May 12, 2018 • 44 mins
We often think of technology and religion as distinct and separate worlds, but what happens when they converge? Join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick in this two-part episode as they examine religious world views shaped by technology, such as John Murray Spear’s electrical messiah, the simple prayer wheel and the psycho-spiritual technologies of Scientology. (Originally published Jun 9, 2015)
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
The vault hangs open. Will you walk inside with us? Yes,
do walk inside, because we're gonna be cracking out our
old episodes on Techno Religion, Part one and Part two.
This is gonna be part one. Yeah, so when did
these originally published? So part one here originally published on
(00:28):
June nine. Oh, this was one of my one of
my first episodes way back when I was a brand
new baby on this show. I wanted to talk about
some intersections between technology and religion, so we did, and
Robert it was a lot of fun. I still remember
those days very fondly. Yeah, we got we got two
long episodes out of it. And the cool thing is,
(00:49):
I think we have the potential to do a third
Techno Religion episode in the future. So keep that in
mind as you're listening to all of this, and certainly
shoot us an email if you can think of a
wonderful example of religious technology that we should include. I
think we heard after this episode from at least one
academic who is doing a dissertation on techno religion. Well,
(01:10):
I've forgot about that. We'll have to reach out to
them anyway. Here is our classic episode on techno Religion
for the Masses, Part one, and of course next weekend
if you want to tune back in on Saturday, we
will be re airing part two. So here's part one.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind from how
(01:32):
Stuff Works dot com. We may say that we have
the birth of a new science, a new philosophy, a
new life. The time of deliverance has come at last,
and henceforward the career of humanity is upward and onward,
(01:54):
a mighty, a noble, and a godlike career. All the
revelations of spiritual as them heretofore, all the control of
spirits over mortals, and the instruction and discipline they have
given us, have only paved the way, as it were,
for the advent of a great practical movement, such as
the world little dreams of though it has long deeply
(02:16):
yearned for it, and agonized and groaned away its life
because it did not come sooner. And this new motive
power is to lead the way in the great, speedily
coming salvation. It is to be the physical savior of
the race, the history of its inception, its various stages
of progress, and its completion will show the world a
(02:38):
most beautiful and significant analogy to the advent of Jesus
is the spiritual savior of the race. Hence we most
confidently assert that the advent of the science of all sciences,
the philosophy of all philosophies, and the art of all
arts has now fairly commenced. The child is born not
(02:59):
long hence he will go alone. Then he will dispute
with the doctors and the temples of science. And then hey,
welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. Joe, what is what
is going on here? I'm reading a quote. This is
(03:20):
a quote from a Boston newspaper. The June four edition
of a Boston newspaper called the New Era or Heaven
Opened to Man, And this passage was written by a
former Universalist minister named Simon Hewitt. So after this passage,
one skeptical reader named Emma Hardinge commented that quote nothing
(03:41):
could be given further beyond vague hints of what was
to follow. The awful then which broke off breathless at
the contemplation of its own inexpressible possibilities. So all this
preamble to something amazing that's going to change humanity? What
on earth could Simon Wit have been talking about? Well,
(04:03):
he was referring to something that sat inside the upper
room of a large tower overlooking the coast beyond the
town of Lynn, Massachusetts. This is high rock tower. If
you want to look it up, you can see a
picture of this place. It still exists to kind of
get a sense of it. And inside the upper room
of this tower were the fruits of what I would
(04:24):
sort of think of as the ultimate backyard engineering project.
It is like garage engineering gone to the extreme. So
from July eighteen fifty three to the following spring in
eighteen fifty four, a group of universalist reformers and spiritualist
enthusiasts had been building a machine called the New Motor.
(04:45):
And it would be something I'd say, probably never seen
before on earth, an electro mechanical messiah. Yes, which you
know this will bring to mind a number of different
stunning visuals. Would we would like to dissuade you from
We'll make sure we have some links to some images
of the the electrical Messiah in question on the landing
(05:08):
page for this episode. But but if you think about
a Dollec from doctor Who, from Doctor Who, if a
Dollec were to breed with a coffee table, Uh, their
offspring when probably resembled the UH decorated with many like
dangling Christmas ornaments. Yes. Yes, so it's a hybrid of
a coffee table and a dialect decorated for Christmas and
(05:29):
serving as kind of kind of an altarpiece as well.
There's certainly an altarpiece vibe to this creation, sure, And
this is bridging two worlds that we tend to see
as sort of I don't know what spectrum it is,
but there, whatever it is, there at the opposite ends
of the spectrum. One is religion and the other is technology.
(05:50):
I mean, we typically think of religion as a very
low tech affair. You tend to go into churches, I
don't know, maybe not some churches these days, but you
see a lot of stuff that recalls an earlier time.
And our religious texts in most of the major religions
of the world are very ancient, and thus the metaphors
in which we talk about our religions tend to be
(06:11):
very ancient, and technology is you know, it's the very
essence of what is new and what the future is.
I mean, what is science fiction that imagines the future
usually focused on its new technology? Yeah, I mean most
of the major world religions. Yeah, they're based on ancient
cosmologies that sometimes we're okay with updating. Uh. Generally, at
(06:33):
certain points in the past we will say, all right,
we're gonna actually change this a little bit to the
fit how we live now. But for the most part, yeah,
they're rooted in the past, and technology is ever rooted
in the president in the future. Right, But today we
want to discuss what happens when you cram the ends
of that spectrum together and you create techno religion. So
(06:54):
what happens when technology changes religions, what happens when technology
becomes a component of religious practice, and what happens when
technology becomes a god or messiah in itself? Right, And
this is something that has been happening for ages. Uh.
If you think of technology and the broader sentence especially,
humans have always been developing new technologies, developing gadgets, developing
(07:19):
um more advanced ways of just looking at the world.
Around them and manipulating the world around them. And this
has always gone hand in hand with our ability to
understand the purpose of life and the purpose of of
our existence here on earth. Yeah. And the concept of
purpose is also built into the idea of technology, because
we typically think of technology as like a machine or
(07:41):
a mechanism that does a particular job. But if you
look at the Standard Dictionary definition of technology, it's going
to say something like the practical application of scientific knowledge
toward a purpose. So keep all of that in mind.
Keep those definitions in mind as we explore the convergence
of technology and religion. Yeah. So I was wondering, what
are some of the earliest examples of the religious use
(08:04):
of a machine? Like you can only think back so far.
I mean, of course, nowadays people might I don't know,
read devotional literature on their iPad or something. But is
there anything people have been doing for hundreds or thousands
of years with machines to help them in their spiritual journeys. Yes.
In fact, we have a couple of really good examples
of this, the first of which is the prayer wheel,
(08:27):
which I imagine most people have seen images or footage
of these, particularly if you've ever traveled into the into
into East Asia, or or had any kind of contact
with with with Buddhism, but these tend to be We're
talking about a wheel and spindle composed of various materials.
Who find a made made out of you know, ornate metals,
(08:49):
You'll find them made out of stone, You'll find the
made out of leather and cotton and it Uh, it's
a physical manifestation of the turning wheel of dharma in Buddhism. Okay,
so physically to picture this is it going to be
kind of like one of those like game prize wheels. Uh, sort,
I mean it's the it's it's not positioned vertically, it's
(09:09):
positioned h's horizontally. It kind of if you were just
an outsider looking at it and you knew nothing about
Eastern religion, you might you might equate it with with
some sort of a dude at at a child's playground, right,
just something that seems like you just spin it and
it's cool to spin. But of course it has far
more purpose than that within the context of the religion.
(09:30):
Um So the wheel of Dharma, Yeah, the wheel of
dharma and uh, and it's all tied in with accumulating
good karma, purifying bad karma, because you you spin this wheel,
and in spinning the prayer wheel, you are assisting yourself
with the with with with the purging of bad karma
and the accumulation of the good. And this is accomplished
(09:53):
by the fact that I mean on top of the
wheel being this, uh, this, this gadget, this device that
that that presents this um this cosmological idea. The prayers
are also filled with up to a mile of prayers. Um,
so we're talking mantras and sutras generally written in Sanskrit
and uh. The prayers are recited each time the wheel
(10:17):
makes a revolution. So a pilgrim spins the wheel and
with each spin helps helps them gain merit and to
concentrate the mind on the mantras and sutras that are
being re enacted by the wheel. Okay, so much in
the way that say, a lever or a pulley might
upgrade our ability to do physical work, this wheel can
(10:39):
upgrade our ability to do spiritual work. Yeah, it's I
guess one way to think if it would be think
about a cassette player. Right, Um, say you're just a
really huge fan of I don't know what's your what's
your favorite metal album, your favorite rock and roll album album? Uh,
Dope Throne, Dope Throne by Electric Wizard. Okay, right, Well,
(11:00):
let's say you're particularly love Dope Throne, and so you
have a cassette of Dope Throne. But that cassette doesn't
actually play just the But imagine this, The mere act
of that tape filtering through the machine and revolving around
that wheel somehow enacted the spirit of that album for you.
