"The Integration of Spiritual Alchemy and Technology: Transforming Our Existence"
Our technology has already radically transformed us and NOT in a good way!
Just as guns are only evil in the hands of an evil person so too goes our technology.
Social media separates and isolates us.
Technology allows us to kill many people from afar.
Technology promotes misinformation and disinformation
Technology is at the center of many people's lives, it replaces God.
Technology is the new Tower of Babel.
Once again WE want to supplant God!
G.K Chesterton famously said that when people stop believing in God they do not believe in nothing but are capable instead of believing in anything.
Digital technology seduces us into thinking we can control the world. If we have all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips on the internet then we have the knowledge to control.
The problem is our human nature does not change or improve.
People choose to do and think evil. Our evil thoughts and intentions are being applied to technology. Killer robots (controlled by AI) are under development as are many other things that are harmful to people. AI is a problem because of Us!
Atheism is failing as the theory of evolution falls apart.
Our current place in history illustrates that human depravity is alive and flourishing.
Christianity is declining rapidly in America and elsewhere as nominal Christians fall away from the faith. We now have a pick-and-choose spiritual consumerism detached from the one and only True God.
Just as the human population before the Flood became corrupt so we are also following that pattern.
The technology that is a gift is also being corrupted in life. The Apple Commercial illustrates this perfectly.
For more read the excellent article from Rod Dreher's Diary below.
Apple Crushes Reality
And: Post-Christian Ireland; Russia, The Promised Land?; Miserable Libs; Holy Fire
The ad sells its powerful new iPad. But there has been a huge backlash to its messaging. As you will have seen just now, the ad shows a huge drill press crushing musical instruments, paint cans, a bust of a human being, and other artifacts of material reality. The idea is that all of these things have been digitized, and made available to you in the magical Apple device.
The thing to notice is that the ad doesn’t promise that the iPad is some new technology. This is what digital technology already does, and has been doing for some time. This ad, though, makes gruesomely explicit what has only been implicit: that all of reality is being dissolved, and is being re-coagulated digitally.
I use the terms “dissolve” and “coagulate” intentionally. They are part of the occult process of “spiritual alchemy,” in which a substance is taken apart, and put back together transmuted into a different substance. I have a longer piece about the Apple ad’s meaning coming out soon in The European Conservative, so I won’t write too much more about it here. In it, I draw from last year’s review essay of Anton Barba-Kay’s great book about how the digital world is changing us. And I mention the recent discussion in this newsletter about tulpamancy..." from the article Apple Crushes Reality
Video from Today
"Tech giant Apple is apologizing after widespread backlash over its new ad for the latest iPad Pro. The promo shows a press crushing symbols of the arts and compressing it into their device. NBC’s Brian Cheung reports for TODAY.' from the video introduction
Pagan America and Spiritual Alchemy
With the retreat of Christianity as a baseline for American culture the "old gods" are infiltrating our culture.
As Christians who are deeply steeped in God's Holy Word, we will know and understand the spiritual reality that surrounds us.
There are many sources concerning the supernatural reality of the world, below is one.
"The psalmist declared that God presides over an assembly of divine beings (Psa. 82:1). Who are they? What does it mean when those beings participate in God’s decisions (1 Kings 22:19–23)? Why wasn’t Eve surprised when the serpent spoke to her? Why are Yahweh and his Angel fused together in Jacob’s prayer (Gen. 48:15–16)? How did descendants of the Nephilim (Gen. 6:4) survive the flood (Num. 13:33)? What are we to make of Peter and Jude’s belief in imprisoned spirits (2 Pet. 2:4; Jude 6)? Why does Paul describe evil spirits in terms of geographical rulership (thrones, principalities, rulers, authorities)? Who are the “glorious ones” that even angels dare not rebuke (2 Pet. 2:10–11)? Dr. Michael Heiser explores these biblical questions in The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible.."
The Return of Paganism
"The spiritual crisis afflicting contemporary America has ancient and enduring roots—and so does the cure
When a 28-year-old person identifying as transgender shot up a Tennessee school in March, killing three children and three adults, the usual grim afterlife of tragedy was underlined by an odd note: One by one, media outlets rushed to apologize for “misgendering” the shooter, who, they explained, had been born female but had recently begun identifying as male.
How to make sense of such a statement? And what to do when a newspaper headline tells you about a “trans woman left sobbing in JFK Airport after TSA agent hit her testicles”? Appealing to reason hardly helps, as J.K. Rowling and others learned the hard way when trying to ask simple questions such as how one might define sex if not according to the chromosomes rooted in literally every cell of our bodies. Instead, anyone wishing to find his way through the thicket of American public discourse these days should start by embracing one simple and terrifying idea: The barbarians are at the gates.
