The Medium is the Messiah: McLuhan’s Religion and its Relationship to His Media Theory
Marshall didn’t publicly discuss his religion. His theory was that people who can see don’t walk around saying, “I’m seeing things” all day. They simply see the world. And so, with religion, it was simply there with him. (61-62)
.. there is a great contrast between perceptual and conceptual confrontation; and I think that the “death of Christianity” or the ”death of God” occurs the moment they become concept. As long as they remain percept, directly involving the perceiver, they are alive. (ML 81)
.. Finally, McLuhan also made clear that the academics were the modern Scribes and Pharisees, and that these were unable to perceive anything as a result of their concepts.
.. Understanding Media(1964), is ultimately a warning against the idolatry of technology, in which he invokes both William Blake and Psalm 115 to tell us that “we become what we behold.”
McLuhan also believed that the tetrad analysis revealed in Laws of Media could only be done on man-made objects, not on spider webs or natural processes. This conviction led him to claim that tetrad analyses could not be performed on the Sacraments of the church, but only on its heresies, offering another inverted proof of the Sacrament’s divine origin. So concerned with the Logos or word was Laws of Media that it precedes the tetrad examples chapter with this final reminder
In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same. (ML 103)