From the Vault: Techno-Religion, Part 1

new baby on this show. I wanted to talk about some intersections between technology and religion, so we did, and Robert it was a lot of fun. I still remember those days very fondly. Yeah, we got we got two long episodes out of it. And the cool thing is, I think we have the potential to do a third Techno Religion episode in the future. So keep that in mind as you're listening to all of this, and certainly shoot us an email if you can think of a

wonderful example of religious technology that we should include. I think we heard after this episode from at least one academic who is doing a dissertation on techno religion. Well, I've forgot about that. We'll have to reach out to them anyway. Here is our classic episode on techno Religion for the Masses, Part one, and of course next weekend if you want to tune back in on Saturday, we will be re airing part two. So here's part one. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind from how

Stuff Works dot com. We may say that we have the birth of a new science, a new philosophy, a new life. The time of deliverance has come at last, and henceforward the career of humanity is upward and onward,

a mighty, a noble, and a godlike career. All the revelations of spiritual as them heretofore, all the control of spirits over mortals, and the instruction and discipline they have given us, have only paved the way, as it were, for the advent of a great practical movement, such as the world little dreams of though it has long deeply yearned for it, and agonized and groaned away its life because it did not come sooner. And this new motive power is to lead the way in the great, speedily

coming salvation. It is to be the physical savior of the race, the history of its inception, its various stages of progress, and its completion will show the world a most beautiful and significant analogy to the advent of Jesus is the spiritual savior of the race. Hence we most confidently assert that the advent of the science of all sciences, the philosophy of all philosophies, and the art of all arts has now fairly commenced. The child is born not

long hence he will go alone. Then he will dispute with the doctors and the temples of science. And then hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. Joe, what is what is going on here? I'm reading a quote. This is a quote from a Boston newspaper. The June four edition of a Boston newspaper called the New Era or Heaven Opened to Man, And this passage was written by a

former Universalist minister named Simon Hewitt. So after this passage, one skeptical reader named Emma Hardinge commented that quote nothing could be given further beyond vague hints of what was to follow. The awful then which broke off breathless at the contemplation of its own inexpressible possibilities. So all this preamble to something amazing that's going to change humanity? What

on earth could Simon Wit have been talking about? Well, he was referring to something that sat inside the upper room of a large tower overlooking the coast beyond the town of Lynn, Massachusetts. This is high rock tower. If you want to look it up, you can see a picture of this place. It still exists to kind of get a sense of it. And inside the upper room of this tower were the fruits of what I would sort of think of as the ultimate backyard engineering project.

It is like garage engineering gone to the extreme. So from July eighteen fifty three to the following spring in eighteen fifty four, a group of universalist reformers and spiritualist enthusiasts had been building a machine called the New Motor. And it would be something I'd say, probably never seen before on earth, an electro mechanical messiah. Yes, which you know this will bring to mind a number of different

stunning visuals. Would we would like to dissuade you from We'll make sure we have some links to some images of the the electrical Messiah in question on the landing page for this episode. But but if you think about a Dollec from doctor Who, from Doctor Who, if a Dollec were to breed with a coffee table, Uh, their offspring when probably resembled the UH decorated with many like

dangling Christmas ornaments. Yes. Yes, so it's a hybrid of a coffee table and a dialect decorated for Christmas and serving as kind of kind of an altarpiece as well. There's certainly an altarpiece vibe to this creation, sure, And this is bridging two worlds that we tend to see as sort of I don't know what spectrum it is, but there, whatever it is, there at the opposite ends of the spectrum. One is religion and the other is technology. I mean, we typically think of religion as a very

low tech affair. You tend to go into churches, I don't know, maybe not some churches these days, but you see a lot of stuff that recalls an earlier time. And our religious texts in most of the major religions of the world are very ancient, and thus the metaphors in which we talk about our religions tend to be very ancient, and technology is you know, it's the very essence of what is new and what the future is. I mean, what is science fiction that imagines the future

usually focused on its new technology? Yeah, I mean most of the major world religions. Yeah, they're based on ancient cosmologies that sometimes we're okay with updating. Uh. Generally, at certain points in the past we will say, all right, we're gonna actually change this a little bit to the fit how we live now. But for the most part, yeah, they're rooted in the past, and technology is ever rooted

