Will the Churches Follow Mark Zuckerberg into the Metaverse?

Churches now are searching for ways to fill emptied sanctuaries. But many also are seeking ways to establish a permanent presence in cyber-space.

Moving into the gap and offering to lead the way out of the desert into a new church of Meta: Mark Zuckerberg. The recent decline in regular viewers, the drastic decline in Meta stock value, and the demise of his Diem currency do not seem to have deterred Zuckerberg from his ambitious goal of incorporating the faithful into his metaverse.

As Elizabeth Dias explained in a recent New York Times article, "Facebook is shaping the future of religious experience itself, as it has for political and social life."

In return for helping "reshape" denominations' religious experiences, Facebook offers apps designed to increase churches' bottom line. As Dias notes, Hillsong, a Protestant megachurch will be streaming its services exclusively on Meta's platform.

In an interview for The Verge magazine, Zuckerberg made it clear that his metaverse has a distinct worldview about "how the virtual space is governed, how its contents would be moderated, and what its existence would do to our shared sense of reality." He speaks of disseminating "authoritative information, taking down content that could lead to "immanent harm" and flagging "misinformation." One thousand people are working on Meta's AI and technical systems, while 30–35,000 people are to "review the content, proactively identifying harmful content."

He summarizes: "In order to have a cohesive society, you want to have a shared foundation of values and some understanding of the world and the problems that we all face together."

Translation: Meta's "community standards" are part of a cohesive worldview that supersedes the worldview of the Christian church.

GROUND ZERO RECENT SHOWS
2/4/22: YOUR OWN VIRTUAL JESUS W/ PASTOR PAUL BEGLEY

https://groundzeromedia.org/2-4-22-your-own-virtual-jesus-w-pastor-paul-begley/

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

I have been noticing lately, a lot of religious leaders basically tell their congregations to go along with the technocratic mission and forego faith and put their focus on how science is saving us.

Many spiritual practitioners don’t have much of a stand, at least when it comes to fighting totalitarian takeovers.

This is nothing new– I remember in History class seeing pictures of so-called good Catholic leaders raising their left hand and chanting heil Hitler during World War II.

If we peek behind the curtain of these pastors’ declared religious affiliations, we’re likely to find their true allegiance is to the cult of scientism for which the true cathedral will eventually be the metaverse.

It is inevitable as the technocracy continues to squash human dignity and faith in God.

The New World Order is being imposed in about 200 countries right now by a corporate technocracy whose accomplishments include that they convinced most people the New World Order was only a conspiracy theory.

We have witnessed and even participated in a full press assault on the laws and constitutions of our country –and other countries that used to value freedom. liberty and the worship of the God of their choice.

Commentators have correctly described what’s happening as a contest between good and evil, and even as the Apocalypse. Adherents of the Abrahamic religions see this as a fight between God or Christ and Satan and they’re finding evidence in the many satanic symbols such as 666 in the logos and publications of various globalist institutions, from Google to CERN to Microsoft’s patent to mine crypto from human energy.

In the context of year zero this is becoming more and more pervasive.

The Pope himself convened a conference of transhumanists at the Vatican. He promoted the vaccine and urged followers to give their souls to the technocracy.

The leaders of most Western faiths have kissed the ring of globalist institutions, ergo we see unvaccinated parishioners excluded from attending service.

The church is changing, getting older, growing colder and sterile with the help of scientism.

In 1978, Time Magazine published a report that predicted that contemporary Protestant and Roman Catholic “theologians” who have become accustomed to follow wherever ‘science’ seems to be leading speculate in turn in the new realm of science and religion a foundation for developing answers to questions about exotheology, the study of relationships between aliens and God, and a transhumanistic cyber theology, the relationship between God and machines.

Scientists, researchers, and religious leaders from across the world are now concerned about how rapidly technology will change our lives.

Recently we discussed how scientists have attempted to enhance human capabilities through the use of artificial body parts and bionics.

We are now moving into a time where not only are bodies and humanity are threatened by an overuse of transhuman augmentation — but religion and spirituality itself is facing sacrifice on the altar of the technocracy.