That's the kind of what's going on. So it gives
(11:20):
you the essence or the aura of Dope Throne without
the sounds having to play right And and ideally, I
think my understanding too, is that you would also focus
the mind on Dope Throne. So it's not just saying
I'm turning this machine instead of thinking about it. I'm
doing both. But but where this gets really interesting is
when you, for instance, when you look at the fact
that until the twentieth century, virtually the only Tibetan use
(11:43):
for the wheel was as a device for activating these mantras,
so that the wheel was was virtually virtually went unused
there as a physical tool. It's a technology for you know,
moving things around or crushing things, etcetera. It was used
almost exclusively as a really is technology. Wow yeah um.
(12:03):
Now that's not to say that all prayer wheels are
turned by hand. That's kind of the main one you see,
and it's certainly the one that often makes the biggest
impression visually. That's a money wheel. But there are also
varieties that are turned by fire, water, wind, um, electricity.
Hold on a second, So we've got an electric prayer
(12:23):
karma machine. Yes, yeah, it's And this is where it
gets really interesting because because it's one thing to say,
all right, this one is spun by hand, because also
I'm the human, I mean, the kind of at the
center of this religious thing, right, It's another to say
the fire, the wind, or the air is going to
move because those are natural forces created by the gods. Right. Yeah,
Well that makes me think of an analogy like if
(12:44):
you look to medieval Catholicism, where you might have chantries
that are where it's ay, a wealthy person, Remember, the
gentry could pay people to pray, and the more prayers
that the monks would say in these chantry is based
on the amount they paid, could lessen their stay in purgatory.
I wonder if you know, if they've had this kind
of technology at the time, would they think, well, would
(13:07):
it be okay to say the number of prayer machines
you build could lessen your stay in purgatory? Um? Could like,
could you get one of those texts to speech synthesizers
to say prayers? You know, I don't know. I would
definitely love to hear from someone, uh with more insight
into the the rules of of Tibetan Buddhism and these
(13:29):
prayer wheels, because it would seem like you could just
buy a bunch of these things and just set them up,
plug them in, and let them go and then maybe
just completely externalize your your karma situation. Um. Yeah. They
call these tardo corlos, and they can keep them running
twenty four hours a day using a four point five
vault DC electric current. Uh and and and so yeah,
(13:53):
you can just keep it running all the time, presuming
when you're sleeping, when you're eating, when you're doing things
that I assume do not involve the the the mental concentration.
It's like a karmic force field generator exactly. Yeah. And
this is even crazier when you think of another technological
uh innovation that you see with the prayer of wheels,
and that's that you can also find microfilm prayer wheels
(14:16):
that contain more, uh came, even more than a million
mantras inside them. So yeah, so you between microfilm technology
and uh and just simple electric uh you know technology
to create a spinning wheel, Um, you can really sort
of change your your karma game. It seems the micro
film is especially interesting to me. It seems like that's
(14:38):
almost like a religious implementation of the idea of nanotechnology,
like accomplishing more in a smaller space. It makes me
wonder and and perhaps someone has has done something along
these lines. But why even deal with the physical wheel?
What if you took the wheel virtually you could have
I mean, what would the limits there would be pretty
much be no limits, right, I mean, you could have
(14:59):
and the an absurd number of mantras moving through a
wheel at pretty much any kind of rate you want. Like,
you could create a computer program that executes a subroutine
that is just a list of these mantras and you
could tell it to loop infinitely. Yeah, kind of a
karmic defragging system just running in the background out of
(15:19):
your your computer at all times. Yeah. And of course,
so this is kind of our outsider's perspective. But I'm
sure somebody who is actually believing in and using these
sorts of prayer wheels would have a pretty good and
well thought out explanation for why you can use technology
to achieve a karmically significant event in one way but
not in another way. It might totally make sense in
(15:41):
terms of how they interpret their spirituality. Yeah, I mean,
I think, I think anytime you see this convergence of
technology and religion, it becomes the domain of of the
the priest or the priest class, or somebody in some
sort of you know, clerical authority to say, all right,
this is the line, this is this is how far
technology can come into the sanctuary. It's okay to you know,
(16:05):
read your hymn or your Bible on an iPad, but
it's not okay to do X, y or z. It
makes me want to ask the question why on that
spectrum I talked about earlier where we have, you know,
the ancient religion on one hand and the new technology
on the other, why are they so far apart? Like,
what is the inherent profanity in technology? It does kind
(16:26):
of seem crass when you see, like when you see
a religious service taking place on a JumboTron or something
like that. Why is that, like what is wrong with
the technology or what is necessarily unspiritual about it. I
don't know the answer, but there seems to be an
intuition like that that we have. I guess so much
of it is rooted in religion, a tradition, you know.
(16:46):
I mean, like I've definitely had that moment before. I've
been at a church service and the person giving the
sermon or you know, officiating at a wedding has been
reading off of a kindle or a or a you know,
a path of something. It looks inappropriate. Yeah, I mean,
I think it's a lot of it has to do
with the fact that religions tend to be inherently traditional,
(17:07):
especially the older traditional religions. So just the the image
of modern technology, especially when you think of technology, is
this thing that's such a mastery uh of you know,
of of human skill and ability to see that uh
you know, shoehorned in with these things that are supposedly
given to us from some sort of a higher power. Yeah.
(17:29):
Though I wonder if people in the ancient world would
have thought about it in the same way. I mean,
this again calls to mind something we talked about the
last time I was on the show, when we talked
about eclipses, which is the Anti Kither mechanism is an
ancient Greek device that's often referred to as the world's
oldest computer or the first computer. And now obviously it
didn't have microprocessors or anything, but this was a device
(17:51):
that comes from more than two thousand years ago, is
found in a shipwreck in the Mediterranean, and it was
an ancient mechanical computer for for computing the locations of
celestial objects and for like predicting lunar eclipses and solar
eclipses in the future. And the interesting thing about this
is it's an amazingly advanced piece of technology for the time,
(18:13):
just astoundingly advanced. But these events, these celestial mechanics had
religious significance to the people who used it. Yeah, I mean,
it's certainly something we discussed in that eclipse episode. When
when you look back at ancient societies and even not
so ancient societies, UM astronomy and UH and cosmology are
are so linked together, like it becomes the domain of
(18:35):
the of the priest and the clergy to know what
the stars are doing, to track the stars, so that
we know what the calendar is telling us and when
certain rites should be observed. Well, that makes me wonder
if star tracking technology has entered religion, even ancient religion,
in the same way the prayer wheel did. Yes, and
that brings us to the astrolabe. The astrolabe. Yeah, and
(18:56):
now everyone I think has probably seen an image of
an astrolabe in their finer forms. These are just works
of just pure art. I'm going to tell you what
a picture tell me how far off I am. Basically,
it's it looks kind of like that compass you used
to use in middle school math classes to draw a
perfect circle with another little half moon piece on it.
(19:17):
Is that completely wrong kind of yeah, with varying levels
of artistry and a lot of figures and sliding mechanisms. Yeah,
it's a small circular device. And these would usually usually
these would be made of wood or brass um and
they date back over two thousand years. The concept seems
to originate around three thirty BC, and they were perfected
(19:40):
by the Arabs in the ninth century, and they remained
at the basic astronomer's tool for the next seven hundred years.
It's essentially a model of the stars in the sky,
which can be moved to show where the stars will
be at any time of the year, and the reverse
side of the astrolabe concerns the position of the sun
in the Okay, so it's a lot like the end
(20:01):
to get through a mechanism in a way. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's portable and has a large display. On top
of that, if you have a really nice model, it's
a beautiful work of art, something you might easily show
it off at the dinner table. Uh. It's arguably one of,
if not the first, personal computer mobile carrying it with
you doing what you need to do in the course
of a day. Now, the question is would it become
(20:23):
overheated if sitting on your lap, if it was made
out of metal and you were sit seated in the sun,
I would say yes, Um, yeah, that's a sterility hazard. It. Uh.
You couldn't get an app for this thing, but it
had a number of features just by virtue of how
it contract the heavens. You can tell the date and time,
You could calculate distances. It could be used in determining
(20:46):
a building height, surveying longitude, latitude, altitude horoscopes. Um. You
can also figure out the position of the planets. But
then on top of this there were various occults usages,
So it gets a little bit into religion there. But
the most notable function where we see the astrolaid becoming
a piece of religious technology is in its ability to
(21:09):
determine Islamic prayer times and determine the direction to Mecca. Okay,
so this is actually that the piece of technology itself
doesn't necessarily have religious significance, but there's a fact you
need to know to execute your religion. You know perfectly
the way you want to do it. If you want
(21:30):
to face Mecca as well as you can, why not
have a machine to help you really hone that piece
of information and get it as accurate as possible. Yeah,
I mean it in a way, it really becomes an
essential piece of technology in Islam because a long place
is a high importance on the position of the believer
in time and space. For starters, uh, the s alot times,
(21:50):
these are the five prayers a day plus the Friday prayer.
They depend It depends on a combination of clock time
and sundial time to determine exactly when you should take place.
So it concerns the exact coordinates for a given location. Um.