in the president in the future. Right, But today we want to discuss what happens when you cram the ends of that spectrum together and you create techno religion. So what happens when technology changes religions, what happens when technology becomes a component of religious practice, and what happens when technology becomes a god or messiah in itself? Right, And

this is something that has been happening for ages. Uh. If you think of technology and the broader sentence especially, humans have always been developing new technologies, developing gadgets, developing um more advanced ways of just looking at the world. Around them and manipulating the world around them. And this has always gone hand in hand with our ability to understand the purpose of life and the purpose of of

our existence here on earth. Yeah. And the concept of purpose is also built into the idea of technology, because we typically think of technology as like a machine or a mechanism that does a particular job. But if you look at the Standard Dictionary definition of technology, it's going to say something like the practical application of scientific knowledge toward a purpose. So keep all of that in mind. Keep those definitions in mind as we explore the convergence

of technology and religion. Yeah. So I was wondering, what are some of the earliest examples of the religious use of a machine? Like you can only think back so far. I mean, of course, nowadays people might I don't know, read devotional literature on their iPad or something. But is there anything people have been doing for hundreds or thousands of years with machines to help them in their spiritual journeys. Yes.

In fact, we have a couple of really good examples of this, the first of which is the prayer wheel, which I imagine most people have seen images or footage of these, particularly if you've ever traveled into the into into East Asia, or or had any kind of contact with with with Buddhism, but these tend to be We're talking about a wheel and spindle composed of various materials.

Who find a made made out of you know, ornate metals, You'll find them made out of stone, You'll find the made out of leather and cotton and it Uh, it's a physical manifestation of the turning wheel of dharma in Buddhism. Okay, so physically to picture this is it going to be kind of like one of those like game prize wheels. Uh, sort, I mean it's the it's it's not positioned vertically, it's

positioned h's horizontally. It kind of if you were just an outsider looking at it and you knew nothing about Eastern religion, you might you might equate it with with some sort of a dude at at a child's playground, right, just something that seems like you just spin it and it's cool to spin. But of course it has far more purpose than that within the context of the religion.

Um So the wheel of Dharma, Yeah, the wheel of dharma and uh, and it's all tied in with accumulating good karma, purifying bad karma, because you you spin this wheel, and in spinning the prayer wheel, you are assisting yourself with the with with with the purging of bad karma and the accumulation of the good. And this is accomplished by the fact that I mean on top of the wheel being this, uh, this, this gadget, this device that that that presents this um this cosmological idea. The prayers

are also filled with up to a mile of prayers. Um, so we're talking mantras and sutras generally written in Sanskrit and uh. The prayers are recited each time the wheel makes a revolution. So a pilgrim spins the wheel and with each spin helps helps them gain merit and to concentrate the mind on the mantras and sutras that are being re enacted by the wheel. Okay, so much in the way that say, a lever or a pulley might upgrade our ability to do physical work, this wheel can

upgrade our ability to do spiritual work. Yeah, it's I guess one way to think if it would be think about a cassette player. Right, Um, say you're just a really huge fan of I don't know what's your what's your favorite metal album, your favorite rock and roll album album? Uh, Dope Throne, Dope Throne by Electric Wizard. Okay, right, Well, let's say you're particularly love Dope Throne, and so you

have a cassette of Dope Throne. But that cassette doesn't actually play just the But imagine this, The mere act of that tape filtering through the machine and revolving around that wheel somehow enacted the spirit of that album for you. That's the kind of what's going on. So it gives you the essence or the aura of Dope Throne without the sounds having to play right And and ideally, I think my understanding too, is that you would also focus the mind on Dope Throne. So it's not just saying

