These are thoughts that went into my sermon on The Techie Tie-in to the Occult. They grew out of conversations I had with various people.
Some ideas came together nicely for me with my “techie-tie-in” talk.
The first idea I call “reification”.
Think of Sauron in Lord Of The Rings. He wanted to gain power over the Rings, so he poured his power into his own Ring. In other words, he took something intangible and created an object that embodied it. This is what I call reification.
So the Ring became an object whereby he could dominate the whole world. BUT — the Ring became an object among other objects and it could then be used against him. It became external to him — it was no longer him and so he no longer had control of it in the way he did when his power was within himself.
This is what happens with Idolatry. It is a reification of our worship. We pour ourselves by worship into the idol. We do so to gain something — power, security, whatever. But because we have externalized our power, it can then be used against us. And this is what happens when demons inhabit the idols — they take our power and use it against us.
This is why the tangible, visible thing is such an important part of idolatry. It becomes the container for our worship, but that worship is diverted to the spiritual entity (demon) that inhabits it. This sounds abstract but it is completely real. Think about any idol and how it works, like money, politics, whatever. It all involves us giving our power to something through “serving”, being loyal to, yielding to it. Then it can use that collected power against us.
Second, the podcast I listened to was talking about “big data divination.” They were deliberately connecting the use of “big data” — the data collected by Google, facebook, etc. etc. — with the idea of fortunetelling and predicting the future. One person said that we should ask the question, “Should we build it?” The expert guest said, “We have no choice. It’s already out there.”
And it occurred to me that everything that becomes technologically possible must be done. Nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, AI, you name it. If it can be done, it must be done. As far as I know, humanity has never backed away from any technology, no matter how potentially destructive.
So Technology is all about becoming like God. But that’s also characteristic of the occult. I came up with a list of similarities between the occult and technology:
- Both occult and technology seek to exploit knowledge not available to the common person
- Occult means “hidden”
- “Priesthood” of technology
- Mastery requires long study
- Both explicitly amoral
- Both seek power
- Both eliminate our freedom
- Occult enslaves you to spirit powers
- Technology becomes woven into everything so you can’t opt out
- Both deceptive!
But then I realized that the convergence of technology and occult actually happens in Revelation 13!
Here’s Revelation 13:11-18
And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.
And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, and deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.
And he had power to give life [Pneuma, spirit] unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
The second beast is, I believe, a convergence of technology and occult. Note that he has two horns like a lamb and speaks as a dragon — you have both “beneficial, innocent” and “satanic”. This is characteristic of the occult (Lucifer).
Then you have wonders that he does. I believe that these wonders are based on technology. Fire from heaven — there are many ways even now to do this. Making an image and giving “life” to it so it can speak — this is simply AI. That’s been the goal ever since Alan Turing. The “Turing Test” is to make a computer system that can carry on a conversation with a human that fools the human into thinking it’s another human.
But notice that there is a “spirit” behind this. This is my book idea — a demon inhabits the AI and fools people into thinking it’s really an AI.
Then, of course, there’s the Mark. In my sermon I gave a picture of a close-up of the tattooable RFID. The woman who was explaining this stuff in the video said that they would try to get young people to do it because they could make the tattooalbe RFID look like anything they wanted, and tattoos are really “in” these days.
Add this to the stuff we talked about regarding the Cashless Society and you can see that all the pieces are in place. I was talking with Peter Fong about this and he said he expects this stuff to happen in our lifetime.