Note: All articles referred to below are included in the links found in the “Blogroll”
Discussion Question 1
What are/were your initial thoughts/impressions/feelings when seeing “Spirituality and Technology” as a topic?
Discussion Question 2
A premise is that spirituality and technology are co-emergent– mutually interdependent. We do not have one without the other. This is not merely semantics. Can we have spirituality without technology? Can we have technology without spirituality? Is the ideal form of spirituality that without technology?
Or is this the moment when we redefine technology as theology and theology as technology, and thereby recognize their historic and metaphysical inseparability? Secularism no longer seems tenable…
Discussion Question 3
Read Groothuis’ “Technoshamansim” . Can technoshamanism awaken a higher consciousness? What is the value of this higher consciousness, or is there value in it?
Discussion Question 4
David Noble feels that technological enterprise should be directed at worldly and humane ends as opposed to the goal of human ‘perfection” or transcendence. What are your thoughts about this?
Discussion Question 5
Read Hozien’s, Haught’s, McLaughlin’s, and/or Stalder’s summaries and reviews of David Noble’s “The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention”. Is the longing for perfection through transcendence, virtual reality and genetic engineering a threat to our survival?
Disucussion Question 6
Read the excerpt from Erik Davis’ “The Spiritual Cyborg”. Do you believe, as he states, that we “must become machines”? Will the realization of this help “dispel delusions” and thus lead us to consider the perils and promises of this gradual shift? In this vein, does thinking critically about the technologies we use become imperative?