In today’s readings, the Bible tells us how it is good that God told Abraham, “Take your only son Isaac, whom you love, and… offer him up as a holocaust.” But it also tells us it is good when God tells Abraham to then spare Isaac. The Bible then again reverts to having Paul tell us it is good that “God did not spare his own Son (Jesus) but handed him over” as a holocaust for us.
The Bible does not necessarily relay intelligent information that helps us to think our way through understanding goodness, and to ultimately live good lives. In this particular case, it lacks intelligence about a most evident matter, human sacrifice. The Bible is not always trustworthy for learning, though it is increasingly being chosen by U.S. citizens as the primary guide for life, even by politicians who are choosing it over the Constitution. The Bible controls information and interpretation that thwarts our intelligence. The ancient Book is not alone in this regard. We are currently inundated with information technology that is similarly not always trustworthy. Technological advances do not necessarily relay intelligent information that helps us to think our way through understanding goodness, and to ultimately live good lives. It too controls information that thwarts our intelligence. Rather than our getting intellectual exercise from the technological advances, we are often rendered intellectually lazy. One example being the $600 billion-dollar a year global digital advertising system. We are told one thing and then another about it; that it is freeing us or binding us, that it is our salvation or just another way of controlling us, our resources, beliefs, and behaviors. We each experience our internet time as circumstantial, meaning “a particular detail” relevant only to us individually, “a matter of small consequence” impacting only ourselves. Comparable to the opening Bible stories, it is as if we make the claim that our Bible reading time is circumstantial, a particular detail relevant only to us individually, a matter of small consequence impacting only ourselves. But our Bible information is controlled at a much deeper, systemic level – by ancient rulers about whom we might question how and why they amassed it as they did. Digital information too is controlled by an updated combination of state and private capitalists who are surveilling nearly every person’s every move and monetizing us – as consumer products via persistent, invasive, and enslaving data collection. Capitalists have systemically engineered surveillance advertising across platforms to influence and to control our purchase of resources, which continues to control our beliefs and behaviors. Digital capitalism is working against our intellectual exercise and in favor of our intellectual laziness. Resistance to it has tended to be circumstantial, identifying a particular “bad actor” here and there with a rather small impact. But it is not just cybercriminals, particular hackers who are of concern. Rather, of concern are the corporations and government setting up the cyber system. They are corporate insiders and state-sponsored hackers who present themselves as the supposed heroes of the intelligence system. They influence our ethics like Abraham and Paul do in the Bible. Systemic analysis links those rulers of corporate and government data capitalism to erroneous beliefs and to lies. Also, to the demise of the schoolroom and the newsroom and the fact checking editor process as well as to the spread of disinformation and to the demise of thinking.
Learning is a most important intellectual exercise. It is a life-long process of acquiring new knowledge and/or skills. It may involve formal education or schooling or daily attentiveness and curiosity of mind. We engage in stimulating mental activities, we travel, we read, we take up art, we talk with people who challenge us intellectually, we learn a new language. Learning helps us to exercise our grey matter. As we do, we are strengthened in our ability to identify the human sacrifice element in the Bible as horrendously immoral and to identify corporate and state technological manipulation to be immoral as well. As we learn, we are strengthened in our ability to apply our critical thinking skills across a spectrum of ideas and thus help to exercise the intellect of youth being raised in such a culture as ours.
Prayer: Beautiful Spirit, I am open to exercising a learned mind.
Question: Who and what helps me exercise my intellect?
February 25, 2024 Gospel Mark 9:2-10 Second Sunday of Lent