A Null Singularity

The Rapture of the Nerds -- have you heard of it?

They say it's coming. They don't agree what it looks like, but the nerds say it's coming. One camp says that the machines will deliver us with artificial technology. The other says that the machines will be our physical servitors and lead us into a bright future where they will fix poverty, sickness, war, illness, injury... you name it. It will not be a pierced carpenter's hand, but a silicone and steel one that wipes every tear from your eye.

The singularity is coming. Technology is getting better. Soon, we'll have computers that give birth to better computers and code that gives rise to even more elegant code. Repent, for the Kingdom of Machines is near!

God, that sounds absolutely ridiculous.

It sounds as ridiculous as what so many Christians are waiting for.

You see, one of the hardest things about my faith is the decrepit, the frail, the overweight, the one that suffers from back problems and the one that suffers from knee problems, those that wait for a future moment of fixing. One day God will come and there'll be no crying or hardship anymore.

Have you ever seen something so unusual? A Christ-follower who has come to hate heaven.

Or at least, the version that these machine-masturbators and cloud-watchers both wait for.

What is it that makes me so upset about these mirror groups? It's their assessment of the problem. To them, the problem lays in the fact that life is hard. That life requires work. And for your work, life will often reward you with failure. That it will give you lots of failure for a lot of your effort. Every now and then, life will give you a success here or there. And not only that, life often seems to reward your enemies. People who seem to get everything so easily while you work so hard for the little you have... IT'S NOT FAIR!

It's hard for me to imagine a more depraved disposition. To me, there is nothing more depraved than giving up on your own life and nothing says surrender more than to stop looking at the present in favor of only looking to the future.

It truly sickens me to the core that so many preachers preach this from the pulpit. This is just passing, temporary, ergo, it is worthless. Do good and wait to die. The stench that such a group gives off is the smell of souls rotting while living.

Instead of fighting to the end with the cards that they've been dealt, these people seem to wait for the cards to somehow change. In heaven, everyone gets a robot side-kick and robot boots. Or mansions and streets lined with gold. Wealth that you didn't have to work for, sacrifice for, the product of a great mind and an intrepid spirit can be yours without having to have a great mind or intrepid spirit yourself. This absurd sense of entitlement is what deeply saddens me.

Look at the video below. I found it through Ross Enamait, and it illustrates to me, an admirable spirit. You know what continually frustrates me about the world we live in? It's wrong to say to fat people, "You're fat." We can't say to the weak, "You're weak." As if not pointing out a weakness would make it somehow less true. At the bottom of this post is a man who acknowledges the fact that he has crippled legs, but he has never let it remain that way.

"I'm not a porcelain doll. If you hurt me, I'm gonna get back up."
"I'm not going to lay down for you. If you put me down, then you put me down."

This is a spirit worth having! Don't wait for the bar to come down lower, teach your legs to jump higher! Don't wait for a mythical telos to arrive and everything to magically be OK, roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty! Don't worry about the great world of things that you can't do, focus on what you can do and then do it. If you can only take small steps, then take small steps. Sure, you have only a small chance of making it to your goal if you take small steps but that's infinitely better than having no chance of getting there.

Where are those brave and intrepid souls who aren't afraid to give it all they got and come out looking like a fool? Where are the pioneering spirits that are willing to work and struggle?