I'm turning this machine instead of thinking about it. I'm doing both. But but where this gets really interesting is when you, for instance, when you look at the fact that until the twentieth century, virtually the only Tibetan use for the wheel was as a device for activating these mantras, so that the wheel was was virtually virtually went unused there as a physical tool. It's a technology for you know, moving things around or crushing things, etcetera. It was used

almost exclusively as a really is technology. Wow yeah um. Now that's not to say that all prayer wheels are turned by hand. That's kind of the main one you see, and it's certainly the one that often makes the biggest impression visually. That's a money wheel. But there are also varieties that are turned by fire, water, wind, um, electricity. Hold on a second, So we've got an electric prayer

karma machine. Yes, yeah, it's And this is where it gets really interesting because because it's one thing to say, all right, this one is spun by hand, because also I'm the human, I mean, the kind of at the center of this religious thing, right, It's another to say the fire, the wind, or the air is going to

move because those are natural forces created by the gods. Right. Yeah, Well that makes me think of an analogy like if you look to medieval Catholicism, where you might have chantries that are where it's ay, a wealthy person, Remember, the gentry could pay people to pray, and the more prayers that the monks would say in these chantry is based on the amount they paid, could lessen their stay in purgatory.

I wonder if you know, if they've had this kind of technology at the time, would they think, well, would it be okay to say the number of prayer machines you build could lessen your stay in purgatory? Um? Could like, could you get one of those texts to speech synthesizers

to say prayers? You know, I don't know. I would definitely love to hear from someone, uh with more insight into the the rules of of Tibetan Buddhism and these prayer wheels, because it would seem like you could just buy a bunch of these things and just set them up, plug them in, and let them go and then maybe just completely externalize your your karma situation. Um. Yeah. They call these tardo corlos, and they can keep them running twenty four hours a day using a four point five

vault DC electric current. Uh and and and so yeah, you can just keep it running all the time, presuming when you're sleeping, when you're eating, when you're doing things that I assume do not involve the the the mental concentration.

It's like a karmic force field generator exactly. Yeah. And this is even crazier when you think of another technological uh innovation that you see with the prayer of wheels, and that's that you can also find microfilm prayer wheels that contain more, uh came, even more than a million mantras inside them. So yeah, so you between microfilm technology and uh and just simple electric uh you know technology to create a spinning wheel, Um, you can really sort

of change your your karma game. It seems the micro film is especially interesting to me. It seems like that's almost like a religious implementation of the idea of nanotechnology, like accomplishing more in a smaller space. It makes me wonder and and perhaps someone has has done something along these lines. But why even deal with the physical wheel?

What if you took the wheel virtually you could have I mean, what would the limits there would be pretty much be no limits, right, I mean, you could have and the an absurd number of mantras moving through a wheel at pretty much any kind of rate you want. Like, you could create a computer program that executes a subroutine that is just a list of these mantras and you could tell it to loop infinitely. Yeah, kind of a karmic defragging system just running in the background out of

your your computer at all times. Yeah. And of course, so this is kind of our outsider's perspective. But I'm sure somebody who is actually believing in and using these sorts of prayer wheels would have a pretty good and well thought out explanation for why you can use technology to achieve a karmically significant event in one way but not in another way. It might totally make sense in

terms of how they interpret their spirituality. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think anytime you see this convergence of technology and religion, it becomes the domain of of the the priest or the priest class, or somebody in some sort of you know, clerical authority to say, all right, this is the line, this is this is how far

technology can come into the sanctuary. It's okay to you know, read your hymn or your Bible on an iPad, but it's not okay to do X, y or z. It makes me want to ask the question why on that spectrum I talked about earlier where we have, you know, the ancient religion on one hand and the new technology on the other, why are they so far apart? Like,

what is the inherent profanity in technology? It does kind of seem crass when you see, like when you see a religious service taking place on a JumboTron or something like that. Why is that, like what is wrong with the technology or what is necessarily unspiritual about it. I don't know the answer, but there seems to be an intuition like that that we have. I guess so much of it is rooted in religion, a tradition, you know.

