Why “Thinking Machines” ( AI and Smart Phones) Were Banned in “Dune”

In a recent homily, Fr John Jimenez, 30 year veteran teacher in San Francisco and Oakland, and 23 year priest of the Archdiocese, made an analogy between themes in the movie/science fiction book series “Dune“, and some of the modern consequences of Big Tech, be it the gentrification and displacement of caused by the Silicon Valley boom, not unlike the Gold Rush in the 19th century that displaced, approaching a genocide, of Native Americans in California, to the current crisis of social media driven mental illness, harassment and threats of mass shootings in schools and places of gathering, such as shopping centers.
The insight of a precocious teenager in the 19th century, Mary Shelly, that Dr Frankenstein became enamored with his ability to “create life”, yet treated his “creation” like an object of his vanity, thus creating a “monster” (who could quote great works of literature and research) that was scapegoated, and reacted with violence.
In a similar way, Frank Herbert’s “Dune” foresaw many modern aspects shaped by modern technology. In a recent article in Wired Magazine (9/28/21) Ryan Kost, an army officer deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, describes his insight gained while reading the Dune series during the down time of his deployment. He sees how Dune foresaw a “half century of global conflict, from Afghanistan to cyberattacks….low level proxy conflicts of those who are more powerful”. While historically this has been empires utilizing proxies in rebel movements and civil wars, the future, as proposed in the TV Series “Person of Interest” could be that those who have control over certain technologies, be it Amazon over servers and delivery systems, or Apple and Microsoft over software, or Google over information and Data, making deals with authoritarian states like the CCP, and manipulating elections here in the US, the rest of us will live at the whim of “gods” like in age of Ancient Greece.
He notes that Frank Herbert, the author of the series, spent time studying the Russian Empire in the Chechnyan region during the “Great Game” era of the 19th century, and also as a reporter in Vietnam during the war there, so, this theme of small rebel groups fighting back for their independence is a theme in Dune, that loyalty, honor and courage are more significant than technological advantage in these conflicts.
Yet, of interest is why there was a galactic ban on “thinking machines” (today would be AI and smart phones): “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free, but, that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

Our American Iliad: Reflections On Our Post 9/11 Experience

Through his work with the Archdiocese of San Francisco chaplain and teacher, Father John Jimenez has published numerous articles and papers on contemporary issues and their links to the past.
Reflecting on America’s involvement in the Middle East in the Post 9/11 era, on how it has affected all involved, our soldiers, intelligence agents, civilians, political leaders and diplomats, on all sides, a great insight is gained by the Showtime produced drama “Homeland”. whose overall message could be summarized as ‘to avoid pain and tragedy, both on the personal level, and geopolitical level, considering the sacrifice of the people involved, ‘good intelligence’, or ‘sacred study’, even, is necessary”. So, this television series is a good study, seeking to understand ourselves, and even our “enemies”, and learn lessons to avoid innocent suffering in the future.
In this sense, “Homeland” is an epic, like “Lord of the Rings”, or “The Iliad”. an epic of the hero’s journey, with Carrie as the hub amongst the spokes of many characters, each with their rationale, serving flawed institutions, yet, the only way they can see of bringing a good. So, too, at the personal cost of loss of trust, negative affects on family and loved ones, and the tremendous sorrow of death, especially for those who sacrificed so you could live, or for the ideal of the institution. A metaphor, then, for the struggle that many people live with, perhaps without such costs, but still painful. This is why tears for such great characters such as Brody, and all he went through, who just wanted to serve his country as a Marine after 9/11, Quinn, an orphan recruited to be Special Ops, trying to find the moral way. Max, the quiet, tech specialist, loyal friend of Carrie, and the young soldiers who would pat Max’s head as their “frosted lucky charm”, whose sacrifice enabled Max to get the black box and help stop a major nuclear exchange, or Astrid, a German agent whose care Quinn did not realize until too late, or Farah, the Persian/Afghan translator, who, like many, becomes willing to take more and more risks, or the Afghan family man, a secret source of intelligence, kidnapped from his home
Homeland, then, is a Homeric tapestry put together by committed actors, writers, producers and production staff (even the details of life in an Afghan village, and the culture of hospitality, or life in the capital of our “enemy” Iran) to help us understand ourselves better, even our “enemies”, who have their stories too.
With “good intelligence”, and sacred study, we can know better how to avoid conflict, or when, or if, we really need to use force to defend the innocent. This tapestry gives hope that it is possible we can come to understand, and do good, despite our fallen nature.

