June 9, 2015 • 43 mins
We often think of technology and religion as distinct and separate worlds, but what happens when they converge? Join Robert and Joe 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.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. We may say that we have the
birth of a new science, a new philosophy, with a
new life. The time of deliverance has come at last,
(00:23):
and henceforward the career of humanity is upward and onward
a mighty, a noble, and a godlike career. All the
revelations of spiritualism 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
(00:44):
of a great practical movement, such as the world little
dreams of, though it has long deeply 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
(01:05):
history of its inception, its various stages of progress, and
its completion will show the world a 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
(01:29):
now fairly commenced. The child is born, not long hints
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
(01:51):
on here? I'm reading a quote. This is a quote
from a Boston newspaper, the June fifty 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 could
(02:15):
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 Hewitt have been talking about? Well, he was
(02:37):
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 sort of think of as
(02:58):
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 and it would be something
(03:20):
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 which we would
like to dissuade you from. We'll make sure we have
some links to an images of the the electrical Messiah
(03:41):
in question on the landing page for this episode. But
but if you think about a dollec from doctor Who,
from Doctor who, if a dollec or to breed with
a coffee table, uh their offspring, and they probably resembled
the be 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 serving as kind of kind
(04:04):
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. I mean, we typically
think of religion as a very low tech affair. You
(04:29):
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 very ancient. And technology
is you know, it's the very essence of what is
(04:51):
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 you have based on ancient cosmologies that sometimes we're
okay with updating um Generally at 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.
(05:13):
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 what happens when technology changes religions, what
happens when technology becomes a component of religious practice, and
(05:36):
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
um more advanced ways of just looking at the world
(05:57):
around them and manipulating the world around them. And this
is 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 is like a machine or
a mechanism that does a particular job. But if you
(06:17):
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
(06:38):
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,
(07:01):
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,
(07:23):
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 not positioned vertically,
(07:43):
it's positioned, uh, 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.
(08:04):
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
(08:27):
by the fact that I mean on top of the
wheel being this, uh, this, this gadget, this device that
that that represents 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
(08:51):
makes a revolution. So a pilgrim spins the wheel and
with each stin helps helps them gain merit and to
concentrate the mind on the 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
(09:12):
can upgrade our ability to do spiritual work. Yeah, it's
I guess one way to think of it would be
think about a cassette player. Right. Um, So you're you're
just a really huge fan of I don't know, what's
your fite. What's your favorite metal album, your favorite rock
and roll album album? Uh, Dope Throne, Dope Throne, who
Electric Wizard? Okay, alright, well let's say you particularly love
(09:35):
Dope Throne, and so you have a cassette of Dope Throne,
But that cassette doesn't actually play just that. 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. Okay, that's the kind of what's
going on. So it gives you the essence or the
(09:55):
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 for the wheel was as a
(10:18):
device for activating these mantras, so that the wheel was
was virtually virtually went unused there as a physical, uh tool,
as a technology for you know, moving things around or
crushing things, etcetera. It was used almost exclusively as a
religious technology. Yeah. Um, Now that's not to say that
all prayer wheels are turned by hand. That's kind of
(10:41):
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
karma machine. Yes, yeah, And this is where it gets
(11:01):
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 you look
to medieval Catholicism, where you might have chantryes that are
(11:23):
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 it
be okay to say the number of prayer machines you
(11:44):
build could lessen your stay in purgatory? Um? Could like,
could you get one of those texts to speech synthesizers
is 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 prayer wheels, because it would seem like you could
(12:05):
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 thardo cor lows and that you can
keep them running twenty four hours a day using a
four point five vault DC electric current. Uh and and
(12:26):
and so yeah, 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
mental concentration. It's like a karmic force field generator exactly. Yeah.
And this is even crazier when you think of another
technological uh uh innovation that you see with the prayer wheels,
(12:47):
and that's that you can also find microfilm prayer wheels.
They contain more uh came, even more than a million
mantras inside them. So yeah, so you between microfilm technology
and uh and 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
(13:10):
is especially interesting to me. It seems like that's 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
(13:31):
no limits, right, I mean, you could have 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
(13:52):
just running in the background out of 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.