I mean, like I've definitely had that moment before. I've been at a church service and the person giving the sermon or you know, officiating at a wedding has been reading off of a kindle or a or a you know, a path of something. It looks inappropriate. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a lot of it has to do with the fact that religions tend to be inherently traditional,

especially the older traditional religions. So just the the image of modern technology, especially when you think of technology, is this thing that's such a mastery uh of you know, of of human skill and ability to see that uh you know, shoehorned in with these things that are supposedly given to us from some sort of a higher power. Yeah. Though I wonder if people in the ancient world would

have thought about it in the same way. I mean, this again calls to mind something we talked about the last time I was on the show, when we talked about eclipses, which is the Anti Kither mechanism is an ancient Greek device that's often referred to as the world's

oldest computer or the first computer. And now obviously it didn't have microprocessors or anything, but this was a device that comes from more than two thousand years ago, is found in a shipwreck in the Mediterranean, and it was an ancient mechanical computer for for computing the locations of celestial objects and for like predicting lunar eclipses and solar eclipses in the future. And the interesting thing about this is it's an amazingly advanced piece of technology for the time,

just astoundingly advanced. But these events, these celestial mechanics had religious significance to the people who used it. Yeah, I mean,

it's certainly something we discussed in that eclipse episode. When when you look back at ancient societies and even not so ancient societies, UM astronomy and UH and cosmology are are so linked together, like it becomes the domain of the of the priest and the clergy to know what the stars are doing, to track the stars, so that we know what the calendar is telling us and when

certain rites should be observed. Well, that makes me wonder if star tracking technology has entered religion, even ancient religion, in the same way the prayer wheel did. Yes, and that brings us to the astrolabe. The astrolabe. Yeah, and now everyone I think has probably seen an image of an astrolabe in their finer forms. These are just works of just pure art. I'm going to tell you what

a picture tell me how far off I am. Basically, it's it looks kind of like that compass you used to use in middle school math classes to draw a perfect circle with another little half moon piece on it. Is that completely wrong kind of yeah, with varying levels of artistry and a lot of figures and sliding mechanisms. Yeah, it's a small circular device. And these would usually usually these would be made of wood or brass um and

they date back over two thousand years. The concept seems to originate around three thirty BC, and they were perfected by the Arabs in the ninth century, and they remained at the basic astronomer's tool for the next seven hundred years. It's essentially a model of the stars in the sky, which can be moved to show where the stars will be at any time of the year, and the reverse side of the astrolabe concerns the position of the sun in the Okay, so it's a lot like the end

to get through a mechanism in a way. Yeah, yeah, it's it's portable and has a large display. On top of that, if you have a really nice model, it's a beautiful work of art, something you might easily show it off at the dinner table. Uh. It's arguably one of, if not the first, personal computer mobile carrying it with you doing what you need to do in the course

of a day. Now, the question is would it become overheated if sitting on your lap, if it was made out of metal and you were sit seated in the sun, I would say yes, Um, yeah, that's a sterility hazard. It. Uh. You couldn't get an app for this thing, but it had a number of features just by virtue of how it contract the heavens. You can tell the date and time, You could calculate distances. It could be used in determining a building height, surveying longitude, latitude, altitude horoscopes. Um. You

can also figure out the position of the planets. But then on top of this there were various occults usages, So it gets a little bit into religion there. But the most notable function where we see the astrolaid becoming a piece of religious technology is in its ability to determine Islamic prayer times and determine the direction to Mecca. Okay, so this is actually that the piece of technology itself doesn't necessarily have religious significance, but there's a fact you

need to know to execute your religion. You know perfectly the way you want to do it. If you want to face Mecca as well as you can, why not have a machine to help you really hone that piece of information and get it as accurate as possible. Yeah, I mean it in a way, it really becomes an essential piece of technology in Islam because a long place is a high importance on the position of the believer

in time and space. For starters, uh, the s alot times, these are the five prayers a day plus the Friday prayer. They depend It depends on a combination of clock time and sundial time to determine exactly when you should take place. So it concerns the exact coordinates for a given location. Um. Because again it's not just it's not just arbitrary about when the prayer times are they have they are specific depending on where you are in the world, about where

you are in terms of sometime. And on top of this, the faithful has to know exactly where they are in relation to the Kaaba in Mecca so that they can face that direction during these prayers. Yeah, I think that's fascinating.

