Welcome to Pastoral Vibe-ology, an imprint of Pastoral Theology with Joseph Lear. In this unserious sub-Substack, I’ll be your connoisseur of vibes, providing you with all the accoutrements necessary to build your personal pastoral brand.
We begin with October’s VIBE:
This month we’re going ANTI-TECH. It’s getting chillier outside, which might tempt us to cozy up for an extended doom-sesh of Tik-Toks. But we’re reminding ourselves that though the scroll might be sweet as honey 🍯, the addiction is bitter 😖
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Its content is creation, its influence is eternal, and its feed is the Bread of Life
☝️ Preaching EmPHAsis:
This month, we’re proclaiming TECHNOLOGY ESCHATOLOGY. Which means we’re giving into all of our most extreme conspiracies about Big Tech.
Is 144,000 the exact number of people globally who have never joined Facebook? YEP.
Will Big Tech’s algorithms ever prioritize the propagation of the gospel? NOPE.
Is OpenAI’s Sora, which makes realistic AI videos, competing with the dreams and visions of the Holy Spirit? PROBABLY.
Is social media the bottomless pit reserved for Satan? DEFINITELY.
Theological SHIFT →:
Use techy language to talk about all things God to make the point: Silicon Valley is all a shadow of God’s reality.
God doesn’t “reveal” stuff to us this month, he “downloads” it!
Refer to your glosses of Scripture as live-AI summaries.
The Sabbath is now the Do Not Disturbath.
And test the theological waters by calling the Holy Spirit the “Algorithm of Discipleship.”
📣 CALL TO ACTION 📣:
Finally recycle the white iBook G4 that you’ve been holding onto since 2006. Don’t think about how you're still paying for it because you bought it with your student loans which still aren’t paid off. Recycling is the green thing to do, and we’ve gotta offset the ChatGPT data centers’ carbon footprint somehow.
Get a cell phone locker at church. Tell members it’s better to have a cellphone locked up for a service than for one’s whole body to be locked up in hell 🔥.
Bonfires are making a comeback, and the youths are loving it. We don’t have secular CDs in hand to burn anymore. Dare I suggest we throw our phones in the flames? I’m kidding. (Am I?)
Switch your search engine to Duck Duck Go. Microagressions against Big Tech are all we have left: he who is faithful in little will be faithful with much.
To join the October Vibe-ology, SHARE. But do so ironically, because—y’know—the VIBE is anti-tech.
I am pro consciousness, not anti-tech. Technology is just a way of skipping over the boring stuff if we know how to use it.
I remember when I was in the Air Force in Southern California. I was driving my car with a friend, and when I passed a truck, nearing the railroad track crossover and pulled back in to my lane we had not gone over the railroad track crossover, but we were beyond it. My consciousness and I think me, my car, and my friend skipped over the tracks like Stephen arriving near the chariot with the Ethiopian eunuch. My friend, Eddie Boren, looked at me and said, “we didn’t go over the tracks did we?” And I said no we didn’t. I said it was a miracle. On reflection over these many years I realized that we had just teleported. Then I recalled that I had been begging God to teleport me back to my military base so I wouldn’t have to walk the 7 miles. I think I had been asking for about a month since it was 7 miles to church from where I stayed. So God answered my prayer with a demonstration of power to show off to my friend who wasn’t a believer. The lesson I care carry with me today is that miracles are not proofs but demonstrations to those who need to see them. Now I feel like I was a brat for asking, but God‘s brat. I still think that about myself today.
Tech is certainly not God. But I think it is godly to use it like God would use it. I don’t think tech is an either/or proposition, just like I don’t think that living like a little stinker in a hidey-hole as a Russian monk to escape the world was a godly use of the human body.
I only shared this because there wasn't any share button at the top of the screen after I had read one paragraph! This is absolutely wonderfully h i g h larias and I enjoyed it immensely! PS yes duck, go!