Sublime

technology, religion,

The overgrowth of tools threatens persons in ways which are profoundly new, though they are also analogous to traditional forms of nuisance and tort. These threats are of a new kind, because their perpetrators and victims are the same people: both operators and clients of inexorably destructive tools. Though some people may cash in on the game at f

Our culture says, “If you don’t own it, you won’t take care of it.” But Christians live by a higher standard: “Because God owns it, I must take the best care of it that I can.” The Bible says, “Those who are trusted with something valuable must show they are worthy of that trust.”

and it is that which cometh out of the heart that defileth a nation, philanthropy, efficiency, organization, social reform.

It does not send food into the house to feed the children; it only sends an inspector into the house to punish the parents for having no food to feed them. It does not see that they have got a fire; it only punishes them for not having a fireguard. It does not even occur to it to provide the fireguard.

I cannot have my countrymen tempted to those pleasures of intellectual pride which are the result of comparing themselves with you. The deep collapse and yawning chasm of your ineptitude leaves me upon a perilous spiritual elevation. Your mistakes are matters of fact; but to enumerate them does not exhaust the truth.

It is hard for me to know exactly how to respond to this vision of Christianity, I have to say. In part, this is because I know it to be based on a notoriously confused reading of scripture, one whose history goes all the way back to the late Augustine—a towering genius whose inability to read Greek and consequent reliance on defective Latin transl