And unlike the prayer wheel, which itself does some sort of religious or spiritual work, this is sort of like a technology that we use to be most properly informed about how to do the rituals that you would be doing anyway, because really a lot of the problems that occur in religion they occur as the believer moves farther away in in time or space. Right, you're you're you're farther away from Mecca. Uh, it's harder to determine exactly

where you are. Uh. You're not necessarily going to have somebody signaling the prayer times each day from a power, so it falls on you to figure it out yourself. And uh, and then that's where the technology becomes extremely useful. But of course there are lots of external influences on how we practice our religions. A lot of these influences are actually going to be technological. One of the things that I thought was interesting was to think about writing

itself as a technology. Now, writing is so crucial to the way we think of most of the major religions of the world today, because you've got the Torah for Jews, you've got the you know, the Hebrew Bible plus the New Testament for Christians, You've got the Kuran for Muslims, and and of course there are texts that are central to Eastern religions as well, the Ramayana and the Mahabarata to be specific. Certainly. Yeah, and so we think about religion as a very text based of fair but there's

really no reason it has to be. I mean, religions can be transmitted orally through culture. That can be systems of cultural practices that don't necessarily have to be written down or encoded anywhere. But for some reason, most of the world's major religions have a strong textual component, and I wonder how it changed the way we practiced religion when writing came into humanity, because writing, I mean, human

civilization is much older than writing. Of course, human life in general, human culture is even older than civilization, so much older than writing. So we can only really imagine, I think, I mean, I'm sure that something like a cultural anthropologist or an archaeologists could tell us more about how they think writing might have changed the way we practice religions, but I really have no idea. Well, I mean,

I think it hard. You're probably doing on the situation of of of the expansion of memory, right, because writing is in essence the ability to externalized human memory. Before writing, how we that we can only contain as much as could fit in a human mind, or if maybe if you were, you know, really skilled at you might compartmentalize it, right and have one person deal with the with these memories versus the other, almost a fahrenheit for fifty one

kind of situation. Yeah, So before writing, it's you're limited by just the power of the human mind, remember, and then the ability to pass that on to us, which of course we know from everyday experience, but also from actual studies. We we don't pass on information all that faithfully if we don't write it down right, memory itself is not set in stone, and uh, and then there's

kind of a telephone game anytime we pass something on anything. Really, anytime you remember something, you're taking it out, you're potentially changing it and then putting it back in. So yeah, I have to imagine, though, of course I could be wrong that, uh, that as much as religious beliefs kind of change from generation to generation today, I have to imagine they changed even more and much more quickly in times before there were sort of like texts to anchor them. Yeah,

before you could actually set a religion in stone. I imagine a religion really just by virtue of how we remembered it. It changed with us so very fluid. So some of these problems we run into where we're saying, all right, we're trying to apply ancient Babylonian cosmology to modern times. Part of that is by virtue of depending upon ancient Babylonian cosmology is set in stone, and then you know and then that that recording of it is

considered sacred and holy. Right, So these ancient writing technologies, we of course had the invention of alphabets, and I think it's very fair to consider an alphabet of technology. But then on top of that, you just had the preservation technology. So you had scrolls, you eventually had cadsseas, you had you know, tablets and carving and and all the different pictograms and libraries and and every bit of

technology we had. But there was one big thing I think that that was the main textual technology that really revolutionized the world, and that would be the printing press. Yes, yeah, we're talking about the mid fifteenth century in Europe particularly called Gutenberg. Gutenberg, yeah, um, and his effect on the Bible, the Gutenberg Bible, because prior to this, any given Western manuscript had to be copied by hand, and it was generally this was something that was handled by by the clergy.

Right can you imagine this living in a world where so you look to the church as your you know, as your authority on all things spiritual, uh, and probably more than that also all things government in some cases and and all that. But they have the Bible as the authority that's interpreted by the church. And so what is the Bible, Well, it is hand to copy documents that most people don't have much access to They might

be because they're so rare. I mean they're kept in script or i ums or libraries or these places that the average per and wouldn't have any access to. Yeah, they're highly fetishized. Uh, it's it's just not something that the average person would have access to. And on top of that, the lack of a printing press means that there's really not much distributed commentary on the documents either.

