Understanding the Metaverse as a Christian

What is the Metaverse?

One of the major projectors of the Metaverse is Mark Zuckerberg who has even rebranded his entire company around Metaverse with a new name ‘Meta’.

Metaverse is a new Universe.

It’s a new kind of universe where you can carry out your physical activities in a digital way with the aid of some technological gadgets. The projectors of Metaverse are trying to replace every physical human activity with a digital form. For example, you will be able to move around without living in your house. You can attend a party, go shopping just by wearing some high-tech pair of lenses and headsets.

In fact, even your properties will become digital. You will have digital assets like clothes, shoes, etc. And your digital assets will also become a bit more physical or tangible, for instance, you will read your WhatsApp chat without holding your phone.

Most of your screens will become visible in the air, so to speak. There will be a fusion of your physical environment in a virtual environment so that when you are wearing some lenses you can see both objects that are physically present with you and those that are not together in the same space. For instance, you can invite someone over to your house virtually, meaning that you will be able to see the person but the person will not be physically present. The vision you see will also factor in the virtual guest into the space of things physically present in your environment such that you can navigate as though the person were physically present.

Remember how children used to relate with their imaginary friends, they tell you “don’t sit there! Fred is there”. This is becoming a reality, when putting up the lenses, what you see is different, even the imaginary becomes visible.

The metaverse, in other words, is a world where the unreal becomes real, the intangible becomes tangible.

Through a headset and some lenses, you move into a different world where you see things in 3-dimensional forms and relate with them tangibly, the tangibility is achieved by stimulating your senses with a simulated experience. You also hear sounds that don’t exist in your real world. In fact, all your 5 senses, are stimulated through different electronic means.

Mark Zuckerberg promises that in the Metaverse you will be able to do the following:

Social connections

So what we have on Social Media currently is people being able to interact via texts, audio conversations and then at the best video conversations. Mark is promising something more than that that will give you what they call ‘immersive experience, an experience that will involve all of your senses. It will no longer be you chatting with someone on the internet, the person will physically be present with you without leaving their homes by wearing a pair of lenses and headset that provide virtual reality.

When playing a game, you will find yourself in the environment of the game and not just you looking at a screen. Some of those are already existing with different gaming corporations. When you send a video, the objects will come out of your screen in 3D forms as holograms. It’s more like what you see when Henry Danger is talking to Captain Man through a wristwatch in the popular Nickelodeon’s Henry Danger TV series.

Entertainment

Mark Zuckerberg is proposing a metaverse where you can attend parties in different parts of the world without moving. You will attend the meetings virtually, you can buy merch at the party virtually, grab some digital tickets for parties and so on.

Watch this video below to understand it better.

Gaming

In the Metaverse, Marks claims that you will be able to play games with people you cannot see physically. You can put on, avatars and be completely immersed in the game with 3-D visuals.

Fitness

Mark also said that in the Metaverse, you will be able to play games that are invisible in your environment but visible with the glasses and headset you are putting on. You can get people to play games with you virtually and feel like they are actually with you.

Working

You can work in virtual spaces as if they were real. See video below:

Education

It is claimed, in the metaverse, education will become more realistic. For instance, while talking about the earth you will literally find yourself in space.

A cursory look at it will look beautiful and enticing to you but there is more to it than what you see at the first glance.

First of all, Mark claims that metaverse will help to deepen the connection that people have and give them an immersive real-time experience but in the actual sense it does the opposite. It will encourage people to stay apart from the more because there is no need to physically meet any longer. It eliminates the need for you to see people, feel people and interact with them. It’s an attempt to replace human beings with a pair of glasses and a headset. So your new world will revolve around those objects and of course the internet. This is similar to what we experienced during the Coronavirus pandemic, man’s interaction with man was prohibited. You had to stand 6 feet away from fellow humans.

By the way, a very strong internet connection is required for all of this to work smoothly. There are particular gadgets that will also be able to access the metaverse while others cannot. Facebook is not the only company delving into the metaverse, Microsoft is doing so as well. But while Facebook is trying to be all-human-live comprehensive, Microsoft is focussing on just workspaces and office meetings.

