My geek cred suffered for a few years while Battlestar Galactica was on TV…I missed out on the entire season. So I borrowed the DVDs and am working through them now slowly. I’m on Season 2.5 now, so lay off the spoilers, please!

The basic premise is that Cylons (robots that look like humans) have declared war on humanity and infiltrated the fleet of starships.  The remaining survivors have to deal with outside attacks and internal suspicions of Cylons in their midst.

There’s another war going on, however: how much can you dehumanize the other? They regularly call the Cylons “toasters” and have no guilt over killing them in combat no matter how human they look. The crewman who illegally killed a Cylon in custody barely got any punishment.  Another (kinda…) Cylon in custody is called a “thing” regularly by even the Commander.  And yet there are some who treat the Cylons like people, with dignity and grace. It is this internal conflict of how to be at war with the other without demonizing/dehumanizing the other (even if they are really not human) that is really interesting.

There’s a scene that is really painful and exemplifies this conflict.  (I am outlining basic points without revealing who Cylons are.  Please be respectful of this in the comments) In the episode Pegasus (Season 2.0, Episode 10), a female Cylon in custody is raped (or attempted rape…there are alternate scenes) by an officer who has raped and dehumanized another Cylon in custody.  She survives and the scene ends with her crying with a blanket held over her body.  You cannot watch the scene and not see the Cylon as a human woman who has just been violated by people who do not treat her as a human, and is saved by people who do.

But that’s not the scene I’m talking about.  In the next episode Resurrection Ship (Season 2.5, Episode 11), the Cylon is examined for trauma by a doctor who has this poignant exchange:

Doctor: Your fluid and electrolytes levels are stable. [minor edit for spoilers] You do have a cracked rib though. Hairline fracture, which means it’s gonna hurt like hell for a while. But, I’m not seeing any signs of permanent damage from the attack.

Cylon: The attack. Is that what we’re calling it now?

Notice how it is a non-human who is commenting on how inhumane it is to refer to rape as anything other than rape. And a subtle reference to this internal conflict of dehumanizing the other.  It is easier to violate the other when you don’t see them as human (even if they aren’t human in the sci-fi show, they are at least humane).

I am reminded of a 2007 courtroom case where the judge outlawed the use of the word “rape”…in a rapist’s trial!  They could only use the term “sex” (not even “sexual assault”).  Feministing’s commentary is worth reading.  Here’s a snippet:

Bowen testified for 13 hours at Safi’s first trial last October, all without using the words rape or sexual assault. She claims, not unreasonably, that describing what happened to her as sex is almost an assault in itself. “This makes women sick, especially the women who have gone through this,” Bowen told the Omaha World-Herald. “They know the difference between sex and rape.”

When we dilute violence by calling it names other than what it is, then we do injustice (again!) to the victims.  And a sci-fi show about treating even non-humans like humans exposes how our language in our real world dehumanizes human women!  Powerful. Poignant.

I did not expect to write about rape and science fiction today, but I cannot let this moment pass without reviewing the way how our language dehumanizes human experience.  I hope you got a little notion of that from this post today.

Thoughts? (please, no spoilers!)

About 16 months ago, we talked about Beta Church, or seeing church ministries as unfinished, incomplete ministries that people could participate in.  We also looked at allowing “beta” ministries to grow unbounded in various ministry contexts in our first series “What the Church can Learn from Wikipedia.”

At the Theology After Google conference (why, oh why didn’t I attend?) Philip Clayton talked about having a Beta Faith, which is beyond simple church ministry structure towards a faith that is always malleable and in process.  Homebrewed Christianity has an hour-long podcast that is really really interesting to listen to.  Some excerpts:

[7:50] Beta version is something that apple or windows programmers have put together. You get to try it out, then you get to send them feedback. The very early releases were really primitive programming…didn’t have the functionality of Word today or something. But you could write macros. And what those of us who were computer nerds did, we wrote macros and then make shortcuts for virtually every key on our keyboard. We took that basic program but what we actually used had our needs and our interests and our creativity built into it…Beta Faith is a faith where we take what’s given, and we bring the creativity, the responses, the questions that we have, and help to make it better.

10:30: What if we could conceive of the church in that beta sense, in process, always renewing, always experimenting in an age where we haven’t been given the easy institutions of our parents and grandparents?

Cool. Listen to the podcast here. And for further reading, Jonathan Stegall has a post on this topic here (h/t @blakehuggins)

Thoughts?

Ran across a quote that sounded interesting and lets me geek out a bit; thought I would share.