And this is something that uh, a lot of people would say played a big role in the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, scientific Revolution. If you just look at the Protestant Reformation, you have to imagine the effect that the printing press had on not just the Bible itself, but on the distribution of Reformation propaganda. And I don't use the word propaganda there in a negative sense. I think that's just the term for all of the ways in

which Reformation ideas were being spread throughout Europe at the time. Yeah, it's really the kind of technological advancement in mass communication that you can you can really only compare it to, if not the emergence of writing to begin with, and perhaps the Internet age like that, like such a big movement in such a drastic change in our ability to

communicate with one another. Speaking of the scientific revolution, Uh, that makes me think about the you know, the whole notion of a clockwork universe, which I'm not gonna get too deep into that here that could easily be its own podcast. But everyone's heard the idea of a creator God as a watchmaker, right, Um, this creator makes the perfect mechanical time piece that is the universe and then just lets it go. Maybe winds it first, I guess hopefully winds it and then lets it go because it

doesn't need to to be rewound or anything. It works perfectly as it's created. And this is an example of, you know, a technological society, A society that has these technological ideas in its head can't help but think about, um, the unseen world in terms of those same mechanisms, right. I mean, it's very common to want to describe the actions of God in terms that we can understand. And

what do we understand these days? And making machines scenes? Yeah, I haven't seen a lot of this, but I wonder to what extent, like modern like email or jargon, etcetera, has has made its way into you know, just average say Christian sermons, Like, does anyone talk about um communication with God, prayer itself being a form of email. I do think a lot of the jokes now displayed on

church signs come from email forwards. Yeah, indeed, I believe I saw one chart church marquee here around town a few years back with a talked about sending God some quote an email, which I thought when I when I read an email, I was instantly thinking, that sounds like a great name for some sort of a wrestling move, finishing maneuver right where you need somebody in the head, and you call it an email. But there of course talking about kneeling, uh, and then praying, which is a

form of an email. That's adorable an email. But getting back to the ways that external advances in technology have affected the progression of religions, one of the ways that I think is very significant is looking at the way technology has changed the way we do work, which of course is the main thing technology does, and how that

affects religious beliefs about how we should do work. Oh, you're talking of course about Shabbat, right, of course, So if you look at the way some Jews interpret teachings in the Torah on what should be done or not done on the Sabbath. There have been lots of ways in which new technologies have sort of intruded on the traditional understanding of what is accepted and forbidden to do

on the day of rest. Right, this is sundown Friday to send down Saturday, in which Orthodox user forbidden to work, right, which is interesting technology, right uh? And to drive vehicle

of course, right. And so of course what you can guess from drive a vehicle is that a lot of these things aren't directly commandments stated in the tour itself as an ancient document, but their interpretations that have come from the rabbis throughout the years about how we should apply the laws of the Torah to the new technological

world we find ourselves in. Right, because just by the basic laws and like the thirty nine different activities that are off limits, um, it would mean that you can't cook or light a fire, and by extension of that, the interpretation is that there would be no moving electricity through a circuit. Okay. So by this interpretation, really, if you want to be observant on the Sabbath, you should not press a button that causes an electrical device to

turn on. Right, And that's where it gets kind of tricky because there's some obvious examples, uh that you know, you could say, well, don't turn on the vacuum cleaner. Okay, well I'm not gonna turn on the vauum cleaner because I'm also not going to vacuum. But then you gotta eat on on the on the Sabbath, right, So, so what do you do about opening the refrigerator door? Oh, because when you open the refrigerator door, a light comes on exactly. That's your action of opening the door that

has cause that light to ignite. Yeah. So I mean for the longest there's an easy workaround, right. You could either unscrew the bulb or you just you tape up that little button right, right. So those are some pretty simple workarounds for that some orthodox chose might use. But it gets more complicated than that in some scenarios. Right. For instance, another classic workaround was involved the use of an oven, right, because you need to heat up food.