I mean this almost literally. Everywhere you turn these days, pagans are afoot, busily hacking away at the Christian and Jewish foundations of American life and replacing them with a cosmology that would have been absolutely coherent to followers of, say, Voltumna, the Etruscan earth god, or to those who worshipped the Celt tribal protector Toutatis..." from the article: The Return of Paganism
The Seven Stages of Spiritual Alchemy and What They Mean
"Spiritual alchemy is an ancient occult practice that seeks to liberate the soul from its attachment to matter. Let’s have a look at what each of the seven stages entails.
Spiritual alchemy is an ancient practice with the goal of spiritual transformation, not material. On the other hand, alchemy was an occult science and a forerunner to modern-day chemistry. It began during the medieval period and sought to transmute base metals, such as lead, into gold. Alchemy was practiced by people who wanted to attain material wealth and those who sought a universal elixir for immortality.
Spiritual alchemy, then, is an ancient philosophy that uses the metaphor of transforming metals into gold for attaining spiritual enlightenment. It is used to achieve contentment, harmony, and awareness by liberating one’s essence from one’s acquired personality. The personality contains the inauthentic part of the self, including one’s beliefs, concepts, opinions, wounds, fears, and phobias. In this way, the transmutation of lead into gold functions as a metaphor for the process of self-actualization and spiritual rebirth. Let’s take a closer look!.." from the article: The Seven Stages of Spiritual Alchemy and What They Mean
The Digital Apocalypse
"..For all practical purposes, you are what you pay attention to. Whatever commands your attention is what will define your identity, your concept of reality. The philosopher Matthew B. Crawford has argued persuasively for modern people to return to “the world beyond your head,” to cite the title of his 2015 book exhorting readers to pay attention to the non-digital world..." from the article below.
The Digital Apocalypse Is Here: Reading Anton Barba-Kay on the Meaning of Online Culture
"The concluding scene in Mel Gibson’s 2006 action-adventure film Apocalypto is one of the most stunning endings in cinema history. Most of the film is a life-or-death chase between a Mayan Indian named Jaguar Paw and servants of the pagan priests who want to make him a human sacrifice. The chase ends at the beach, when the pursuer and pursued are struck immobile by a staggering sight: the appearance of Spanish galleons anchored offshore. In a single awe-inspiring moment, the Age of the Conquistadores arrives, rendering the struggles among the Mayans more or less irrelevant.
That’s how I felt after finishing A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, a new book by American philosopher Antón Barba-Kay. I came to the book interested in what Barba-Kay might have to say relevant to my interest in prospects for re-enchanting, in a Christian way, the post-Christian West. I left it extremely dismayed about the prospect of maintaining our humanity in the digital age, but also resolute about the form resistance has to take..." from the article: The Digital Apocalypse Is Here: Reading Anton Barba-Kay on the Meaning of Online Culture
The Return of the gods
As materialists, we ignore the supernatural even though it manifests itself around us daily.
God's revelation in nature is replaced with a convenient illusion that the complexity we see before us is of no real purpose, it just happened.
These demonic entities we choose to disregard (or call aliens) are constantly at work to undermine God's authority and also to harm and even kill us.
We know that we are children of God and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one. 1 John 5:19
We have yet again fallen for the oldest lie you shall all be gods Genesis 3:5.
The church in America is struggling to be a force in our society.
That struggle is never overcome by our own strength but by the power of God in our lives and the world. Will we make Christ our focus or go along with the world around us?
Video from Praise On TBN
"Jonathan Cahn joins Erick Stackelbeck on TBN's Praise. Gain wisdom as Jonathan Cahn speaks about the prophetic messaging from his new book, "The Return of the Gods". Listen in as Jonathan Cahn exposes mysterious secrets of today's world and the reasoning behind gender confusion, certain laws being created and more.
This video was brought to you by TBN Networks®." From the video introduction
The Simulacrum of Happiness
We do not know what happiness is.
We think we do.
For many the illusion of happiness, some entertainment, some affirmation, and the feeling of doing ok in life is adequate. We are promised by Apple and others that technology will fulfill our needs by stretching out our lifespan for example.
All things material can be cured or made better by technology.
If we buy into this even on a subliminal level then God becomes a facet of life we can live without.
God makes plain the reality that we will be judged for what we do and say in this life. There is no technology that we can take into death that can change that.
27 Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, Hebrews 9:27
The reality of life is that happiness is only found through and in God.
“in your presence is fullness of joy, and at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11)
For further reading:
The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible by Dr. Michael S. Heiser (link)