Secondly, the metaverse is trying to create a new nature. A nature of 3D, a nature where the digital becomes the real. This will draw man away from the natural habitat in which God made him to function. Man’s interaction with nature will be reduced, causing him to be more focused on unreal things. Again, during the pandemic, several cities all over the world were locked down, causing man’s interaction with nature to reduce. This had a negative effect on the entire man’s ecosystem. Man owns the world, God gave him the authority. Shutting man from nature will cause a lot of misnomer for both the earth and for man himself. Most of the COVID-19 survivors claimed that they exposed themselves to fresh air and went out. Metaverse wants to change that, they want you to live in a world where you perceive everything through intermediaries.

Your ears and eyes will no longer receive natural signals. Everything they receive will be filtered through some lens and headsets. Yes, I know that it is not compulsory to get any of the metaverse gadgets, but the world will eventually get to a point where not being in the metaverse may be an archaic thing, just like it is today not to be on the internet. by the way, Facebook is not the platform Meta wants to host the metaverse through, they have another platform for that called horizon. Of course, other platforms will also be metamorphosed in one way or the other to be metaverse controlled or focused.

The metaverse may further strengthen the divide between the strong and the weak, it may enrich the divide between the poor and the rich. Most of the gadgets that will be used to access the metaverse are expensive. Users of the metaverse will also be under the pressure to acquire more digital assets in addition to their physical assets. Most of the digital assets or  Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are very expensive. The world has not recovered from the mental illness several people get into from Instagram frenzy. Several people have a fake life on Instagram that is far different from their real lives.

With the metaverse, there will be so much control given to one man. Already Facebook has more than 3 billion users, the metaverse is more robust. It will not just store your names and emails, it will have a record of your interactions, your cognitive behaviour, your expressions, your locations and several other things about you. That is so much risk, this data can be exploited either by Facebook itself, by government agencies or by some other private organisations.

I also believe that it will be unhealthy to have gadgets fixed on your face for a long while just because you want to live in the metaverse. This will contribute to health issues, in the first place the waves emitted from electronic gadgets are not healthy.

As a Christian, I see some elements in the projection of metaverse that seems to be a look-alike or a distorted form of some spiritual elements in Christian.

We walk by faith and not by sight

For we walk by faith, not by sight:

2Cor. 5:7 (KJV)

What makes us Christians is the fact that we live beyond the realm of senses. We live beyond what we can see, feel, hear, smell or taste. We live by Faith, in a sense, Faith is the lens and headset we put on in order to see things from God’s perspective and what we see by Faith is our reality not what we see physically. Faith is what brings a possibility that is beyond the human realm, just like metaverse is trying to tell you you can be outside space even while on planet earth. Faith is what enables you to call things that be not as though they were. Faith is your currency for purchasing spiritual assets in the Kingdom of God (Rom. 4:17). Without faith, it is impossible to please God or live in the spirit and of course, living in the spirit is the only way for you as a Christian to avoid fulfilling the lust of the flesh. (Gal. 5:22)

Metaverse is recreating a world which men can access through man-made objects rather than accessing the heavenly realm through Faith. God has given us as Christians the authority to recreate our world through faith and not to run into some unreal world. We are to create things with our words not to buy digital assets in a world that is totally vague, empty and unreal.

The Bible talked about unseen things being more real than things that are seen, meta-verse projectors understand this and they are taking advantage of it, however, the world they are creating is totally in the realm of illusions, make-believes.

Teleporting

The powers that metaverse is trying to assign to the people of its world is what God has given to the Christian by nature. For example, in Acts 8:26-40 we see Philip teleporting from one city to another. This teleportation involved his physical body, that of Mark’s metaverse this teleportation is only in your mind not in any way close to reality.

The metaverse is another distraction for the Christian. A distraction that will lock you more into the systems of this world, into the world dominated by senses rather than by faith.

I’m not excited about it. I believe that as Christians we should be careful about it and be sensitive to the instructions of the Holy Spirit.

Metaverse is not entirely new, talks about it started more than 20 years ago. The word metaverse was first used by an author – Neal Stephenson in his book Snow Crash (1992). The word ‘meta’ itself is a Greek word that means ‘beyond’, so metaverse is an attempt to take you beyond this world. But you can live beyond the evil, chaos, anarchy, perils and struggles of this world only through Jesus.

Only Jesus can give you eternal life, a life that goes beyond time. A life that is beyond death, time, man and the earth.

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

John 14:6 (NKJV)

To learn more about Jesus, click here.