You can't light your stove. You can't activate the oven by pushing the button. But if you activate the oven, you turn it on before sundown. Um on Friday and just leave it running through and keep it warm, you know, through sundown on Saturday. Then you can make use of that heat. You're you're just setting an emotion beforehand and

then picking up after the Sabbath is done. I'd imagine a lot of ovens today are programmed not to do that because they don't want it would be a safety hazard to just leave an oven on and leave town or something. Yeah, so they probably have like an automatic shut off, right they do, Yeah, an automatic safety shut off. And when they started using these, you know, they were getting complaints from people who who needed uh to keep their oven on in order to observe the religious practices.

So this is where we get Sabbath mode on on various appliances, Uh not where they play Sabbath albums. Right, So that would that was certainly an innovation that would be that would be great on modern Welcome in my house, a black Sabbath mode on your your dishwasher, etcetera. But no, this would involve simply a manual override to the safety features so that you could operate your cooking technology in accordance with your religious faith. You know, I bet that

there are specific manufacturers that do this. There are and in fact there's actually something called star K Kosher Certification for Appliances. Yeah, you can actually go to their their website it's star uh dash K dot org and they have a lot of stuff dealing with with kosher foods,

what have you. But also at a whole system, a whole section on appliances where you can look up the appliances and see what they're their, their potential Sabbath modes are, how to activate them, how to use them in accordance with these rules and regulations. Another classic example about the Shabbat and technology is the use of an elevator. Right, reasonly, you need to use an elevator to move around in a high rise building. How do you do it if

you can't push a button? While you just simply program the elevator, uh, during the Sabbat to go from floor to floor to floor to floor, up and down, up and down NonStop. And then you just get on and you just ride the ride. Wow. Yeah, so I might be a long ride and a long wait, but at

least you can observe your your practices exactly. Another bit of religious technology wounded to touch on real quick is a sixteenth century clockwork monk created by one La Torriana, who was a mechanic for Spanish Emperor Charles the Fifth, the emperor's son, King Philip the Second, the story goes, was praying at the bedside of his own dying son and he's getting desperate, so he's making promises to the divine.

He's promising a miracle for a miracle. Uh it is child survives, he ends up recovering, and he has to keep his promise. What kind of a miracle can can a king actually do? Well? Obviously, the king is gonna um his mechanical constelled as a mechanic and get him to create a miracle as a as kind of an offering right as a as as a thank you to the divine. And so that's where when Ello comes in and he creates a key wound spring operated automaton and

a really complicated automaton at that. Yeah, I've seen pictures of this and it's fascinating. You can, like, I think there's a little compartment where you can peek in on the inside of it, and it's got gears, and I don't I couldn't begin to understand how it works on the inside. But what does it actually do? Well? I mean it it walks around, uh kind of a square shape. It strikes its chest with its right arm. It raises and lowers a small cross and rosary with its left.

It occasionally kisses the cross. It turns and nods its head, It rolls its eyes, and it mouths you know, silent prayers and whatnot. So so wait, you said it strikes its chest, So is this is this auto automatic self flagellation. I don't think it's quite flagellation, but that would be

a different That would be an interesting different. Yea. Um, But some of you probably heard a Radio Lab episode a few years back where they did like a short profile of this piece and sort of the mysteries around it, because there are a lot of questions regarding, you know, why why was this created? What's the exact purpose? You know, what was the mindset in creating it? Because it's simply an offering, uh, you know to God. Is it's a is it something you're supposed to put on the table

and you also around in prayer, pray while observing it? Right, my question would be does it do something relevant or is it more kind of like when a painter sculptor would create a work of art and dedicate it to the Lord. I think that seems to be the prevalent interpretation, though in the light of what we talked about with the prayer wheel, it's it's tempting to want to go that direction with it, you know, and think of it as a think that, like its prayers had some efficacy. Yeah,

