Jamie Metzl

And people prayed to the corn god, which means praying to technology.

In the book, I compare that to the Return of the Jedi scene when the Ewoks capture everybody and they're going to cook Luke and Han and Chewbacca.

But then when they see C-3PO, they think, oh, he must be a god.

And they say, oh, we're still going to cook these other guys.

But then Luke elevates C-3PO and they say, oh, my God, this technology is a god.

So we have a tradition of praying to our technology.

And in the beginning of our conversation,

I trashed this way of the future church, this Corey Lewandowski church.

Because I think it's really dangerous to say we're going to pray to our own technology.

I mean, it's praying to our own creation.

But I think it is appropriate to say that all of our technological innovations have changed our religious and spiritual lives.

And I think it's OK for us to keep an eye on how is that going to apply here.

And I say this over and over.

Our technologies may be new, even though they're dependent on thousands of years of technological innovation.

But the values that we need to navigate wisely are in many cases very old.

And that's why in Judaism, even though I got kicked out of the Hebrew day school in Kansas City, I learned a couple of things along the way.

And one of them is that in Judaism, the early at least books of interpretation are themselves considered sacred texts.

So like in Islam, there's the Koran and that's the holy thing.

Nothing else in Judaism.

The debates about the meaning of the original text are themselves sacred.