Is your cell phone your God?

By Donald A. Collins | 28 February 2025
Church and State

(Credit: Shutterstock.com)

It has happened to me more than once, but recently quite spectacularly by inadvertence as a nonagenarian I was loading some groceries in my car and I put my cell phone on its roof then forgetting that I had put it there while driving away to my home where I went into a panic at not being able to find it.

Suddenly, I realized that the only place it could possibly have been lost was at the grocery store to which I returned only to find that no one in the store had picked it up from what I thought was the pavement next to my car!

Completely panicked I was assisted by one of the stores employees who brought his phone and dialed it with my cell phone number, hoping that it would reveal the phone’s location.

No answer came when suddenly I looked up and saw my cell phone sitting sedately on the roof of my car where I had put it when loading my groceries 30 minutes before.

The fact that it had not fallen off when I drove home the first time and drove back a second time still serves as a remarkable event, one if the phone had been lost would have been a disaster in my life since all of my information accumulated over years is in this instrument.

As I thought about what happened afterwards, I must say this became to me something of a religious miracle.

This of course raises the extent to which a cell phone occupies a position in a modern person’s life equivalent to a religion.

Religion has many definitions of which many are secular, not ethereal in nature.

I want to make very clear that I am not anti-religious if it serves as a spiritual function in a person’s life. For example, during the racial history of African Americans, their churches served as a place of refuge and encouragement for the brave people who fought through that disgusting era in American history, which by the way is far from over.

As the 2/27th Washington Post artcke entitled “Neo-Nazis targeted a majority-Black town. Locals launched an armed watch” starts “Residents of Lincoln Heights, Ohio, are guarding their streets with rifles after criticizing the police response to a neo-Nazi rally”.

Read this devastating repetition of the August 17, 2017 Charlottesville extremist rally about which President Trump commented, “there were good people on both sides”.

Read this latest version of racist behavior in Lincoln Heights, Ohio here.

I guess the ability to hate anyone not of your faith can be called a religion.

Of course, immediately at the beginning of his 2nd term, Trump pardoned all of those convicted of the January 6, 2021 Capitol invaders who followed his orders to attempt a coup which could have kept Biden from assuming the Presidency on January 20, 2024. Trump dubbed those pardoned, which include the same Oath Takers and Proud Boys who had been at Charlottesville.

Wonder what religion fosters such positions? Christianity and Islam, the two most populous, have been guilty of many reported and forgotten incidences of far worse cases!

The problem with any religion (as has been extensively covered in this splendid website) comes when its proponents take secular roles which attempt to impose their ideological positions on others.

For that reason, all of the major world religions have taken such positions and thus I consider myself a spiritual person, but definitely skeptical about aligning with any religion, which unquestionably will be led by a human not a God in the sense that their religions understand.

“I got religion” about how I would approach—fill in any secular subject—and you realize how broad and unprovable any spiritual belief can be.

OK, talk about the 10 Commandments, which the late comedian George Carlin quickly reduced to two or three including without fail not to kill anyone which certainly should be a matter of belief to everyone!

Daily I am thinking about the almost God like performance of my cell phone, which allows me not only to contact others, but to also even write on my own or on ChatGPT *(which I always acknowledge in my writing) or to receive news and critical information from an infinite number of sources.

In watching others pursuing cruelty to their organized religions, I can only wonder how they can keep contributing when the only response they get is not furnished by a credible concrete entity.

Of course, adherence to contribute to all sustained religions through something called tithing in the US for the 62 percent of our citizens who are Christians. This often not fulfilled percent amounts to giving about 10% of one’s income in support of their places of worship.

Again, I stress my support for any religion that seeks only to advance ideas which do not have to be punitively and authoritarianly put on others, such as those US Christians who fall believe in a category called Christian Nationalism, which would impose their beliefs on everyone in the United States as a matter of official policy.

Trump and his allies, of course, have mostly totally material objectives in their search for complete control of USA. As a PR device among many other false strategies have adopted what is obviously a totally hypocritical statement about their religious beliefs.

As we move forward in Trump’s second term, we see those attempts in full swing, including a powerful influence on our mass media.

Whether we will have another election in the United States seems to me an urgent question for all voters to contemplate.

Since for me, my cell phone is in fact, my God of choice I shall be in constant contact with the world we live in so that I may continue to favor freedom in allot possible dimensions!

Pick your gods carefully, folks, as what they give you may be utter tyranny and take away your ability to know that is the case!!

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”, “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”, “On the Precipice of Political Disaster in 2024”, “Democracy at Red State Risk”, “Does Trump Go to Jail or to The Oval Office?” and “Trump: Pardon or Punish?: The Nixon Precedence Was Not A Trump Coup Denied!”.

Zelenskyy and Trump clash in Oval Office

Five Things Christian Nationalists Want for the Trump Presidency

GEORGE CARLIN – The Ten Commandments

Be sure to ‘like’ us on Facebook

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here