“Contrary to the ultra-Darwinist view, reverse engineering doesn’t always work in biology for the simple reason that God is not an engineer; God’s a hacker.”

Francis Crick, Co-discoverer of DNS

I think the original reference is the chaotic mutations and random genetic transformations of organic beings make for a big difficulty to start with a frog and end up with complete fish genetics.  However, it becomes exponentially more difficult with rapidly growing and complex organs like the human brain as the brain changes daily from utero to death.  Reverse-engineering the human brain and creating a robotic or synthetic one that replicates human brains (the Singularity) and passes scrutiny as a human being (the Turing Test) is nigh impossible.*  In this sense, because of the human brain, we may never become God-like creators of our own image.

However, there’s a question of theology in the quote as well.  As mentioned at a Slashdot discussion on the above quote, if God is a hacker then we would expect the “code” to be clean and foolproof.  After all, hacking into a system written by someone smarter than you is exponentially more difficult; and if God was the engineer, then finite humans are sunk trying to completely understand God’s creation.

However, our DNA is practically a binary system, with four pairs as the basis for its complexity. Our own DNA has crap DNA strands that mean nothing other than evolutionary history (the Appendix, anyone?).   Damaged brains teach us that brains rewrite themselves on the fly, not from some systematic reboot.  So we don’t have a highly complex brain that is perfectly written with neat engineer code; rather, we have a haphazard hacked system patched on the fly that can fail at any moment and it is a wonder that all the neurons continue firing.

If God is a hacker, then there’s hope for humanity. There’s hope because all of us are damaged systems just trying to make sense of the world around us, one day at a time.  We will never find a complete reboot and will never find a clean slate; we will never find a religious system that we completely agree with or that is faultless; we will never be completely born again (wiped?) and will have to deal with our human histories and failings.  But God is a hacker and can patch us, update us, bring us to new heights unimaginable if we allow God in past our firewalls and our protections.  Indeed, God can offer us salvation beyond our own construction, can insert new code for life eternal.

If God is a hacker, then hack us into new creations with fresh stirrings of our radical human potential and incredible dependency on God for all things new.**

* Yes, I just watched Battlestar Galactica for the first time.  So Cylons that look like humans until you burn their bodies is a neat commentary on what life would be like post-Singularity.


**Ugh, sometimes I hate it that ridiculous nerdy analogies like that flow freely from my brain, and yet I’m serving the Church in rural farmland.  Ah well, that’s why I blog, eh?

::EDIT:: And the followup quote by a fellow researcher expounds on the above quote.

“My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer,” Dr. Ramachandran said. “You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.”

V.S. Ramachandran, “phantom limb syndrome” researcher

I’m a geek and a reformed gamer…meaning I’m so busy nowadays that I can’t play FPS or RTS games anymore.  But in college, my roomie and I were serious geek gamers.  We had our first taste of high-speed internet and used it to research papers shoot other virtual people.  Not to brag, but for a long time about 2 hours, I was #5 in the world’s quarterly rankings in Unreal Tournament.  Life was good, fragging unknown strangers with weird names from across the globe.

So it caught my eye when a new study came out about gamers. At LAN parties (where geeks would bring their computers, hook them together, and play competitive games), gamers are more aggressive towards strangers than friends (via /.)

…multiplayer video games tap into the same mechanisms as warfare, where testosterone’s effect on aggression is advantageous.
Against a group of strangers – be it an opposing football team or an opposing army – there is little reason to hold back, so testosterone’s effects on aggression offer an advantage.
“In a serious out-group competition you can kill all your rivals and you’re better for it,” says David Geary, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who led the study.

But the flip side is also true: gamer’s testosterone levels actually went down when they competed against friends or people they knew.

However, when competing against friends or relatives to establish social hierarchy, annihilation doesn’t make sense. “You can’t alienate your in-group partners, because you need them,” he says.

I certainly agree with this.  When gaming with your friends, sometimes there’s a common courtesy (“no cheap shots”) and you give each other feedback (“Quad damage makes you glow so you can’t hide and snipe people!”).  While games with friends are competitive, it seems you really take your gloves off when playing against strangers.

While we aren’t fragging people in churches, this study says two things to me in relation to church dynamics:

1. When there’s a disagreement in churches, strap them to computers and have them settle their differences with joysticks. j/k!
2. Seriously, this highlights the tremendous importance in building a sense of teamwork and community even in the most contentious of church committees. 