There is no doubt that modern life, and its institutions, attempt to seduce us. We are breaking down as well as digitizing our boundaries of longing. Modern cultural landscapes and digital realms are de-territorializing the reach of the voyeur.

There is now a shift in how desires are being redirected into new simulated sensibilities and customized indulgences. We are being drawn into new modes of seduction – a form of ‘always available’ easy access.

Seductions no longer tease us with waiting but can be instantaneously ‘streamed’ in the ever-present now. We now binge-watch TV shows and video games are episodic, meaning they do not end when the game is turned off.

The idea that you are going to miss out on something that is not real is peculiar in the sense that it keeps us on edge—it puts us into a cultural trance.

It doles out what is called pop spirit or a pop spiritual fix. If you want to use it in religious metaphor it is like the technological Holy Spirit.

The pop spirit marketplace is hot – it offers exorbitant choice in the belief that more is good. This encourages some people to take, experiment, taste, and dabble with a rag-bag bunch of spiritually enhancing or corrupting goodies in the hope that the resulting fusion will develop their ‘essential self.

Like it or not, there is a subculture that defines itself by their video games and their virtual selves. It is becoming similar to a type of religion or pseudo-spirituality within a collective.

Whilst there are sincere and genuine developmental tools and practices in the world, the online social media-sphere becomes the window-displays for attractive quotations, phrases, and slogans that are hungrily consumed by a fast-paced crowd.

It is easier to ‘like’ and ‘share’ a spiritual tool these days than to consider its use. Pop spirit, like breakfast pop tarts, are tastily consumable, although high in sugary fats.

The modern media marketplace delivers an easy ‘on-demand’ lifestyle which is making us lazy and complacent in that we are used to receiving what we request; and either immediately or within 24-hours.

Many Americans — some traditionally religious, some religiously unaffiliated — are increasingly finding a sense of community through virtual reality.

It comes at a time when religions worldwide face the challenge of keeping physical buildings open while the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated a shift to online services. Some of the gatherings are traditional Christian worship services, sometimes including virtual sacraments in hyper realistic, churchlike environments.

Others are spiritual meditations in fantasy worlds. One worshipper in Virginia described floating in a 3D outer-space wonderland of pastures, rocky cliffs and rivers, as the avatar of a pastor guided him through computer-generated illustrations of Biblical passages.

Is this yet another tool for worship or does this defeat the purpose of what religion and fellowship are about?

While some question whether or not a church can truly exist in virtual reality, others find that the experience can be equal, and sometimes, better than a physical church.

When you deal with the new technological Holy Ghost or goofy avatars that represent the cyber Christ you understand that it fits nicely onto this conveyor belt of the technological spiritual supply that young people and others crave.

Today’s major religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, took hundreds of years to propagate. Their turning points from small factions to true movements happened when they addressed social injustices.

The paganism of the Romans was one thing, but it was their injustices to the people of Judea that gave ground for the rise of Judaism, and later Christianity. In 1517, the sale of Roman Catholic indulgences sparked Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses on Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, kicking off the Protestant movement, and revolting against perceived corruption by the Church.

Tech-backed movements like the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, #ClimateStrike, and even Q Anon have all tapped into a growing sense of social injustice.

Right or Left, economic inequality is becoming visible on a global scale, and technology is connecting all of those audiences into one digital network tasked to affect change. Instead of legal or economic changes, these movements rely on the social agreement as their first outcome. Social agreement is powerful and represents a type of group-think that can evolve quickly into action when it reaches a tipping point.

It is not only the pop spirit, and the pop bible that is fueled by technology – it is the technocults that will eventually become the religious movements of the future.

Like it or not there are various hashtags identifying these technocults and fragmenting the possibility of an all-out synthetic virtual war of ideologies and new “spiritual movements.”

None of them have messiahs yet but of course, that will come much later.

In the metaverse, it won’t be long before everyone has their own virtual Jesus. Meta churches Meta synagogues and Meta Mosques will be popping up all over the counterfeit world.

Today we have the ability to scale audiences to extremes and have instant access to whatever Reddit or Facebook group will best serve a message. No more wandering the plains of medieval Europe seeking people to convert—social media has brought billions of people right to you from the safety of your couch.

