and money generated to satisfy it and social regulation to control it. Wants turn into need. The cotton-gin increased the demand for slaves because now there is more cotton to harvest. Technology propels us to higher standards of living raising the poverty level and demand for unnecessary things, for more widgets and gadgets that occupy our time and pocket-books. The faster we move the faster we want to go. In the car you can never go fast enough. We commonly call this “road-rage” heaven help us if someone gets in our way. There was never any need to join the car with the computer thereby increasing the cost of an automobile. Technology increases the need for police interference in our lives. Because we can travel twice as fast we need twice the protection. World government will be introduced to control nuclear-power, genetic-engineering and cloning. We already see this with international regulatory agencies. The automobile brought us the highway-patrol and speeding- tickets. Everyday commercials convince us to buy things we never wanted until we see them. Sight incites desire. We are always stretching to increase our social-status, to get the next thing and trying to catch up to ourselves. We satisfy yesterday’s need only to create more need in the present and the future like the greyhound chasing the rabbit. The computer increases our work-load, because we can go twice as fast, now we can work twice as much. What happened to the four-hour workday promised by the introduction of the computer?

All Anti-Semitism is Anti-Christian, yes Anti-Christ – to hate the Jews is to hate the perfect Jew, Jesus Christ, to hate the apostles, the Mother of Jesus and finally the church. The decline of Roman Catholicism in France and Italy means the rise of Anti-Semitism. The Aryan Reich was one of the most anti-Christian nations in history. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) says in Moses and Monotheism that the attack against Jews is also an attack against Christians; “The hatred for Judaism is at bottom a hatred for Christianity and it is not surprising that in the German National Socialist revolution this close connection of two monotheistic religions finds such clear expression in the hostile treatment of both.”[1] In the United States the stature of the Jews increase according to their power and acceptance of their service; they are professionals in everything they do; although there still remains a strong undercurrent of Anti-Semitism in America, people who believe Jesus was the only good Jew, the only good Jew is a dead Jew, Anti-Semitism despises Jesus Christ, only Christian Zionism and the Federal Government really protects Israel, without their influence, the whole world would turn against the Jews. Zionism believes the Jews have a divine right to the Land that Christians and Muslims must honor. No less formidable figure than Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948), a believer in the “Russian Idea” that Russia on the basis of its Eastern heritage will bring the world to Jesus, to the Russian Millennium or World Communism, says this very thing; “There can be no doubt that Christians are a heavy burden of sin in regard to the people of Israel, and it is upon Christians that the duty of protecting them now rests.”[2] Pope Francis was once asked a question of what he thought of the Jews to which he replied, “How can the branches comment on the trunk?” Semitism Berdyaev says, “has been grafted on to the Christian spirit and is indispensable to its destiny.”[3] All Christians and Muslims for that matter stem from Semitism. It is difficult to think of Islam without its Jewish origins. The family resemblance is uncanny; similar languages, radical monotheism, dietary laws, scholasticism and mysticism. We should recognize at this point that it took the Jews centuries to abolish idolatry. Muhammad did it in only one generation that is in the course of his lifetime; although the Jews rejected Jesus they were also the first to follow him. Saul’s fanatical Judaism was legendary (Philippians 3:4-6); “in keeping the law blameless.” He executed or imprisoned Christians on the spot and mercilessly persecuted his own people if they professed Jesus Christ (Acts 8:1-3). People including the Jews everywhere feared him that is how he was able to enter the synagogues first, his reputation preceded him, he was the high henchman, the Heinrich Himmler of the Sanhedrin, Jewish Highest Court. Judaism was developed in captivity in Tel Aviv on the banks of the Euphrates in Babylonian exile. It is a stranger in an alien world longing for home, just as the Christians found themselves on a pilgrimage alienated from the Synagogue and despised by the Romans.

Judaism is the seed of which the Church is planted and Western Civilization, the right to exist along with different traditions, for enemies to live peacefully with each other, to share power, a democracy, given their perpetual majority or minority struggle. Jesus gives us human dignity, the ideal of freedom, the value of every single person, regardless of race, language, nationality, class and position in society, even someone as high as a Roman Emperor, such as, Constantine the Great, or lowly as a slave, such as Onesimus who was “more than a slave, but a brother” (Philemon: 16 NABRE) can be saved. Christians were much more generous in granting salvation than the Gnostics and Mystery Cults of the time who only catered to initiates. “It is the Man, the human ideal, freedom of Spirit that the world is attacking from every side.”[4] The ancient root of Christian democracy draws from the religious tolerance of the Edict of Milano AD 312 and the legalization of Christianity or what Tertullian called “religious freedom.” Church Historian Elaine Pagels says, early Christianity was born of human rights,

Tertullian demands from Roman magistrates something unprecedented−something for which he might have been the first to conceive the idea that American revolutionaries, more than fifteen centuries later, would incorporate into their new social and political system: freedom of religion, which Tertullian, writing in Latin, calls liberate religionis. Those of us who usually think of human rights and natural rights as concepts born of the Enlightenment, wrung from the violence of the French and American revolutions, might be surprised to see this African Christian standing up to defy Scapula, the Roman magistrate in Africa, circa 205 c. e., with these words: “It is a fundamental human right, a power bestowed by nature, that each person should worship according to his own convictions, free from compulsions.” [5]

Anti-Semitism hates the line of Jacob and loves the line of Esau. Rebekah was told that two warring sons struggled within her; “And the LORD said to her, ‘Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger’” (Genesis 25:23 NRSV). The East is definitely founded on Anti-Semitism, the West shows tolerance for the Jews, at least, this is the current arrangement. To hate the Jews is to hate Jesus Christ. This is because he is from the line of Israel, the Son of David, they even have written over the mosque “cursed is anyone who says, ‘Jesus is the Son of God.’” Muhammad was from the line of Ishmael who became one of the Arabian sons of Abraham, a very proud race indeed, making them cousins and historical enemies with the Jews. They have no tolerance for the Jews. Pro-Israel is a defining characteristic of Modern Western Society. The Federal Republic of Germany is now a Western province or power in its new found support for the Jews even paying reparations. The United Nations created the modern Israeli State, shouldn’t that count for something? The Jewish and Western Democracies must work together if either one of them wishes to survive the coming onslaught of Sharia Law, Russian Messiahship already being demonstrated in Ukraine and Chinese expansionism including the annexation of Taiwan. NATO may well recruit a Japanese and South Korean Army for a proper defense. There has been talk of rearming the Japanese and Germans, even with nuclear weapons in order to defend themselves without foreign aid. The West is way out numbered by the East only nuclear weapons keep the hordes of the East from taking Rome. As I said elsewhere abolishment of the atom bomb will lead to World War Three and a conventional Eastern victory. Possession of the bomb will lead inevitably to its use and its users own annihilation, on both, sides. Everyone who possesses nuclear weapons have ICBM’s pointed at them. War will be the world’s self-immolation, apocalyptic in nature, and it may very well be humanity’s own fault not God’s, self-inflected guilt. We bring into existence or at least create the conditions for the end of the world. It is only by divine providence we have so far survived and it is that providence that will bring us to ever lasting peace or nirvana, even the unthinkable. This is why we say “Godspeed” to those who are departing, “May they have a safe journey.”

To protect the Jews was the special province of Cyrus the Great – who felt himself called to restore the Jews and rebuild the temple. The Persian or in modern terms, Iranian Empire, flourished in its embrace of different traditions. Cyrus is remembered as one of the most benevolent emperors of ancient times. This makes Cyrus an archetype of a Western Emperor. Perhaps modern day descendants of Esau, Ishmael and Cyrus should follow their forbearers example and make overtures of peace with their brother Jacob. After all The Koran does call the Jews “the people of the book.” This would be the salvation of the world, Islam would become a truly leading world religion because everyone will see their kindness and generosity; Islam has everything to gain from forgiving the Jews for their treachery, of cheating Esau out of the birthright, which entitled them to the Land, just as Esau forgave Jacob (Genesis 27, 33); perhaps Israel should pay reparations or grant statehood to Palestine, for what they have created in Gaza, and be held accountable for its action and find a just solution, one that doesn’t include genocide; it is only Jesus who could bring them together. President Jimmy Carter was a Born Again Christian and found a way to, however, in part, through the Camp David Accords (1978) convert the two alienated brothers through Jesus Christ.