I mean, I'm tempting. I really want to believe that I can, in good uh, in good faith, put that forward. Is is something that I think or that even the majority of the experts think that that was in the mind of of the king or the mechanic responsible. But you can't help but but wonder exactly how the mindset of the mechanic played into it. And of course, in our modern time, UM, we've plenty of examples of of prayer taking place online U prayer groups, etcetera. Sharing their

concerns via the Internet. And I don't know to what extent they can you know, they ever consider the email itself a prayer. But but certainly that seems like a lot that will blurn more and more as that becomes like standard practice, right because certainly, uh, at some point the written word uh became holy. Right, and then I can't help but but imagine that in the advent of the printing press, maybe initially the printed word was a little less holy, a little more manufactured. Sure than that

becomes uh, you know, de facto holy as well. Right, Well, this is the other side of the advance of the textual technology uh progression, because religion is so inherently social and in most the way most people practice it, and it's something that deeply does involve communication between groups and so allowing greater communication between people who think alike or want to offer each other religious advice or interpretation or consolation. The Internet is obviously going to be a huge explosion

in that. But it's also not just a peer to peer exchange, right. So you can have your sort of like your religious you know, emails goal where you forward each other the things that you know you want to show to your friends and your peers in the church. You can also have services provided by church officials over telecommunications links. Indeed, and uh, you know, here's a question that comes to mind here if it's if it's blasphemous to um, to burn or to face a religious text

such as the Bible or the Koran. What have you deleted an e book of it? Oh? Man, is that's this that blasphemous? I don't know, I don't know. I'm sure some people have opinions on that. Yeah, I I personally do not. Hey, and we haven't even mentioned exorcism online, right, Well, that would be one of those services that could be offered by you know, your religious official who might be

so far away. What if they're in a cabin in Alaska that hopefully has a fast Internet connection, but they want to offer the spiritual service that you really need, and that might be the exorcism of a demon or multiple demons from your person. Right, And there are individuals who have and continue to offer online exorcism services. Back in two thousand nine, famed Israelian Kabbala master Rabbi Botsfrey attempted to remove a dibbic, a disembodied spirit from a

Brazilian man via the Internet. And more recently we've seen evangelical Reverend Bob Larson offering exorcisms for a fee, of course, via Skype. And this, uh, this was actually featured on the Daily Show several months back. Yeah, so imagine I didn't see that imagine a number of our listeners caught it there. Yeah, that sounds way more interesting than the

video conferencing that we have here at work. Yeah, But you know, ultimately, what's I don't see what the big big deal is because if if an exorcism involved like this right by which you're driving a spiritual invader out, that's essentially that the demon is kind of telecommuting through an individual, right, Yeah, Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it seems to me that the ideology behind an exorcism would suggest that it's a it's an interpersonal connection that

breaks the power of the demon. It's sort of the spiritual or emotional or intellectual presence of the clerical official that can drive the demon out, not so much the physical presence, like why would they really need to be

in the room. Yeah, I mean it reminds me of I think we both recently rewatched portions are the entirety of the Hell Razor Bloodlines movie, where an individual, of course, you know religious technology, right, the limit configuration is a little mechanical device and you solve it, and the demon show up, the cinobyte show up. And in that movie, there's an individual that's cheating, right, by trying by solving

it virtually or remotely by use of a robot. Right, yes, he's he's using essentially the technology of a bomb disposal robot, but to solve the lament configuration puzzle box and workroom. Initially it works, but then some some people who are not very technologically savvy or like, well, we gotta solve this problem. They opened the door to the room where the cinobytes are contained, and then there's a problem. But

that's interesting. Initially they're able to outmaneuver the technologically empowered demons that are the cinabytes via more advanced technology. Right, they can put those cinobytes in a box inside a box, exactly inside a box. All right. So that's gonna be the end of part one here. This is very much

again a two part series. Yeah, and if you want to hear the conclusion of that story that we started this episode with the construction of the electro mechanical Messiah at the High Rock Tower in Lynn, Massachusetts, that's gonna be in our next episode. So that's going to be in part two. Indeed, we're also gonna get into some some wonderful UFO and scientology territory as well. So hey, if you're if you're listening to this episode as it comes out, just wait a couple of days and you know,

get the second part. If you're catching up on this at a later point, I will make sure that there is a link to the second episode on the landing page for this episode at stuff to blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's where we'll find all the episodes, all the videos, all the blog post plus links out to our social media accounts such as Facebook

and Twitter. And if you want to let us know about any interesting thoughts you have or stories you've ever experienced about the intersection of religion and technology, or even the complete synthesis and marriage of religion and technology, email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.