It is the recreation of the whole God and follower matrix, complete with the Holy Spirit of justice and a collective that thinks in a hive mind; crowd cohesion but within the eighth sphere.

There is something about this religious metaverse that does not sit well but I am sure others see it as a miracle.

Modern society has been unsuccessful in scaling new religions beyond the cults of personality or the niches of Scientology. But as the digital and virtual worlds evolve, this is set to change. The 21st century is setting the stage for a new type of widespread faith: technology-based religions.

Technology today is pervasive and granulated. It encompasses our worldview, and people are translating it into their spiritual views. The internet acts as an accelerant on these forces, enabling cross-pollination and mutation at rapid rates. This slippery-slope of transmutation provides new guardrails for how technology itself can become a new cult or religion, or at least a component of them.

Techno-oriented religious movements represent a big departure from the strategies of 20th-century-style cults, which could make them even more dangerous. The foundations for this growth are governed by three factors: the internet, which allows for rapid scale; quantified-self technologies, which promise self-betterment; and new surveillance methods, which ensure a whole new type of peer-pressured submission.

If only enough computing power is thrown at the equation, the thinking goes; we would ultimately connect the dots and perhaps know the secrets of the Virtual counterfeit Jesus or even create him and have him appear as some sort of hard to debunk hologram.

In the Psalms we have been warned about the counterintuitive side of idolatry — with the scripture that states that we should not worship that which have mouths, but cannot speak; eyes, but cannot see; ears, but cannot hear; and noses, that cannot smell– while the scripture mentions Gods of Silver and Gold — can we also include technological avatars as well?

Can this also be what the book of Revelation calls “The image of the beast where technology gives the power to the simulacrum of God and in the process, we reject the true God?

Is this the advent of technological blasphemy?

The apocalypse being carried out in virtual reality had me thinking about the possibilities of staging an apocalypse on a grander scale using the technology we have to somehow convince people through synthetic telepathy that perhaps the end has arrived and the staging of the return of the messiah could be a remote possibility.

I mean, for years I have been hearing some followers of fundamentalist Christianity talking about the staged alien invasion through something called “Project Blue Beam.”

But perhaps the staged alien invasion theory is the deception that hides the true mission of the so-called Project Blue Beam, and that is to create and prop up the virtual Jesus that the hive mind of the technocracy worships.

In the Book of Mathew, it says that there shall arise false Christs and false prophets and shall show great signs and wonders, insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

Post-Modernist, Jean Baudrillard wrote in his book, Simulacra, and Simulation, “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”

Baudrillard’s key ideas include two that are often used in discussing postmodernism in the arts: “simulation” and “the hyperreal.” The hyperreal is “more real than real”: something fake and artificial comes to be more definitive of the real than reality itself. Examples include high fashion which is simulated to be more beautiful than genuine beauty, the mainstream media where “sound bites” determine outcomes of political contests and set agendas for what the media wants you to believe, and Disneyland a theme park that uses illusion to simulate anything from Lincoln speaking to you and holographic dragons appearing out of motes surrounding a simulated castle.

It all looks real to the mind because the simulation is so perfect that the brain cannot differentiate the fake from the real thing – this is hyperreality.

Baudrillard suggests that simulating the second coming of a messiah or the arrival of alien gods, would be mankind’s most cynical act.

With technology able to generate hyperreality it is not at all crazy to think that mankind is fully capable of faking his own alien threats and his own messianic second coming to fit the needs of what he has imagined it to be.

If the technology is advanced, why stop at an alien invasion – why is it not possible that a cynical technocult could stage a rapture or a second coming with some high-tech deep fakery?

Doesn’t the good book tell us that the antichrist will rise up and gain power from a Beast? Can the beast work miracles? Could the beast create the illusion that this master techno Anti-Christ calls down fire from heaven and raise hideous beasts from the sea?

Can the beast be advanced technology that can make the world end on a grander scale like an advanced version of Fortnite or some other metaverse virtual reality?

I admit that the avatars of the virtual world now are like little Lego men and Bears but the advancement of imagery and iconography give way to the technological graven image.

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