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Preaching Mahon
Tom Mahon, author and technology guru, recently gave a great interview to the Silicon Valley News about the role of religion in a digital society. Mahon says, "Digital technology is powerful and often beneficial. But it's not a lifestyle choice. We need some other more lasting foundation." His solution to the accelerating speed of a tech-hyped life? A digital Sabbath. Mahon also lets loose on how few engineers and scientists feel a moral responsibility to their community equal to their technological capability. One way that he hopes to work against that is by creating Engineers Without Frontiers, modeled on the noble-winning charity Doctors Without Borders. Mahon says that changing technology means we must update our view of God: "The creed of the Christian church, the Nicene Creed, was written in the 4th century when Ptolemy's view of the earth was dominant. So the core belief statement of the largest religion in the developed world still reflects Ptolemy's flat-earth physics in which the earth is a flat disk in between the dome of heaven and the bowl of hell." Mahon also believes technology makes us like our maker. "We are mastering the quantum, the gene, the bit," he says, "We can manipulate the world at the most fundamental levels, but we're exercising these God-like powers without God's sense of responsibility."

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October (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44