Because again it's not just it's not just arbitrary about
when the prayer times are they have they are specific
depending on where you are in the world, about where
(22:13):
you are in terms of sometime. And on top of this,
the faithful has to know exactly where they are in
relation to the Kaaba in Mecca so that they can
face that direction during these prayers. Yeah, I think that's fascinating.
And unlike the prayer wheel, which itself does some sort
of religious or spiritual work, this is sort of like
a technology that we use to be most properly informed
(22:35):
about how to do the rituals that you would be
doing anyway, because really a lot of the problems that
occur in religion they occur as the believer moves farther
away in in time or space. Right, you're you're you're
farther away from Mecca. Uh, it's harder to determine exactly
where you are. Uh. You're not necessarily going to have
(22:57):
somebody signaling the prayer times each day from a power,
so it falls on you to figure it out yourself.
And uh, and then that's where the technology becomes extremely useful.
But of course there are lots of external influences on
(23:17):
how we practice our religions. A lot of these influences
are actually going to be technological. One of the things
that I thought was interesting was to think about writing
itself as a technology. Now, writing is so crucial to
the way we think of most of the major religions
of the world today, because you've got the Torah for Jews,
(23:40):
you've got the you know, the Hebrew Bible plus the
New Testament for Christians, You've got the Kuran for Muslims,
and and of course there are texts that are central
to Eastern religions as well, the Ramayana and the Mahabarata
to be specific. Certainly. Yeah, and so we think about
religion as a very text based of fair but there's
(24:01):
really no reason it has to be. I mean, religions
can be transmitted orally through culture. That can be systems
of cultural practices that don't necessarily have to be written
down or encoded anywhere. But for some reason, most of
the world's major religions have a strong textual component, and
I wonder how it changed the way we practiced religion
(24:25):
when writing came into humanity, because writing, I mean, human
civilization is much older than writing. Of course, human life
in general, human culture is even older than civilization, so
much older than writing. So we can only really imagine,
I think, I mean, I'm sure that something like a
cultural anthropologist or an archaeologists could tell us more about
(24:45):
how they think writing might have changed the way we
practice religions, but I really have no idea. Well, I mean,
I think it hard. You're probably doing on the situation
of of of the expansion of memory, right, because writing
is in essence the ability to externalized human memory. Before writing,
how we that we can only contain as much as
(25:06):
could fit in a human mind, or if maybe if
you were, you know, really skilled at you might compartmentalize it,
right and have one person deal with the with these
memories versus the other, almost a fahrenheit for fifty one
kind of situation. Yeah, So before writing, it's you're limited
by just the power of the human mind, remember, and
then the ability to pass that on to us, which
(25:27):
of course we know from everyday experience, but also from
actual studies. We we don't pass on information all that
faithfully if we don't write it down right, memory itself
is not set in stone, and uh, and then there's
kind of a telephone game anytime we pass something on anything. Really,
anytime you remember something, you're taking it out, you're potentially
changing it and then putting it back in. So yeah,
(25:48):
I have to imagine, though, of course I could be
wrong that, uh, that as much as religious beliefs kind
of change from generation to generation today, I have to
imagine they changed even more and much more quickly in
times before there were sort of like texts to anchor them. Yeah,
before you could actually set a religion in stone. I
(26:09):
imagine a religion really just by virtue of how we
remembered it. It changed with us so very fluid. So
some of these problems we run into where we're saying,
all right, we're trying to apply ancient Babylonian cosmology to
modern times. Part of that is by virtue of depending
upon ancient Babylonian cosmology is set in stone, and then
(26:30):
you know and then that that recording of it is
considered sacred and holy. Right, So these ancient writing technologies,
we of course had the invention of alphabets, and I
think it's very fair to consider an alphabet of technology.
But then on top of that, you just had the
preservation technology. So you had scrolls, you eventually had cadsseas,
you had you know, tablets and carving and and all
(26:51):
the different pictograms and libraries and and every bit of
technology we had. But there was one big thing I
think that that was the main textual technology that really
revolutionized the world, and that would be the printing press. Yes, yeah,
we're talking about the mid fifteenth century in Europe particularly
called Gutenberg. Gutenberg, yeah, um, and his effect on the Bible,
(27:15):
the Gutenberg Bible, because prior to this, any given Western
manuscript had to be copied by hand, and it was
generally this was something that was handled by by the clergy.
Right can you imagine this living in a world where
so you look to the church as your you know,
as your authority on all things spiritual, uh, and probably
(27:36):
more than that also all things government in some cases
and and all that. But they have the Bible as
the authority that's interpreted by the church. And so what
is the Bible, Well, it is hand to copy documents
that most people don't have much access to They might
be because they're so rare. I mean they're kept in
script or i ums or libraries or these places that
(27:59):
the average per and wouldn't have any access to. Yeah,
they're highly fetishized. Uh, it's it's just not something that
the average person would have access to. And on top
of that, the lack of a printing press means that
there's really not much distributed commentary on the documents either.
And this is something that uh, a lot of people
would say played a big role in the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation,
(28:22):
the Enlightenment, scientific Revolution. If you just look at the
Protestant Reformation, you have to imagine the effect that the
printing press had on not just the Bible itself, but
on the distribution of Reformation propaganda. And I don't use
the word propaganda there in a negative sense. I think
that's just the term for all of the ways in
(28:42):
which Reformation ideas were being spread throughout Europe at the time. Yeah,
it's really the kind of technological advancement in mass communication
that you can you can really only compare it to,
if not the emergence of writing to begin with, and
perhaps the Internet age like that, like such a big
movement in such a drastic change in our ability to
(29:03):
communicate with one another. Speaking of the scientific revolution, Uh,
that makes me think about the you know, the whole
notion of a clockwork universe, which I'm not gonna get
too deep into that here that could easily be its
own podcast. But everyone's heard the idea of a creator
God as a watchmaker, right, Um, this creator makes the
(29:24):
perfect mechanical time piece that is the universe and then
just lets it go. Maybe winds it first, I guess
hopefully winds it and then lets it go because it
doesn't need to to be rewound or anything. It works
perfectly as it's created. And this is an example of,
you know, a technological society, A society that has these
technological ideas in its head can't help but think about, um,
(29:46):
the unseen world in terms of those same mechanisms, right.
I mean, it's very common to want to describe the
actions of God in terms that we can understand. And
what do we understand these days? And making machines scenes? Yeah,
I haven't seen a lot of this, but I wonder
to what extent, like modern like email or jargon, etcetera,
(30:06):
has has made its way into you know, just average
say Christian sermons, Like, does anyone talk about um communication
with God, prayer itself being a form of email. I
do think a lot of the jokes now displayed on
church signs come from email forwards. Yeah, indeed, I believe
I saw one chart church marquee here around town a
(30:28):
few years back with a talked about sending God some
quote an email, which I thought when I when I
read an email, I was instantly thinking, that sounds like
a great name for some sort of a wrestling move,
finishing maneuver right where you need somebody in the head,
and you call it an email. But there of course
talking about kneeling, uh, and then praying, which is a
(30:48):
form of an email. That's adorable an email. But getting
back to the ways that external advances in technology have
affected the progression of religions, one of the ways that
I think is very significant is looking at the way
technology has changed the way we do work, which of
course is the main thing technology does, and how that
(31:11):
affects religious beliefs about how we should do work. Oh,
you're talking of course about Shabbat, right, of course, So
if you look at the way some Jews interpret teachings
in the Torah on what should be done or not
done on the Sabbath. There have been lots of ways
in which new technologies have sort of intruded on the
(31:34):
traditional understanding of what is accepted and forbidden to do
on the day of rest. Right, this is sundown Friday
to send down Saturday, in which Orthodox user forbidden to work, right,
which is interesting technology, right uh? And to drive vehicle
of course, right. And so of course what you can
guess from drive a vehicle is that a lot of
(31:55):
these things aren't directly commandments stated in the tour itself
as an ancient document, but their interpretations that have come
from the rabbis throughout the years about how we should
apply the laws of the Torah to the new technological
world we find ourselves in. Right, because just by the
basic laws and like the thirty nine different activities that
(32:16):
are off limits, um, it would mean that you can't
cook or light a fire, and by extension of that,
the interpretation is that there would be no moving electricity
through a circuit. Okay. So by this interpretation, really, if
you want to be observant on the Sabbath, you should
not press a button that causes an electrical device to
turn on. Right, And that's where it gets kind of
(32:37):
tricky because there's some obvious examples, uh that you know,
you could say, well, don't turn on the vacuum cleaner. Okay,
well I'm not gonna turn on the vauum cleaner because
I'm also not going to vacuum. But then you gotta
eat on on the on the Sabbath, right, So, so
what do you do about opening the refrigerator door? Oh,
because when you open the refrigerator door, a light comes
on exactly. That's your action of opening the door that
(32:59):
has cause that light to ignite. Yeah. So I mean
for the longest there's an easy workaround, right. You could
either unscrew the bulb or you just you tape up
that little button right, right. So those are some pretty
simple workarounds for that some orthodox chose might use. But
it gets more complicated than that in some scenarios. Right.
For instance, another classic workaround was involved the use of
(33:23):
an oven, right, because you need to heat up food.