(14:13):
It might totally make sense in 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
(14:35):
the sanctuary. It's okay to you know, 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
(14:55):
inherent profanity in technology? It does kind of see 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
(15:16):
we have. I guess so much of it is rooted
in religion tradition, you know. 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 her
officiating at a wedding has been reading off of a
kindle or a or a you know, a path of
some good. It looks inappropriate. Yeah, I mean, I think
(15:37):
it's a lot of it has to do with the
fact that religions tend to be inherently traditional, 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, a human skill
and ability to see that uh you know, shoehorned in
(15:58):
with these things that are just supposedly giving to us
from some sort of higher power. Yeah. No, 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 Kithera mechanism is an ancient Greek device.
It's often referred to as the world's oldest computer or
(16:20):
the first computer. And now obviously it didn't have microprocessors
or anything. But this was a device that comes from
more than two thousand years ago, was 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.
(16:42):
And the interesting thing about this is it's an amazingly
advanced piece of technology for the time, 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 and cosmology are are so linked together,
(17:07):
like it becomes the domain of 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 rights should be observed. Well,
that makes me wonder if star treking 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,
(17:30):
and 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.
(17:51):
Is that completely wrong kind of yeah, with varying levels
of artistry and a lot of figures and sliding mechanisms. Okay, yeah,
it 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 thir BC, and they were perfected by
(18:14):
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 moon. Okay, so it's a lot like the
(18:35):
end 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 win, 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
(18:56):
it become overheated if sitting on your lap, if it
was made out of metal and you were seated in
the sign, 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 contract the heavens. You can tell
the date and time. You could calculate distances to be
(19:18):
used in determine 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
(19:38):
a piece of religious technology is in its ability to
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 ex acute your religion. You know
(20:02):
perfectly the way you want to do it. If you
want 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, 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,
(20:24):
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 they 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, where you
(20:46):
are in terms of sun time. 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 used to be most properly informed
(21:09):
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, Sure, 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
(21:30):
have somebody signaling the prayer times each day from a tower,
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
(21:51):
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,
(22:13):
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 Mahabata
specific certainly, Yeah, and so we think about religion as
a very text based affair. But there's really no reason
(22:35):
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
(22:55):
changed the way we practiced religion 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 and archael just
(23:17):
could tell us more about how they think writing might
have changed the way we practice religions. But I really
have no idea. Well, I mean, I think at hard
you're probably dealing on the situation of of of the
expansion of memory, right, because writing is in essence, the
ability to externalize human memory. Before writing, how we that
(23:38):
we can only contain as much as could fit in
a human mind, or if maybe if you were, you know,
really skilled, that you might compartmentalize it, right and have
one person deal with the with these memories versus the other.
Almost a Fahrenheit four 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
(23:59):
pass that on to us, which 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 and then there's kind of a telephone game anytime
we passed something on anything. Really, anytime you remember something,
you're taking it out, you're potentially changing it. And then
(24:20):
putting it back in. So yeah, 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
(24:40):
could actually set a religion in stone. I 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 and
ancient Babylonian cosmology is set in stone, and you know,
(25:03):
and 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 caudessease, you had you know, tablets and
carving and all the different pictograms and libraries and and
(25:27):
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, the Gutenberg Bible because
(25:50):
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 edge and 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 more
than that also all things government in some cases and
(26:12):
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 copied documents that most
people don't have much access to. They might be because
they're so rare. I mean they're kept in scriptory ums
or libraries or these places that the average person wouldn't
(26:33):
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 brnning 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, the Enlightenment, scientific Revolution. If
(26:58):
you just look at the Protestant Reformation, shan, 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 which Reformation ideas were
being spread throughout Europe at the time. Yeah, it's really
(27:20):
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 the like, such a big movement and
such a drastic change in our ability to communicate with
one another. Speaking of the Scientific Revolution, uh, that makes
(27:41):
me think about the you know, the whole notion of
a clockwork universe, which I'm not going to 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 perfect mechanical
time piece that is the universe and then just lets
(28:01):
it go. Maybe winds it first, I guess hopefully winds
it and then lets it go because it doesn't need
to be rewound or anything. It works perfectly as it's created.
