Church of God, New World Ministries

Your Spiritual Computer

There are many parallels between computers and the human mind. Understanding these parallels should help you see more clearly how you can be an overcomer through proper “spiritual programming and “data reception.”

Today, computers have become a way of life, a fundamental tool in this 21st century. It is a multi-billion dollar industry. Millions of people around this world own a computer.

    Also today, the military, businesses and industry couldn’t operate without a computer. Computers are used to count votes and predict the results of elections, for data storage, maintaining magazine subscription lists, for translation, for teaching and hundreds of other purpose.

   Scientists use computers to implement global weather predictions. In our homes, computers can pay our bills. They serve, via a telephone or satellite as a computerized library, as a home information center.

Just how powerful are computers? As far back as the 70s NASA had to use the computer to bring Apollo 13 back to the right trajectory when it went off course. Within minutes, computers had figured out the correct flight path and brought the mission under control. In order to save Apollo 13 it was necessary to compute the trajectory around the moon and back all over again.

A man working with a pencil and paper could have done the necessary calculations in 1,040,256 years. If he would have used the desk calculator to aid him it would have taken just 60, 480 years, but back then the computer corrected the path in just 84 minutes.

The computer’s powers seem so awesome that some people have wondered if they would replace man, will machines ever out-think their designers?  But is a computer “almost human”? Does a computer have real intelligence? Today, with what a computer can do, some people may really think that computers have intelligence, but that would depend on how you define intelligence.

According to an apocryphal story, a computer was once asked the question, “Is there a God?” It replied (so the story goes), “Now there is?” One expert said: “Up until the computer everything designed was just an extension of the hands of man, but the computer is an extension of his mind!”

 Then another person said, a computer is simply a “big dumb moron with a good memory.” And, you might add, with an aptitude for mathematics!

The fact is that computers are not “conscious” as human beings are. These machines are essentially high-speed abacuses or slide rules, which are accurate and fast, but morons nonetheless. If a computer ever gets out of line, all we have to do is pull the plug.

 The computers we use in God’s Work are crucial to our operation, without these machines, very little work would be getting done. But in spite of their great usefulness, these computers are very delicate tools, and a mistake on the part of an operation, or a programmer can cause great problems.

Computers must be handled, maintained and utilized very carefully. Fortunately, our minds are not so sensitive, or are they? Does your God-given mind make mistakes, or worked at half capacity, because of or “dirty” conditions in your physical body, or wrong “data” fed into it through mis-education?

Even if all the previously mentioned factors are perfectly balanced, there is still one major cause of computer error, the data that is put into it. Data processing people have a saying, “garbage in, garbage out.” If you put the wrong information, bad data into the computer, you are going to get bad data out of it.

It is possible, however, to program a computer to recognize bad data. It is possible to program an “edit check” capability into the computer which will recognize bad or spurious data. The computer will “flag” that which is not good, or sometimes it may display the bad data on a video screen, as if saying, “try again, this information is not acceptable.”

There is much superstition about the computer. Some people actually think it has independent thinking, creative intelligence. But this is absolute nonsense because the computer is at all times subject to the man who is operating it!

 Computers do not even begin to compare with the human mind which packs into a volume no larger than a grapefruit some 10 billion neuron cells and another 100 billion glial cells. The brain is hooked up like some ultra complicated switchboard. The network interconnections store an estimated 200,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of information during a lifetime!

There is a world of difference between even the most sophisticated electronic computer and the brain of any man. Yet computers are a lot like our human minds in certain ways. Both must be programmed properly, given the right instructions, and both, to function properly and accurately require considerable attention to their environment as well as to their “diet,” the data they are fed, let’s call it right education.

Our minds, like a computer, have been fed “data” since the day we were born. Every conscious moment data flows into our minds. Much of it has been bad data. But before conversion we didn’t have the “program” to tell us whether or not is was bad! We simply responded impulsively to whatever was fed in. Most of the time we just grew up doing what other people were doing. We followed the crowd. We accepted blindly what other people told us.

There simply was no “edit program” in our minds to tell us whether it was good data or bad data. And if by any chance some suggestion was made to us that some of the data was “garbage,” usually we simply rejected the suggestion, forcing our mental computer to continue judging by saying, that’s “garbage.” We just overruled the truth.