The Catholic Church’s Humanitarian Efforts in War-Ravaged Areas

Father John Jimenez is a Catholic priest, teacher, and missionary who belongs to the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco. As a missionary, Father John Jimenez has served in two mission districts, one of which is in Sudan.

Sudan has had two civil wars. The first lasted from 1955 to 1972, while the second was fought from 1983 to 2005. Sudan has seen more wartime than peacetime since its independence as a nation. Fundamentally, these wars were fought between the northern and southern factions of the country. They were provoked by religious and tribal differences between these two regions.

Worldwide, many human rights abuses occur during wartime. People are displaced and become impoverished. The Catholic Church is often part of the humanitarian effort to help people who are affected by military conflict, sending missionaries to parts of the world ravaged by war, famine, and underdevelopment. Apart from building churches, these missionaries are also involved in infrastructure and social development, such as building schools and health centers. In Sudan, these efforts have included kindergarten programs for children, women’s education programs, and multipurpose centers in refugee camps.

Tech Driven Conflict Gone Mad? Look to Tolkein’s Response Century Ago

With roles as a priest, chaplain, and teacher, Father John Jimenez lives and works in San Francisco. Father John Jimenez is an advocate for the residents of his community and writes about the tech driven “expanding bubble of desire” in society displacing residents, Here is a recent commentary
This tech driven, expanding bubble of desire, driving envious conflict, and displacing the innocent, parallels Tolkein’s time at the beginning of the 20th century, meant to begin with promise and progress, yet quickly becoming war and pandemic out of control, driven by globalist forces using superior technology in order to dominate and displace local, independent communities.

When Tolkein went off to war with his childhood friends, they did so out of a fraternal bond of loyalty and love of country. Then, in the endless months of trench warfare, hearing each of his buddy’s last breath calling out in anguish, amidst the mud and blood and screaming rockets hitting the trenches, hearing the same from soldiers on the other side of the battlefield, here in this hovel of hopelessness, Tolkien imagines the story of the Lord of the Rings, beginning with simple hobbits who lived in small, cooperative villages of underhill huts, workshops and tilled land, like seeds that survive storms, until they can blossom again.

What began as an imaginative story to help one cope with and transcend a hellish existence of the illogical logic of chess game geopolitics, stuck in the mud and blood of trench warfare just to gain a small kilometer sized field, soon, through God’s revelation, became a moral tale and prophecy of our modern, tech advanced time.

In the hobbit life of the shire, we see the cooperative village life that God’s revelation shows in the life of the Holy Family in the community of Nazareth, that many displaced peoples of Europe actually attempted to live in response to the tech gone mad of WWI, (described by writers such as Dorothy Day, Fr Vincent McNabb, Hillarie Belloc, Wendall Berry, and in the Soviet Union, Alexander Chayonov, who was sent to the Gulag for expressing these ideas), but rose up even worse in WWII, as leaders did not heed the Message of Fatima.