And this isn't 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, the unseen world in
terms of those same mechanisms, right. I mean, it's very
(28:24):
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 change? Yeah, I haven't seen
a lot of this, but I wonder to what extent,
like modern like email or jargon, etcetera, has has made
its way into you know, just average say Christian sermons,
(28:45):
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 coming
from email forwards. Indeed, I believe I saw one chart
church marquis here around town a few years back with
a talked about sending God some quote an email, which
(29:09):
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. Right there, of course, talking about kneeling, uh,
and then praying, which is a form of n eemail. Uh.
That's adorable an email. But getting back to the ways
that external advances in technology have affected the progression of religions,
(29:33):
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 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
(29:55):
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 traditional understanding of what is accepted and
forbidden to do on the day of rest. Right, This
is sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, in which Orthodox use
(30:17):
a 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 vehicle is that
a lot of these things aren't directly commandments stated in
the Torah itself as an ancient document, but their interpretations
that have come from the rabbis throughout the years about
(30:40):
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 are awful 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,
(31:02):
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 tricky, because there's some obvious examples that you know,
you could say, well, don't turn on the vacuum cleaner. Okay,
Well I'm not gonna turn the vacuum cleaner because I'm
also not going to vacuum, but then you gotta eat
on on the on the Sabbath, right, So, so what
(31:23):
do you do about opening the refrigerator door? Oh, because
when you open the refrigerator door a light comes on
exactly that your action of opening the door that has
caused 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
(31:44):
workarounds for that some Orthodox Jews might use, but it
gets more complicated than that in some scenarios. Right. For instance,
another classic workaround was involved the use of an oven, right,
because you need to heat up food. You can't light stove.
You can't activate the oven by pushing the button. But
if you activate the oven, you turn it on before
(32:07):
sundown m 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 then picking up after
the Sabbath is due. 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
(32:29):
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 to keep their oven on in order to observe
the religious practices. So this is where we get Sabbath
mode on on on various appliances, uh not where they
(32:52):
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 features so that you
could operate your cooking technology in accordance with your religious
of faith. You know, I bet that there are specific
(33:14):
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 have a lot
of stuff dealing with with kosher foods, what have you.
But also in a whole system, whole section on appliances
where you can look up the appliances and see what
(33:36):
their their their potential of Sabbath modes are, how to
activate them, how to use them in accordance with these
rules and regulations. Another classic example about the shabat and
technology is the use of an elevator. Right occasonally, 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,
(33:57):
uh during the Shabbat 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 be a long
ride and a long wait, but at least you can
observe your your practices exactly. Another bit of a religious
technology wanted to touch on real quick is a sixteenth
(34:18):
century clockwork monk created by one Ello Toryana, who was
a mechanic for Spanish Emperor Charles the Fifth. Now the
emperor's son, King Philip the Second, the story goes, 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, even his
child survives, he ends up recovering, and he has to
(34:42):
keep his promise. What kind of a miracle can can
a king actually do? Well? Obviously, the king's gonna um
his mechanical constolled as a mechanic and get him to
create a miracle as a as kind of an offering
right as a as a as a thank you to
the divine. And so that's where one ello comes in,
and he creates a key wound spring operated automaton and
(35:05):
it really complicated automaton at that. Yeah, I've seen pictures
of this and it's fascinating. You can, like, I think
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.
(35:26):
It it strikes its chest with its right arm. It
raises and lowers a small cross and rosary with it's left.
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 what you said, it strikes
its chest. So is this is this auto automatic self flagellation.
(35:47):
I don't think it's quite flagellation. Okay, but that would
be a different That would be an interesting different. Yea um.
But some of you probably heard a Radio Lab episode
of 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,
(36:10):
what was the mindset in creating it? Is it simply
an offering, uh, you know to God? Is it's a
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 great painter
sculptor would create a work of art and dedicate it
to the Lord. I think that seems to be the
(36:33):
prevalent interpretation, though in the light of what we talked
about with 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 extorts think that
(36:54):
that was in the mind of of the king or
the mechanic responsible. But 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 prayer taking place online U prayer groups, etcetera.
