Improvements in Idolatry
I’ve noticed it’s getting tougher to pray certain psalms. Up till recently, I found it fairly easy, because the psalmist and I were living in roughly the same world. Nowadays I’m not so sure.
I give you an instance: when David described idolatry, the simulacra gentium, those gold and silver images that were the “works of men’s hands,” he relished poking fun at their impotence, listing the seven (perfect number!) things that the idols were unable to do. Produced by human hands, they were inert, deaf, dumb, and blind. They couldn’t hurt anybody. I enjoyed the ridicule as much as David did.
Now, however, in our advanced age of technology, sarcasm of this sort is not so easy; idolatry has been thoroughly modernized, as it were. As we advance into the dark forest of Artificial Intelligence, the psalmist may be reluctant to hold our hand. The idols seem not so impotent as heretofore.
Quite the contrary. These new models have a mouth, and they do speak. They have eyes, and they do see. They have ears and a nose, and they do hear and smell. Hands they have that feel, and feet that walk. And that shout in guttere suo is certainly real. Indeed, it is closer to a growl. The new idols return our ridicule tenfold and threaten worse.
Dante, when he entered the dark forest, was appointed another great poet to guide him. I don’t know who will take our hand and walk us through this new inferno; David seems hesitant.
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
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