You can't light your stove. You can't activate the oven
by pushing the button. But if you activate the oven,
you turn it on before sundown. Um on Friday and
just leave it running through and keep it warm, you know,
through sundown on Saturday. Then you can make use of
that heat. You're you're just setting an emotion beforehand and
(33:46):
then picking up after the Sabbath is done. I'd imagine
a lot of ovens today are programmed not to do
that because they don't want it would be a safety
hazard to just leave an oven on and leave town
or something. Yeah, so they probably have like an automatic
shut off, right they do, Yeah, an automatic safety shut off.
And when they started using these, you know, they were
getting complaints from people who who needed uh to keep
(34:09):
their oven on in order to observe the religious practices.
So this is where we get Sabbath mode on on
various appliances, Uh not where they play Sabbath albums. Right,
So that would that was certainly an innovation that would
be that would be great on modern Welcome in my house,
a black Sabbath mode on your your dishwasher, etcetera. But no,
this would involve simply a manual override to the safety
(34:32):
features so that you could operate your cooking technology in
accordance with your religious faith. You know, I bet that
there are specific manufacturers that do this. There are and
in fact there's actually something called star K Kosher Certification
for Appliances. Yeah, you can actually go to their their
website it's star uh dash K dot org and they
(34:55):
have a lot of stuff dealing with with kosher foods,
what have you. But also at a whole system, a
whole section on appliances where you can look up the
appliances and see what they're their, their potential Sabbath modes are,
how to activate them, how to use them in accordance
with these rules and regulations. Another classic example about the
(35:20):
Shabbat and technology is the use of an elevator. Right, reasonly,
you need to use an elevator to move around in
a high rise building. How do you do it if
you can't push a button? While you just simply program
the elevator, uh, during the Sabbat to go from floor
to floor to floor to floor, up and down, up
and down NonStop. And then you just get on and
you just ride the ride. Wow. Yeah, so I might
(35:41):
be a long ride and a long wait, but at
least you can observe your your practices exactly. Another bit
of religious technology wounded to touch on real quick is
a sixteenth century clockwork monk created by one La Torriana,
who was a mechanic for Spanish Emperor Charles the Fifth,
the emperor's son, King Philip the Second, the story goes,
(36:03):
was praying at the bedside of his own dying son
and he's getting desperate, so he's making promises to the divine.
He's promising a miracle for a miracle. Uh it is
child survives, he ends up recovering, and he has to
keep his promise. What kind of a miracle can can
a king actually do? Well? Obviously, the king is gonna
um his mechanical constelled as a mechanic and get him
(36:24):
to create a miracle as a as kind of an
offering right as a as as a thank you to
the divine. And so that's where when Ello comes in
and he creates a key wound spring operated automaton and
a really complicated automaton at that. Yeah, I've seen pictures
of this and it's fascinating. You can, like, I think
(36:45):
there's a little compartment where you can peek in on
the inside of it, and it's got gears, and I
don't I couldn't begin to understand how it works on
the inside. But what does it actually do? Well? I
mean it it walks around, uh kind of a square shape.
It strikes its chest with its right arm. It raises
and lowers a small cross and rosary with its left.
(37:05):
It occasionally kisses the cross. It turns and nods its head,
It rolls its eyes, and it mouths you know, silent
prayers and whatnot. So so wait, you said it strikes
its chest, So is this is this auto automatic self flagellation.
I don't think it's quite flagellation, but that would be
a different That would be an interesting different. Yea. Um,
(37:29):
But some of you probably heard a Radio Lab episode
a few years back where they did like a short
profile of this piece and sort of the mysteries around it,
because there are a lot of questions regarding, you know,
why why was this created? What's the exact purpose? You know,
what was the mindset in creating it? Because it's simply
an offering, uh, you know to God. Is it's a
(37:49):
is it something you're supposed to put on the table
and you also around in prayer, pray while observing it? Right,
my question would be does it do something relevant or
is it more kind of like when a painter sculptor
would create a work of art and dedicate it to
the Lord. I think that seems to be the prevalent interpretation,
though in the light of what we talked about with
(38:09):
the prayer wheel, it's it's tempting to want to go
that direction with it, you know, and think of it
as a think that, like its prayers had some efficacy. Yeah,
I mean, I'm tempting. I really want to believe that
I can, in good uh, in good faith, put that forward.
Is is something that I think or that even the
majority of the experts think that that was in the
mind of of the king or the mechanic responsible. But
(38:33):
you can't help but but wonder exactly how the mindset
of the mechanic played into it. And of course, in
our modern time, UM, we've plenty of examples of of
prayer taking place online U prayer groups, etcetera. Sharing their
concerns via the Internet. And I don't know to what
extent they can you know, they ever consider the email
(38:55):
itself a prayer. But but certainly that seems like a
lot that will blurn more and more as that becomes
like standard practice, right because certainly, uh, at some point
the written word uh became holy. Right, and then I
can't help but but imagine that in the advent of
the printing press, maybe initially the printed word was a
(39:16):
little less holy, a little more manufactured. Sure than that
becomes uh, you know, de facto holy as well. Right, Well,
this is the other side of the advance of the
textual technology uh progression, because religion is so inherently social
and in most the way most people practice it, and
it's something that deeply does involve communication between groups and
(39:39):
so allowing greater communication between people who think alike or
want to offer each other religious advice or interpretation or consolation.
The Internet is obviously going to be a huge explosion
in that. But it's also not just a peer to
peer exchange, right. So you can have your sort of
like your religious you know, emails goal where you forward
(40:01):
each other the things that you know you want to
show to your friends and your peers in the church.
You can also have services provided by church officials over
telecommunications links. Indeed, and uh, you know, here's a question
that comes to mind here if it's if it's blasphemous
to um, to burn or to face a religious text
(40:21):
such as the Bible or the Koran. What have you
deleted an e book of it? Oh? Man, is that's
this that blasphemous? I don't know, I don't know. I'm
sure some people have opinions on that. Yeah, I I
personally do not. Hey, and we haven't even mentioned exorcism online, right, Well,
that would be one of those services that could be
offered by you know, your religious official who might be
(40:44):
so far away. What if they're in a cabin in
Alaska that hopefully has a fast Internet connection, but they
want to offer the spiritual service that you really need,
and that might be the exorcism of a demon or
multiple demons from your person. Right, And there are individuals
who have and continue to offer online exorcism services. Back
(41:04):
in two thousand nine, famed Israelian Kabbala master Rabbi Botsfrey
attempted to remove a dibbic, a disembodied spirit from a
Brazilian man via the Internet. And more recently we've seen
evangelical Reverend Bob Larson offering exorcisms for a fee, of course,
via Skype. And this, uh, this was actually featured on
(41:25):
the Daily Show several months back. Yeah, so imagine I
didn't see that imagine a number of our listeners caught
it there. Yeah, that sounds way more interesting than the
video conferencing that we have here at work. Yeah, But
you know, ultimately, what's I don't see what the big
big deal is because if if an exorcism involved like
this right by which you're driving a spiritual invader out,
(41:48):
that's essentially that the demon is kind of telecommuting through
an individual, right, Yeah, Yeah, that makes sense. I mean,
it seems to me that the ideology behind an exorcism
would suggest that it's a it's an interpersonal connection that
breaks the power of the demon. It's sort of the
spiritual or emotional or intellectual presence of the clerical official
that can drive the demon out, not so much the
(42:09):
physical presence, like why would they really need to be
in the room. Yeah, I mean it reminds me of
I think we both recently rewatched portions are the entirety
of the Hell Razor Bloodlines movie, where an individual, of course,
you know religious technology, right, the limit configuration is a
little mechanical device and you solve it, and the demon
(42:30):
show up, the cinobyte show up. And in that movie,
there's an individual that's cheating, right, by trying by solving
it virtually or remotely by use of a robot. Right, yes,
he's he's using essentially the technology of a bomb disposal robot,
but to solve the lament configuration puzzle box and workroom.
Initially it works, but then some some people who are
(42:51):
not very technologically savvy or like, well, we gotta solve
this problem. They opened the door to the room where
the cinobytes are contained, and then there's a problem. But
that's interesting. Initially they're able to outmaneuver the technologically empowered
demons that are the cinabytes via more advanced technology. Right,
they can put those cinobytes in a box inside a box,
(43:15):
exactly inside a box. All right. So that's gonna be
the end of part one here. This is very much
again a two part series. Yeah, and if you want
to hear the conclusion of that story that we started
this episode with the construction of the electro mechanical Messiah
at the High Rock Tower in Lynn, Massachusetts, that's gonna
be in our next episode. So that's going to be
(43:36):
in part two. Indeed, we're also gonna get into some
some wonderful UFO and scientology territory as well. So hey,
if you're if you're listening to this episode as it
comes out, just wait a couple of days and you know,
get the second part. If you're catching up on this
at a later point, I will make sure that there
is a link to the second episode on the landing
(43:57):
page for this episode at stuff to blow your Mind
dot com. That's the mothership. That's where we'll find all
the episodes, all the videos, all the blog post plus
links out to our social media accounts such as Facebook
and Twitter. And if you want to let us know
about any interesting thoughts you have or stories you've ever
experienced about the intersection of religion and technology, or even
the complete synthesis and marriage of religion and technology, email
(44:20):
us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com.
Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
The vault hangs open. Will you walk inside with us? Yes,
do walk inside, because we're gonna be cracking out our
old episodes on Techno Religion, Part one and Part two.
This is gonna be part one. Yeah, so when did
these originally published? So part one here originally published on
(00:28):
June nine. Oh, this was one of my one of
my first episodes way back when I was a brand
new baby on this show. I wanted to talk about
some intersections between technology and religion, so we did, and
Robert it was a lot of fun. I still remember
those days very fondly. Yeah, we got we got two
long episodes out of it. And the cool thing is,
(00:49):
I think we have the potential to do a third
Techno Religion episode in the future. So keep that in
mind as you're listening to all of this, and certainly
shoot us an email if you can think of a
wonderful example of religious technology that we should include. I
think we heard after this episode from at least one
academic who is doing a dissertation on techno religion. Well,
(01:10):
I've forgot about that. We'll have to reach out to
them anyway. Here is our classic episode on techno Religion
for the Masses, Part one, and of course next weekend
if you want to tune back in on Saturday, we
will be re airing part two. So here's part one.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind from how
(01:32):
Stuff Works dot com. We may say that we have
the birth of a new science, a new philosophy, a
new life. The time of deliverance has come at last,
and henceforward the career of humanity is upward and onward,
(01:54):
a mighty, a noble, and a godlike career. All the
revelations of spiritual as them heretofore, all the control of
spirits over mortals, and the instruction and discipline they have
given us, have only paved the way, as it were,
for the advent of a great practical movement, such as
the world little dreams of though it has long deeply
(02:16):
yearned for it, and agonized and groaned away its life
because it did not come sooner. And this new motive
power is to lead the way in the great, speedily
coming salvation. It is to be the physical savior of
the race, the history of its inception, its various stages
of progress, and its completion will show the world a
(02:38):
most beautiful and significant analogy to the advent of Jesus
is the spiritual savior of the race. Hence we most
confidently assert that the advent of the science of all sciences,
the philosophy of all philosophies, and the art of all
arts has now fairly commenced. The child is born not
(02:59):
long hence he will go alone. Then he will dispute
with the doctors and the temples of science. And then hey,
welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. Joe, what is what
is going on here? I'm reading a quote. This is
(03:20):
a quote from a Boston newspaper. The June four edition
of a Boston newspaper called the New Era or Heaven
Opened to Man, And this passage was written by a
former Universalist minister named Simon Hewitt. So after this passage,
one skeptical reader named Emma Hardinge commented that quote nothing
(03:41):
could be given further beyond vague hints of what was
to follow. The awful then which broke off breathless at
the contemplation of its own inexpressible possibilities. So all this
preamble to something amazing that's going to change humanity? What
on earth could Simon Wit have been talking about? Well,
(04:03):
he was referring to something that sat inside the upper
room of a large tower overlooking the coast beyond the
town of Lynn, Massachusetts. This is high rock tower. If
you want to look it up, you can see a
picture of this place. It still exists to kind of
get a sense of it. And inside the upper room
of this tower were the fruits of what I would
(04:24):
sort of think of as the ultimate backyard engineering project.
It is like garage engineering gone to the extreme. So
from July eighteen fifty three to the following spring in
eighteen fifty four, a group of universalist reformers and spiritualist
enthusiasts had been building a machine called the New Motor.
(04:45):
And it would be something I'd say, probably never seen
before on earth, an electro mechanical messiah. Yes, which you
know this will bring to mind a number of different
stunning visuals. Would we would like to dissuade you from
We'll make sure we have some links to some images
of the the electrical Messiah in question on the landing
(05:08):
page for this episode. But but if you think about
a Dollec from doctor Who, from Doctor Who, if a
Dollec were to breed with a coffee table, Uh, their
offspring when probably resembled the UH decorated with many like
dangling Christmas ornaments. Yes. Yes, so it's a hybrid of
a coffee table and a dialect decorated for Christmas and
(05:29):
serving as kind of kind of an altarpiece as well.
There's certainly an altarpiece vibe to this creation, sure, And
this is bridging two worlds that we tend to see
as sort of I don't know what spectrum it is,
but there, whatever it is, there at the opposite ends
of the spectrum. One is religion and the other is technology.
(05:50):
I mean, we typically think of religion as a very
low tech affair. You tend to go into churches, I
don't know, maybe not some churches these days, but you
see a lot of stuff that recalls an earlier time.
And our religious texts in most of the major religions
of the world are very ancient, and thus the metaphors
in which we talk about our religions tend to be
(06:11):
very ancient, and technology is you know, it's the very
essence of what is new and what the future is.
I mean, what is science fiction that imagines the future
usually focused on its new technology? Yeah, I mean most
of the major world religions. Yeah, they're based on ancient
cosmologies that sometimes we're okay with updating. Uh. Generally, at
(06:33):
certain points in the past we will say, all right,
we're gonna actually change this a little bit to the
fit how we live now. But for the most part, yeah,
they're rooted in the past, and technology is ever rooted
in the president in the future. Right, But today we
want to discuss what happens when you cram the ends
of that spectrum together and you create techno religion. So
(06:54):
what happens when technology changes religions, what happens when technology
becomes a component of religious practice, and what happens when
technology becomes a god or messiah in itself? Right, And
this is something that has been happening for ages. Uh.
If you think of technology and the broader sentence especially,
humans have always been developing new technologies, developing gadgets, developing
(07:19):
um more advanced ways of just looking at the world.
Around them and manipulating the world around them. And this
has always gone hand in hand with our ability to
understand the purpose of life and the purpose of of
our existence here on earth. Yeah. And the concept of
purpose is also built into the idea of technology, because
we typically think of technology as like a machine or
(07:41):
a mechanism that does a particular job. But if you
look at the Standard Dictionary definition of technology, it's going
to say something like the practical application of scientific knowledge
toward a purpose. So keep all of that in mind.
Keep those definitions in mind as we explore the convergence
of technology and religion. Yeah. So I was wondering, what
are some of the earliest examples of the religious use
(08:04):
of a machine? Like you can only think back so far.
I mean, of course, nowadays people might I don't know,
read devotional literature on their iPad or something. But is
there anything people have been doing for hundreds or thousands
of years with machines to help them in their spiritual journeys. Yes.
In fact, we have a couple of really good examples
of this, the first of which is the prayer wheel,
(08:27):
which I imagine most people have seen images or footage
of these, particularly if you've ever traveled into the into
into East Asia, or or had any kind of contact
with with with Buddhism, but these tend to be We're
talking about a wheel and spindle composed of various materials.
Who find a made made out of you know, ornate metals,
(08:49):
You'll find them made out of stone, You'll find the
made out of leather and cotton and it Uh, it's
a physical manifestation of the turning wheel of dharma in Buddhism. Okay,
so physically to picture this is it going to be
kind of like one of those like game prize wheels. Uh, sort,
I mean it's the it's it's not positioned vertically, it's
(09:09):
positioned h's horizontally. It kind of if you were just
an outsider looking at it and you knew nothing about
Eastern religion, you might you might equate it with with
some sort of a dude at at a child's playground, right,
just something that seems like you just spin it and
it's cool to spin. But of course it has far
more purpose than that within the context of the religion.
(09:30):
Um So the wheel of Dharma, Yeah, the wheel of
dharma and uh, and it's all tied in with accumulating
good karma, purifying bad karma, because you you spin this wheel,
and in spinning the prayer wheel, you are assisting yourself
with the with with with the purging of bad karma
and the accumulation of the good. And this is accomplished
(09:53):
by the fact that I mean on top of the
wheel being this, uh, this, this gadget, this device that
that that presents this um this cosmological idea. The prayers
are also filled with up to a mile of prayers. Um,
so we're talking mantras and sutras generally written in Sanskrit
and uh. The prayers are recited each time the wheel
(10:17):
makes a revolution. So a pilgrim spins the wheel and
with each spin helps helps them gain merit and to
concentrate the mind on the mantras and sutras that are
being re enacted by the wheel. Okay, so much in
the way that say, a lever or a pulley might
upgrade our ability to do physical work, this wheel can
(10:39):
upgrade our ability to do spiritual work. Yeah, it's I
guess one way to think if it would be think
about a cassette player. Right, Um, say you're just a
really huge fan of I don't know what's your what's
your favorite metal album, your favorite rock and roll album album? Uh,
Dope Throne, Dope Throne by Electric Wizard. Okay, right, Well,
(11:00):
let's say you're particularly love Dope Throne, and so you
have a cassette of Dope Throne. But that cassette doesn't
actually play just the But imagine this, The mere act
of that tape filtering through the machine and revolving around
that wheel somehow enacted the spirit of that album for you.
