Let's face it: What the Old World has done with Christianity in the realms of art, architecture and music, the New World has never even begun to approximate: Oh perhaps Shaker hymns and furniture, and African American spirituals, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Bernstein's Mass * ---but that's it. Michaelangelo's world and Emerson's are as different as outdoors and indoors: the one tangible and imagistic (think the David; the Pieta) ; the other intangible and cerebral (think The American Scholar; The Address to Harvard Divinity Students) . But both worlds are --or could be -- connected by a bridge : the human Spirit.
The New World's religion--Materialism -- has been ritualized not in stained glass, Gregorian chants, Baldaccino's, and Sistine chapels, but in skyscrapers, spacewalks, super-highways,and stock-exchanges---all of which now perform their rites in the most sacred and hallowed of Matrialism's cathedrals, the Internet.
This new theology offers for examination and worship the Holy Word of the God Data. Data sits as the trinity on a throne of rubrics: at His right hand sits the divine Son, Benchmark; and at His left hand, the Holy Ghost, Outcome.
It's as if the new God is a Giant Appetite: Feed it its food (data) , direct the data toward a benchmark,and god-the-data-machine vomits up (or excretes) an outcome.
What is missing from this new datology is the voice of the prophet in the wilderness shouting: False God!! Idolatary !! Sin !!
The consequences of this bogus worship sadly can be seen in current events and national policies:
A.) Generals projecting a war in Afghanistan speaking about benchmarks and outcomes as if they involve no human blood;
B.) Education officals projecting dominance once again when America leads the world in the number of people it graduates annually from college (as if a lifetime spent in the straightjacket of standardized tests won't make students'ultimate exit from the educational treadmill with a college degree merely a national procession of empty mortaboards and gowns, draped on vapid scarecrows);
C.) Stock Exchange gurus producing benchmarks like the Prince of Ponzi, Bernie Madoff, and outcomes like the aging Elie Wiesel, the great humanitarian who was suckered into the embrace of the false God Data, losing his entire portfolio to greed.(To say nothing of the millions of others who have lost their retirement security and their mortgages to the same false God.)
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. (1 Corinthians 13:1)
The theology of the New World speaks the hollow truth of its hollow mercantile God.
It has become a brass, bellowing out benchmarks, stifling the human spirit--the bridge to the artistic beauty of the Old World -- in order to unleash empty vessels made of human flesh, who Consume, Consume, Consume.
Appetite reigns.
Data help us!
* Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms does not qualify in this regard for two reasons: He is Russian and Psalms are pre-New Testament (i.e. pre-"Christianity")
Photo: The Cathedral of La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
