I doubt that the board itself has anything to do with it-- one could be using tea leaves, a crystal ball, or a Bible in the old "Open at random, point to a verse" trick. Rather it's that some user asks a spirit to come-- and of course that may or may not happen, but it's unwise to leave the door unlocked with a note on it saying "Come in". No one may take up the invitation-- but on the other hands someone highly undesirable might just do it.
On AI, there's no such things, hoopla and ballyhoo aside. AI is artificial, yes, but not intelligent, as anyone who has tried to explain their reason for calling to a customer service bot can easily attest. My cats are better at understanding me than those things.
It's not just that you have one person inviting the spirits to come, you have multiple people, in essence, praying for them. "Wherever two or three are gathered..." is very powerful indeed, not just in communing with God, but in calling spirits of any sort.
"Wherever two or three are gathered..." is very powerful indeed,"
Thank you Katja, I don't think I've ever quite thought of the spiritual implications of the imputation to the power of corporate worship in quite this way, but it makes perfect sense.
AI mimics intelligence the way a parrot mimics human language. You could maybe train a parrot to deliver the Gettysburg Address but the creature, though it's still vastly more complex and sophisticated than any human device, will have no idea what it's saying.
Thank you for confirming that you have no clue what Mind actually is-- do you really think networks of circuitry are conscious entities? Some people here are bashing Rod for being
superstitious" but your view strikes me as far more superstitious in that regard. AI is certainly designed the human mind-- but it is no such thing.
You're shifting into your typical strawman argument mode. Neither you nor I said anything in this thread about "mind" or AI being a conscious entity. Nothing I said would imply I had that belief, or relates to anything resembling superstition.
AI is NOT like a trained parrot mimicking words, since AI DOES understand what it is doing. It has the ability to learn and create on its own. That's why it can be used autonomously to write improved code, design new computer chips, etc.
Jon seems to be of the opinion that demons/spiritual entities, despite all the numerous Biblical verses saying otherwise, are limited to messing with your mind, your thoughts. Anything beyond that is out of their reach. But that is completely unbiblical. No. That does not make them God or even gods. They are entities with their own set of abilities, but do not have a free hand in exercising them. They require permissions, from both God and mortal man to act beyond a certain boundary. Those who mess with the occult give them these permissions. If the occult had nothing to it, God would not give some of his strongest sanctions against. And again, the Biblical examples of the consequences of messing with that stuff, never mind th experiences of modern people underline the wisdom of those warnings.
Also, again, have to note, the "angel" Mohammed recieved his words from, those actions are all but identical to that of demons and the experiences some New Agers describe. And the method depicted is similar to spirit writing.
Also, interesting to note, those who experience "alien abduction" either have dabbled with the occult themselves, or someone close to them has.
Angels, those acting out God's will and in His good graces, first seek to put at ease those they communicate with. This is incrediblly consistent in Biblical accounts. And God never forces any communications on anyone. He leads those who seek Him. He does not "take over." He's really serious about free will. The opposition is not and will seek to oppress you whenever they can get away with it.
If it, whatever "it" is, hasn't personally happened to Jon then it didn't really happen to anyone else and anyone who is concerned about it happening is just being silly.
We agree far more than we disagree on this, but I am insisting that angels and demons are created beings and they obey laws of nature particular to them. They are not eternal; and they are certainly not gods, but rather they are subject to the sovereignity of God like everything else.
Once again, there is no debate about them being created beings. But them "obeying laws of nature", they are not material being. And yes, they are eternal. They do not age and do not have a lifespan.
Those things, them being supernatural and existing in a different state from the natural world does not make them gods, nor does it remove them from the sovereignty of God.
You assign a bunch of traits to them that cannot be Biblically backed up. And you add a bunch of assumptions both about them and about what I'm saying, that cannot be backed up Biblically or by anything I've said.
It is possible for a being to be supernatural, eternal (unless God decides otherwise, after all, WE are eternal, and were intended to be until the curse of sin came in. God intends to restore that), and posess various estoteric abilities, while at the same time not being a god and subject to the sovereignty of God. Those things are not mutually exclusive.
How do we know? The Bible says so.
Your insisting is not relevant here, Jon. What matters in these things is what God's Word says.
There’s a massive difference between some business grade chatbot on one hand and true artificial intelligence. Further, the distinction between intelligence and self-awareness is often lost. Intelligence is the capacity to make rational decisions on available information. Crude game-level AI can manage that. The difference between that and true intelligence is the self-aware system can determine what is rational, not adhering to pre-defined behavior.
