Despite claiming to be anti-religion, the people in the underground society in which Vashti and Kuno live worship the Machine as if it were a god—an example of situational irony. The irony comes across in the following passage (that starts with the narrator quoting the people in the underground city):
“The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.” And before long this allocution was printed on the first page of the Book, and in subsequent editions the ritual swelled into a complicated system of praise and prayer. The word “religion” was sedulously avoided, and in theory the Machine was still the creation and the implement of man. But in practice all, save a few retrogrades worshipped it as divine.
Here the people claim that the Machine is “the enemy of superstition” (an anti-religious stance) while, in the same sentence, they state “blessed is the Machine” (supremely religious language). The Machine also comes with what is essentially a holy text—“the Book”—that makes no mention of religion while also being full of “praise and prayer.” As the narrator puts it, the Machine was viewed as “the creation […] of man” while also being “worshipped as divine.”
In this passage, Forster’s not-so-subtle critique of this society's contradictory relationship with technology is essentially a warning to his readers: if humankind doesn’t remember that technology is man-made, they will end up worshipping it—and ultimately being destroyed by it—the way the people in the story are.