(37:15):
Sharing their concerns via the Internet. And I don't know
to what extent they can you know, they ever consider
the email itself a prayer. But but certainly that seems
like a line that will blur more and more as
that becomes like standard practice, right because certainly, uh, at
some point the written word uh became holy. Right, And
(37:36):
then I can't help but but imagine that in the
advent of the printing press, maybe initially the printed word
was a 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
(37:57):
and in most the way most people practice it, and
it's something that deeply does involve communication between groups, and
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
(38:18):
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, email circle where you forward
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
(38:40):
that comes to mind here. If it's if it's blasphemous
to um, to burn or to face a religious text
such as the Bible or the Koran? What have you
deleted an e book of its? Oh? Man, is that's
it's that blasphemous? I don't know. I don't know. I'm
sure some people have opinions on that. Yeah, I personally
do not. Hey, and we haven't even mentioned exorcism online, right, Well,
(39:06):
that would be one of those services that could be
offered by you know, your religious official who might be
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
(39:31):
in two thousand nine, famed Israelian Kabbala master Rabbi bot
three attempted to remove a dibbck, 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
(39:52):
featured on The Daily Show several months back. Really, yes,
so I imagine I didn't see that. Imagine a number
of our listeners caught it there. Yeah, that's 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 involves like this, right, by which you're driving
(40:12):
a spiritual invader out. 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
(40:33):
of the clerical official that can drive the demon out,
not so much the physical presence, like why would they
really need to be in the room. Yeah, I mean
it reminds me. I think we've both recently rewatched portions
are the entirety of the The Hell Razor Bloodlines movie
where and of course you know religious technology, right, the
limit configuration is a little mechanical device and you solve it,
(40:56):
and the demon show up, the cinebyte show up and
in that movie as 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
(41:17):
some some people who are not very technologically savvy or like, well,
we gotta solve this problem. They open the door to
the room where the cinobytes are contained, and then there's
a big problem. But that's interesting. Initially they're able to
out maneuver the technologically empowered demons that are the cinabytes
via more advanced technology. Right, they can put those cinobytes
(41:39):
in a box inside a box, exactly inside a box,
all right. So that's going to 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
(42:01):
next episode. So that's going to be 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
(42:21):
the second episode on the landing 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 posts, 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
(42:41):
religion and technology, or even the complete synthesis and marriage
of religion and technology, email us at blow the Mind
at how stuffworks dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com?
Could you be you Plier
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. We may say that we have the
birth of a new science, a new philosophy, with a
new life. The time of deliverance has come at last,
(00:23):
and henceforward the career of humanity is upward and onward
a mighty, a noble, and a godlike career. All the
revelations of spiritualism 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
(00:44):
of a great practical movement, such as the world little
dreams of, though it has long deeply 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
(01:05):
history of its inception, its various stages of progress, and
its completion will show the world a 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
(01:29):
now fairly commenced. The child is born, not long hints
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
(01:51):
on here? I'm reading a quote. This is a quote
from a Boston newspaper, the June fifty 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 could
(02:15):
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 Hewitt have been talking about? Well, he was
(02:37):
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 sort of think of as
(02:58):
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 and it would be something
(03:20):
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 which we would
like to dissuade you from. We'll make sure we have
some links to an images of the the electrical Messiah
(03:41):
in question on the landing page for this episode. But
but if you think about a dollec from doctor Who,
from Doctor who, if a dollec or to breed with
a coffee table, uh their offspring, and they probably resembled
the be 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 serving as kind of kind
(04:04):
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. I mean, we typically
think of religion as a very low tech affair. You
(04:29):
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 very ancient. And technology
is you know, it's the very essence of what is
(04:51):
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 you have based on ancient cosmologies that sometimes we're
okay with updating um Generally at 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.
(05:13):
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 what happens when technology changes religions, what
happens when technology becomes a component of religious practice, and
(05:36):
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
um more advanced ways of just looking at the world
(05:57):
around them and manipulating the world around them. And this
is 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 is like a machine or
a mechanism that does a particular job. But if you
(06:17):
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
(06:38):
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,
(07:01):
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,
(07:23):
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 not positioned vertically,
(07:43):
it's positioned, uh, 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.
