You can organize the clothing of the less than via online. But when your church, pew, pulpit, and congregant are all online because you bit the VR church bullet, then you find yourself in a strange place. One that wants to be Christian, and looks and sounds Christian, but can't act Christian in the ways Christ prescribed. Because they do church in a way Christ contradicted. How do you clothe the fan-serviced avatar who shows up at your metaverse church? The one whose pixilated breasts and ass cheeks move at every nudge of the mouse to capture the attention of every man in attendance. I'm not making the accusation and prudish judgement that a person needs to adorn themselves in perfect modesty to find a church to attend, even in person.
But the naked woman who shows up on your actual church's doorstep can be clothed. How do you clothe the digital one? Can you. Do you have the requisite digital control over your digital worship services? Or if given enough space to do such, is the rendering literally done to Ceasar? Who demands that sexuality belongs online in all spaces.
You thought Rule 34 was a joke and a meme. But it's not. It's the law and prophets of those who actually worship online. When you don't control the pixels that your digital space is represented through, then who ever does gets to decide what can and can't be done in your space. And more importantly, what you wear down the church aisles.
McLuhan said that any new technological adoption amputates the sense it enhances. That there is no way to really go back to a world without electric light, as a moral good, once you’ve had a surgeon do a 24 hour procedure inside the skull of an infant. To remove the light would be to doom the child. But in saving the child you remove the stars from the heavens. So far as we can see in the city with electric lights.
The same thing goes for clothes. You don’t get a world where nudity isn’t a problem after you weave the first fig leaves together. What motivated you to do such weavings was a cascading sin that would effect everything we do as humans, And this first of all man’s technologies led the way for a every tech to do the same kind of thing to us. Keep us from God. Which is why God sacrificed animals for Adam and Eve’s sin to clothe them. He was atoning for their sin and replacing the sinfulness of their tech with something that pointed to a future savior. One that would bring us back to him.
There might have once been a world where clothing wasn’t made to clothe the naked. Because it would have been in the presence of perfect humans and a perfect God. One where you needn’t worry about the nakedness we all have as one of our basest fears. A world where clothing was only ever an act of obedience to our loving God and a tool for our dominion mandate of the world. And not a veil to hide behind, one for us before the wedding or God before the temple sanctuary. There might even have been a world, if we had not sinned, where the same naked people who only need clothes for the work the clothes do, show up in art and pictures and videos and wind up on an interconnected network of machines that store the pictures for us. To share and view in godly ethical observance with no traces of sin that we all brought to the paragraph, when I just described what pornography is without sin.
What does a world without porn look like? We will never know. But there was a brief time between the 6th day and 2nd human where we could have found out. Since and until a future then, any digitally rendered version of a human will be what pornography is online, by any and every metric we use to define pornography. Aside from the nudity.
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
Matthew 25:35-40 KJV
My harshest criticism of the online church, despite its reach and connection, is that it cannot do the least amount of church work by the means it claims affinity to a church that could. Namely one that isn’t online and is actually feeding, clothing, and visiting the people around them in the name of Jesus.
No comments:
Post a Comment