That's the kind of what's going on. So it gives
(11:20):
you the essence or the aura of Dope Throne without
the sounds having to play right And and ideally, I
think my understanding too, is that you would also focus
the mind on Dope Throne. So it's not just saying
I'm turning this machine instead of thinking about it. I'm
doing both. But but where this gets really interesting is
when you, for instance, when you look at the fact
that until the twentieth century, virtually the only Tibetan use
(11:43):
for the wheel was as a device for activating these mantras,
so that the wheel was was virtually virtually went unused
there as a physical tool. It's a technology for you know,
moving things around or crushing things, etcetera. It was used
almost exclusively as a really is technology. Wow yeah um.
(12:03):
Now that's not to say that all prayer wheels are
turned by hand. That's kind of the main one you see,
and it's certainly the one that often makes the biggest
impression visually. That's a money wheel. But there are also
varieties that are turned by fire, water, wind, um, electricity.
Hold on a second, So we've got an electric prayer
(12:23):
karma machine. Yes, yeah, it's And this is where it
gets really interesting because because it's one thing to say,
all right, this one is spun by hand, because also
I'm the human, I mean, the kind of at the
center of this religious thing, right, It's another to say
the fire, the wind, or the air is going to
move because those are natural forces created by the gods. Right. Yeah,
Well that makes me think of an analogy like if
(12:44):
you look to medieval Catholicism, where you might have chantries
that are where it's ay, a wealthy person, Remember, the
gentry could pay people to pray, and the more prayers
that the monks would say in these chantry is based
on the amount they paid, could lessen their stay in purgatory.
I wonder if you know, if they've had this kind
of technology at the time, would they think, well, would
(13:07):
it be okay to say the number of prayer machines
you build could lessen your stay in purgatory? Um? Could like,
could you get one of those texts to speech synthesizers
to say prayers? You know, I don't know. I would
definitely love to hear from someone, uh with more insight
into the the rules of of Tibetan Buddhism and these
(13:29):
prayer wheels, because it would seem like you could just
buy a bunch of these things and just set them up,
plug them in, and let them go and then maybe
just completely externalize your your karma situation. Um. Yeah. They
call these tardo corlos, and they can keep them running
twenty four hours a day using a four point five
vault DC electric current. Uh and and and so yeah,
(13:53):
you can just keep it running all the time, presuming
when you're sleeping, when you're eating, when you're doing things
that I assume do not involve the the the mental concentration.
It's like a karmic force field generator exactly. Yeah. And
this is even crazier when you think of another technological
uh innovation that you see with the prayer of wheels,
and that's that you can also find microfilm prayer wheels
(14:16):
that contain more, uh came, even more than a million
mantras inside them. So yeah, so you between microfilm technology
and uh and just simple electric uh you know technology
to create a spinning wheel, Um, you can really sort
of change your your karma game. It seems the micro
film is especially interesting to me. It seems like that's
(14:38):
almost like a religious implementation of the idea of nanotechnology,
like accomplishing more in a smaller space. It makes me
wonder and and perhaps someone has has done something along
these lines. But why even deal with the physical wheel?
What if you took the wheel virtually you could have
I mean, what would the limits there would be pretty
much be no limits, right, I mean, you could have
(14:59):
and the an absurd number of mantras moving through a
wheel at pretty much any kind of rate you want. Like,
you could create a computer program that executes a subroutine
that is just a list of these mantras and you
could tell it to loop infinitely. Yeah, kind of a
karmic defragging system just running in the background out of
(15:19):
your your computer at all times. Yeah. And of course,
so this is kind of our outsider's perspective. But I'm
sure somebody who is actually believing in and using these
sorts of prayer wheels would have a pretty good and
well thought out explanation for why you can use technology
to achieve a karmically significant event in one way but
not in another way. It might totally make sense in
(15:41):
terms of how they interpret their spirituality. Yeah, I mean,
I think, I think anytime you see this convergence of
technology and religion, it becomes the domain of of the
the priest or the priest class, or somebody in some
sort of you know, clerical authority to say, all right,
this is the line, this is this is how far
technology can come into the sanctuary. It's okay to you know,
(16:05):
read your hymn or your Bible on an iPad, but
it's not okay to do X, y or z. It
makes me want to ask the question why on that
spectrum I talked about earlier where we have, you know,
the ancient religion on one hand and the new technology
on the other, why are they so far apart? Like,
what is the inherent profanity in technology? It does kind
(16:26):
of seem crass when you see, like when you see
a religious service taking place on a JumboTron or something
like that. Why is that, like what is wrong with
the technology or what is necessarily unspiritual about it. I
don't know the answer, but there seems to be an
intuition like that that we have. I guess so much
of it is rooted in religion, a tradition, you know.
(16:46):
I mean, like I've definitely had that moment before. I've
been at a church service and the person giving the
sermon or you know, officiating at a wedding has been
reading off of a kindle or a or a you know,
a path of something. It looks inappropriate. Yeah, I mean,
I think it's a lot of it has to do
with the fact that religions tend to be inherently traditional,
(17:07):
especially the older traditional religions. So just the the image
of modern technology, especially when you think of technology, is
this thing that's such a mastery uh of you know,
of of human skill and ability to see that uh
you know, shoehorned in with these things that are supposedly
given to us from some sort of a higher power. Yeah.
(17:29):
Though I wonder if people in the ancient world would
have thought about it in the same way. I mean,
this again calls to mind something we talked about the
last time I was on the show, when we talked
about eclipses, which is the Anti Kither mechanism is an
ancient Greek device that's often referred to as the world's
oldest computer or the first computer. And now obviously it
didn't have microprocessors or anything, but this was a device
(17:51):
that comes from more than two thousand years ago, is
found in a shipwreck in the Mediterranean, and it was
an ancient mechanical computer for for computing the locations of
celestial objects and for like predicting lunar eclipses and solar
eclipses in the future. And the interesting thing about this
is it's an amazingly advanced piece of technology for the time,
(18:13):
just astoundingly advanced. But these events, these celestial mechanics had
religious significance to the people who used it. Yeah, I mean,
it's certainly something we discussed in that eclipse episode. When
when you look back at ancient societies and even not
so ancient societies, UM astronomy and UH and cosmology are
are so linked together, like it becomes the domain of
(18:35):
the of the priest and the clergy to know what
the stars are doing, to track the stars, so that
we know what the calendar is telling us and when
certain rites should be observed. Well, that makes me wonder
if star tracking technology has entered religion, even ancient religion,
in the same way the prayer wheel did. Yes, and
that brings us to the astrolabe. The astrolabe. Yeah, and
(18:56):
now everyone I think has probably seen an image of
an astrolabe in their finer forms. These are just works
of just pure art. I'm going to tell you what
a picture tell me how far off I am. Basically,
it's it looks kind of like that compass you used
to use in middle school math classes to draw a
perfect circle with another little half moon piece on it.
(19:17):
Is that completely wrong kind of yeah, with varying levels
of artistry and a lot of figures and sliding mechanisms. Yeah,
it's a small circular device. And these would usually usually
these would be made of wood or brass um and
they date back over two thousand years. The concept seems
to originate around three thirty BC, and they were perfected
(19:40):
by the Arabs in the ninth century, and they remained
at the basic astronomer's tool for the next seven hundred years.
It's essentially a model of the stars in the sky,
which can be moved to show where the stars will
be at any time of the year, and the reverse
side of the astrolabe concerns the position of the sun
in the Okay, so it's a lot like the end
(20:01):
to get through a mechanism in a way. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's portable and has a large display. On top
of that, if you have a really nice model, it's
a beautiful work of art, something you might easily show
it off at the dinner table. Uh. It's arguably one of,
if not the first, personal computer mobile carrying it with
you doing what you need to do in the course
of a day. Now, the question is would it become
(20:23):
overheated if sitting on your lap, if it was made
out of metal and you were sit seated in the sun,
I would say yes, Um, yeah, that's a sterility hazard. It. Uh.
You couldn't get an app for this thing, but it
had a number of features just by virtue of how
it contract the heavens. You can tell the date and time,
You could calculate distances. It could be used in determining
(20:46):
a building height, surveying longitude, latitude, altitude horoscopes. Um. You
can also figure out the position of the planets. But
then on top of this there were various occults usages,
So it gets a little bit into religion there. But
the most notable function where we see the astrolaid becoming
a piece of religious technology is in its ability to
(21:09):
determine Islamic prayer times and determine the direction to Mecca. Okay,
so this is actually that the piece of technology itself
doesn't necessarily have religious significance, but there's a fact you
need to know to execute your religion. You know perfectly
the way you want to do it. If you want
(21:30):
to face Mecca as well as you can, why not
have a machine to help you really hone that piece
of information and get it as accurate as possible. Yeah,
I mean it in a way, it really becomes an
essential piece of technology in Islam because a long place
is a high importance on the position of the believer
in time and space. For starters, uh, the s alot times,
(21:50):
these are the five prayers a day plus the Friday prayer.
They depend It depends on a combination of clock time
and sundial time to determine exactly when you should take place.
So it concerns the exact coordinates for a given location. Um.
Because again it's not just it's not just arbitrary about
when the prayer times are they have they are specific
depending on where you are in the world, about where
(22:13):
you are in terms of sometime. And on top of this,
the faithful has to know exactly where they are in
relation to the Kaaba in Mecca so that they can
face that direction during these prayers. Yeah, I think that's fascinating.
