Induction

Movement 1:
You are here!

Movement 2:
Cyborgs Can't be Educated

Movement 3:
I Don't Want to be a Computer!

Movement 4:
A Cyborg Humanist's Vision

Movement 5:
Flash from a Cyborg Classrooom

This self-referential hyperreality is, I think, peculiarly familiar to students of religion and herein lies the rub for us (everyone has a particular version of this rub, and that’s why all this is so emotion engendering). When we locate cyberworld in the classic three-level cosmos, it most closely resembles heaven. Hell is comprised of the many levels that correlate appropriately with the many classes of sins (I see Woody Allen here). Paradise, however, is all unity and presence correlating closely with how we characterize cyberworld. We can enter heaven simply by logging on and the only keys we need to pass through the golden gates are Microsoft Explorer 4.0 and a WEB connection. If this doesn’t bring terror to traditional students of religion, what could? Entering heaven’s gates or Gates’ heaven means suicide to any earthly enterprise that depends on absolute distinctions, on duality. Crossing this threshold collapses the distinctions, the dualities, on which depend certain, if not all, of our methods for the study of religion. And incidentally, but not at all insignificantly, arriving on the other side of this gate spells the end to all religions that are based on radical dual distinctions. No wonder the academic study of religion is using its most potent weapon against these technologies, turning its cheeks (ignoring the threatening). This strategy will work well and probably indefinitely, but with the irony that it succeeds only by hermetically sealing the academic study of religion into a self-referential hyperreality.

The presence of moebiatic hyperreality is, I believe, the watershed for a paradigm shift. The cyborg monster has created itself, a capitalist and Christian mutation. But many have yet to recognize its presence. Like the most frightening of monsters, cyborgs are indistinguishable from ordinary human beings. As in all good stories, children (at least the younger generation) can see them more easily than their parents (the older generation). One generation embracing, the other bracing. One generation playing, the other fearing. One generation creating new operations, morphing old categories into heretofore unimagined shapes, daring to think and to do the unthinkable and undoable; one generation proud of itself for adapting this technology to make familiar tools more efficient, for protecting familiar categories. This is not a simple shift in technology, it is not a simple shift in humanity; it is an ontological shift, an epistemological shift, signified by the boundary transgressions of the cyborg.