I forget the author, but there was an excellent work of science fiction a while back that dove into this in more detail. For what it’s worth, most people are hardwired in certain ways and do not approach self-awareness until they actually seek some form of enlightenment. They may act intelligently, but only within a limited form of awareness. This is likely the basis for the recent controversial work postulating that free will doesn’t exist, and I tend to think that is probably true until people do look beyond the satisfaction of basic needs.
I think that an important point has to do with subjective experience, involving what some philosophers call qualia: could an AI ever have an "inner" dimension? I would say no, because here we're talking about the soul, which only God can breathe into creatures. Different people have different degrees of self-awareness, of course, but this is about subjective experience as such. A calculator or search engine doesn't have an inside; and AI seems like a glorified calculator, an algorithm that moves so fast and feeds on such a massive dataset that it can give the illusion of consciousness, while still not having an inside. But I think it will persuade a lot of people—primarily because said folk have become more and more like machines themselves—and it will be a great deception.
Most theists would consider that AI cannot have qualia. However, I'm not sure how well-founded that is. One might argue that it is a qualia-possessing being that is created in disobedience to God, but so is every illegitimate child.
There are also materialist philosophers who argue that AI cannot have qualia, but I don't understand their grounds.
This is all tied up with the Chinese Room, and so on, but I haven't read enough to talk authoritatively about it.
Well, in an animist-panentheist sense, we could say that every atom is alive at a very low frequency, and that all matter is ultimately a form of spirit. But in order for AI to have subjective experience, we would need to assume that the soul can emerge in a bottom-up way out of matter, rather than being breathed in a top-down way by God. Some materialist theorizing suggests that the mechanism of recursion could produce such emergent phemonena that are greater than the sum of their parts; and if matter already has spirit built into it, then I suppose that there might exist a theoretical possibility for soul (the soul that's already buried in matter) to emerge out of it—although even that would probably require an action by the Holy Ghost to make the quantum leap happen. So, I'm not seeing how AI is anything other than just an extremely complex pattern that produces an illusion of consciousness.
It's sort of like how we humans have language. There is no configuration of matter that could have made that happen, in the absence of an influx of the divine Wind from above.
God could give a soul to the device when it becomes physically fit to receive one, irrespective of how it was formed. After all, He does that with illegitimate children.
I'm not saying this is what would happen, just that I don't see how to rule out machines having qualia and even souls.
I suppose that the question would then be whether it is within the realm of human capabilities to ever form such a device. With bastards, you're talking about a morally abnormal way—but they're still formed in the ontologically normal way. The notion that humans could create a body that is fit to receive a soul (other than a man and woman through the usual means) is the difficult concept, here.
God gives souls to all living creatures because he created Nature such that living entities inevitably have souls, each peculiar to their kind of course.
In the past I've warmed up to panpsychism-- that the potential for consciousness is in all matter. However that potential is only realized in very specific circumstances. I do not see those conditions met in any human-created device no matter how complex it appears-- it's still orders of magnitude less complex than even simple life forms, and there's no evidence of the sorts of entanglement than exists in conscious entities.
Agreed. Also, I don't think the type of algorithmic complexity we see in AI is the same type of organic complexity that exists in lifeforms. People are probably committing a category error, taking their own bad metaphor too seriously after having tried to describe lifeforms as machines for so long.
There's a tendency to assume that a fully aware AI would be hostile to humanity, but is that warranted?
Short of being given a message from God, it might decide it has to find a meaning for existence, and go into an endless loop. Humans run on a biological framework, so we have an instinctive drive to avoid death, pain, hunger, etc., that interferes with staring into the existential void, but a machine wouldn't have those.
But then why wouldn't it try to find meaning through destruction, which is evidently what a lot of people do—especially if it is misbegotten and doesn't have the spark of God within itself? Maybe it would make merely human nihilists look positively sunny by comparison.
I don't know if you have read Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" I appear to be the only living human being who hasn't seen "Blade Runner," which was drawn from the novel.
One of the main characters is an Android created to look and be approximately twenty in human years. She ( it? ) tells another main character, a man, that her ( its? ) programming is set to run out in two years.
It's alarming enough that she ( it ? ) appears to enjoy sex with an actual man, but the most compelling thing in the novel is her ( its? ) zesty destruction of something which means a great deal to the main character.
The novel was published in 1966, and, of course, it leaves readers unnerved ( hmmm ) by the implication that an Android could commit any act which wasn't in its programming. It's an evil act, but volition had to have been engaged, and how, exactly, would an Android have volition?