And unlike the prayer wheel, which itself does some sort
of religious or spiritual work, this is sort of like
a technology that we use to be most properly informed
(22:35):
about how to do the rituals that you would be
doing anyway, because really a lot of the problems that
occur in religion they occur as the believer moves farther
away in in time or space. Right, you're you're you're
farther away from Mecca. Uh, it's harder to determine exactly
where you are. Uh. You're not necessarily going to have
(22:57):
somebody signaling the prayer times each day from a power,
so it falls on you to figure it out yourself.
And uh, and then that's where the technology becomes extremely useful.
But of course there are lots of external influences on
(23:17):
how we practice our religions. A lot of these influences
are actually going to be technological. One of the things
that I thought was interesting was to think about writing
itself as a technology. Now, writing is so crucial to
the way we think of most of the major religions
of the world today, because you've got the Torah for Jews,
(23:40):
you've got the you know, the Hebrew Bible plus the
New Testament for Christians, You've got the Kuran for Muslims,
and and of course there are texts that are central
to Eastern religions as well, the Ramayana and the Mahabarata
to be specific. Certainly. Yeah, and so we think about
religion as a very text based of fair but there's
(24:01):
really no reason it has to be. I mean, religions
can be transmitted orally through culture. That can be systems
of cultural practices that don't necessarily have to be written
down or encoded anywhere. But for some reason, most of
the world's major religions have a strong textual component, and
I wonder how it changed the way we practiced religion
(24:25):
when writing came into humanity, because writing, I mean, human
civilization is much older than writing. Of course, human life
in general, human culture is even older than civilization, so
much older than writing. So we can only really imagine,
I think, I mean, I'm sure that something like a
cultural anthropologist or an archaeologists could tell us more about
(24:45):
how they think writing might have changed the way we
practice religions, but I really have no idea. Well, I mean,
I think it hard. You're probably doing on the situation
of of of the expansion of memory, right, because writing
is in essence the ability to externalized human memory. Before writing,
how we that we can only contain as much as
(25:06):
could fit in a human mind, or if maybe if
you were, you know, really skilled at you might compartmentalize it,
right and have one person deal with the with these
memories versus the other, almost a fahrenheit for fifty one
kind of situation. Yeah, So before writing, it's you're limited
by just the power of the human mind, remember, and
then the ability to pass that on to us, which
(25:27):
of course we know from everyday experience, but also from
actual studies. We we don't pass on information all that
faithfully if we don't write it down right, memory itself
is not set in stone, and uh, and then there's
kind of a telephone game anytime we pass something on anything. Really,
anytime you remember something, you're taking it out, you're potentially
changing it and then putting it back in. So yeah,
(25:48):
I have to imagine, though, of course I could be
wrong that, uh, that as much as religious beliefs kind
of change from generation to generation today, I have to
imagine they changed even more and much more quickly in
times before there were sort of like texts to anchor them. Yeah,
before you could actually set a religion in stone. I
(26:09):
imagine a religion really just by virtue of how we
remembered it. It changed with us so very fluid. So
some of these problems we run into where we're saying,
all right, we're trying to apply ancient Babylonian cosmology to
modern times. Part of that is by virtue of depending
upon ancient Babylonian cosmology is set in stone, and then
(26:30):
you know and then that that recording of it is
considered sacred and holy. Right, So these ancient writing technologies,
we of course had the invention of alphabets, and I
think it's very fair to consider an alphabet of technology.
But then on top of that, you just had the
preservation technology. So you had scrolls, you eventually had cadsseas,
you had you know, tablets and carving and and all
(26:51):
the different pictograms and libraries and and every bit of
technology we had. But there was one big thing I
think that that was the main textual technology that really
revolutionized the world, and that would be the printing press. Yes, yeah,
we're talking about the mid fifteenth century in Europe particularly
called Gutenberg. Gutenberg, yeah, um, and his effect on the Bible,
(27:15):
the Gutenberg Bible, because prior to this, any given Western
manuscript had to be copied by hand, and it was
generally this was something that was handled by by the clergy.
Right can you imagine this living in a world where
so you look to the church as your you know,
as your authority on all things spiritual, uh, and probably
(27:36):
more than that also all things government in some cases
and and all that. But they have the Bible as
the authority that's interpreted by the church. And so what
is the Bible, Well, it is hand to copy documents
that most people don't have much access to They might
be because they're so rare. I mean they're kept in
script or i ums or libraries or these places that
(27:59):
the average per and wouldn't have any access to. Yeah,
they're highly fetishized. Uh, it's it's just not something that
the average person would have access to. And on top
of that, the lack of a printing press means that
there's really not much distributed commentary on the documents either.
And this is something that uh, a lot of people
would say played a big role in the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation,
(28:22):
the Enlightenment, scientific Revolution. If you just look at the
Protestant Reformation, you have to imagine the effect that the
printing press had on not just the Bible itself, but
on the distribution of Reformation propaganda. And I don't use
the word propaganda there in a negative sense. I think
that's just the term for all of the ways in
(28:42):
which Reformation ideas were being spread throughout Europe at the time. Yeah,
it's really the kind of technological advancement in mass communication
that you can you can really only compare it to,
if not the emergence of writing to begin with, and
perhaps the Internet age like that, like such a big
movement in such a drastic change in our ability to
(29:03):
communicate with one another. Speaking of the scientific revolution, Uh,
that makes me think about the you know, the whole
notion of a clockwork universe, which I'm not gonna get
too deep into that here that could easily be its
own podcast. But everyone's heard the idea of a creator
God as a watchmaker, right, Um, this creator makes the
(29:24):
perfect mechanical time piece that is the universe and then
just lets it go. Maybe winds it first, I guess
hopefully winds it and then lets it go because it
doesn't need to to be rewound or anything. It works
perfectly as it's created. And this is an example of,
you know, a technological society, A society that has these
technological ideas in its head can't help but think about, um,
(29:46):
the unseen world in terms of those same mechanisms, right.
I mean, it's very common to want to describe the
actions of God in terms that we can understand. And
what do we understand these days? And making machines scenes? Yeah,
I haven't seen a lot of this, but I wonder
to what extent, like modern like email or jargon, etcetera,
(30:06):
has has made its way into you know, just average
say Christian sermons, Like, does anyone talk about um communication
with God, prayer itself being a form of email. I
do think a lot of the jokes now displayed on
church signs come from email forwards. Yeah, indeed, I believe
I saw one chart church marquee here around town a
(30:28):
few years back with a talked about sending God some
quote an email, which I thought when I when I
read an email, I was instantly thinking, that sounds like
a great name for some sort of a wrestling move,
finishing maneuver right where you need somebody in the head,
and you call it an email. But there of course
talking about kneeling, uh, and then praying, which is a
(30:48):
form of an email. That's adorable an email. But getting
back to the ways that external advances in technology have
affected the progression of religions, one of the ways that
I think is very significant is looking at the way
technology has changed the way we do work, which of
course is the main thing technology does, and how that
(31:11):
affects religious beliefs about how we should do work. Oh,
you're talking of course about Shabbat, right, of course, So
if you look at the way some Jews interpret teachings
in the Torah on what should be done or not
done on the Sabbath. There have been lots of ways
in which new technologies have sort of intruded on the
(31:34):
traditional understanding of what is accepted and forbidden to do
on the day of rest. Right, this is sundown Friday
to send down Saturday, in which Orthodox user forbidden to work, right,
which is interesting technology, right uh? And to drive vehicle
of course, right. And so of course what you can
guess from drive a vehicle is that a lot of
(31:55):
these things aren't directly commandments stated in the tour itself
as an ancient document, but their interpretations that have come
from the rabbis throughout the years about how we should
apply the laws of the Torah to the new technological
world we find ourselves in. Right, because just by the
basic laws and like the thirty nine different activities that
(32:16):
are off limits, um, it would mean that you can't
cook or light a fire, and by extension of that,
the interpretation is that there would be no moving electricity
through a circuit. Okay. So by this interpretation, really, if
you want to be observant on the Sabbath, you should
not press a button that causes an electrical device to
turn on. Right, And that's where it gets kind of
(32:37):
tricky because there's some obvious examples, uh that you know,
you could say, well, don't turn on the vacuum cleaner. Okay,
well I'm not gonna turn on the vauum cleaner because
I'm also not going to vacuum. But then you gotta
eat on on the on the Sabbath, right, So, so
what do you do about opening the refrigerator door? Oh,
because when you open the refrigerator door, a light comes
on exactly. That's your action of opening the door that
(32:59):
has cause that light to ignite. Yeah. So I mean
for the longest there's an easy workaround, right. You could
either unscrew the bulb or you just you tape up
that little button right, right. So those are some pretty
simple workarounds for that some orthodox chose might use. But
it gets more complicated than that in some scenarios. Right.
For instance, another classic workaround was involved the use of
(33:23):
an oven, right, because you need to heat up food.
