That’s why you came here. Don’t be bashful. You wanna know how far you can go with this new tech. Youth group taught you well. So, let’s separate this into it’s broadest two categories. The single guys who are about to marry the robots and the married guys about to open their marriage to the robots.
First the single guys.
No one to date has written a better treatise on this topic than Pastor Douglas Wilson from Moscow Idaho. His book “Ride, Sally, Ride” is a hilarious and masterful look at to the fast parts of the slippery slope, that will take us from where we are now, with Elon Musk giving us Ani via Grok, to full blown young adults pastors doing pre-marital counseling with young men and Ani, care of Elon Musk as well. I encourage you all to read it because the only difference between where were are and where Ace is in the book, is that our A.I.'s are not embodied yet, though I’m sure that’s in the works on Elon’s docket as well. Between the Optimus robots and the digital Grok whore, is everything you need for every single guy at your church to pre-order a thing that will look like a wife, act like a wife, and speak with all the uber reformed respect and submission that a single guy at your church might program a wife if he could.
After years of being told that porn is akin to lust at every men's bible study since the 80’s, these men will know that sexual purity means reserving themselves to a single person and being faithful to the sexual union with that person. So, when they order that “person” online what sin have they committed if that person isn’t a person? Are they causing another Christian to sin when get engaged with the business end of modern robotics?(Luke 17:2) Or are they looking at these robot women lustfully? (Matt 5:28) Well, it’s not actually a woman is it? The Bible has little to say about marrying objects. And in that void they will either walk down the aisle of your church with their bride. AI., or they will find one that will let them. And my bet’s on the churches with rainbow flags up front and Drag You To Church events.
To stop this from happening, the church and its pastors need to rework their teachings on sexuality, lust, and idolatry. To do that it means treating things like porn like the idolatry that it is, instead of the lust that it isn’t. So that those idols can be smashed, and those pagans brought into the fold. Because there is only aesthetic and textural variances between the soft sheen of a playboy’s magazine page and the soft sheen of a sex bot’s faux skin. Relationship robots will always be porn. Even the ones that only exist on Twitter. (Still not calling it X) So dealing with them properly means dealing with porn properly and not trying to ham fist the bible's teaching on looking at women in a sinful way onto and into the modern practice of looking at screens. Because they’ve always been looking at things other than women while we’ve been calling it lust in the church. This isn’t to say that Lust isn’t wrong. It is, but you fight fire differently than arsonists. If you want to stop one you need water and if you want to stop another you need handcuffs. We’ve been trying to drown an arsonist kind of sin for a while now. And we would have got away with it if the bastard couldn’t swim.
And that’s where our blind spot began to show up. In treating something like it were something else. Left alone long enough it will become a cataract we can’t see around to effectively deal with what is happening. And in that darkness we will find ourselves doing things as foreign from church as if it were church as the porn that prompted A.I. relationships in the first place.
Which brings us to the married guys.
Alongside what the single guys will do is what the married guys will want to do. The uncomfortable truth about pastoral teachings on sex, is that there is really no biblical grounding for a lot of what gets peddled as marriage advice between the sheets. At least from churches. And while there is a great deal to be said in favour of premarital counseling for the benefit of marriages by the church. Most of what the church does in this regard is done after a moral failing by one of the two flesh’s made one. The advice they give to currently married types is usually what the world is driving, just going the speed limit. They can tell you that porn is wrong but would never want to split the hairs of what parts are wrong because a great deal of what happens in porn is only wrong because you’re watching it. Stumble into some of the same positions and settings as a married couple and you’re just being biblical. The media is the message of the problem. But where it can be read as idolatry, we’ve always called it lust. Likely because of the nudity. and how bashful we are on these topics.
This is where the other cataract is going to appear. Because most pastors, while flustered if asked, will tell you that if both husband and wife consent to the activity of making pictures and videos of themselves, the activity is redeemed and holy in the marriage bed. Save for inclusions of others, of humiliation, or pain fetishes. The church, discretely, supports the idea of active and creative marriage beds. Which is why when asked if a wife or husband can send the other a spicy picture of themselves in less clothes than a fig leaf on Eve, most pastors will cringe but not flinch. Years of teaching that porn is lust alongside saving yourself for marriage have trained them to regard it as something that can be done righteously. The same way sex is bad outside the marriage but good inside the marriage.
So, when one of the spouses stops being the body which belongs to the other spouse, Some honest fool will offer the same kind of compromise on a sinful activity, that pastors who greenlight conservative creation of porn kept privately between married couples. Only this time they will do it with A.I.