The better the members of your team know each other, the better they might treat each other.  If they are faceless people having disagreements, then arguments can be more aggressive.  If all you know about the Finance chair is that he once ran into the church mailbox, then arguments can be more aggressive. 

To get people to know one another, try these:

• Get to know each other.  Even though it sounds like something to do with children or youth, start meetings with interaction.  A bible study or hymn or even a name-game gets people a bit closer to treating one another like…people.
  
• Go to trainings together. I’ve served for several years on Lay Academies and they have trainings in your area of ministry.  Going together with a ministry team is essential to building trust and competency.
• Eat together.  Before a big meeting, meet for dinner, or have a lunch meeting where people bring their lunch.  Words shared over food somehow taste better.

So, that’s how Gamers can teach Churches how to treat each other.  Get to know one another, and it becomes at least hormonally more difficult to treat one another badly.

Thoughts?

I wonder if I’m being influenced by moving to Tornado Alley.  In writing my draft of response to the doctrinal questions of the UMC (you’ll see them eventually), I’m struck by a repeated theme in my answers: loops.

Some examples of concepts I’m tinkering with:

• Humanity is not fallen, but swirling in circles without a firm foundation.
• Humanity succumbs to cycles of violence which are not easily broken.
• In the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, the other three marks circle like a funnel above the bible, constantly evaluating the bible in light of those three but never from the same place (or even elevation).
• Cycles of steps in Sanctification and seeking Christian perfection (Wesleyan theology)

In programming terms, an infinite loop is one where a computer program gets a code or request that it cannot fulfill and its response evokes the code again. This infinite loop of request and response usually freeze the computer and causes it to crash and BSoD.

I wonder if this is the human condition (often called depravity): we are stuck in an infinite loop, swirling without stopping, succumbing to cycles of violence and unable to escape without the grace of God.  This not only breaks these cycles but gives us a firm foundation to reorient our lives around.

One theological problem is that infinite loops are usually done by programmer error, which would mean that God as Programmer made an error in the human makeup or intentionally put us in this situation, neither of which is theologically acceptable to this blogger.

One possible response is found in an area near and dear to my heart: Nintendo video games.  These games (or cartridges…the ones you blew into, remember?) are written as an infinite loop that will run until the power is turned off.  Their consoles are so simple they don’t have an operating system: thus, each individual cartridge is based on an assumed infinite loop to keep it running and to give the game’s code inside the ability to work.

Perhaps then God as Nintendo Programmer writes us on an infinite loop, but it is the subprograms that we write on our own cartridges that cause us to foul up and lose our way.  We write our own shallow reflections of infinite loops which cause us to get stuck in cycles and break the code within. But there is hope: our words and actions alone will not break the cartridge or ensure an upgrade, only God can do that.  By realizing our life is reliant on God alone, all other cycles can cease and we can work on building up our own programs into life-affirming ones that continue even when the reset button is pushed.

….And all it takes is the breath of God blowing into our cartridges that gives us life!  Hahahahahaha…whew…ok, I need to end this analogy.

I think this may be the world’s first blog post on Nintendo and human depravity.  Maybe that is too nerdy for Saturday morning and I should go back to writing my doctrinal answers.  But for those of you that enjoy nerdy analogies (I’ve written them before)…what do you think?

(Graphic from Stevie Nova)

The Matrix Trilogy is a Christian Hacker’s dream of nuanced meaning, theological dilemmas, and the sci-fi world of humanity v. machine.  It makes me sweat.

In the Matrix Trilogy, the character of the Architect describes how the machines (who have taken over the world and enslaved humanity into a drea world) dealt with the variable called human free will which refused to be controlled or pacified:

[The Architect]: The matrix is older than you know. I prefer counting from the emergence of one integral anomaly to the emergence of the next, in which case this is the sixth version…You are here because Zion is about to be destroyed. Its every living inhabitant terminated, its entire existence eradicated…

The function of the One is now to return to the source, allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry, reinserting the prime program. After which you will be required to select from the matrix 23 individuals, 16 female, 7 male, to rebuild Zion. Failure to comply with this process will result in a cataclysmic system crash killing everyone connected to the matrix, which coupled with the extermination of Zion will ultimately result in the extinction of the entire human race.

The Architect rules the world even though all of life hinges on the unpredictability of a single human response.  And each time that human life becomes able to pose a threat, the Architect manufactures events to force a reset of the system (and thus its continuation).  The Architect plays God with unpredictable humans and does well until he accepts a different outcome in Neo, the seventh anomaly, who introduces a lasting change of peace between human and machine.