(08:04):
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
(08:27):
by the fact that I mean on top of the
wheel being this, uh, this, this gadget, this device that
that that represents 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
(08:51):
makes a revolution. So a pilgrim spins the wheel and
with each stin helps helps them gain merit and to
concentrate the mind on the 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
(09:12):
can upgrade our ability to do spiritual work. Yeah, it's
I guess one way to think of it would be
think about a cassette player. Right. Um, So you're you're
just a really huge fan of I don't know, what's
your fite. What's your favorite metal album, your favorite rock
and roll album album? Uh, Dope Throne, Dope Throne, who
Electric Wizard? Okay, alright, well let's say you particularly love
(09:35):
Dope Throne, and so you have a cassette of Dope Throne,
But that cassette doesn't actually play just that. 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. Okay, that's the kind of what's
going on. So it gives you the essence or the
(09:55):
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 for the wheel was as a
(10:18):
device for activating these mantras, so that the wheel was
was virtually virtually went unused there as a physical, uh tool,
as a technology for you know, moving things around or
crushing things, etcetera. It was used almost exclusively as a
religious technology. Yeah. Um, Now that's not to say that
all prayer wheels are turned by hand. That's kind of
(10:41):
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
karma machine. Yes, yeah, And this is where it gets
(11:01):
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 you look
to medieval Catholicism, where you might have chantryes that are
(11:23):
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 it
be okay to say the number of prayer machines you
(11:44):
build could lessen your stay in purgatory? Um? Could like,
could you get one of those texts to speech synthesizers
is 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 prayer wheels, because it would seem like you could
(12:05):
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 thardo cor lows and that you can
keep them running twenty four hours a day using a
four point five vault DC electric current. Uh and and
(12:26):
and so yeah, 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
mental concentration. It's like a karmic force field generator exactly. Yeah.
And this is even crazier when you think of another
technological uh uh innovation that you see with the prayer wheels,
(12:47):
and that's that you can also find microfilm prayer wheels.
They contain more uh came, even more than a million
mantras inside them. So yeah, so you between microfilm technology
and uh and 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
(13:10):
is especially interesting to me. It seems like that's 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
(13:31):
no limits, right, I mean, you could have 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
(13:52):
just running in the background out of 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.
(14:13):
It might totally make sense in 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
(14:35):
the sanctuary. It's okay to you know, 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
(14:55):
inherent profanity in technology? It does kind of see 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
(15:16):
we have. I guess so much of it is rooted
in religion tradition, you know. 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 her
officiating at a wedding has been reading off of a
kindle or a or a you know, a path of
some good. It looks inappropriate. Yeah, I mean, I think
(15:37):
it's a lot of it has to do with the
fact that religions tend to be inherently traditional, 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, a human skill
and ability to see that uh you know, shoehorned in
(15:58):
with these things that are just supposedly giving to us
from some sort of higher power. Yeah. No, 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 Kithera mechanism is an ancient Greek device.
It's often referred to as the world's oldest computer or
(16:20):
the first computer. And now obviously it didn't have microprocessors
or anything. But this was a device that comes from
more than two thousand years ago, was 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.
(16:42):
And the interesting thing about this is it's an amazingly
advanced piece of technology for the time, 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 and cosmology are are so linked together,
(17:07):
like it becomes the domain of 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 rights should be observed. Well,
that makes me wonder if star treking 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,
(17:30):
and 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.
(17:51):
Is that completely wrong kind of yeah, with varying levels
of artistry and a lot of figures and sliding mechanisms. Okay, yeah,
it 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 thir BC, and they were perfected by
(18:14):
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 moon. Okay, so it's a lot like the
(18:35):
end 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 win, 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
(18:56):
it become overheated if sitting on your lap, if it
was made out of metal and you were seated in
the sign, 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 contract the heavens. You can tell
the date and time. You could calculate distances to be
(19:18):
used in determine 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
(19:38):
a piece of religious technology is in its ability to
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 ex acute your religion. You know
(20:02):
perfectly the way you want to do it. If you
want 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, 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,
(20:24):
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 they 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, where you
(20:46):
are in terms of sun time. 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 used to be most properly informed
(21:09):
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, Sure, 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
(21:30):
have somebody signaling the prayer times each day from a tower,
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
(21:51):
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,
(22:13):
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 Mahabata
specific certainly, Yeah, and so we think about religion as
a very text based affair. But there's really no reason
(22:35):
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
(22:55):
changed the way we practiced religion 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 and archael just
(23:17):
could tell us more about how they think writing might
have changed the way we practice religions. But I really
have no idea. Well, I mean, I think at hard
you're probably dealing on the situation of of of the
expansion of memory, right, because writing is in essence, the
ability to externalize human memory. Before writing, how we that
(23:38):
we can only contain as much as could fit in
a human mind, or if maybe if you were, you know,
really skilled, that you might compartmentalize it, right and have
one person deal with the with these memories versus the other.