The text says God loves Jacob and hates Esau (Malachi 1:3; Romans 9:13), this was only an illustration of God’s sovereignty in providing salvation by grace. They should bless God that they were worthy to be part of this analogy. The godly are recognized according to all social lines in Jacob and Esau. God does not despise Esau, nor does he play favorite’s with any other nation. This represents the explicit teaching of the New Testament. Israel was only a vehicle used by God to bring all people to himself in Jesus Christ, but they are not cast off because they rejected their Messiah. God still has plans for them, as he does for every nation. Prosperity for Israel will mean a Cornucopia for the rest of the world. The Jews were told to pray for the peace of Babylon; for in their success they will find success (Jeremiah 29:7). The prophet Isaiah declared, “Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands and Israel my heritage” (Isaiah 19:25) God will make Jacob and Esau one in Jesus Christ; if this proves true, Christianity will regain its spiritual hold over world affairs as a moral majority or moral authority. We can think of the enormity of the impact if both the Jews and the Arabs converted to Christianity, to Christ himself not a creed, in order to resolve their differences?

Léon Bloy (1846-1917) a nineteenth century French Roman Catholic Apologist once wrote concerning the Jews,

Suppose that there were people round you continually speaking of your father and mother with utmost contempt, who had nothing to offer them but insults and offensive sarcasms, how would you feel? Well this is just what happens to our Lord Jesus Christ. We forget, or rather we do not wish to know, that our God man is a Jew, nature’s most perfect Jew, the lion of Judah, that his mother was a Jewess, the flour of the Jewish race; that the Apostles were Jews, as well as all the prophets, and finally that our whole sacred Liturgy is drawn from Jewish books. In consequence, how may one express the enormity of the outrage and blasphemy of vilifying the Jewish race?[6]

The salvation of the Jews and the Restoration to the Promised Land will be fulfilled in the Millennium. This will give historical precedent to the return of Christ. These two events will happen simultaneously. The Jews will believe and God will send his Messiah to rescue them. The world waits for the Jews to convert before coming to an end, but the Jews wait for the world to convert first. They will believe when the full number of the Gentiles is saved. The Great Commission must be fulfilled and the Jews brought to faith before Christ returns. Just as the native branches were broken off and the wild grafted back in, so the restoration of the native to its proper place will lead to abundant life; “For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead” (Romans 11:15 NRSV). Princeton theologian Charles Hodge lists “the conversion of the Jews” as the second condition for the return of Christ, preceded by universal evangelism following the rise of Antichrist.[7]

We believe in the restoration of the Jews to Zion and her witness to the nations. Zechariah predicts national conversion; “And I will pour out a spirit of compassion and supplication on the House of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so that, when they look on the one whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weeps bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn” (12:10 NRSV). Paul promises “all Israel shall be saved” (Romans 11:26 KJV). This speaks to the conversion and restoration of the Jews. Just as their falling away meant salvation for the Gentiles, so the Fullness of the Gentiles will precede the conversion of the Jews. Hodge puts it this way, “The rejection of the Jews was the occasion of the conversion of the Gentiles; and the conversion of the Gentiles is to be the occasion of the restoration of the Jews.”[8] Salvation comes first to the Jews then the Gentiles; Jesus himself said, “for salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22 NRSV). This sets the entire precedent of the New Testament as Jewish literature of the first century. Paul always spoke to the Jews first in the Synagogue before going to the Areopagus. At the Jewish rejection of the Messiah this fortune has been reversed. Now salvation comes first to the Gentiles and then to the Jews. Jesus told the Philadelphians that he will make the Jews come and worship before the feet of the Christians so that they will know that he loves them (Revelation 3:9). The Jews of the Book of Revelation are described as Satanic because of their opposition to Christians. Paul says they are enemies of the gospel, but blessed for the sake of the Patriarchs (Romans 11:28, 29). They are still sons of Abraham, however in disbelief. This was a common condition of the ancient Israelites who were always tempted by idolatry, no sooner did Moses ascend the Mount to receive the Ten Commandments than Aaron formed a golden calf and the people broke out into sexual orgies. The Kings of Israel and Judea constantly struggled with marrying foreign wives to form political alliances, Solomon had six hundred wives. The Israelites practiced Baal worship; ate pork, Ahab and Jezebel being the prime example. They even offered child sacrifices to Moloch a pagan deity that required the life of the first born. This would have wiped out the house of Judah, no more kings will be born from it, the first born always will be sacrificed. The Messiah could never be born; since he will be the first born. To save the world from this condition that is genocide or christocide, God exiled the remnant to Babylonia. The Babylonian Exile or sometimes called Captivity purges the Jews from eating pork and practicing idolatry and miscegenation. In Babylon they became once again the chosen people. Who were called out by God to be a witness. In the Book of Hosea the Jews were cast off because of their idolatry, but once again resorted to God after a period of trial; “the LORD loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods” (3:1 NRSV).

The Millennium will fulfill Israel’s destiny as a nation to testify to God’s love as well as his holiness. Simeon predicted that the baby Jesus will become, “A light to the Gentiles, and the glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:32 NRSV). The Abrahamic and Davidic Covenants will both reach their greatest heights when the Messiah rules from Jerusalem. In the Millennium God will honor his promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and give their descendant’s title to the Land from the Nile to the Euphrates, perhaps this shows a future geography of the Zion World Capital. This gives it real historical certainty. What was promised in time will be answered in time, not eternity; this is not a simple allegory. The entire Old Testament logic leads to a kingdom of God on earth. This makes a literal Millennium and a saved Israel a metaphysical necessity in the plan of God. Christ will then offer a redeemed planet to God as a holy sacrifice, so that God may be all in all.

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[1] Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (UK: The Hogarth Press, 1939), 145.

[2] Nicolas Berdyaev, Christianity and Anti-Semitism, trans., by A. Spears and Victor B. Kanter (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), 4.

[3]  Ibid., 48, 49.                                                                                          

[4] Ibid., 28.

[5] Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, & Politics in the Book of Revelation (New York: Viking, 2012), 131. Tertullian To Scapula, 2: Tamen humani iuris et naturalis potestatis est unicuique quod putaverit, colere nec alii obest aut prodest alterius religio.

[6] Léon Bloy quoted in Berdyaev, Christianity And Anti-Semitism, 1.

[7] Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986 [1873]), 792.

[8] Ibid., 807.

In an odd job here or there a young girl once asked me “What was the Cold-War?” I was astonished that here was this fine young savage who knew nothing of the 2Oth Century and hence must remain ignorant of contemporary times. The era I grew up in largely from the 1960’s-1990’s was largely forgotten, by the next generations of Millennials and Generation Z. They could not understand its impact on their world. We could take this dialectical principal all the why back to the Fall of Rome but that would be beyond the scope of this blog. Let’s just look at our times, the previous century and possibly the future because they are immediately relevant. Young people cannot recall the horrors of the Nuclear Arms Race or the joy of seeing the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Soviet Union. The presence of President Ronald Reagan showed strength to the Russians in rebuilding the armed forces, especially the introduction of the MX missile. A weapon that was capable of carrying up to 12 warheads, the explosive device inside a hydrogen bomb. 50 were deployed in roving bands around the countryside. They made a total of six hundred bombs in addition to the thousands of other nuclear devices in the army and the navy including nuclear submarines capable of destroying the world. We can combine this paranoia with the possibility of introducing the neutron bomb, but was never deployed. A weapon targeting infantry and tanks, but could just as easily be used against cities by destroying all the people but leaving the infrastructure intact. It was dubbed by the Communists or the Soviets as a “dirty bomb” because it would kill all the people but leave the real estate. This they thought reflected Capitalism’s or Imperialism’s ethic of survival of the fittest, kill or be killed. The fact is if the West created a neutron bomb so would the East. People today can make small neutron bombs that explode in a densely populated areas causing catastrophic damage. They can turn a nuclear power plant into a neutron bomb, even by accident they blew themselves up at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. This is a legacy of the Cold-War, nuclear power and the threat of international terrorism. Terrorists existed in the 20th Century, from Ireland to Islamabad including state sponsored terrorism as in the Republic of Iran, or Libya, but it was the big boys who held their figure on the button we worried about the most. Nuclear war was a constant threat since 1945 and reached its height under Reagon after that of course United States became the world’s Super-Power.

The Cold-War returns between lesser powers such as Pakistan and India, also a democracy verses an Islamic State, or Israel and Iran. Everyone armed with nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s) in an International Mexican Standoff. A proxy war with Russia has already begun in the Ukraine.[1] And will start with China when they capture Taiwan. We see a classic East verses West match off. NATO verses China and Russia, the odds are in favor of the East because they have equal the fire power and eight times the population. They have the human resources to win the next war. This would still entail mass genocide; even if they had half the population they have today they would still outnumber us two to one. Now it’s something like eight to one ratio. The numbers add up to a conventional victory over nuclear weapons. The West will simply lose its fighting capacities and capitulate.

We had a double hatred for the Russians and the Iranians, Marxists or Muslims something that persists to this day. The Iranian Hostage Crisis represents the perfect example of another legacy from the 20th Century, the ever widening of the gulf between East and West, especially with the current World War with Islam.

I believe there have been six great global conflagrations in modern times between East and West not including Greece verses Persia or Rome verses Parthia. We are only talking about contemporary times. The Napoleonic war was the first world war of Western aggression. This expresses the West’s ambitions to rule the world in the person of the French-Emperor who was exporting democracy to the less enlightened world, very much like Alexander brought Greek culture to the East. The so called “First World War” or the Great War became the second global conflagration. The East responded in kind to the French in the Franco-Prussian War and decades later in World War One. This was followed by World War Two, which in my opinion was actually World War Three. The Reich represented the East in Western clothing; one of Mussolini’s daughter’s once called Hitler “Attila the Hun in a raincoat.” The Axis-Powers were definitely Eastern in orientation, with their lean to absolute control verses democracy. There are still Westerners stranded in Hong Kong, an essentially Western City State under Chinese occupation, which began in 1997, just like they occupy Tibet. Hitler was equal to the Emperor of Japan the land of the Rising-Sun, the Kings of the East, both of whom who fought offensives wars and had aspirations to global domination.

Then the Communists came. A fourth world war between East and West erupted. This was the era of proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan. This was war between China, the Soviet-Union and the United-States and their allies also called the Cold-War where East and West throw libelous speech and epitaphs at each other; Nikta Khruschev slammed his shoe on the podium at the United-Nations, vowing “we will bury you!” The East called them names like “Capitalist Pigs” or the West called Communists “Reds.” The fifth war is currently being fought between Christian and Secular-Society and Islam or even Islam verses the modern world. It is difficult to tell who’s winning. Look at Afghanistan and the success of the Taliban or the advances of China who have expressly declared that they want to be the Hegemon; or a Super-Power that will replace the United-States on the world scene. The sixth war will be against China and possibly a Chinese-Russian-Iranian Axis, another Axis of Evil. Already there is a new Cold-War between the East and the West, the stakes are Ukraine, Taiwan and Jerusalem. Napoleon was the last offensive world war the West has undertaken. Colonialism which propelled the West to world dominance preceded this. War’s two through six were all lead by Eastern aggression. The West has been on the defense ever since. Three times within a century the Germans invaded France. The West has so far barely won its defensive wars against the onslaught of the Kaiser, Genghis Khan, the Ottomans and the Arab-Caliphate, I know I’m deviating from the present moment but they are a great examples of East verses West match off, but at great loss to population and land. The entire Middle-East and North-Africa and Asia-Minor were once Christian and were wiped out by Muslim Arabs and the Turks. The next Great-War can only result in disaster for both sides. It is difficult to tell who will win given the East’s overwhelming population and the West’s formidable defense. President Richard Nixon thought the East will win the showdown given the superiority of their population. They can afford massive casualties and still recover their population. Mao called the Atom-Bomb a “Paper Tiger.”

The Soviets had an equal amount of warheads but the Russians kept upping the ante, by building more and more. The world was afraid of Reagan. Here is the most powerful man in the world arming for disaster. Did he really believe a war between East and West was inevitable? This is the atmosphere Generation X grew up in including Heavy Metal music as a form of protest against the indecency of it all. Ozzy sings his most popular tune Crazy Train, “Heirs of a Cold War, that’s what we’ve become/Inheriting troubles, I’m mentally numb/Crazy, I just cannot bear/I’m living with something that just isn’t fair.”[2]

People felt secure knowing that Reagan was in office, one young man once remarked, “I sleep peacefully knowing that Reagan is President.” Reagan ruled the 1980’s, another said he had been given the “mantle of leadership” after bombing Libya and killing Gaddafi’s daughter. The West takes no prisoners. Many experts attribute his aggression for why we won the Cold-War. He was also inspiring, a Great Communicator, I remember him saying, “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall!” People also hated Reagan mostly those on the Left and called him a war monger. I had one Marxist professor, who ironically enough taught American Government, say he wished him dead, of course he was shot but not killed. The Pope was shot by a Muslim and survived, John Lennon was shot and killed along with Anwar Sadat, JFK, RFK and MLK. The 20th Century was a time of assassination of progressive leaders. Muslims still hate the Jews, any alliance with them was considered an offense to Allah.

The 20th Century brought Rock ‘N’ Roll, Hip-Hope, Rap music, Counter-Culture and Popular-Culture, such as Beat Nicks, the Beatles, Hippies, Woodstock, Punk Rock and Elvis Presley; it gave us the first Space-Race which covered for the Arms-Race something that now continues between the Americans, Russians and Chinese. Instead of Mars it was the Moon we aimed for.

Madonna was the essence of divine female sexuality. The prototype to today’s many Divas. She believed herself a master of sex or gender, a Matriarchy of Amazons above men. She believed in the Kabbalah because it expresses the divine feminine, a female avatar. And she lived the part, she was often depicted as a Catholic-School girl and acted like the Holy Mother giving birth miraculously without the intervention of sex. She had a daughter of course by means of artificial insemination. Madonna was also beyond sexual intercourse. She was the Holy-Mother during the Cold-War. In fact she replaced The Assumption of Mary (1950) and Marilyn Monroe in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

The war between Israel and Islam also had its origins in the 20th Century, such as the birth of the Israeli-State (1948). The 20th Century also brought with it computers, cell phones, the automobile and most of the world we know today, an energy crisis, cocaine addiction, Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” only underscored the problem, the destruction of the rain forest, war between East and West. The long-standing war in Iraq and the Middle-East happened right after the fall of the Soviet-Union in the 1990’s and persists to this day. President George Bush Senior said that by winning the Gulf-War America had kicked the Vietnam-Syndrome, fear of sending troops to fight in international conflicts. The shooting war between Islam and West may even go beyond that back to Lebanon and its war between Christians and Muslims and the death of hundreds of marines. Sexually transmitted disease, such as AIDs and Chlamydia followed the Sexual-Revolution and the Birth-Control Pill. The Spanish-Flu like the Covid plagues killed millions of people, “open the window and in flew Enza,” was a children’s song. This was the original worldwide pandemic, something we are causally aware of in the 21^st century. We can mention more things like Vatican II, a reassertion of Western values for the 20^th and 21^st centuries, peace movements like Anti-Vietnam protests or “No-Nukes” two world wars. The 21^st century will continue the war between East and West completing what was begun in the 20^th century, with Eastern offensive wars against Western defense. We can only speculate what this will mean for the 22^nd century, either war and revolution or a peaceful assent into technological bliss; maybe both at the same time. What happens to the world once the dialectic between East and West comes to an end? This will mean nirvana on Earth, a return to atoms.

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[1] Lawrence J. Terlizzese, War in Ukraine (2022); https://dr.terlizzese.com/?s=Ukrain

[2] Ozzy Osborn “Crazy Train” in Blizzard of Oz (JET 1980).

The 2024 presidential debate depicted the strong man verses the intelligent woman. The spilt in thinking is about leadership. Family life, education, and politics traditionally follow a masculine tendency. Most great figures of history were males with exceptions, such as Agrippina, Cleopatra, Saint Joan of Arch, Susan B. Anthony, Sacagawea or Golda Meir. Women offer an alternative to the status quo that is the accomplishment of Feminism or the appeal to the Son (the power source) via the Mother. Troubled people usually look to the father figure for guidance, but will turn to the Mother if left unanswered. This need not be a bad thing. Where the Father closes a door the Mother opens a window. The Father has the ability to resolve differences and assert authority and wield power, to get the job done and not simply to think or talk about it and pray, these of course are excellent values. Not to move in haste but to reflect has great advantages. This is the essence of wisdom. The goddess of wisdom is a female. Athena was the god of wisdom, war and technology. She sprung straight from Zeus’s head suggesting her divine power. The male female dichotomy will determine the election results. Do we want an Alpha Male or a Colorful Princess to rule over us? Do we want someone who acts immediately or someone who acts deliberately? Do people identify more with female or male characteristics? Is this still the Age of Pisces or do we look for the dawning of the Age of Aquarius where women are predominant? The vote is a vote of no-confidence in traditional society or a vote for the progressive side represented by Mother Earth or the Holy Mother, the Goddess figure, even the Cyborg? This shows a controversy between power struggles that go back between Zeus and Hera. I think Donald trump will win, granting there is no such thing as fraudulent returns. We are not ready yet for the new age or space age family. The vote is a referendum on the Holy Father figure or the father’s role or the Fatherhood of God. This does not mean something negative. There are plenty of good fathers out there to turn the tide. But we shall see. Paternity is under attack like never before. Nothing is really certain in an age where a woman will control the hydrogen bomb. This has never happened before. Will she lead us to peace and victory or to self-destruction? There are plenty of examples of successful women leaderships: Judith, Esther, the Holy Mother herself the Queen of Heaven, the White or Virgin Queen, Queen Victoria or Mother Teresa and Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton. The queen is actually the strongest piece on the chessboard who protects the king and leads offensive wars; so female leadership can be effective, even welcomed. Trump wants to save America and Harris wants to change it.

