From the faded outline of a cross to the silhouette of a speaker, the dream house of today looks like a nightmare of the future—a present-day nightmare in which we are awake but not aware, active but not alert, anxious but not attentive. Where the Word was God, the words now echo from Amazon’s Echo: a plastic icon with a red halo, one of seven colors whose rings radiate with the sound of each word, as Alexa says each word, in a tone as hollow as it is unholy. Welcome to a country where 39 million Americans own a smart speaker; where, in three years, there will be more households with a smart speaker than there will be Catholic households; where the house of the LORD may decline, but God will never die; where the stones of all other houses will crumble, while one perfect Rock will remain; where, in the meantime, we agree to do what no foreign tyrant could ever pay us to do—install surveillance devices in our homes.
We speak to an inanimate object. We speak to this thing—we honor this false god—while we object to those who speak of God. We would sooner accept such people than we would reject the one person responsible for having invaded our homes without an ounce of force, whose Echo weighs as little as 10.6 ounces.
Leave it to Jeff Bezos to know what we desire, when we neither know nor seem to care to know what we ought to believe and do. We do not even know what we do not know, as we sacrifice salvation for the cost of amusing ourselves to death.
To die that way profits one man. It profits Jeff Bezos to gain the whole world, provided all other men lose their souls.