This is actually a post about the Gospel, but it may do one of these things to you:
– it may offend you (it ought to offend you a little at least)
– it may confuse you
– it may cause you to take the rest of the day off because you are utterly bewildered
I’m almost too squeemish to post this note, so you can imagine what kind of atrocity the link takes you to, so be forewarned. But as reported all over the the internet in the last week, The Boston Herald posts its take on Doug Hines’ new invention, introduced this weekend at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas.
The least to say about this is that it is utterly un-nerving and particularly vile. And most people will let it go at that, except that those people aren’t thinking about the fact that someone is going to buy one of those things.
Listen: in the last two or three years there has been a bizarre trend — people are trying to invent robots to be home companions. One guy in japan has invented a manequin which is a servicable receptionist; another guy has been prototyping robot runway models. I am sure many teen-aged boys and comic-book shop owners are thrilled about the future happening today, but those of us who love people ought to be very concerned about this.
I could write about 1000 words about this topic today, but I am (again) snowed at work. Instead, I’ll let y’all talk about this issue under this umbrella: doesn’t this prove in some way that the church has failed to preach the Gospel, believe it to be true, and live as if there are necessary consquences to the work of Jesus Christ? Asked another way, how can robots possibly be better at loving other people than the people of God?
Think about that and discuss it in the comments.
January 14th, 2010 | 1:38 pm | #1
I recently heard yet another pastor/author (whose church meets in a movie theater so that “that smell of buttered popcorn is kinda like our incense”) say that the gospel is all about “doing the best you can with what you have and maximizing your potential.”
He said this in response to a question on a podcast for Christian twenty-somethings about what it means to live out the gospel.
If the gospel is about being all we can be,
then marriage is about what’s going on in Vegas.
Makes perfect sense.
January 14th, 2010 | 2:46 pm | #2
Only when the replacement of man with machine spreads to the world of sex do modern Christians notice that the limits of love are being transgressed.
But by then, it’s a bit late since we’ve already accepted the logic of reductive “efficiency” in every other area of life.
January 14th, 2010 | 3:16 pm | #3
Albert: The problem is not that this is where we notice it. I think the problem is that this happens, and we don’t notice it.
How much worse does the plea of the lost have to be before we give them the actual Gospel and call them away from this sort of radical depravity?
January 14th, 2010 | 4:55 pm | #4
Horrifying, but not (to me) terribly surprising. My 18-20-year-old students live in an increasingly unreal world anyway; this just adds in a bit more. My students seem to be literally addicted to texting, losing even what little bit of humanity you’d get from hearing the voice of a friend in a phone call. Facebook/MySpace allow people to construct their own personalities and worlds online, posting the pictures that they want that send the image they desire. Pornography has pretty much gone mainstream; it’s certainly readily available. Video games are increasingly immersive; forget Pong and Tetris, now you can be a virtual fighter or adventurer without having to actually have any skills whatsoever in real life.
When someone lives in a virtual/constructed world most of the time, the inevitable collisions with reality are often unpleasant. For instance, many of my students have little or no idea of how to carry on a polite conversation or make a polite request; they seem to be losing the ability to navigate personal relationships, the give and take of responding to a live human being. And so we have the hookup culture, in which there are no longer boyfriends and girlfriends (and their annoying emotional needs) but just hookup partners for sex.
So, no surprise that there’s going to be a market for fake people. So much more manageable than the real thing.
I wonder if the most shocking part of the Gospel, these days, might be the Incarnation?
January 14th, 2010 | 5:36 pm | #5
Frank, what do you mean by saying we don’t notice it? Are Christians unaware of these developments–or any other of the thousands of evils portrayed in the media daily?
If you mean our understanding of these developments tends to be superficial and so we believe the solution to such problems is merely to preach harder and better to the lost, then yes, I agree that is part of the problem.
Preaching is essential, but not sufficient. And it never has been, as the practice of the Church for over nineteen centuries has generally, though imperfectly, shown. But modern Christians have been deceived by the Gnostic lie that institutions, like the economic systems in which we live and participate, have no relation whatsoever to “the Gospel” or the intellectual and existential plausibility of the Gospel to the lost we evangelicals sincerely care about saving.