Most of the tradition and education we have received, our “input,” has been garbage! The result was bad “output,” bad action in our lives! Our data sources were unreliable. We were victims of the wrong influences of the devil’s society and religion “whose minds the god of this age has blinded” (II Cor. 4:4). “So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world” (Rev. 12:9). We were ignorant of the right source of information about God. But now we have knowledge from the right source. And now we are able to differentiate good data from bad. Now we know how to handle it.

Notice in Matthew 15:17-18 how Jesus Christ talked about the concept of “garbage in, and garbage out.” Now, He didn’t use the word garbage, of course, nevertheless He said: “Do not ye yet understand that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth, goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught?” – Just goes right through – “but those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart (mind) and they defile the man.” When mental garbage is put in and processed, defiling thoughts and actions come out (vs. 19-20). “For out of the heart proceeds evil thoughts.” They are the results of bad input, bad data, garbage put into the mind!

“For out of the heart (mind) proceed evil thoughts of murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, and blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man.”

For example, an idea goes into the mind which says, “It’s perfectly acceptable to break the Sabbath.” So a man by his actions breaks the Sabbath. The idea that it is all right to break the Sabbath was spiritual garbage. And the results, breaking the Sabbath, is garbage also, Garbage in, garbage out. We see all around us, today, the results of a wrong way of life, the results of wrong information being acted upon.

Information which has been fed into the world is from a wrong source. Originally, Satan pumped poisonous data into Adam and Eve’s mind. He put garbage in and look what has happened, garbage came out and  ever since that time mankind has been cut off from God, the source of right spiritual data.

 Adam and Eve made a wrong decision based on wrong information. He certainly had a proclivity for doing that, since he was self-centered. But God didn’t give him wrong information! Adam and Eve’s source of wrong information was Satan. Ultimately, then, Satan is the source of all this society’s wrong
“output”!

Now the computer’s previous programming instructions can be completely obliterated from its memory banks. But the human mind has to unlearn. It has to unlearn gradually all the wrong ways and wrong ideas that have been fed into it. It has been programmed to react in certain ways and its memory bank is filled with wrong information. So it has to learn by degrees to recognize and reject bad spiritual data which cause wrong thoughts and actions, and replace it with good data. The human mind has to learn to discern between good and evil, right and wrong. This process is spiritual growth and we call it conversion.

God has told us what is right and wrong, yet we have to study His instructions, and His good data, the Bible. We must feed these right instructions into our minds daily. It is possible for us, through Bible study, by practice and application of the power of the Holy Spirit to “reprogram” our minds (Rom. 12:1-2) just as a computer may be programmed to accept only good information and reject the bad.

When we reprogram our minds, or rather when God reprograms them for us, through the power of the Holy Spirit, our minds are changed, we begin to develop the ability to discern what’s right from what’s wrong, and then to do the right. With our reprogrammed minds, we can resist the data which is wrong, because we can now differentiate between good and bad input and impulses. We can also make right decisions since our source data is good! Now, if we see an ad about a movie entitled “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we reject it. Our new programming says, “That’s garbage!” Exactly what kind of data should go into our minds daily? Notice what the Apostle Paul says in Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, If there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy, mediate on these things.”

The good, the just, and the honest and true things, God’s Word tells us to accept and process this kind of data! It provides the right kind of input of our minds.

No mechanical computer can really choose its own course. I can and you can! But even when our minds has been converted and reprogrammed by God’s Holy Spirit and given right data, what you do is still entirely up to you! We have the capability either to choose the right data, make the right choices, do the right thing, or to reject the right and continue the wrong. We in God’s Church must always remember that we have to make special effort to choose and do the right things in our life!

Many of you reading this article have received improper data all your lives.  Your minds have been programmed to do that which seems right and good for you.  But the Bible says, “there is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end leads to death” (Prov. 16:25). Many of you have accepted improper data from men who themselves have been deceived by Satan the Devil. If you would like to re-program your minds today with proper Biblical knowledge you need to enroll in our Bible Correspondence Course and our Traditional Christian Doctrine Course. The human mind is far greater than a mechanical computer.  Isn’t it time you began putting the proper data into it?

 
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