There's a lot here and I'll need more time to really get my head around all (or most) of it, but for now I have a question about functional Idolatry.
So, my work uncovers the images in fiction that inspired our animalized machines--our submarines, automobiles (think "Ford Mustang"), airplanes, helicopters, and lately, our drones. Would a shift in focus toward functional idolatry mean I turn my attention from these artifacts to the technologizing impulse instead? Like, is the idolatry here not so much aimed at our animalized machines as at our ability to design, develop, and deploy such machines to wield greater control over the world (politically, militarily, economically, even just physically)? Is this the distinction you're making here, Myles?
The short answer is yes—that I think the impulse will yield interrelations between the particular objects in your case. From my vantage point, the language of powers and principalities helps see this: that if principalities are all ordered toward human destruction, this can take multiple guises, and even opposite guises! To spitball here: what if different animalized machines led in different, but equally destructive directions, but were animated by the same kind of impulse?
Put differently, the distinctions between Baal and Asherah matter in materially descriptive ways, but are ultimately both leading away from God. It's the trick of the principalities that we say "at least we're not with Baal any more!"
There's a lot here and I'll need more time to really get my head around all (or most) of it, but for now I have a question about functional Idolatry.
So, my work uncovers the images in fiction that inspired our animalized machines--our submarines, automobiles (think "Ford Mustang"), airplanes, helicopters, and lately, our drones. Would a shift in focus toward functional idolatry mean I turn my attention from these artifacts to the technologizing impulse instead? Like, is the idolatry here not so much aimed at our animalized machines as at our ability to design, develop, and deploy such machines to wield greater control over the world (politically, militarily, economically, even just physically)? Is this the distinction you're making here, Myles?
The short answer is yes—that I think the impulse will yield interrelations between the particular objects in your case. From my vantage point, the language of powers and principalities helps see this: that if principalities are all ordered toward human destruction, this can take multiple guises, and even opposite guises! To spitball here: what if different animalized machines led in different, but equally destructive directions, but were animated by the same kind of impulse?
Put differently, the distinctions between Baal and Asherah matter in materially descriptive ways, but are ultimately both leading away from God. It's the trick of the principalities that we say "at least we're not with Baal any more!"