What is technology good for?

Much less than everything but much more than merely more 
This text is not really about new technologies.  It's about the human priority and creativity involved in making them.  
And the infinite Divine Creativity in generating all



Preface's preface: I am neither a grumpy luddite or a starry-eyed geek.  I hate the johnny-come-lately-sound-and-fury-which-signifies-nothing of "Technology!"   But I lay the blame for it at my own feet and that of a church still waiting for rapture or other get rich to heaven quick scheme. It's from an Etherchapel text and idea started 11/2008 which is, like most of my musings, both half-baked and unfinished.

Outline and Idea seeds

• Preface: Technology is more than just an amoral catalyst to be left in the enemy's hands.  Good is more than just a set of arbitrarily chosen and labeled  proscriptions for man. Religion is more than ritual and rubric.  Man and the material world is more than junk.
• Conclusion: God deserves more innovation and creativity from his believers than he's getting.

What is Technology?

• Tekth and Logos: weaving two or more things, implicit order, and new creations
• Matter and Spirit, intervoven: "what is man that you should think of him?.." 
• Catalysts and tools

What is Good?

• Man's material purpose
• God's spiritual grace
• Can the amoral and material hold grace

Religion, the original high technology

• Human beings, divine Persons. Human things, divine patterns.
• Sacred place and empty space- religious architecture.
• Inert matter and living form- religious art.
• The Word.. Incarnate-  Sacraments
• Mystery and microcosm- Sacramentals

Reasoning, Conclusion and Epilogue

• Can powerful technologies only be used for evil
• Can this powerful technology only be used for evil
• Would effort/grace be better spent elsewhere somehow
• Whose effort, how much grace, where else, and how
•  Man is meant for heaven and technology is one of God's gifts to ennoble him to get there.

 ...

Preface (and conclusion)

This article is not so much about particular new technologies as much as it is on the huge generalities of human creativity (and priority) in making them and the infinite Divine Creativity in generating all. It asks more than it answers, and even in answering it must be undersood that I'm only one layman and, as with all mysteries, the attempted codification (no ether-pun intended) is bound to dissapoint and probably rather laughably compared to Logos' reasons.  Only after floundering a little in the deep end does it wade back in to the kiddie-pool of human particulars, and almost immediately drown.
Where am I ultimately going with all this?: God deserves more innovation and creativity from his believers than he's getting

What is Technology? 

Technikos and Logos
Those wily Greeks had a way with words.  A way of inventing them, that is.  But, unlike our inventions, theirs never seem to grow stale or old, they somehow invented classical too, remember. Even from here it's penultimate Greek origin sheds more incidental light on what we call technology than all the user's manuals extant, for it unwittingly sheds light on Wisdom with a capital W.. 
Technology started human life in the aegean foothills where an ancient concept called tekth (indo-european for craft, and especially that of weaving) was itself interwoven with a new greek one called logos (orderly discussion and the cumulative interplay of ideas). The new whole: interwoven craft, logic, and synergy has something of the divine in it ..
Humanity
The concepts Technikos and Logos together make a cocktail older than humanity, (if Christianity is to be believed).  In the begining God wove (technikos) matter and spirit together with and in his own image (logos) and got a rather spunky little synergy in the process, us. Thus was technology invented with the creation of little creating creatures.
...all that remains of an idea seed for a later part of this idea, probably in the religion or conclusion sections:
Written language, printing press, typewriter, hypertext, internet, web - human inventions come and go, or rather, grow whenever and wherever there are humans free and interested enough to build with them. For to be-human is to-build, or atleast yearn to. It is one of the greatest ironies and scandals that religion and Christianity are seen as stultified