Almost a Fahrenheit four 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
(23:59):
pass that on to us, which 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 and then there's kind of a telephone game anytime
we passed something on anything. Really, anytime you remember something,
you're taking it out, you're potentially changing it. And then
(24:20):
putting it back in. So yeah, 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
(24:40):
could actually set a religion in stone. I 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 and
ancient Babylonian cosmology is set in stone, and you know,
(25:03):
and 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 caudessease, you had you know, tablets and
carving and all the different pictograms and libraries and and
(25:27):
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, the Gutenberg Bible because
(25:50):
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 edge and 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 more
than that also all things government in some cases and
(26:12):
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 copied documents that most
people don't have much access to. They might be because
they're so rare. I mean they're kept in scriptory ums
or libraries or these places that the average person wouldn't
(26:33):
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 brnning 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, the Enlightenment, scientific Revolution. If
(26:58):
you just look at the Protestant Reformation, shan, 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 which Reformation ideas were
being spread throughout Europe at the time. Yeah, it's really
(27:20):
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 the like, such a big movement and
such a drastic change in our ability to communicate with
one another. Speaking of the Scientific Revolution, uh, that makes
(27:41):
me think about the you know, the whole notion of
a clockwork universe, which I'm not going to 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 perfect mechanical
time piece that is the universe and then just lets
(28:01):
it go. Maybe winds it first, I guess hopefully winds
it and then lets it go because it doesn't need
to be rewound or anything. It works perfectly as it's created.
And this isn't 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, the unseen world in
terms of those same mechanisms, right. I mean, it's very
(28:24):
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 change? Yeah, I haven't seen
a lot of this, but I wonder to what extent,
like modern like email or jargon, etcetera, has has made
its way into you know, just average say Christian sermons,
(28:45):
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 coming
from email forwards. Indeed, I believe I saw one chart
church marquis here around town a few years back with
a talked about sending God some quote an email, which
(29:09):
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. Right there, of course, talking about kneeling, uh,
and then praying, which is a form of n eemail. Uh.
That's adorable an email. But getting back to the ways
that external advances in technology have affected the progression of religions,
(29:33):
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 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
(29:55):
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 traditional understanding of what is accepted and
forbidden to do on the day of rest. Right, This
is sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, in which Orthodox use
(30:17):
a 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 vehicle is that
a lot of these things aren't directly commandments stated in
the Torah itself as an ancient document, but their interpretations
that have come from the rabbis throughout the years about
(30:40):
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 are awful 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,
(31:02):
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 tricky, because there's some obvious examples that you know,
you could say, well, don't turn on the vacuum cleaner. Okay,
Well I'm not gonna turn the vacuum cleaner because I'm
also not going to vacuum, but then you gotta eat
on on the on the Sabbath, right, So, so what
(31:23):
do you do about opening the refrigerator door? Oh, because
when you open the refrigerator door a light comes on
exactly that your action of opening the door that has
caused 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
(31:44):
workarounds for that some Orthodox Jews might use, but it
gets more complicated than that in some scenarios. Right. For instance,
another classic workaround was involved the use of an oven, right,
because you need to heat up food. You can't light stove.
You can't activate the oven by pushing the button. But
if you activate the oven, you turn it on before
(32:07):
sundown m 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 then picking up after
the Sabbath is due. 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
(32:29):
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 to keep their oven on in order to observe
the religious practices. So this is where we get Sabbath
mode on on on various appliances, uh not where they
(32:52):
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 features so that you
could operate your cooking technology in accordance with your religious
of faith. You know, I bet that there are specific
(33:14):
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 have a lot
of stuff dealing with with kosher foods, what have you.