In Sauron, and his desire for the Ring of Power, we see how human freedom and desire are easily deceived, and accumulate into an oppresive force that desroys, becoming Mordor and the Twin Towers of Fascism and Communism. The Sauron/Mordor of our time could be Artificial Intelligience and an internet culture accumulating all power, desire and choice (quantified as “data”), displacing and dehumanizing people and communities. Only the simple hobbits of the shire are able to resist and destroy the ring of power. In Gollum/Smeagol we see the Providence of God, that even when someone does what is evil, God can bring a good. In Strider/Aragorn we see the Suffering Servant become Christ the King. In Frodo, we see the Christ Child, and in Sam we see ourselves, the faithful friend/disciple. This is how we overcome the madness.
To support those who are displaced in the Middle East and Africa, please see projects sponsored by Catholic Near East Welfare Association or CNEWA.com or my project at SFSudanrelief.com or email me at jojimenez4@yahoo.com

No Room At The Globalist Inn: To Help Those Displaced See CNEWA

Father John Jimenez is a resident of San Francisco, and has been a priest in the city for over three decades. An educator as well as a priest, Father John Jimenez writes articles and sermons that make Christian teachings relevant in today’s society, Here is a recent commentary on an article by Robert Morrison in “The Remnant” concerning those displaced by Globalism.
The Holy Family encountered contradictions and trials as soon as they entered Bethelehem. They entered a town the town and wandered through many streets in search of lodging. They knocked on many doors, even of family acquaintances. They were met with harsh words and insults. Thinking in terms of the Holy Family’s search for lodging, this year men and women of good will have been rejected by the various inns of the world more than at any time of our lifetimes. At each door, we knock and say we would like to live our faith fully. What do we hear? The ostensibly Catholic churches tell us their doors are closed and they cannot provide the sacraments that people need the most. The Church hierarchy sees our plight, and endorse Joe Biden for president, continues to betray Chinese Catholics, ingratiate themselves with the elite class rather than pastor their people.
Worldwide and national medical professionals tell us to take various actions to protect the health of the vulnerable population, all of which diminishes everyone’s physical and mental health. The medical profession, rather than ‘do no harm’, has become an untrustworthy tool of tyranny.
Our government tells us that our vote no longer counts. The globalists tell us that our world will no longer tolerate the practice of devout Christianity. Quite simply, the globalists must require us to reject God because otherwise we might have the sense and grace to resist their initiatives.
Yet, moral responsibility requires us to engage in the world as it is. Joseph perservered in the face of contradictions. Blessed Catherine Emerich describes Joseph’s distress. ‘Joseph came back to her in great distress. He had found no shelter. His friends, of whom he had spoken to the Blessed Virgin, would hardly recognize him. From house to house he met with even more decided refusals.’
Faced with the reality that the people of Bethlehem refused to provide shelter for the Holy Family in their time of great need, St Joseph recognized that God must have a purpose for such contradictions.
Though we may have some consolation that our hardships may have led us closer to virtue, we still have reason to be apprehensive about what comes next. Surely what comes next for each of us will be other opportunities to choose between rejecting God or being rejected by the world. God had chosen from all eternity to lead the Holy Family to the cave which was not deemed worthy for lodging by others. Indeed, St Joseph would not have considered the cave had he not been continuously rejected by all who could provide shelter in Bethlehem. And yet, it is precisely where God wanted the Holy Family to be.

If you would like to be of support to those who have been affected most by globalist, tech driven forces of displacement, please see the website of Catholic Near East Welfare Association CNEWA.com to read about projects in India, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan and Congo, all affected by the endless wars of the 20th century and the current drive for geopolitical trade advantage and rare materials to make tech products. Or see SFSudanrelief.com or email me at jojimenez4@yahoo.com

The Way Forward: Live The Apostolic Truth and Aid the Dispossessed

Church People Believe Faith Religious

An alumnus of San Francisco State University and City College of San Francisco, Father John Jimenez is a chaplain and math teacher at Archbishop Riordan High School. A priest at the Archdiocese of San Francisco, Father John Jimenez teaches Christians to resist what he calls “the expanding bubble of desire,” which is the pursuit of vainglory aiming to get a technological advantage over their neighbors. The desire to have a technological advantage over others, conquer more territory, and have geopolitical dominance is at the heart of the wars of the past, and the current manufactured pandemic