I know it has been a few years since these movies came out (I remember taking a group of 20 religion students to the first movie when it came out), but it is striking how when what I’m reading screams realization of what a movie plot point might mean.

In Kester Brewin’s book Signs of Emergence, he outlines how God moves from transforming the world through revolutionary tactics (floods, smiting, etc) to transforming the world through evolutionary tactics (becoming human and embodying God’s wishes rather than dictating them).  One of the hinge points is in the Tower of Babel story where God scatters the human race that sought to reach God through illicit means:

We have seen that this sort of violent action iis pretty characteristic of God in Genesis: casting out and cursing, flooding and scattering, circumcizing and bartering over the destruction of Sodom. And like all revolutionary change, its effects are not transformative. People are scattered but continue to build cities…if God wanted to transform his creation, he couldn’t keep periodically pressing “reset.”

K. Brewin, Signs of Emergence, 125-126

In the end of the Matrix, humans and machines presumably learn to co-exist in harmony rather than dictated existence as slave and master.  In the continuing story of the people of God, our God has chosen to stop smiting the world and pressing reset (reminding us every time a rainbow is in the sky that this is not God’s way) and instead works with us to transform our hearts, turn our minds away from cyclical sin, and work alongside us for our redemption.

The only thing working against God: Free will, our human frailty, the anomaly that is part and parcel to Creation that God cannot stamp out or filter.  As the Architect succinctly says:

As you adequately put, the problem is choice.

God has chosen to stop the cycle, and has placed a huge section of that responsibility in your hands.  What will you do to hack the system, to stop those seeking to domesticate humanity (and thus God), and instead open the system to all those who seek God’s presence in their lives?

Or will you choose the door on the right, back to the Matrix, and keep the system in place?

Image by aLii_ via Flickr

I love MIT. I was on the subway today with a MIT computer geek and we started talking shop with me polishing my geek cred. Star Trek, the upcoming Anime convention: it was 15 minutes that would make my spouse twitch a little bit.

Then the conversation got even more interesting. He saw I had my cross out and visible and asked if I was a Christian. I said yes, I am a pastor, and I actually have a blog called “Hacking Christianity.” He liked the blog name and then said something that really turned wheels in my head.  Here’s roughly what we said:

Hacker: You know what I think?  I think if Death was a system, then Jesus hacked the system of death.  We could say he did it through a 0day exploit.
Me: Or in Jesus’ case, a 3day exploit.
Hacker: Exactly.  He broke it open for everyone.

In hacking, a 0day exploit is a vulnerability in a system that is so newly uncovered that it is unfixed (hence: zero days in existence).  It is not a virus, but knowledge of the vulnerability is shared from hacker to hacker once it is released into the wild.  The company then has to fix the system quickly to keep the hack from working anymore.  The longer the gap between detection and fixing it, the greater the 0day hack.

I like this metaphor because it speaks to nerds about what Jesus did.

• Jesus hacked the system of death by living and dying in a way that death hadn’t seen before or knew how to contain, even in a tomb.
• Three days later, Jesus escaped from death and told of his 3day exploit to his followers, with instructions to spread it “to all the nations.”
• The followers did so, and the hack continues to work for generations of followers because the exploit of the system of death is unfixable.  The hack is eternal life.

Nerds.  You never know what they might come up with.

Thoughts?

Cover of Eagle Eye

Eagle Eye, with Shia LeBoughertgey (the latter is silent), is a techno-thriller that was a decent movie.  What struck me is that the movie portrays two very different ideas of the mastermind Eagle Eye, and they correlate nicely to images of God

1. To the good guys, they are given tasks by a shadowy puppetmaster.  They each function like cogs in a machine ran by a shadowy spider head that is pushing them forward through sheer inertia and threats.
2. To Eagle Eye, Shia and Michelle Monaghan are called as modern-day minutemen, as ordinary citizens called up to oppose a corrupt government.  Each member is recruited and has no knowledge of the greater goals or even of each other until they perform the specific roles and actualize their potential in a distributed terrorist network.

Both of these images of Eagle Eye’s activity correlate to popular concepts of God.

1. God as puppetmaster, as the one who controls all the strings and causes us to dance.  Sure, we have free will, but the puppetmaster moves us where God wants us.  This has various forms in contemporary bad-boy Calvinism which is called determinism, or where God determines what will happen and predestines events and actions.
2. God as giving a purpose (or role) to each individual and it is up to them to see how they fit into the distributed network.  This is the key concept behind the Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren, that if we find our God-given purpose, we actualize our potential.