A machine is a slave, a thing that has no right to exist free from whatever alien purpose its user may wish. The classical world asserted a strong aversion to mechanization because it was believed to be centered in slavery. Mechanical tools belonged to craftsmen who were mostly slaves. Athenian humanism associated technology therefore, with slavery as demonstrated in the Periclean Age, which excelled in all manner of arts and science, except for technology, which remained slave work. “The slave was quite literally, man reduced to machine.”[1] For Plato mechanical learning required no creative thought since its operations are consistently automatic. Aristotle’s doctrine on causes remains relevant, he argued for four causes that brings ordinary things into existence, a chair, for example, has a material cause, which is the unfinished wood that serves as raw material. Second, the formal cause would be the idea of a chair; then there is the efficient cause, the tool used to construct the chair, a carpenter and his hammer are not as we might suspect essentially different. Lastly, the final cause is the actual chair. Despite the plethora of imagery used in literary analogy, the ancients considered technology to be imitation of nature existing on an inferior level to the ideal concept. The organic stood above the inorganic. The chair was not greater than the tree it was hewed from. The statue was below the human form it represented. Man is the measure of all things not the Machine. The modern world has stressed the efficient cause, the actual tool as above humanity itself. We are slaves to our tools. Transhumanism is based on a false premise that believes the creation is somehow greater than the creator. Technology will cause us to transcend our lowly condition with the arrival of the cyborg.

The machine order does not receive religious sanction until the middle ages, when it becomes the means for redemption. Historian David Noble pointed out that from the French Emperor Charlemagne to early modern times, technology was associated with salvation. It was believed Earth could be returned to Edenic paradise through technological progress and the lost image of God would be restored.[2] Theologian Ernst Benz, likewise taught that the Modern Project was founded on a theological notion in which humanity believed itself to be a fellow worker with God in establishing the kingdom of Heaven. Technology reverses Adam’s fall.[3] Millennial theology overemphasized the human role in creating the New Jerusalem turning into works based salvation, something like the Protestant Work Ethic or Prosperity Gospel that define themselves by material possessions.

In the Patristic Era, the so called, “mechanical arts” were never conceived as a means of Endenic restoration; rather theology shared the Platonic view that held technology to be intrinsically bound to the material world. They could have no redemptive qualities. Super science today belies its roots in Millennialism. Noble summarized, “For modern technology and modern faith are neither complements nor opposites, nor do they represent succeeding stages of human development. They are merged and always have been, the technological enterprise being at the same time, an essentially religious endeavor.”[4] Technological progress was expected to reverse the effects of the Fall and recreate original perfection. Transhumanism extends this vision into the twenty-first century. However, a thousand years into this millennial venture, so to speak, we do not find a regenerated planet ruled by the Son of David (Isaiah 11). Instead, we encounter a world controlled by Luciferian Powers assuming divinity. We find a society that grows at the expense of irreplaceable natural resources, like a huge war engine burning all it can as fast as possible (Nahum 3).

A slave is a machine, legally and effectively. The ancients would be scandalized at the cyborg condition. They might see it as something like the revenge of the slaves. The human-machine hybrid was not a viable concept until the eighteenth century, when it received considerable traction in connection to the Industrial Revolution. It serves as an intellectual framework for a mechanistic future. Tech goes from subhuman slavery to superhuman mastery and from less than nature to more than humanity. Technology, however, is neither animal nor God, but completely man-made, a contrivance, whatever we think human nature to be, it is that concept that gives rise to our machines. Technology is never any more or less than who we are. Mankind must remain in control of its own creation in order to retain its own humanity.

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[1] Aram Vartanian in “Man-Machine from the Greeks to the Computer” in Phillip P. Wiener, Ed., The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. III (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 134.

[2] David Noble, The Religion of Technology (New York: Knopf, 1997), 9.

[3] Ernst Benz, Evolution and Christian Hope: Man’s Concept of the Future  from Early Fathers to Teilhard de Chardin, trans., by Heinz G. Frank (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 124-125; Lawrence J. Terlizzese, Into the Void: The Coming Transhuman Transformation (Cambridge,  OH: Christian Publishing House, 2016), 20, 21; https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HFSQMDS?ref_=k4w_oembed_MgcdZmHaqmbCiq&tag=kpembed-20&linkCode=kpd

[4] Noble, The Religion of Technology, 4, 5.

[5] Pink Floyd, “Welcome to the Machine” Wish You Were Here (Harvest, 1975).

[6] John Herman Randell, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 25281.

[7] Floyd Matson, The Broken Image: Man, Science and Society (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1964), 11.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Nikolai Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom trans., by R. M. French (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 149.

[10] Karl Rahner, Dictionary of Theology New Revised Ed., (New York: Crossroads, 1981), 19.

Black Sabbath sings, “I’ve seen the future and I left it behind.”[1] Technology that pushes the frontiers at risk to humanity compels us to the forbidden future; a potential world where unwarranted curiosity with speed something we experience daily by riding cars, watching TV, using computers and cell phones to communicate, seduces us into an irretrievable chain of events that would have otherwise been avoided. Belief in “Speed Demons” is not uncalled for or fanatical. Extinction, in the words of Jonathan Schell, is “a human future that can never become a human present.”[2] Any endeavor that sacrifices survival for instant gratification is obviously absurd. Immediate gains that endanger posterity are self-defeating and therefore irrational. When there is more to lose than there is to gain wisdom counsels a different path. It was believed during the nineteenth century that technological advances would raise society’s spiritual condition automatically, so that there could never be any discrepancy between morality and progress. Science would solve ethical quandaries by improving the material world: feed the poor, cure the sick house the needy and abolish war by beating swords into plowshares. The fundamental contradiction in modernism is that technological progress will inevitably lead to war not peace. The Maxim Machine Gun and the British Dreadnought were super weapons believed to make an army or navy invincible, unassailable making challenge unthinkable−ending warfare. This logic is repeated today, we know however, that efficiency in killing does not make war less likely. We cannot end war by building greater and more horrible weapons. Proliferation only leads to genocide.

Technology is a means to an end, but when the end justifies the means, the agents of progress exceed their limits. This is the will-to-power, as Berdyaev declared, “The will to power is the will to murder . . . the will to power can only be realized through murder.”[3] Science is murder when grounded in power instead of truth and renounces reverence for life. It loses moral authority as humanism’s vanguard, turning into its radical opposite (another example of the reversal of values caused by excess and lack of restraint) posing the greatest threat to survival by treating people like gambling chips thrown down in pursuit of convenience. This was the case with the atom bomb. The Trinity test-explosion in 1945 was the early design towards genocidal technology. To terrorize life for the unknown, immediate benefits−the bomb brought a speedy end to World War Two which otherwise would have dragged on for month or years, nevertheless it also brought with it a nuclear arms race that threatens the world with destruction−to risk the world for knowledge, to chase forbidden fruit is to acquire dark-light under the guise of enlightenment contributing to our fall from grace. To prevent injustice instrument and purpose must cohere. Like bad company corrupting good morals, so unjust channels produce unholy results by giving rise to anarchy, which leads to tyranny, law’s end. Tyranny is anarchy come to power. And since the atom bomb the problem of power has eclipsed all others.

