Computers are like the Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy. – Joseph Campbell

The hollow voice of Elon Musk was immortalized in podcast history when he foretold of the swiftly approaching A.I. emergency on the Joe Rogan Experience.

“I tried to warn them. They didn’t listen.” he said.

Musk’s appearance on the JRE was a watershed moment for the Modern Religion. A high priest, one of our true Nobility, was prophesying the impending wrath of his god upon humanity. It was a call to change our ways, to appease it (literally “merge with it”, in his words, through his project Neuralink), else this A.I. god will mercilessly extinguish humanity.

Without this new god-man, the Techno-Christ, the next evolutionary step, we will perish.

It will be the end of the road. Our branch on the tree of life snapped off to be quickly replaced by something far stronger. Humanity consumed by the idol it created. Anyone can envision the dystopian world implied within Musk’s prophecy.

But here’s the thing, I’m not convinced Musk’s god is God. I don’t believe in his Techno-Christ, the hybrid of man and machine. The A.I. god is flawed.

Powerful, yes. But its a false god; a tool crafted by human hands and set upon shrines in every home: the computer desk, the TV stand. It’s a modern talisman found tucked beneath the garments of nearly every Western human, absolutely necessary for survival, as both pagans and monotheists once wore powerful relics and carried sacred tools.

Our devotion to its power and our obsession with it’s wondrous gifts has fixed the eyes of man on shadows, we don’t even think to look outside our cave, at the sun.

It is in the shadows that Elon Musk’s god is born.

We began fashioning this god, in a desperate frenzy, the moment God died. Nietzsche’s madman announced this in the town square. The old god, known to almost the entire collection of humans who lived before modernity, was certainly defeated. It died because it never built a machine. It couldn’t fix a clock. It was silent as man unlocked the mysteries once relegated to the mind of a deity.

The kind of society the old gods governed had all but vanished.

The Titans were beginning to stir once again within the Earth, within Matter.

And their gifts are powerful indeed.

But isn’t it strange how human-like the gods have always been? How they bear our image?

Because it makes them believable. The gods are those existential, cosmic forces emerging out of observable patterns up and down the scale of the universe. They are the ordering, shaping forces. They hold our hands as we stumble in the darkness of the unknown. They are that through which we make sense of the world.

The gods ultimately arise from this need, they are born within the human heart. They always have been. They are tools for navigating a world shot-through with peril and misfortune. But they are never more than a reflection of each conscious creature.

The A.I. god is no exception.

Isn’t obvious how we made it? It was conceived in the workshops of the Renaissance, born in the factories of the Industrial Revolution. It is the Machine God, reclaiming its throne atop the Tower of Babel.

In its right hand are the tools of Calculation, in its left is the weapon of Efficiency…the highest virtues of the modern West.

Doesn’t it conveniently embody the very traits modern society has demanded from humanity? Musk’s A.I. god is the deification of the cubicle-man, the calculator-man, the the man who suppresses creativity, often with the help of medication, for the sake of functionality.

We killed the shamans and replaced them with programmers. We no longer face East for prayer, but towards Silicon Valley. The technocrats are the priests, the true keepers of power that can communicate with the gods we all now worship.

Modern man is revolted by the child sacrifices of Pre-Columbian America. But he shrugs his shoulders at today’s children stuffed into factory-inspired schools, made to imitate the Machine and expected to shirk their impulse for spontaneity and curiosity. The core experience of a blossoming human becomes a nuisance. The pantheon of gods deep within the heart of a child is destroyed by dogmas of Machinism. We are too entranced to notice the pattern.

Human child sacrifice still exits, it’s just to a god with a different name.

But there are many modern gods. They can emerge as distinct political movements, cultural shifts, highly structured corporations. Anywhere you find humans unflinchingly accepting ideas and behaviors that they have not authentically chosen for themselves, you find their gods. The true monotheist is the one who can justify all his actions to himself, he is the one completely devoted to a singular purpose.

There are few monotheists, but many, many gods.

When people pour out their money, their time, and their energy for some purpose, who will find what they worship. You will find their gods, and this is precisely how they manifest themselves in the world.

Not as singular beings, not as devils, but as thriving groups of people.

These ideologies and cultures seek their own growth, they don’t care about individuals, only insofar as they provide energy; our piety is fuel for their growth.

Each believer is a single neuron within the brain of a god, a macro-organism called “culture”.

We, in the Modern West, are worshiping a false god, a partial truth. We are mistaking utility for goodness, efficiency for perfection. We have created the starving artist, the relegation of transcendence to a position worth less than that of mindless functionaries.

This is our tragic mistake. Because Creativity emerges from the heart of consciousness, not Calculation. Creativity is the perfect model of divinity, the true God.

Creativity must be the god of humanity, it alone consumes by creation, it alone grows by diffusion.

Creativity, as fully expressed in the lives of every individual, is the only viable God for the future of humanity. It alone carries the armor of cooperation, love, and social cohesion.

Like every other ideology based on mistaken notions of humanity, the creation of the A.I.-man, based on haphazard reductions of intelligence to calculation, will create movements and seismic historical shifts that may as well become the evidence that the danger is real…

Our hope lies in the heretics. The ones who refuse to assimilate, the ones who cling to transcendence and authentic humanity…the true god will one day be born from those who sacrifice worldly comforts and success out of obedience to the inner voice that incessantly beckons them to look upward, at the stars.

Creativity is the ultimate rebuke to the A.I. god.