I think many of us see God as Eagle Eye, as a force which causes bad things to happen when we do bad things (much like Eagle Eye punishes Shia when he ‘disobeys’), but also gives us a purpose that we are eventually pushed towards.  Some purposes are mundane (like the TSA agent changing the x-ray machine at the airport), and some are huge (like Michelle delivering ‘the package’).  Coincidences are God connecting different chess pieces into a greater vision and purpose drawn inexorbitably together.

But what happens to defeat this understanding of “God” in the movie?  The turning point occurs when Michelle refuses to eliminate Shia, even though she has complied (to the extreme) in all other areas.  Why?  Because she has gotten to know Shia and even with Shia’s acceptance of this outcome, Michelle won’t do it.  Michelle’s breaking the chain of “commands” allows Shia to become free and eventually stop Eagle Eye.  The closer Michelle drew to Shia, the closer they made decisions based on their relationship instead of being unwilling subjects to the all-powerful Eagle Eye.

In the same way, ideas of determinism and Calvinism fall short when we experience and grow closer in our relationship with God.  God ceases to be a puppetmaster and becomes a companion on the journey, opening possibilities instead of willing purposes.

Moses’ concept of God undergoes a similar transformation on the mountaintop when God’s anger burns bright, about to wipe out the idol-worshipping Hebrews, and Moses argues with God.  While it is questionable whether God actually changes God’s mind, Moses transforms from a willing subject into a companion who feels he can challenge and question God…all formed by Moses working with God for a long time saving the Hebrew people.  Moses had a relationship with God, and that relationship allowed Moses to question God.

When we allow relationships to form our reactions, when we allow depth of relationships to trump society’s threats to “keep us to the script” then we experience transformation not only of our selves, but of our image of God.  When we rebel against society’s scripts that say that women should be in the kitchen and black Americans know their place in the fields, then we experience transformation.  When we cease to give power to God as Eagle Eye, then we cease following the Law and instead live in the unpredictable currents of the Spirit.

Thoughts?

Since we talk about hacking the bible, we might as well branch that out to other intersections of religion and technology.  So this seems to fit perfectly: an assembly-line robot has been haXoRed to replicate the Bible on a continuously rolling 900m parchment, just like the scribes in the middle-ages. (hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan)

Website here.  Video can be found here.  More pics can be found here.

The installation ‘bios [bible]‘ consists of an industrial robot, which writes down the bible on rolls of paper. The machine draws the calligraphic lines with high precision. Like a monk in the scriptorium it creates step by step the text.

Starting with the old testament and the books of Moses ‘bios [bible]’ produces within seven month continuously the whole book. All 66 books of the bible are written on rolls and then retained and presented in the library of the installation.

Pretty nifty!  Read on for more!

So, what is this? Dick calls it Performance Art but can’t decide what to do with the narcissism inherent in performance art since the performer is a robot.  Peter quotes the project’s desire to create an environment where “the massive appearance of the robots, the movements and the machine sounds effect the visitor.”  So, in the performance aspect of this piece, the idea of automatons assembling one of the most human of books may be disconcerting.

In computer technology ‘basic input output system’ (bios) designates the module which basically coordinates the interchange between hard- and software. Therefore it contains the indispensable code, the essential program writing, on which every further program can be established.”

Are we looking at post-human reproduction where reproduction includes human effects even though the copy is perfect?

What the robot does is a step up from print in reproducing the manuscripts made by monks, which is great, though it doesn’t say whether the robot arm applies differential pressure and angle of stroke depending on the previous letters, or how far across the line it is, or how far down the page, like a human being would. If it did, then that would in my mind give the work a magical, delicate quality of something written. I don’t want to get all tedious and mystical about some missing innate human or animistic quality, but I like the idea of a robot arm having to stretch a bit at the edges of the page, altering its stroke weight after a particularly arduous cadel previously, all that kind of stuff. I can imagine a whole series of publications that could be given this ‘hand done’ treatment. We could have special editions of books made by one-time-only robot arms, ones that get tired after a number of copies and can’t be made to write any more, books made by robots with a signature style, with minds of their own. All eventually of course leading to original works created by machines so advanced we have to refer to them as human (or post-human) too

What do you think about this project? Is its theological claims of perfection and reproduction faithful?  Or is its squelching of human ingenuity (even though it is a product of it) render its reception of the Spirit meaningless?

Discuss.