Psalm 115: 3-8
The Message
Our God is in heaven
doing whatever he wants to do.
Their gods are metal and wood,
handmade in a basement shop:
Carved mouths that can’t talk,
painted eyes that can’t see,
Tin ears that can’t hear,
molded noses that can’t smell,
Hands that can’t grasp, feet that can’t walk or run,
throats that never utter a sound.
Those who make them have become just like them,
have become just like the gods they trust.
Neil Postman
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (p. 54), Vintage Books, 1992
… the success of twentieth-century technology in providing Americans with convenience, comfort, speed, hygiene, and abundance was so obvious and promising that there seemed no reason to look for any other sources of fulfillment or creativity or purpose. To every Old World belief, habit, or tradition, there was and still is a technological alternative. To prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to reading, the alternative is television; to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification; to sin, the alternative is psychotherapy; to political ideology, the alternative is popular appeal established though scientific polling. There is even an alternative to the painful riddle of death, as Freud called it. The riddle may be postponed through longer life, and then perhaps solved altogether by cryogenics. At least, no one can easily think of a reason why not.
Comment: (One)
I thought about some aspects of my Work and,…on reflection,…theres a big Temptation there. In development planning, you can see the obvious "What is" and often try to craft a Prog/proj so that you have "What should be". And herein lies the temptation.
To think that we know it all,… that we can provide ultimate solutions to human problems,… that our methods, approaches and analyses are in themselves adequate. How often do we fall at this Cusp!This is not ideology of the Physical things, but rather Ideological idolatry,…so pernicious, unseemly and often unrecognizable!
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[…] Editor wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptOur God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him. But their idols are silver and gold, made by the hands of men. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but they cannot see; they have ears, but cannot hear, noses, but they cannot … […]