You can't light your stove. You can't activate the oven
by pushing the button. But if you activate the oven,
you turn it on before sundown. Um on Friday and
just leave it running through and keep it warm, you know,
through sundown on Saturday. Then you can make use of
that heat. You're you're just setting an emotion beforehand and
(33:46):
then picking up after the Sabbath is done. I'd imagine
a lot of ovens today are programmed not to do
that because they don't want it would be a safety
hazard to just leave an oven on and leave town
or something. Yeah, so they probably have like an automatic
shut off, right they do, Yeah, an automatic safety shut off.
And when they started using these, you know, they were
getting complaints from people who who needed uh to keep
(34:09):
their oven on in order to observe the religious practices.
So this is where we get Sabbath mode on on
various appliances, Uh not where they play Sabbath albums. Right,
So that would that was certainly an innovation that would
be that would be great on modern Welcome in my house,
a black Sabbath mode on your your dishwasher, etcetera. But no,
this would involve simply a manual override to the safety
(34:32):
features so that you could operate your cooking technology in
accordance with your religious faith. You know, I bet that
there are specific manufacturers that do this. There are and
in fact there's actually something called star K Kosher Certification
for Appliances. Yeah, you can actually go to their their
website it's star uh dash K dot org and they
(34:55):
have a lot of stuff dealing with with kosher foods,
what have you. But also at a whole system, a
whole section on appliances where you can look up the
appliances and see what they're their, their potential Sabbath modes are,
how to activate them, how to use them in accordance
with these rules and regulations. Another classic example about the
(35:20):
Shabbat and technology is the use of an elevator. Right, reasonly,
you need to use an elevator to move around in
a high rise building. How do you do it if
you can't push a button? While you just simply program
the elevator, uh, during the Sabbat to go from floor
to floor to floor to floor, up and down, up
and down NonStop. And then you just get on and
you just ride the ride. Wow. Yeah, so I might
(35:41):
be a long ride and a long wait, but at
least you can observe your your practices exactly. Another bit
of religious technology wounded to touch on real quick is
a sixteenth century clockwork monk created by one La Torriana,
who was a mechanic for Spanish Emperor Charles the Fifth,
the emperor's son, King Philip the Second, the story goes,
(36:03):
was praying at the bedside of his own dying son
and he's getting desperate, so he's making promises to the divine.
He's promising a miracle for a miracle. Uh it is
child survives, he ends up recovering, and he has to
keep his promise. What kind of a miracle can can
a king actually do? Well? Obviously, the king is gonna
um his mechanical constelled as a mechanic and get him
(36:24):
to create a miracle as a as kind of an
offering right as a as as a thank you to
the divine. And so that's where when Ello comes in
and he creates a key wound spring operated automaton and
a really complicated automaton at that. Yeah, I've seen pictures
of this and it's fascinating. You can, like, I think
(36:45):
there's a little compartment where you can peek in on
the inside of it, and it's got gears, and I
don't I couldn't begin to understand how it works on
the inside. But what does it actually do? Well? I
mean it it walks around, uh kind of a square shape.
It strikes its chest with its right arm. It raises
and lowers a small cross and rosary with its left.
(37:05):
It occasionally kisses the cross. It turns and nods its head,
It rolls its eyes, and it mouths you know, silent
prayers and whatnot. So so wait, you said it strikes
its chest, So is this is this auto automatic self flagellation.
I don't think it's quite flagellation, but that would be
a different That would be an interesting different. Yea. Um,
(37:29):
But some of you probably heard a Radio Lab episode
a few years back where they did like a short
profile of this piece and sort of the mysteries around it,
because there are a lot of questions regarding, you know,
why why was this created? What's the exact purpose? You know,
what was the mindset in creating it? Because it's simply
an offering, uh, you know to God. Is it's a
(37:49):
is it something you're supposed to put on the table
and you also around in prayer, pray while observing it? Right,
my question would be does it do something relevant or
is it more kind of like when a painter sculptor
would create a work of art and dedicate it to
the Lord. I think that seems to be the prevalent interpretation,
though in the light of what we talked about with
(38:09):
the prayer wheel, it's it's tempting to want to go
that direction with it, you know, and think of it
as a think that, like its prayers had some efficacy. Yeah,
I mean, I'm tempting. I really want to believe that
I can, in good uh, in good faith, put that forward.
Is is something that I think or that even the
majority of the experts think that that was in the
mind of of the king or the mechanic responsible. But
(38:33):
you can't help but but wonder exactly how the mindset
of the mechanic played into it. And of course, in
our modern time, UM, we've plenty of examples of of
prayer taking place online U prayer groups, etcetera. Sharing their
concerns via the Internet. And I don't know to what
extent they can you know, they ever consider the email
(38:55):
itself a prayer. But but certainly that seems like a
lot that will blurn more and more as that becomes
like standard practice, right because certainly, uh, at some point
the written word uh became holy. Right, and then I
can't help but but imagine that in the advent of
the printing press, maybe initially the printed word was a
(39:16):
little less holy, a little more manufactured. Sure than that
becomes uh, you know, de facto holy as well. Right, Well,
this is the other side of the advance of the
textual technology uh progression, because religion is so inherently social
and in most the way most people practice it, and
it's something that deeply does involve communication between groups and
(39:39):
so allowing greater communication between people who think alike or
want to offer each other religious advice or interpretation or consolation.
The Internet is obviously going to be a huge explosion
in that. But it's also not just a peer to
peer exchange, right. So you can have your sort of
like your religious you know, emails goal where you forward
(40:01):
each other the things that you know you want to
show to your friends and your peers in the church.
You can also have services provided by church officials over
telecommunications links. Indeed, and uh, you know, here's a question
that comes to mind here if it's if it's blasphemous
to um, to burn or to face a religious text
(40:21):
such as the Bible or the Koran. What have you
deleted an e book of it? Oh? Man, is that's
this that blasphemous? I don't know, I don't know. I'm
sure some people have opinions on that. Yeah, I I
personally do not. Hey, and we haven't even mentioned exorcism online, right, Well,
that would be one of those services that could be
offered by you know, your religious official who might be
(40:44):
so far away. What if they're in a cabin in
Alaska that hopefully has a fast Internet connection, but they
want to offer the spiritual service that you really need,
and that might be the exorcism of a demon or
multiple demons from your person. Right, And there are individuals
who have and continue to offer online exorcism services. Back
(41:04):
in two thousand nine, famed Israelian Kabbala master Rabbi Botsfrey
attempted to remove a dibbic, a disembodied spirit from a
Brazilian man via the Internet. And more recently we've seen
evangelical Reverend Bob Larson offering exorcisms for a fee, of course,
via Skype. And this, uh, this was actually featured on
(41:25):
the Daily Show several months back. Yeah, so imagine I
didn't see that imagine a number of our listeners caught
it there. Yeah, that sounds way more interesting than the
video conferencing that we have here at work. Yeah, But
you know, ultimately, what's I don't see what the big
big deal is because if if an exorcism involved like
this right by which you're driving a spiritual invader out,
(41:48):
that's essentially that the demon is kind of telecommuting through
an individual, right, Yeah, Yeah, that makes sense. I mean,
it seems to me that the ideology behind an exorcism
would suggest that it's a it's an interpersonal connection that
breaks the power of the demon. It's sort of the
spiritual or emotional or intellectual presence of the clerical official
that can drive the demon out, not so much the
(42:09):
physical presence, like why would they really need to be
in the room. Yeah, I mean it reminds me of
I think we both recently rewatched portions are the entirety
of the Hell Razor Bloodlines movie, where an individual, of course,
you know religious technology, right, the limit configuration is a
little mechanical device and you solve it, and the demon
(42:30):
show up, the cinobyte show up. And in that movie,
there's an individual that's cheating, right, by trying by solving
it virtually or remotely by use of a robot. Right, yes,
he's he's using essentially the technology of a bomb disposal robot,
but to solve the lament configuration puzzle box and workroom.
Initially it works, but then some some people who are
(42:51):
not very technologically savvy or like, well, we gotta solve
this problem. They opened the door to the room where
the cinobytes are contained, and then there's a problem. But
that's interesting. Initially they're able to outmaneuver the technologically empowered
demons that are the cinabytes via more advanced technology. Right,
they can put those cinobytes in a box inside a box,
(43:15):
exactly inside a box. All right. So that's gonna be
the end of part one here. This is very much
again a two part series. Yeah, and if you want
to hear the conclusion of that story that we started
this episode with the construction of the electro mechanical Messiah
at the High Rock Tower in Lynn, Massachusetts, that's gonna
be in our next episode. So that's going to be
(43:36):
in part two. Indeed, we're also gonna get into some
some wonderful UFO and scientology territory as well. So hey,
if you're if you're listening to this episode as it
comes out, just wait a couple of days and you know,
get the second part. If you're catching up on this
at a later point, I will make sure that there
is a link to the second episode on the landing
(43:57):
page for this episode at stuff to blow your Mind
dot com. That's the mothership. That's where we'll find all
the episodes, all the videos, all the blog post plus
links out to our social media accounts such as Facebook
and Twitter. And if you want to let us know
about any interesting thoughts you have or stories you've ever
experienced about the intersection of religion and technology, or even
the complete synthesis and marriage of religion and technology, email
(44:20):
us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.