Knowledge is power encapsulates the technosecular belief system. The prevailing nihilism was not supposed to happen; although it was entirely predictable. The law of regression asserts that as power increases choice decreases. An irresistible global techno-order invariably destroys any independent spiritual existence. Absolute political systems produce alienation for the individual. People cannot survive long in a world without choice. Voter apathy prevalent today is a good example. The ballot appears useless in affecting change because volition is coerced by limiting the range of candidates and issues. “Free . . . and meaningful choices are eliminated. They simply cannot co-exist with the necessity of efficient planning [campaigns, TV ads].”[4] The Faust legend teaches that power and knowledge comes at the price of your soul. Jesus was emphatic about the obstacle materialism presented to salvation. “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul” (Mark 8:36 NIV). Likewise, the Buddha announced, “It is the law of humanity that though one accumulates hundreds of thousands worldly goods one still succumbs to the spell of death.”[5] Power’s depraved influence does not cease when it changes accent from politics and religion to science and technology corrupting its handlers after eradicating dissent, so technological over-extension turns users into victims. The conquest of nature leaves the eclipse of God and Mankind in its wake. Total Systems Control creates a void, the abeyance of negation or the lack of established values[6] Necessary boundaries that provide spiritual compass disappear making restraint impossible. Negation is the path to limits and revival. The “no” of faith will establish the “yes” for technology. But the “no” must come first otherwise we will simply lose control of our technology. A world that knows no fear proceeds with great know-how, but no wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Engineers rush in where poets fear to tread. Nietzsche understood the importance for limits. “Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge” he said and T. S. Eliot confirmed, “where is the knowledge lost in information? Where is the wisdom that is lost in knowledge?”[7]

The technological future is predictable because it races toward a predetermined end established by its own inner logic. Like Oedipus Rex we cannot change our destiny through cunning reason, which ensnares us further. In trying to avoid fate we seal it by giving it credence. Knowing future events insures their arrival. Like Ebenezer Scrooge we ask the Ghost of Christmas Future upon witnessing our own tragic demise are these visions of what, “Will be” or, “are they shadows of the things that May be only?”[8] The future is worse than useless; it appears to be dangerous, if we cannot envision more than one potential outcome.

If we disallow for an irrevocable course, we must allow for a conditional one, open to difference and subject to change. Inevitable returns exist when we decline to vary cause and effect. We stubbornly maintain the present trajectory regardless the cost. This has been called “technological determinism” by philosophers of technology, which believes technological progress toward an inevitable goal, such as the Singularity, human advancement to a higher level of existence or a universal civilization a one world system of government is inevitable by the nature of advancement. Technology has a built in purpose that will automatically lead to its end. Adversaries of this this view, such as French critics Jacques Ellul and Gabriel Marcel assert that the ultimate results of technological growth may just as easily end in disaster or what I have called “the forbidden future.” We change the future by changing ourselves. Scrooge remade himself in selflessness: to care for the needy, feed the poor, and to love the unlovable. Similarly, Captain Kirk refused to relent to the confines of the inevitable, when as a Space Cadet on the authority of faith he changed the Kobayshi Maru Simulator by reprograming  the computer not to permit a lose-lose scenario. “I don’t believe in a no-win situation,” was his only defense. Ambitious faith is needed to counter our hopeless belief in materialism and determinism. If logic dictates that certain outcomes are inescapable, a no-win dilemma, a lonely death or doomsday, then, these futures can be altered through causal reversal. This removes the causal agent in the cause and effect sequence. The absolute inevitable becomes the conditional. Things that were once must be change to may be. This is a simple but not an easy process. We must look at the direction technology is taking us and if we do not like the results we redirect it with better causes which brings different effects to avoid an unwelcomed end. Nothing is predetermined. We are responsible for self-control, all other power is illusory. We can spend ourselves on stupid fleshly pleasure with immediate gratification or commit to saving the future by reversing our direction today.

Technology was once liberator, freeing us from stifling tradition and unremitting nature, Old World Order; it is now characterized by the opposite. The doctrine on limited government that defines the modern Republic from absolutism cannot preclude a new ethic surrounding technological limits. Government over-reach and technological acceleration are co-extensive and interdependent. Unlimited returns will be the end to democracy as the recent death in privacy proves. In the nineteenth century technological nerve replaced liberation as core belief. The Industrial Revolution and Manifest Destiny overpowered Jefferson’s simple agrarian republic. So long as technology remains the bases for progress, “the rest will care for itself,” the automatic hand of techno-providence will direct our culture. Instrumental value remains the all controlling motif; freedom, equality, harmony, beauty and the pursuit of happiness revert to secondary status−nominal at best. Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood. “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge to the Ghost; “But if the course be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you have shown me!”[9]

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[1] Black Sabbath, “Supernaut” Black Sabbath Vol. 4 (Record Plant, 1972).

[2] Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Avon 1982), 138.

[3] Nicolas Berdyaev, Towards a New Epoch (London: Bles 1949), 9 (Second Thessalonians 2:1-12).

[4] Lawrence J. Terlizzese, Trajectory of the 21^st Century: Essays on Theology and Technology (Eugene, OR: Resource, 2009), 47;https://www.amazon.com/Trajectory-21st-Century-Theology-Technology/dp/1606081292/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

[5] Buddha quoted in Jesus and Buddha: The Parallels Sayings, Ed., Marcus Borg (Berkeley, CA: Ulysses, 1997), 71.

[6] Lawrence J. Terlizzese, Into the Void: The Coming Transhuman Transformation (Cambridge, OH: Christian Publishing House, 2016); https://www.amazon.com/INTO-VOID-Coming-Transhuman-Transformation/dp/0692744479/ref=sr_1_1

[7] Fredrick Nietzsche and T. S. Eliot quoted in Terlizzese, Trajectory of the 21^st Century, 131.

[8] A Christmas Carol: By Charles Dickens: Illustrated by Roberto Innocenti (Italy, 1990 [1843]), 135.

[9] Ibid., 135, 138.

William Shakespeare says in Hamlet, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy” after Horatio saw a ghost suggesting the limitation to our understanding of the universe and the existence of things beyond the range of the senses. Magic in one age is technology in another. Traditional magic was the precursor to modern technology both are ways to act on nature, to coerce it to do our will. Spells and enchantments were the arts and science of their day. The modern engineer plays a comparable role to the ancient magician. A robot in the bible should not surprise us bearing in mind that technology is mankind lying to itself in aspiration to godhood. Thus, Machinehead is the modern counterpart to the image of the beast, the artificial construct of mankind.[1] Technology, like magic, creates an illusion that fools us into thinking we’re someone we’re not, causing us to miss who we really are; it leads us down the path of the forbidden future; a potential world where we receive the full reward for our efforts at playing God. This technological paradise usurps traditional notions of God’s earthly kingdom by replacing it with a forgery.

It was commonplace for ancient Emperors to set up statues in their own likeness and demand worship upon penalty of death. The three Hebrew boys were forced to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s idol or face the fiery furnace (Daniel 3:1-24). Christians refused to acknowledge the divinity of the Emperor and were thrown to the lions. Nero brought out statues of Caesar and forced Christians to worship them. This was really a practice of honoring the Emperor in his absence. The idol took the place of the king ensuring universal worship. The Book of Wisdom related the ultimate in distant worship when it says, “Then, in time, the impious practice gained strength and was observed as law and graven things were worshiped by princely decrees. Men who lived so far away that they could not honor him in his presence copied the appearance of the distant king and made a public image of him they wished to honor, out of zeal to flatter him when absent, as though present” (14:16, 17 NABRE). No sooner was Julius Caesar assassinated then his heir apparent Marc Antony erected an image, a statue in his honor for the crowds to gawk at, and to their awe and wonder the image could speak and move, a sorcerer’s trick performed to amaze the people. Antony used an automaton to fool the masses into thinking Caesar had come back from the dead. However, primitive this technology was, a statue that could move and speak is upgraded to robot in the modern world. Emperors employed this clever illusion ever since to insure their control over the ignorant rabble. Scripture alludes to this hoax when it says that the false prophet an illusionist, “could animate the wild beast’s statue, so that the statue of the wild beast could speak and cause all those who would not prostrate before the statue of the wild beast to be killed” (Revelation 13:15, author’s translation).[2]

This represents the killer robot in the bible, the face of the unholy trinity in Revelation 13: the dragon, the first and second wild beast. The dragon is obviously the invisible power of the devil, which is the ability to craft the lie that mankind will live forever once he becomes a god. The first wild beast is a world ruler empowered by satanic energy, a Roman Emperor in the similitude of past emperors, such as Antiochus IV Epiphanies, “God Manifest,” the Greek Leopard or Cyrus the Great, “King of Kings and Lord of Lords” the Persian Bear and King Nebuchadnezzar, “I am Babylon” the Babylonian Lion. The Roman emperor fashioned himself as Apollo the sun-god. The despot appeared to recover from a fatal headshot, a blow from a dagger. This phenomenal revival would cause the world to worship him−his war machine could not be defeated. His power was unprecedented in all history. He became arrogant, boastful and blasphemous. He persecuted all who did not receive his branding on their right hand or forehead: 666. This was the mark of a man who proclaims himself God on Earth. 7-1=6, one short of perfection the number of mankind repeated three times in parody of the Holy Trinity. His persecutions included baptizing his opponents in pitch and setting them on fire to light his drunken orgies. Others were thrown to the lions for sport. Many were crucified as enemies of the state and those he liked were beheaded.

