Summary of “How Computer Nerds Describe God”

This piece is an interview by Christianity Today with Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired and man who had a tremendously powerful religious experience in Jerusalem that leads him to try and blend religion and technology. The story of how Kevin Kelly found religion is in and of itself quite the tale, he evidently was staying a Jerusalem taking photos of the Easter celebration when he was locked out of his hostel. Broke and with no place to stay he slept in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the next morning he simply had this great conviction that Jesus rose from the dead and began to believe in him. He also felt he was going to die in 6 months and so began reconnecting to family and gave to charity. He did not die but now lives his life trying to figure out the intersection between religion and technology and how they interact. His main points seem to be that sci-fi writers are analogous to modern day theologians because they ask big questions about human existence and the nature of things as well as that God can be easily understood on metaphors based on technology and computing but that’s because it is the metaphorical language easily accessed by the current generation.

Now personally my first thought was a bit of a chuckle because I found it amusing that he was so terribly convinced he was going to die back in 1979 but has survived to at least 2002 when the interview was posted. Less facetious it’s an interesting look at how one might use technology to help one understand God in a sense but it still seemed traditional in a sense. Kelly isn’t trying to re-invent anything here, he’s just trying to explain God with the language that comes most naturally to him as a computer nerd.

His last questions was quite the interesting one though, even if unrelated to technology. If there were other intelligent life-forms out there, would they have a Jesus? It’s terribly interesting because I believe it can be assumed that if there is both A.) A God in the traditional sense and B.) Other sentient life that God is their creator too. So why or why not give them a prophet, or a way to join God in eternal life?

Reading Response Numero Uno

One of the biggest confusions the Bogost reading has provided me with is that fact that in his preface he mentions that he believes that the rhetorical power of video games does not lie in their content as the Serious Games movement says. Then in his next chapter though he goes on the describe things such as visual rhetoric which certainly concerns content. He also uses The McDonald’s Game as an example of procedural rhetoric and it’s content is what is being used rhetorically. In fact, the process he refers to in the playing of the game IS the content of the game.

With all the next games and other things he mentions, the content is what is doing the rhetorical work. Freaky Flakes allows users to create satirically targeted children cereals, the procedure of making a sort of archetypal kid’s cereal box is what is making the creator’s point. But that procedure of making the cereal box IS the content of the game, so either I misread him in the preface, misunderstood what he meant, or he was wrong or miswrote. In retrospect it seems trivial but the preface informs the readers reading of the rest of the material, and so that disunity was jarring.