From Francis Schaeffer to Google
if your children want to scare someone on Halloween, have them dress p as a giant Google. you don't know exactly what the cost me should look like? Join the crowd: No one else does, really, because Goo is not just a giant octopus. it's the ocean we swim in: Goo has an 88% share of the search-engine market and most of the nation's school kids are coming to rely on goo education apps.
if you and your children want to honor someone on Halloween, which is also the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517, dress them up as Marin Luther or Francis Schaeffer....here's a morsel on Sch, who from the 1950s into the 1980s put into practice the lesson of Isa. 1.18 'Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord.'
Sch reasoned with the young people who came to his haven in Switzerland. he put his basic teaching into 3 books - The God who Is There, Escape from Reason and He Is There and He Is Not Silent - still worth reading. ..He wrote, 'if you follow true rationality and true morality so that you are truly human, you will turn back to God...Isaiah and Paul tell us that a rational pursuit of truth will lead us to God'.
most of Sch's teaching and writing was theological, but he emphasized that neglecting politics and law is 'absolutely utopian in a fallen world'. personal computers didn't become common until the 1980s, but Sch concluded his excellent survey of Western civilization, How Should We Then Live? (1979) with a look at how 'the high speed computer literally leaves no place to hid and little room for any privacy'.
this great Christian thinker died in 1984, the year made famous in the title of george Orwell's book about totalitarian countries stomping out individuality, but She presciently said the biggest problem is not 'the use to which present totalitarian regimes will put the computer. the question is what will all these available manipulating techniques mean in our own countries?' and that brings us to Google.
Schaeffer noted that Luther through his Bible translation and teaching 'opened the way for all the people to come directly to God'. in our secular culture, that's what we thought Google and some other titans (Facebook, amazon, Apple, PayPal) would do. people could enjoy a broad means of exchanging information, ideas and money via neutral channels, with friends rather than New York Times editors curating our news feed.
we're learning this year that those neutral channels aren't so neutral. Goo has forced critics to shut up, booted out right-wingers, fired an engineer who criticized 'diversity' propaganda and done other things we can see - but the real danger may be in what we can't see. former Goo 'design ethicist Tristan Harris said, 'if you control the menu you control the choices' - and every time we do a Goo search, a goo algorithm is controlling what's on the first page that comes up and what's on the 20th, which is online Siberia.
Goo, far from being neutral, has bragged that it helped reelect Barack Obama in 2012: 'Google Analytics provided the campaign a window into voters' questions and concerns and allowed them to deliver answers directly from the campaign through search ads...the results from Election Day speak for themselves a resounding victory, with nearly every battleground state falling into the President's column.
Goo scratched Obama's back and he scratched its. Journalist Franklin Foer notes: 'Goo executives set foot in the Obama White House more often than those of any other corporation - its head lobbyist visited 128 times...Goo managed to overcome the recommendation staffers on the Federal Trade Commission who found Go's monopolistic machinations worthy of a lawsuit'.
much more than politicking and dominance by technocratic autocrats is going on here. Sch's A Christian Manifesto (1981) described how a man-centered view that material is all there is and that we're here by chance, leads to 'an intolerance that gives less and less freedom in courts and schools for the view which originally gave the freedoms'. the more we let Goo and its kin pick informational winners and losers, the less freedom Christians and other dissidents will have.
Time for a new Reformation. (note - this issue covers the 500th anniversary of the Reformation of the church by Germany's Martin Luther.) ...he chose to follow the Truth of God's Word even if it cost him his life.
...that's the 'Tough', unbending side of Jesus Christ...God's Truth will win in the end.
that is to be combined with 'Benignity' of Christ suffering the sins of the world. His instructions are:
love your enemies,
do good to those who hate you
bless those who curse you
pray for (and forgive) those who despitefully use you...Luke 6. 27-8
to the death if necessary!
Blessed are you, when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for My sake.
Rejoice and leap around for joy, for great is your reward in heaven, for so persecuted the prophets which were before you. Matthew 5.11-2
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