Today, technology and social media are feeding people’s desires and expanding a global bubble of desire. This leads people on a path of exploitation, where they use others as objects to get what they want. resulting in forces that displace people from their communities,
The Way forward is to embrace the way of spiritual poverty.
Here are some examples.
The Middle East, and East and Central Africa have for decades been displaced and in the middle of conflicts of greater economic powers. Here are projects that we can help

Catholic Near East Welfare Association www.cnewa.org
1011 First Ave
New York, NY 10022

assists in the education of seminarians at St Peter Seminary in Baghdad and the formation of novices of Dominican Sisters of St Catherine in Iraqi Kurdistan
assists the Mother of Mercy Clinic in Zerqa, Jordan
assists in food aid , blankets and kerosene heaters to Iraqi Refugees in Jordan
helps parishes in Haifa, Jerusalem, Nazareth and Tel Aviv
helps the Afro-Asian Migrant Center in Beirut, Lebanon
assists a religious community establish a poultry farm in Eritrea,
assists a special needs child care program in Ethiopia
assists the Syro Malabar Social Service Society help families affected by floods in India

To help the underground, persecuted church in China, please see the website of the Cardinal Kung Foundation

to help projects that I am involved in, please see SFSudanRelief.com on google sites or email me at jojimenez4@yahoo.com if you would like to help with a project for the poor in the Archdiocese of Guayaquil, Ecuador

The Corona Chastisement: Consequence Of Our Vanity

Father John Jimenez has served as a priest at the Archdiocese of San Francisco since 1998. In a recent sermon, Fr Jimenez made the analogy of our own times with the Message of Fatima 100 years ago and the context of that era, technology gone mad that resulted in a War to End All Wars, and also a destructive pandemic, the Spanish Flu. The Message of Fatima pretold of such a chastisement at that time, and further chastisements, if were no repentance or Consecration to her Immaculate Heart, a rejection of the vanity and power addiction of technology.
So too, this current Corona Virus pandemic is also a chastisement, in three ways.
All of us, whatever religion or non religion, whatever country, or economic level, large corporation or individual consumer, have benefited from exploited labor under the Communist China system…we turned our eyes from this, making deals with the CCP government, so now, common products that we use and contribute to our vanity are taken away or are practically useless.
Second. The Christian Churches, the Catholic Church and other public organizations that purport to protect human rights failed to speak out about the millions of Chinese people who languish in unsafe factories, prison camps, arrested and disappeared in the night, organs harvested, surveillence technology set up by Google to control the people, all compromises with the government of China, our vanity to say that our organization is growing.
Finally, the Catholic Church in general, now unable to celebrate the mass or have access to the sacraments that the Lord desires to provide. This is taken away because we have turned the celebration of the mass into a stage show of vainglory, and positions in the church as seats of power. The problem of many public organizations, churches, political groups, social service groups, is that we become addicted to power, similar to a drug addiction. So now, like helping a drug addict come off an addiction, the “fix’ of power is taken away, until we learn to treat the things of God, His sacraments, His Church, our coworkers and neighbors and family, as God’s gift.
We as a Church cannot allow the world to change us, to “adapt and be more relevant” to the world. Why should we? We are headed to a technology gone mad, AI controlled, manufactured virus/climate change fear mongering system meant to control, supposedly by efficient experts.. No. we are commisioned by the Lord to change the world, that all comes under His feet

The “Expanding Bubble of Desire”

A Christian leader and educator, Father John Jimenez has served as chaplain of San Francisco’s Archbishop Riordan High School since 2017. Over the years, Father John Jimenez has authored numerous sermons and articles including “Resist the ‘Expanding Bubble of Desire’ that Displaces Residents, #MeToo’s Innocents, Fuels Mass Shootings.”

The daily newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle published this article on November 5, 2019. The piece explained Father Jimenez’s notion of “the expanding bubble of desire” to decry the dehumanization and objectification of certain populations as well as the terrible consequences of this dehumanization and objectification. He points to the expanding bubble of desire as a leading cause of regarding other human beings as “the other.”