The second wild beast was advocate for the first; it was his job to make the first look good. We call him, “the false prophet” because he is something like a sinister John the Baptist announcing the arrival of the new man-god. As the magicians Jan’nes and Jam’bres stood against Moses by turning their staffs into serpents and water into blood for Pharaoh, so he will perform miracles and great signs and wonders on behalf of the first wild beast. (Exodus 7:11; Second Timothy 3:8). These may very well be super weapons in space. He could call down lightening to strike whoever the Emperor wished, for all to see. The second wild beast serves the first by convincing the world that he is a god. He represents the Propagandist for the Antichrist. He erects a monument to the first wild beast, an automaton, a statue that speaks and moves to frighten the people and cause all who do not honor it to be killed.

In the twenty-first century the image of world controller looks less like a talking statue residing in the public square and more like a talking head on live TV. It appears less like the historical pattern of flesh and blood as in Nero-the Mommy-Killer and more like flickering image or colorful pixels on a projected screen adored by all. Orwell’s Big Brother was a media composite incorporating the nation’s hopes and fears. People really loved him, torture, psycho and physical conditioning insured the worship was genuine. At the end of 1984 Winston Smith came to love him in all sincerity, tears and all, drinking his nasty tasting gin and smoking crumbling cigarettes. This image comes alive in our collective digital veneration and consciousness. We do not see one stock photo because Big Brother is a computer-generated collage. He is the projection of the grand sum of each of us constituting the global mind. No one sees it all at once because no one looks at the beast within. Self-reflection is out of the question. We refuse to take personal responsibility for our place in history. We will be more than happy to let things run their course. Machinehead, as I call it, the Man-God-Machine, then reflects the image of a world controller in the twenty-first century, programmed for universal control, a power we all acquiesce to. Just as no one ever saw Big Brother in person or even knew if he existed, so Machinehead will project the cult of personality beyond sensory perception.

Media over exposer is everywhere. We cannot escape the city by fleeing to the country without seeing a sky-writer, hearing an airplane or be haunted by billboards and cell-phones, TV and computer screens are everywhere including bathrooms, showers, the woods or the jungle. Media saturation produces morally ambiguous results. On one hand, advertisements provide information on how to meet basic needs, here are the groceries you must buy, on the other, they demoralize by normalizing obscenity; not a day goes by without witnessing a mass sacrilege, objectification of women, unconscionable exploitation of addiction, valorizing gambling, drug use and alcohol. Certainly, we are smart enough to feed, house and cloth the world without appealing to the lowest common absurdity.

The modern blueprint for slavery and totalitarianism is to meet all material needs, while simultaneously limiting intelligence among the proletariat and middleclass for that matter, making commoners just smart enough to take orders and get the job done. Education is granted according to station. The rich go to university while the poor barely graduate high school. The Machine creates social problems by its strict ethic of speed, disaffected people such as homeless, unemployed, dropouts, addicts, alcoholics, illiterate, criminals, stay at home moms, working moms, under educated, even over educated and mal-adapted minorities simply cannot keep tempo with the fast pace of our society; it’s education, technological and financial demands. Marxist Professor Herbert Marcuse argued that the proliferation of alienated groups such as hippies and rebellious students signals the disintegration of the system.[3] Slavery is a structure of consciousness and consciousness determines who we are. Media programing restricts mental acuity leaving users without the ability to think for themselves, to create our own consciousness. Mass media offers no possibility for dialogue and social media appears like a parody of democracy. They recreate history and reality to fit consumerist’s mentality. All this communication technology goes into amusement, literally, to cause one not to think; ignorance is bliss. According to commercials, nirvana is achieved by possessing one of every consumer object, all things, on the market, and the forbidden fruit was really a candy-bar, it’s fun to get drunk and lose control and cartoons, the children’s medium, pushes pharmaceuticals, convincing people they are sick when they are not in order to sell more drugs.

Mass media in Oceania consisted of little more than popular entertainment (to hold attention agreeably with amusement), its litany included: racy tabloids, dime novels, film, radio, and all pervasive TV screens, with cameras everywhere, whose content was strictly comprised of campy material covering a limited range of topics, not excluding a grotesque preoccupation with sex, crime, the lottery, violence and astrology, we might say “meteorology.” Sports of course, the ultimate distraction took center stage. Music was sentimentalism, electric swoon, produced by machines, not unlike the contemporary techno sound made without instruments, the imitation of music. Media, the computer and smartphone makes pornography and violent images more accessible to children. Parental guidance represents a false security. The kids know more about technology than the adults. The children become the teachers and the adults the students in a reversal of the natural order. In 1984 language was castrated by word reduction. Political control was reinforced through New Speak and the Thought Police by editing vocabulary and replacing traditional words with artificial ones in a sort of political correctness. Most of these alternatives eliminated complementary opposites in thinking; for example the dialectic between light and dark was recast by striking the word, “light” and substituting the inane “undark.” Fanatic ideology comes from hearing only one side of the story, the biased account. Extreme prejudice or propaganda leads to war.

Word reduction and the predominance in picture learning as in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) are two allies that have a stultifying impact on public perception making people scarcely aware they are being manipulated by a totalitarian regime. In the case of our technosecular environment subtle control proceeds not from tangible public representatives, rather we are seduced by our own desire for speed, order, ease and convenience. We have summoned the technocratic order. Complicated technology demands greater political control to prevent chaos; the proliferation of traffic lights and signs to facilitate automobile culture is a good example. Some say only with the creation of a world government can we control nuclear power. Big Technology means Big Government, the faster technology grows the more powerful it is. We are haplessly addicted to the premise that faster is easier, easier is better. We hardly realize that we have sold our souls for a better mousetrap and a richer cup of coffee. Like Esau trading the family birthright for a hot bowl of lentil soup, we barely notice what we have lost in exchange for instant gratification (Genesis 25:29-34), freedom itself!

Visual media ends free thought by telling us what to think. The image makes a final statement by whatever is pictured. Literary imagination never regains poise after watching a movie. When we see Star Trek or Star Wars, we cannot think of the future in any other light than fantastic speed and space travel. Mass media is the ultimate mind control machine. Reduce words. Abbreviate thought. Curb freedom. Show the people what to think. Program their reality according to pleasurable thought or vamp things up a bit when they become stagnate and in need of stimulation. German philosopher Karl Jaspers makes this frightening comment on the falsity of a visually framed reality. “Pictures deceive us by their visibility and vividness, and reality itself is changing fast: a comparison of travel accounts from the past century shows that what was once real yesterday is no longer real today.”[4] Images are a falsification of facts. They distort reality, then, claim to be depicting an accurate account of it. The TV projection is not real. Susan Sontag discusses in her famous essay On Photography (1977) that pictures create a voyeuristic society removed from reality.

Yet, the be-all and end-all in totalitarianism is the barbarization in public morality created by the death of privacy. We see something of this in our surveillance and Luciferian controlled society. Everything is visible and there is no longer any shame in bad behavior, everything is acceptable. Orwell was more accurate than we have the courage to take seriously,

With the development of television and technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit, simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen or at least every citizen worth watching could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the state, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.[5]

A world without privacy is a world without shame and a world without self-reflection. A world without guilt possesses no virtue. We can think of the transposition of Dionysus onto to Jesus Christ at the Paris Olympics. Society without virtue is democracy run amok. Such cultural chaos is the incubator for tyranny. A strong man will emerge to restore order.

The rock band Styx sings a poetically apropos song called the “Grand Illusion.” It brings indictment to the Luciferian Powers that hold us under a gentle tether; “Don’t be fooled by the radio, the TV or the magazines, they show you photographs of how your life should be, but they’re someone, else’s fantasy . . . America spells competition, join us in our blind ambition, get yourself a brand-new motor car, Someday soon we’ll stop and ponder what on earth’s this spell we’re under, We made the grade and still we wonder who the hell we are.”[6]

Sinful-Humanity will bring prophecy to climax by embodying rebellion. We play-God by assuming the powers of God; the Apostle declared concerning the World Controller that he will exalt himself, “proclaiming to be God” (Second Thessalonians 2:4 RSV). This supposes the perennial temptation to usurp God’s place and reveals the secret of lawlessness. Listen to Reformer John Calvin explain the deceitful origins to our temptation to Godhood. “[Mankind] cannot arrogate to himself one particle [gene, atom, molecule, etc.] beyond his due without losing himself . . . whenever our minds are seized with a longing to possess a somewhat of our own, which may reside in us rather than in God we may rest assured that the thought is suggested by no other counselor than he who enticed our first parents to aspire to be gods.”[7] This is the ultimate coup d’état; it prefigures the coming of “the tyrant whose presence is infused with Satanic energy working through the forsaken by powerful miracles, strange phenomena and much slander,” the Apostle warned us, “because they did not receive the truth in love to be saved,” he said, “so then God will turn them over to the grand illusion believing the lie, so that, they may all be judged who do not believe the truth but revel in wickedness” (Second Thessalonians 2:9-11 author’s translation).

