The Bible is full of dire warnings against worshiping false gods.
So, what does it mean, to worship? Is it to direct one's energy and attention towards something perceived as a non-human source of power and truth?
If so, machine worship is the dominant faith of our time.
A traditional element of many religious rituals is the posture of prayer. It can be kneeling or prostration, but more commonly it is the act of bowing one's head. This is not coincidental. In many cultures, hanging one's head is associated with submission - either to God, a monarch, or some other authority figure.
Of course, context is important. If you see a person walking off a tennis court with his or her head bowed in this way, you might see it a different way: as the posture of defeat.
But most of the time, when you see people in this posture today, they are simply looking at their phones - bowing their heads a thousand times a day to consult the oracle they carry in their pockets.
The connection between the brain and the body is not a one-way street. What you do with your body sends messages to your brain. If, over the course of years, you assume a prayerful, submissive posture many times a day as you consult a relic perceived to be the source of both joy and wisdom, your brain will most certainly come to believe it.
Whether you mean to or not, you are practicing worship of the machine.
In Fritz Lang's cinematic masterpiece, Metropolis, most of the attention goes to Maria, the first android in movie history. It is, again, not coincidental that Maria's name is evocative of Mary, Mother of God. But there is no God in Metropolis. Instead, Lang conjured the ultimate false god: Moloch.
Historically, Moloch was a Canaanite diety associated with child sacrifice. In the Bible, it represents the personification of everything false and corrupt that we might be tempted to worship.
In Metropolis, it is a machine that literally consumes its users.
The imagery of the Moloch machine is usually interpreted as a metaphor for industrialization, and maybe capitalism. But these days, it is barely a metaphor at all.
In the movie, worn-out workers march submissively into the mouth of the machine, sacrificing their lives to feed their master.
How different is that, really, from what we do? We spend our lives slaving for the machine, and although it may not devour us all at once, it most certainly devours us piece by piece, minute by minute.
If humanity is to have a future worth having, one thing is certain: worshipping Moloch will not take us there.