Based in part on the work of Stanford anthropologist Rene Girard, the expanding bubble of desire harkens back to Jesus Christ calling his disciples the “salt of the earth.” By stressing the essential value of basic fundamental goodness, people can resist the never-ending drive of personal desire and stop dehumanizing and objectifying others.

The Corona Chastisement: Consequence Of Our Vanity

Father John Jimenez has dedicated himself to meeting the spiritual needs of Roman Catholics in California. A resident of San Francisco, Father John Jimenez gave this message. “There are three ways to understand this shutdown. One, all of us, whether we are religious or not, whatever country, or economic level, large corporation or individual consumer, have benefited from the exploited labor under the Communist Chinese system. We turned a blind eye to this and making deals with the Communist government. So, now, common products that we use and and which contribute to our vanity are taken away, and practically useless.
Second, the Christian Churches, the Catholic Church, and other public organizations that purport to protect human rights failed to speak out about millions of Chinese people who languish in unsafe factories, prison camps, arrested and disappeared in the night, organs harvested….we did not speak out, we make compromises with the government to advance our growth in China, our vanity to say that our organization is growing (it’s marketshare in a sense).
Finally, the Catholic Church, in general, is now unable to celebrate mass or have access to the sacraments that the Lord desires to provide. This si taken away because we have turned the celebration of the mass into a stage show of vainglory, and positions in the church to as seats of power….the problem of many public organizations, churches, political groups, social service groups, is that we become addicted to power, similar to a drug addiction. So now, like helping a drug addict come off an addiction, the “fix” of power is taken away, until we learn to treat things of God, His sacraments, His Church, our coworkers and neighbors and family, as God’s gift, rather than as a posession. We can see current events in light of the Message of Fatima, her ultimate call to us to acknowledge our sins, and repent. The Corona Chastisement is God’s justice, but ultimately, so we may turn to his ways, and receive his Mercy.

Overcoming Hate (16th Sunday Yr A Wisdom 12, Matthew 13:24-43)

A chaplain, teacher, and family counselor with the Archdiocese of San Francisco Father John Jimenez presents his sermons orally and in writing.
“A few years ago, Jayce Duggard, a young woman who was kidnapped as a child and lived many years as a virtual slave of her kidnapper, was asked, in an interview with ABC News, how she dealt with such mistreatment for so many years, if she hated her kidnapper, if she had rage against him for all that he had taken from her?
With the wisdom of the parable of the weeds and the wheat that Jesus teaches, Jaycee answered that she does not hate him. At 31 years of age, after about 20 years of bondage, she is now free of him, and by not hating him, by not thinking about him, by letting go of the past, she is able to remain free, and now live the life that she wants to live.
In the parable of the weeds and the wheat, we might wonder why God allows the weeds to continue to live among the wheat and make life more difficult. Those of us who have worked the soil know that weeds choke off the nutrients, especially water, from the wheat. The wheat gets crowded out by the weeds, just as it is difficult for us to live the moral life when we see some among us getting ahead by cheating, and exploiting and manipulation.
A great burden is taken away from us when we realize that the Lord of the Harvest will burn the weeds at the end of time. We do not have the power to make right all of the wrongs that people have done, all the injuries and hurts caused by sin. Yet, God does, and since God will make right all that is unjust, we then are free. We do not have to put our energy into vengeance or even righteous anger. Rather, we can direct our efforts to the good that is still possible, utilizing the gifts and time left that God has given. We do not know how ling this gift shall last, so why waste the gift of time and goodness on anger.
Science and Anthropology show us that over thousands of years of human civilization, primary steps were taken when humans were able to cultivate weeds to become wheat, over generations of cultivation. In the fullness of God’s time, working for the peace of God’s kingdom, may we all be instruments of cultivating the soil of our culture and communities, such that weeds that survive deprivation and become destructive, instead, with care, become wheat that feeds us.