We are like surgeons who don’t know about bacteria on our hands or believe we are faithless to wash our hands before surgery or are ignorant of the historical traditions of washing hands. So people die, and we say, “We just need to cut better!” And the truth is that maybe in some situations we do need to cut better; and every surgeon needs to cut. But maybe we need to do more.
But the lack of interest and comments demonstrated here after great posts by Matt Anderson, David Koyzis, and James Grant (among others) suggest evangelicals generally don’t care about learning about faithfulness in all of life and are content only with what is comfortably familiar to them, whether or not learning about something unfamiliar (to recent generations of Christians but not to earlier) would be of greater benefit in learning all that is necessary rather than just a part. Maybe I’m wrong about that. It seems that way, though.
Let’s take usury as an example, a sin that has virtually disappeared off the radar of American Christianity. What do evangelicals think about it? Has that sin, for example, been institutionalized in the modern banking system? What would the implications be for Christians’ use of money, a topic Jesus seemed pretty interested in? If it is sin and participation in sin deadens the conscience and then shreds the soul, does that have anything to do with the Gospel or its plausibility to a citizenry formed and shaped in usury? Does it matter, or can we safely ignore such things?
More relevant to sex robots, what about industrial economies? If the replacement of people with machines for sex is simply an extension of the same logic which saw the merciless sacrifice of steel workers on the altar of reductive “efficiency,” what should the church say about what the American systems of money and economics tell us about our priorities today?
We know that sometimes it isn’t enough to preach at men addicted to pornography. Sometimes we need to install software on their computers or take it away entirely; or we need to get him out of an office where there are women constantly hitting on him. In other words, we have to be concerned with their practices and institutions; is this less spiritual? We know that the prevalence of sin (e.g. homosexual acts) can make it more plausible that the sin is not a sin, and so give people reason to reject the Law and therefore the Gospel. Does addressing the practices and institutions which embody sinful beliefs have nothing to do with the Gospel even though we take away a man’s computer in addition to preaching to him?
We are not mere spirits or souls with incidental bodies. We were created as ensouled bodies, so what happens to us in space and time, affecting our bodies and therefore our souls, matters–certainly in different ways for different practices and institutions–and not deterministically so but in fact with influence. Soul and body. Preaching and practice. But you wouldn’t know this by how most evangelicals live, or from the dismissals of artistic and musical content posts in some comments I’ve seen.
This has been a bit of a rant. But I hope it shows more of where I’m coming from.
January 14th, 2010 | 7:46 pm | #6
I’m not sure I see how it is the Church’s fault that there are perverts out there inventing sex robots.
I kind of chalk that up to the fact that man is, by nature, at enmity with God, children of wrath, and corrupt to the core.
January 15th, 2010 | 7:15 am | #7
Rev. McCain –
That’s the danger of posting a provocative statement without a lot of exposition: being misunderstood.
In the linked article, the creator of this little gem makes it clear that the point of this machine is not merely to have it available for sex; the point is that this device also allegedly will talk to you afterward and give you something which apes a relationship afterward.
This is the part which, to me, completely forfeits the mere charge if sinful depravity — it speaks to a perceived need on the part of the inventor for companionship, and somehow people as the right option does not occur to him.
Why would this be? Certainly, a lot of the blame has to be laid at his own doorstep. But on top of that it seems to me that if this guy knew loving people who were not merely conforming to his lustful needs but surpassing that by showing him how love ought to work, a robot would simply not occur to him.
A robot occurs to him because actual love does not. That’s why I think this is a church problem: he lives in the English-speaking work and apparently he has never seen the light of the world.
January 21st, 2010 | 6:50 pm | #8
I fear I agree with Frank, Rev. This quote is both heart-breaking and horrific:
Sex only goes so far – then you want to be able to talk to the person,” Hines said of Roxxxy. “We’re more interested in creating companions.”
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact