A pencil?
A concordance?
And a keyboard meant for ignoring in favor of a speech to text function on a smart phone?
We all have a list of words we know how to spell wrong so the red squiggly lines can auto correct it for us. Definitely, beautiful, sincerely, the list goes on. But part and parcel with that list is a growing trend of humanity not being technically good with its means of communication, because our technology is technically as good, for the most part.
I mean touch screens still put I’s where U’s are supposed to go.
This could all be the grumpy ramblings of your slightly GenX-Millenial unc, but I do want to point out that you likely never spell words wrong that you know how to spell right, with a pencil. Why is that, by the way. I thought the keyboard was a more advance version of technologies that preceded it?
Unless, keyboards aren’t the next best thing in a line but rather a new contender in a ring. Because the keyboard inherently accepts human error where the pencil and concordance are used to express human truth.
The reason you use a pencil to do the action of handwriting is to express what you could think or say in a transferable medium. It is very hard to spell a word you know wrong if you in fact you know it. But it’s proportionally easy to spell a word wrong on a keyboard that you do know how to spell, which is why the red squiggly lines tell us what we did wrong when we use a keyboard and those red line only show up with an elementary schoolteacher when we use the pencil.
But from there to touch screen phones with a laughable accuracy for our giant fingers to type on the world made a winding rope of paths back to clarity of expressed written thought. Voice to text works, but only kinda. That swipe method seemed to do the trick, but only kinda. And before too long the world seemed to want to do away with any real input method that had them do all the imputing and we got the GPT. Where would could enter in the gist of what we wanted and it would spit out its best approximation.
And this is where the lines got crossed because it's one thing to write a love letter in fountain pen and lipstick to a lover, and another thing to print a smooch via jpeg on the corner of the page, and use a hand written font and GPT to get the exact same words you “could” have use. Even if you would use those exact same words and the GPT flexed some prophetic/synthetic muscles, saying exactly what you thought but couldn’t muster your fingers to type, would that be a love letter or what looks like a love letter. Because it’s currently what a sermon is, or what it could be.
What we’re witnessing is commodification of intent and meaning. And what you don’t ever get when you do that is what you meant or intended, only what meaning and intent looks like.
For example. You, likely, don't know what the Bible says, you know what a translated copy of the biblical text’s copies say. And all of that under the assumption that you have your copy of a copy memorized. Which you don’t. Let’s be real here. But we can all rest easy knowing that the Bible doesn’t tell us to be as textually accurate in its distribution as that new weird tech-theology blogger you know.
Right?
“And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites:”
Deuteronomy 17:18 KJV
Uh oh guys, I think we may missed something.
And before the armchair theologians and/or language scholars come at me, let’s just consider that if the most important people in a kingdom are told to do this, that it would be at the very least beneficial to do it ourselves. Yeah. We aren’t told in Hebrew and Greek to hand copy our NLT bibles. Let alone to translate them into Hebrew And Greek. But it may be the only way to rescue meaning and intent from the content machine of the internet. Especially in the age of getting GPT’s to create that content for you, because of the glorification (Literally) of efficiency.
We have a unique chance at the top of this waterslide to not only realize it’s a slippery slope but to also realize, while we are equipped to slide, we may not know how to swim. The walk down the stairs to that slide will be arduous and intellectually embarrassing. Some might say humbling, but it will guarantee that we will not drown. To go down the slide anyway hoping a God that can walk on water, might find ourselves quoting the wrong person in the Bible to make our points about Christian tech use.
“Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”
Matthew 4:5-7 KJV
I would have loved to have typed that out in Greek for the full effect of the bit. But I fear that those of you with ears to hear would have miss heard me.
There is a way to play nicely in this water. Even in the shadow of a slippery slope as large as the one we just walked down from. A way that will will teach us all the necessary skills and techniques needed to go head first down the slide all the same, to the glory of God and the enjoyment of all men at the water park. But it is clearly not where a GPT can recite more of any given Bible translation than you.
That way means putting the GPT in the shallow end with you as you write down what you know and not search for what you could find out the hard way. The way hand and foot kick and flail until you suddenly find yourself swimming. The way you splash and cannon ball before a swan dive knocks the socks off the cute lifeguard you want a phone number from. GPT’s can be a great set of water wings in this pool, and an even greater surf simulators. But only if we learn to swim first. Everything before that is a kind of danger that is as transparent as the water is when it's still. And the reason why fences are mandated around pools these days. Not to prevent swimming but to prevent drowning. Which will look the same until it’s almost too late. But there is a way to enjoy the swim in spite of the danger that comes from understanding the nature of the danger instead of trying to compensate for it.
Swimmers have the same muscles that drowners do. The difference is the application of wisdom through knowledge, and just not its replacement through technique.
“For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”
Habakkuk 2:14 KJV
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