But also in a whole system, whole section on appliances
where you can look up the appliances and see what
(33:36):
their their their potential of Sabbath modes are, how to
activate them, how to use them in accordance with these
rules and regulations. Another classic example about the shabat and
technology is the use of an elevator. Right occasonally, 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,
(33:57):
uh during the Shabbat 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 be a long
ride and a long wait, but at least you can
observe your your practices exactly. Another bit of a religious
technology wanted to touch on real quick is a sixteenth
(34:18):
century clockwork monk created by one Ello Toryana, who was
a mechanic for Spanish Emperor Charles the Fifth. Now the
emperor's son, King Philip the Second, the story goes, 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, even his
child survives, he ends up recovering, and he has to
(34:42):
keep his promise. What kind of a miracle can can
a king actually do? Well? Obviously, the king's gonna um
his mechanical constolled as a mechanic and get him to
create a miracle as a as kind of an offering
right as a as a as a thank you to
the divine. And so that's where one ello comes in,
and he creates a key wound spring operated automaton and
(35:05):
it really complicated automaton at that. Yeah, I've seen pictures
of this and it's fascinating. You can, like, I think
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.
(35:26):
It it strikes its chest with its right arm. It
raises and lowers a small cross and rosary with it's left.
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 what you said, it strikes
its chest. So is this is this auto automatic self flagellation.
(35:47):
I don't think it's quite flagellation. Okay, but that would
be a different That would be an interesting different. Yea um.
But some of you probably heard a Radio Lab episode
of 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,
(36:10):
what was the mindset in creating it? Is it simply
an offering, uh, you know to God? Is it's a
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 great painter
sculptor would create a work of art and dedicate it
to the Lord. I think that seems to be the
(36:33):
prevalent interpretation, though in the light of what we talked
about with 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 extorts think that
(36:54):
that was in the mind of of the king or
the mechanic responsible. But 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 prayer taking place online U prayer groups, etcetera.
(37:15):
Sharing their concerns via the Internet. And I don't know
to what extent they can you know, they ever consider
the email itself a prayer. But but certainly that seems
like a line that will blur more and more as
that becomes like standard practice, right because certainly, uh, at
some point the written word uh became holy. Right, And
(37:36):
then I can't help but but imagine that in the
advent of the printing press, maybe initially the printed word
was a 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
(37:57):
and in most the way most people practice it, and
it's something that deeply does involve communication between groups, and
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
(38:18):
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, email circle where you forward
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
(38:40):
that comes to mind here. If it's if it's blasphemous
to um, to burn or to face a religious text
such as the Bible or the Koran? What have you
deleted an e book of its? Oh? Man, is that's
it's that blasphemous? I don't know. I don't know. I'm
sure some people have opinions on that. Yeah, I personally
do not. Hey, and we haven't even mentioned exorcism online, right, Well,
(39:06):
that would be one of those services that could be
offered by you know, your religious official who might be
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
(39:31):
in two thousand nine, famed Israelian Kabbala master Rabbi bot
three attempted to remove a dibbck, 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
(39:52):
featured on The Daily Show several months back. Really, yes,
so I imagine I didn't see that. Imagine a number
of our listeners caught it there. Yeah, that's 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 involves like this, right, by which you're driving
(40:12):
a spiritual invader out. 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
(40:33):
of the clerical official that can drive the demon out,
not so much the physical presence, like why would they
really need to be in the room. Yeah, I mean
it reminds me. I think we've both recently rewatched portions
are the entirety of the The Hell Razor Bloodlines movie
where and of course you know religious technology, right, the
limit configuration is a little mechanical device and you solve it,
(40:56):
and the demon show up, the cinebyte show up and
in that movie as 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
(41:17):
some some people who are not very technologically savvy or like, well,
we gotta solve this problem. They open the door to
the room where the cinobytes are contained, and then there's
a big problem. But that's interesting. Initially they're able to
out maneuver the technologically empowered demons that are the cinabytes
via more advanced technology. Right, they can put those cinobytes
(41:39):
in a box inside a box, exactly inside a box,
all right. So that's going to 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
(42:01):
next episode. So that's going to be 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
(42:21):
the second episode on the landing 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 posts, 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
(42:41):
religion and technology, or even the complete synthesis and marriage
of religion and technology, email us at blow the Mind
at how stuffworks dot com for more on this and
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