Today’s non-Gospel readings tell of a lethal God. The Book of Wisdom recalls God’s lethal plague killing the first-born of the Egyptians, “a multitude of their children (you) made perish all at once.” The Letter to the Hebrews recalls Abraham’s willingness to take a knife and obey God’s lethal command to “sacrifice” his son Isaac. Jesus tells a parable about a loving God with loving servants.
Thousands of years ago, lethal earthly Gods invented a lethal heavenly God. God is imagined as a killer who demands people offer him sacrifice. Sacrifice means to kill, to offer one’s life to a deity. The worst of the killer class’ sacrifice rituals is war. All of humanity is sacrificed in endless warfare from which lethal earthly Gods gain capital. Street gangs like the Bloods, the Crips, and MS-13 fight smaller wars while their mirror-image international gangs like China, Russia, and the U.S. fight bigger wars. Gangs have always operated as a complicit political-capitalist entity; gangsters strategize the lethal warfare and the lethal weaponry in their plots for capital gain. Of late, the international gangs show signs of even more lethal complicity for even greater capital gain. For example, four executives from AI weapons manufacturing gangs were recently inducted into the U.S. military gang as Lieutenant Colonels. These gangsters are Andrew Bosworth (Chief Technology Officer of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta), Bob McGrew (advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for Sam Altman’s and Ian Hathaway’s OpenAI), Kevin Weil (Chief Product Officer of OpenAI), and Shyam Sankar (Chief Technology Officer of Peter Theil’s Palantir). The U.S. military’s press release says it is bringing “top tech talent into the Army Reserve to bridge the commercial-military tech gap.” It “aims to make the (military) leaner, smarter, and more lethal.” As stated by Pete Hegseth, the lethal aim is at the direction of President Trump, “We will rebuild our military… (by) rapidly fielding emerging technologies.” The U.S. has built a $1 trillion dollar military with 3 million soldiers in over 750 bases world-wide with its technologies. The military-AI gang is expanding from rapidly fielding standard lethal technologies, like conventional and nuclear weapons, to rapidly fielding AI technologies, like lethal autonomous weapons. For example, drones and robotics are used to reconnoiter, surveil, and kill people (e.g. Project Maven). It enables the military-AI gangs to expand their dehumanization, algorithmic bias, and killer impunity – all the while they increase their media ownership. Trump and his AI weapons manufacturing cohort, including Elon Musk of SpaceX + Twitter/X, Palmer Luckey of Anduril + Meta/Facebook, and Sundar Pichai of The Dept of Defense’s Cloud TPUs + Google are humanity’s current lethal Gods writing their current lethal scriptures. They are currently sacrificing lesser beings in their endless wars to secure their capital gain. For the ruling class, war has always been an endless money-making business which they influence us to support.
“Our governing classes are overwhelmingly Junker: all who are not Junkers… only claim to their position is their… ability to make money.” “…it has a practical bearing on the most perilously urgent and immediate business before us: the business of the appeal to the nation for recruits and for enormous sums of money.” “A far graver doubt is… the susceptibility of the masses to war fever, and the appalling danger of a daily deluge of cheap newspapers… and their servility to the financial department, controlled by a moneyed class which not only curries favour with the military caste for social reasons, but has large direct interests in war as a method of raising the price of money, the only commodity the moneyed class has to sell.” (Common Sense About the War – George Bernard Shaw)
Prayer: Beautiful Spirit, Embolden us with the power of peace
Question: How can I disinvest from the business of war and the media that hypes it?
August 10, 2025 Gospel Luke 12:32-48 Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time