Technophobia

On Saturday, George W. Bush gave the commencement address at Oklahoma State University. Apart from expressing pride at speaking to "a lot of other cowboys", the Cowboy in Chief warned these graduates of the dangers of technology:

"Science offers the prospect of eventual cures for terrible diseases — and temptations to manipulate life and violate human dignity," Bush said during commencement exercises at Oklahoma State University. "With the Internet, you can communicate instantly with someone halfway across the world — and isolate yourself from your family and your neighbors."

We've come a long way in the last ten years or so, when the Clinton/Gore administration was embracing and encouraging technology, and pumping the idea of "the information superhighway". That administration called to our minds the science fiction stories that depict technology making our lives easier and better, and strove to make those stories real. This administration calls to our minds the science fiction stories that depict the robots taking over and making us subservient, that show technology taking away our souls, and want to make us think those stories would be real.

Some believe that when we apply some areas of science, and develop certain technology, we are meddling in God's milieu, and to do so is to offend God and to cause certain doom. This makes no sense to me; isn't it more sensible to believe that God gave us the intelligence to do this, and actually expects us to? Much science and technology, including the understanding of the solar system and the technology to travel through it, was initially dismissed — and worse — as heresy, but these are now fully accepted and there is no credible opposition to them now.

I believe that if there be a God who cares about what we do here, that God has given us the intelligence to discover and understand science, and to develop technology, and that God wants us to do so — and not to do so, well, that is what goes against God's desire and puts us at risk of wrath.

Throughout history, through every sort of theism we've had, it's always been the conservative element who claimed to know what the gods wanted, and who used it to try to impede advancement of knowledge.

They have always been wrong.