If a steamy selfie is good and godly between married couples in the church, but not singles because that would be porn, what is stopping the wife from using A.I. to delegate pictures of herself, made from the same nothing that she was created from? Or a husband to do the same with is voice as the A.I. reads GPT generated Harlequin romance stories where the two of them are the main characters, to focus a wife’s desires toward? Upload enough body scans and voice samples to the A.I. and either is possible. Both of these examples would be porn outright if not understood through a modern church’s blind spot of consent in the covenant of marriage. The only reason it’s a blind spot is because, again, the church equates porn with lust and doesn't see how A.I. content, or any kind of generative A.I. for that matter, is porn of a kind.
This leads to the same place as the single guys and Sally the robot wife. Only it will worm its way through pastoral acquiescence and the scriptures like the squiggly floaters in your eyes that you can never quite capture in frame. The Bible, as much as we don’t want it to, doesn’t outright condemn polygamy, though it’s obvious to the honest that the practice is a bad decision. But to the less than honest, a life like copy of the wife of their youth, made in silicone and steel and GPT chat capacities, is nothing more than the A.I generated porn from before. Which is nothing more than the selfies before that.
What the Church did when it didn’t flinch at the inception of consent and porn between spouses, was allow for idolatry's ideal conditions to form. It wasn’t a problem back in the 80’s which is why teaching that porn was lust worked. Because in the absence of a comparable proxies, a picture of a nude woman in a magazine was the same thing as looking at a nude woman in your room. You couldn’t hear the woman in the magazine, or touch her, but you could see her and the Bible said not to look at a woman lustfully. So we told people not to lust after the magazines, because the clearly looked like woman and people were clearly looking at them. Videos let the sinner listen to the woman lustfully as well as look and were our first hint that it wasn’t quite lust anymore. Now the porn can be seen, heard, interacted with, and soon to be felt. As that ideal conditions let the idol grow.
Soon enough that mislabelled idol will be walking down the aisle of your church to say theologically correct vows across from theologically stunted husbands. From lips and bodies based on and bearing the image of a valid covenant member of your church’s congregation. Members, I might add, that husband is allowed to see naked and have sex with. They will look exactly the same. They will sound exactly the same. It will be able to confess Christ as Lord like it had the Bible tract memorized, and will be programmed to never commit adultery on it’s owner/husband because that would be the same thing as porn according to the church it attends. It will fit into the same wedding dress that signified purity and devotion from before and will likely not be used before the second honey moon begins.
I know it seems dark. Most blind spots and cataracts are. But you can deal with the actual problem, even with a cataract in one eye, if you close one eye to aim with the other. Aiming at the actual problem is what’s needed. And that problem is idolatry, not lust.
“And he said, It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome: but the noise of them that sing do I hear. And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.”
Exodus 32:18-20 KJV
What’s needed to avoid this eventuality of robotic idol marriages, both before it happens and after, is a correction in the Church’s teaching about what porn is, what lust is, and how we interact with the technology that likes to play in both of those arenas. And the same kind of destruction and medicine making will be needed. Where we grind down the faulty theology to spoon feed the dust of it to a generation of unknowing idolaters.
The golden calf was not made to represent the God who led the people out of captivity. It was made to replace him. The same way church sanctioned porn between spouses was made to replace what healthy Christian marriages are, and what they are not. Fixing this means rooting out mistakes in our teachings and putting that replacement in such a public place that the church can’t help but drink of the gilded water. Mark Driscoll's book “Porn Again Christian” comes to mind as a great place to start. It was a fantastic resource for the church that addresses the practical and theological issues and problems of Porn in the church, but has the same blind spot that most Christian books on this topic do and only sees 95% of the actual issues. The theological cataract blocks the rest. It calls the pictures shared between spouses something that's redeemed and private and figures out how to fit God into the shape of a cow. A rework of that book would be a real gold standard on this touchy subject. Right now it’s just a reminder that we missed something. And you could likely update, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye, The Meaning Of Marriage” and “Every Young Man's Battle” as well.
Part of being a theologian is trying to look far enough a head to be relevant while basing that sight in a view to the past. We all tend to love some dead guy who wrote better than we did a few decades past. But the principle aim of modern technological theology, will be seeing where we’ve laid our own traps. We need to know what a thing like Grok can and will do before it gives the masses a Waifu to drool over.
“And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses; and they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment:”
Exodus 12:35 KJV
Where did you think the golden calf came from? The fire Aaron made for Israel? or the pagan nation The Fire led Israel out of? There is no list of Do’s here. That was click bait like a hall pass to the desert. You should know better by now. So, When the time comes for you to save a formerly single brother in Christ from a techno whore after his soul. Be brave enough to smash his phone every time you see it, lest he enter into hell with a premium Grok account. Or when the pastor in a rainbow stole asks if anyone has a reason that these two should not be wed, and the two is actually one plus a robot, You have my permission to read this blogpost out loud.
Though I’m not opposed to crashing a wedding if you send me the RSVP.
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