a thought rolling over on itself like a snowball tumbling into an avalanche: barely structured ideas on valentines day

I just saw an ad that said, "Texting at Church? TXT3 is a new worshiping experience..."

My reaction occurred to me visually before it took on a description. The vision was that of a member of the clergy pissing into a bottle of wine. The use of communication age technology to engage in Christian worshiping exercises seems extremely counterintuitive. Then again, most everything about religion seems counterintuitive to me. Alas.

Technology is pure but not sacred. Religion is not pure but it is sacred. Technology is pure because it is objective. It carries no implicit judgment and is external to morality. Thus, hypocrisy is an impossibility. Religion is sacred because it is old and tends to, or at least pre-tends to, stay the same. It centers on cycles and recurrences. It is based on tradition and it posits a morality which its members are sporadically faithful to.

Technology is not sacred because it is not nostalgic. Though technology operates in cycles, its overall movement is linear. It progresses and adapts to changes in its environment, just like the Darwinian model of a species. Religion is not pure because it is inconsistent. Its doctrines and its history are polluted with contradiction.

The problem with religion is that it is largely non-adaptive. It is rigid. It cannot improvise in a dynamic environment. Religion would be a terrible jazz musician. Technology exists only to address its dynamic environment. Quite ironically, the idea of technology would be terrible at executing repetitive tasks (as opposed to the actual physical manifestation of technology which mostly used to execute repetitive tasks with an extremely high degree of accuracy).

The problem with technology is that it is cold. Nazism was a technological society in this sense. Certain people were deemed less effective as others, and the others were overworked and abused until they died. Though the basis for judging who was effective and who was not was essentially flawed because it was based on baseless intolerance, the course of action was coldly rational. If you had a tool that you meant to replace, you might still use it until it gives out completely. If you had a country full of Jews, you might throw them into labor camps until they die. This is the danger of purely progressive, i.e. technological thinking.

What we need is sacredness--a nostalgia for life and the absence of suffering. The problem is that we need to arrive at that nostalgia through the same type of reasoning that led to the holocaust. I am confident that such a thing is possible. Reasoning is impartial. I feel that pragmatism will serve as a segue into a progressive ideology that has room for sacredness and thus, will have safeguards against abuse.

Pragmatism is the marriage of intuition and reasoning. If we think pragmatically long enough, I think that collectively our seemingly separate, intuition-driven conclusions will reveal an underlying system or ideology that can can unite thought as religion once did.

Speaking of linear progression, I am way off from where I started. Apparently I need to develop a nostalgia for how I begin my writing. Oh well. Americans never look back.