The Grand Illusion is the lie that we can effectively play-God without losing ourselves. I simply advert playing-God is not worth the risk. We are delusional to believe technology frees us to be Masters of the Universe, closer to the truth we will destroy the earth in the liberation process. The cyborg condition will supersede the human one. We debase ourselves in deference to a superior race. Computer Science Professor Matthew Dickerson prophetically asked, what if the transhuman, “transformation is based on something that is not true?”[8] Into whose image are we transforming? It is an equally formidable task to decipher the image of mankind for mankind as it is to decode the meaning of the image of God in mankind. This problem is compounded when we try to discern that image in light of the atom bomb and AI. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9 KJV). Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said, “it is not unfair to affirm that modern culture, that is, our culture since the Renaissance, is to be credited with the greatest advances in the understanding of nature and with the greatest confusion in the understanding of man.”[9] The Will of Mankind is more arduous to understand than the Will of God. To the question of what end Expressionist Vincent van Gogh painted, he answered, “je ne sais quoi” (I know not what).[10] This is the mystery of faith transhumanism cannot fathom. Medievalist C. S Lewis instructed that when humanity prevails over nature’s fury we subject the entire race to the caprice of a handful of, “individual men” and “those individuals,” he said, will lose themselves to what, “is purely natural−to their irrational impulses.”[11] Science fiction writer Frank Herbert in his famous novel Dune (1965) echoed Lewis, “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”[12] Men with machines are not liberators, but slavers. The device, agent that frees from limits, is the vice that holds us in place. The computer screen mediates the world reframing reality making it smaller. The world has shrunken since the advent of the telegraph. So the Cyborg will diminish human life by making it obsolete and inferior to itself. A techno utopian world will be dominated by machines and loss of personal freedom, individuality and peculiarity. Everyone is basically the same, addicted to speed and endangered by obsolescence.

Freedom encompasses three forms: religion, reason and community. Humanity is religious by nature. As creatures we identify with a purpose greater than ourselves, as I said in a previous blog, with a divine imperative.[13] Faith is the distinguish mark of humanity. Intelligence affords us the ability to make rational choices according to a higher principle, which gives meaning and coherence. This is freedom grounded in Being. Aristotle said, “Man is a social animal.” People have an innate connection with a larger group that provides a sense of belonging, stability and direction. We are communal: husband, wife, child, friend, tribe, language and nation; just as God is a family of persons: Father, Son and Spirit. People remain in fellowship with others ordering life according to this higher power and care for each other and creation.

By establishing human existence, we prove the existence of God. Our own conscience testifies to the Creator. We reflect the divine image. We are a synthesis between infinite and finite. “Infinity in infinite form,” said Berdyaev.[14] Any attack on the human shape is a reproach to the character of God. The denial of humanity involves the denial of God. We are only fully human in God. God is relevant to the world only when we believe in his existence. “But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarded of them that diligently seek him” (Hebrews 11:6 KJV). A dead God is a mockery and means that the idea of God has no meaning in a world that is self-sufficient. God is dead to a world that no longer experiences his presence. The existence of God outside the divine-human encounter, regardless of its monotheism is idolatry. God lives in relationship with us, or he does not exist at all. Only in God do we transcend nothingness. Without God to give purpose to the world all values flatten because there no longer remains anything greater than ourselves. We are free to be ourselves only if God exists. Idolatry requires submission to an order lower than ourselves. Faith raises us to our true selves beyond the world, but located directly in it. Without the counterbalance in threefold division in human nature (God, Self, Others) we move freely in strength without wisdom and without metaphysical and ethical limits which is chaos.

Technology presupposes life. A higher purpose for which it was designed; however, it fosters perverse nihilism by usurping that sacred end with its own cause. Technology for its own sake is knowledge that kills the user. Research and development without reverence for life produces the hydrogen bomb; the final limit to all horizons. As a child growing up during the Cold War I identified with American Architect Richard Ross’ feeling concerning what life was like for youth living in the shadow of the nuclear arms race, “by the time I was old enough to start planning a future, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have one. I am still amazed I got to grow up. Amazed!”[15] Albert Einstein said, “The atomic bomb has changed everything except the nature of man.”[16] The invention of the atom bomb and the absolute necessity for its abolition is the defining element for all time. If we want a rallying point for a prosperous future, if we care about the lives of our children’s children, the earth and the world to come, we cannot entertain human extinction. Japers stressed the importance in finding a solution to the global problem raised by unleashing the nuclear genie. “Without world peace,” he said, “there is no preventing the extinction of mankind in an atomic holocaust.”[17] Why work toward of future devoid of people? How can we live comfortable today knowing we will execute our children tomorrow? Why fight the future when we can change it? Everything we do has significance and impacts those around us and future generations, no matter how small or great. With each joyful smile and good deed we inch away from the abyss. For better or for worse we hold the power of the future in every decision regardless of how private, trivial or grandiose. “Now, unless all of us live with and for one another, we all should be destroyed together” Jaspers remarked soberly; we do, “in miniature what on a larger scale makes mankind destroy itself.”[18] Whatever ethic causes people to rise to the occasion in times of crisis must be woven into our daily fabric to be effective. People face trials and tribulation the same way they do the normal conditions of life with courage and fortitude or in fear and ignorance, as in life so in death. The truth remains one and always the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Limitless behavior ends in self-destruction. Extinction looms over an indefinite technological horizon like the Sword of Damocles, threatening any attempt to refit ourselves for immortality with a grand explosion, painful, asphyxiation and subtle replacement. Albert Einstein said, “radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and hence annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of technical possibilities.”[19] Astrophysicist Stephan Hawking, once hailed as “the smartest man alive”, recently proclaimed AI and genetic engineering menaces to global survival over the next 100 years, “I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” he said frankly.[20] SpaceX founder Elon Musk exclaimed concerning AI, “We are summoning the demon.”[21]  And partner in DeepMind Shane Legg said bluntly, “I think human extinction will probably occur, and technology will likely play a part in this.”[22] A limitless future is never possible for a limited creature regardless of how advanced. There is always an endpoint. The biological needs to eat, sleep and procreate are guidelines placed on us to curb excess and produce a social order to accommodate their needs. With these needs guidelines gone we lose social order that goes with it. We will never experience romance, beauty and machismo in space. Their relationship is strictly technical. The gender or sexual baseline disappears in a new race of Astronauts. Space people are asexual and have no need for genitalia. They have risen above the procreation imperative. Soon they will be able to live without food and sleep. They will transcend the human condition or they will soon retire. The body itself will become irrelevant and ultimately discarded. They have reached humanity’s zenith “ye shall be gods!” Death is the final limit, without which new life and growth could not occur. A thousand-year Reich was possible if the regime’s fathers never died, effectively murdering all further progress. Tomorrow Land, Futurama, Epcot, NASA and the Atomic City, the City of the Future and the enthrallment with spaceflight as the new ascension is a lie for those who believe that death is the final obstacle to immortality resolved ultimately upon resurrection and ascension. To believe that death can be overcome with technological enhancement will create an abomination.

Technology that destroys life kills itself. Regression began when progress lost its spiritual ground with the advent of history’s first technological Singularity at the dawn of the nuclear age. For the first-time humanity acquired the means of its own annihilation. We effectively acquiesced to extinction. It will close any further intellectual horizons. The imminent convergence of ICBM’s and AI is flirting with disaster. No further progress is possible until we resolve the approaching danger unleashed by the Manhattan Project, the near simultaneous invention of the computer and rocket technology. Fascination with the Moon and Mars is a distraction that fails to account for the hypothesis that the reason we do not encounter Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life, is that, it is not possible for civilization to advance beyond its industrial phase without destroying itself. Faster is the future, yet we remain the same. Since 1945 acceleration has been bound to a perpetual repetition in the present order. The future is no different today than yesterday, or tomorrow only faster. Efficiency as guiding light has not abated since the Computer’s First Coming, but has accelerated the future’s arrival, as fixed destiny; technological progress supersedes human freedom. We have resigned ourselves to extinction. People no longer care if humanity lives or dies. We have reached the tipping point, so be it, you can’t stop progress. Extinction does not disturb them, some may even think it is necessary for the earth to go on.

Speed fastened into place the cardinal value. Accelerated time has no purpose except for the hell of it, an irresponsible attitude that beckons the day of reckoning. No universal consensus prevails on the rush to the future, not even human improvement. Humanity as presently constituted is not on the agenda: otherwise we would not be talking about a Posthuman Singularity, or Donna Haraway’s, A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) and Transhumanism. I hear no universal definition for “better” other than “faster.”  Speed facilitates control in order to avoid anarchy. When liberation ceases to be the goal for progress we have crossed the Rubicon. There will be no turning back. The law of reverse effects dominates and transvaluation pervades all. We now serve the Computer or the Luciferian Powers that be, not the other way around. Liberation will bring free choices according to self-determination creating a meaningful universe because it will be one in which we feel responsible, where we can affect the course of change through our Higher Power. The fact that we have a choice between 31 flavors of ice cream and from red, white and blue cars, but we cannot disarm a hoard of nuclear warheads, is not liberty, but the illusion of freedom on parade. A hypnotic spell cast by the media grid further entangling our loyalties with instant gratification not spiritual satisfaction for a life well-lived grounded in the mystery of faith. Faith without a center is anarchism leading to nihilism; it is zeal without knowledge going nowhere fast. The illusion of progress spawned by mass media hides the reality of our regression into impending oblivion.

The Posthuman refusal to define human nature in male and female distinction above the world does not open our minds. We cannot create ourselves without presupposing a greater definite center. We are left defenseless and exposed regressing into a rarefied scientific order as final reference devoid of God. Media closes the future through eternal recurrence. The same materialist theme: buy, drive, fight is repeated endlessly. Space the Final Frontier is a fiction that prohibits alternative conceptions. Contemporary thought on the future is limited by the fast-foreword version predominate today: more of the same just faster. This means the twilight of humanity, the end of history, frozen in whatever petrified lump, the Second Technological Coming, that is, the Singularity, will find us. There are two Singularities, a past one and a future one, a beginning and an end, the joining of all things as one. Our final form will be indistinguishable from our Paleolithic ancestry up from Africa, a brutish imp.

Simulacra replaces reality with a digital copy made in our own image−the copy of a copy. The duplicate of course, is never greater than the original. “The disciple is not above his master, or the servant above his lord” (Matthew 10:24 KJV). Mankind represents God, the earthly prototype to the heavenly Father, the imago dei is the glory of God on earth; art captures him in a technological medium, which is religion, it is that facsimile that provides the outlook for how we view ourselves through the digital prism−the copy of a copy, the shadow of an image.[23]

To believe that a glorified reproduction, a snapshot somehow surpasses the unique person demonstrates how far along the popular illusion has accrued. Media qualifies as a delusional influence by remaking us into the likeness of the simulation creating a soulless drone that is blind, deaf and dumb and sterile. Media technology’s bombastic proclivities silence its user. The drone equals a deconstructed humanity imitating God. A divine resemblance once removed that recreates Homo sapiens as an appendage in abbreviated form. Believing in the Machine-god literally repeats the biblical model for idolatry. The Transhumanist enterprise fashions an ideal, the cyborg in the form of a replicant exalting itself to godhood, but brutal subjugation places us lower than our own design. Mankind builds a Machine, he feels represents God, which in truth is a replacement of itself in the likeness of a clone less than God. He lowers himself to a sub-human thing that appears real but does not exist outside faith in his own highly-stylized self-projection.

The image of God means God comes to earth in the birth of a child; however, we degrade that likeness by projecting our highest qualities along with our greatest vices onto a machine. The semblance between God in heaven and Adam on earth diminishes to a fearsome shadow lower than both. The Artilect will always be inferior to us, but we are entrapped the instant we believe the creation greater than its Maker.

Marcuse says we have all the technology we need to create a New World Order, but we refuse to use them for peace; “All the material and intellectual forces which could be put to work for the realization of a free society are at hand. That they are not used for that purpose is to be attributed to the total mobilization of existing society against its own potential for liberation.”[24] He is saying technology is suicidal when it is used for exploitation instead of freedom because its users will eventually turn its power on itself. This was the great fear after the invention of the atom bomb that our opponents would use it against us. Then the Soviets exploded their own bomb; then the Chinese. Technology must liberate everyone or its acquisition simply allows for the few to control the many and finally one to control all. How is this even possible without technical aid? Media technology is used to control the world and redirect history, to whatever end. People will follow their devices into purgatory. They believe what they see on TV. The one world ruler will assume control of all media technology and recreate the world in its own image, a collusion of asexual humanity and machine. Some speculate that the Antichrist may very well be an asexual cyborg. Big Brother and hijacking cell-phones to impose a new dictatorship may sound like a cliché by now, but throughout third world revolutions the winning parties always take the radio and television station first. This is how world war two was started; the Germans accused the Poles of attacking a German radio tower. The use of communication technology can bring us to war or peace. These two conditions are often confused with doublespeak. War becomes police action for the greater good. Genocide becomes liquidation. “I made a desert and called it peace”−Scipio. Think of it, Luciferian Powers already control the 911 feature on your phone, they can find you anywhere you go and give special alerts, such as dangerous weather conditions, incoming missiles and missing children. TV always interrupts with emergency broadcasts. The police monitor Facebook. They have assumed control of your media device for a greater cause. This should all be obvious. 

The majority of the world’s population lives under dictatorship including Russia and China. They are using digital technology to index and profile its citizens. They want to create the perfect digital dictatorship. Everyone is suspect. Everyone using digital technology gets monitored. We would assume the Chinese hinterland is relatively free from government control because they don’t use digital media or watch TV. We should ban digital voting as a threat to democracy. Imagine hackers being successful even one time could change the course of history forever. There is no inerrant digital system. All algorithms should be tested because they are not 100% accurate.

The fight for the future is a fight for a quality of life we will leave to our children. Will they be able to make free moral choices, hold to unorthodox views, find love, experience the beauty of nature without a programed algorithm? Attorney for the German Society for Civil Rights Bijan Moini says we must preserve free rights today in order to save them for the future; “We can prevent all this from happening. We still know life in freedom, but our descendants could be born into a zoo, ignorant and comfortable. They would know nothing but a life in which invisible higher intelligence permanently observes, cares for, entertains, and protects them from their environment’s adversities.”[25] Digital profiling whether for profit or security should be made illegal to insure a free tomorrow.

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[1] Lawrence J. Terlizzese Machinehead: Rise of the Technology God (Cambridge, OH: Christian Publishing House, 2019). https://www.christianpublishers.org/product-page/machinehead-rise-of-the-technology-god-by-lawrence-j-terlizzese-ph-d

[2] Lawrence J. Terlizzese, The Book of Revelation: The Climax of Hope (Cambridge, OH: BookMark Press, 2024). https://www.christianpublishers.org/product-page/the-book-of-revelation-the-climax-of-hope

[3] Herbert Marcuse in “The End of Utopia,” 1967; https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/1967/end-utopia.htm

[4] Karl Jaspers, The Future of Mankind trans., by E. B. Ashton (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961), 96.

[5] George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet, 1949), 169-170.

[6] Styx, “The Grand Illusion” The Grand Illusion (A&M, 1977).

[7] John Calvin, Institutes II, 2, 10.

[8] Matthew Dickerson, The Mind and the Machine: What it Means to be Human and Why it Matters (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2011), xiv.

[9] Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941), 5.

[10] Vincent van Gogh quoted in Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era (New York: George Braziller, 1960), 182.

[11] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 79, 80.

[12] Frank Herbert, Dune (New York: Ace, 1965), 11.

[13] Lawrence J. Terlizzese in “Space Travel-Here-Now” (2024); https://dr.terlizzese.com/2024/07/27/space-travel-here-now/

[14] Nikolai Berdyaev, The Realm of the Spirit and the Realm of Caesar (New York: Harper, 1952), 36.

[15] Richard Ross, Waiting for the End (Princeton, NJ: Architectural Press, 2004), 12.

[16] Albert Einstein, quoted in Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 36.

[17] Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, 16.

[18] Ibid., 24, 25.

[19] Albert Einstein quoted in Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Avon, 1982), 12, 13.

[20] Stephan Hawking quoted in, “Rise of the Machine” in The Dallas Morning News (Sunday, February 14, 2016), 1P.

[21] Elon Musk quoted in, “Elon Musk’s Future Shock” Vanity Fair (April 2017), 118.

[22] Shane Legg quoted in, “Elon Musk’s Future Shock,” 118.

[23] Lawrence J. Terlizzese “The Technological Simulacra” (2015) https://probe.org/the-technological-simulacra-on-the-edge-of-reality-and-illusion/

[24] Herbert Marcuse in “The End of Utopia,” 1967; https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/1967/end-utopia.htm

[25] Bijan Moini, Save Our Freedom: A Wake-Up Call in Digital Times, trans., by Oliver Latsch (Stamford, CT: Arctis, 2021), 79.