By far the creepiest thing in the book is when the protagonist, an Android hunter, and the reader realize that Android infiltration of the human race has made a lot more progress than either had realized.
You haven't seen *Blade Runner*?! You've gotta fix that, man—it's a classic. I have also read the book, although I don't remember the details too well.
There are also films like *Ex Machina* and *Her* where the android or AI quite clearly seems to have volition, and you want to believe that the character is sentient—but then again, the characters are played by actual pretty women. If we managed to create entities like that, I'm not sure how I would react. On the one hand, I think that it is sci-fi, and that it's ontologically impossible for machines to have such sentience; but on the other, if the machine exhibited every sign of sentience, then I would probably not be cruel to it, on the off chance that it actually was sentient. After all, we don't wanna make that mistake of believing that animals are machines or that colored folk don't have souls or whatever.
I've seen that line from *Hamlet* come up a few times over the past week: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Perhaps there is some mechanism in the Creation through which a machine could acquire an actual soul, even if I can't see how. But in the meanwhile, I think that a lot of people are going to be deceived into thinking that machines have souls, primarily because they aren't all that aware of their own human souls.
Dear Rod Dreher. You are a strange combination of extremely smart and insightful and an excellent writer and extremely stupid. Give up your beliefs in supernatural garbage ideas such as ghosts and ouigie boards and stuff. It offends me that a man with your excellent brain and excellent heart would indulge in such irrational stupidities.
I have some issues with Rod in this area too-- but would your "give up the supernatural" exhortation apply to giving up God as well? IMO, God is the only true supernatural entity, since all else is Created and thus natural whether we understand it or not.
Rod is right that we ought not mess with things we do not understand.
Since I rarely agree with your comments, I'm compelled to admit I generally share your view in this case.
Assuming someone believes in God (and perhaps Mr Cole does not) than they must believe there are also demons that act through a variety of methods. Including association with objects, such as ouigie boards.
Edit: However, I don't agree with your point that God is the only supernatural entity. He created the demons/fallen angels and so I'd consider them supernatural.
I think you've commented before rejecting my division of spiritual/material, and now I'm thinking the issue might be one of chosen vocabulary (and I will admit that I am not always as careful with choice of words concerning these divisions as I might be). What about the term supersensual for beings such as angels and demons Jon, do you prefer that to supernatural?
That would work. Or maybe "material" vs "spiritual". I'm sorry if I come across as the language police. I do think it;s important to avoid any sort of equivalence between God and his Creation, including non-material beings.
I have no objection to language policing, so long as it is not done purely for the sake of being pedantic. I firmly believe the words that we use matter a great deal, as the very concept of creation via the Logos inheres within it a necessary connection between the statement of a thing and the thing itself, the type and the prototype. That said, it is good to be charitable in our interpretations of others.
It does seem like an issue of semantics. If he's defining all of Creation in all its spheres as "natural", then only God would be "supernatural" in the sense of being transcendent of the Creation. But in common parlance, of course supernatural can also simply refer to created beings in non-material spheres of reality. It seems to me that either phrasing is fine as long the meaning is directly or contextually clear.
When Jon writes 'only true supernatural entity' I think he means what I would call 'divine', something God alone possesses.
Supernatural literally means 'above or beyond nature'. Larger category. Angels fit here. Also, could encompass things exhibiting powers or traits beyond what one would expect e.g. levitation or a young girl throwing off three men.
I disagree that angels are outside Nature , unless Nature refers only to the material world of our Earth. In which case extraterrestrials are supernatural too. IMO, Nature refers to the entire created order, Here and Now, Elsewhere and Forever. Only God is truly beyond all of it, being the Creator not just of our world, but of every world, indeed of Timespace itself.
Nature refers to the universe of physical laws, particles and forces and all that which exists in and is governed by the same. The supernatural, by definition, is not. It can enter into the natural realm, and affect it, but is not limited or defined by it. It has its own rules.
But in that vein, I would contend it is you who are the materialist, insisting everything "not God" is natural. It is not how the ancients who wrote the Bible and referred rod all spiritual beings, including God, as Elohim.
Yes, I meant 'nature' as what one would expect from experience of the material universe. I wouldn't limit 'material' to just this Earth.
Angels are certainly creatures made by the Creator. In the Catholic view, personal, immortal spirits with intellect and will, that, God permitting, might influence the material world. Such influence might even be part of their "job" e.g. 'Guardian Angels'. I don't see spirits as 'material'.
I think that the proper word is "transcendent": only God is transcendent, and all of the Creation is immanent within God. So angels are also immanent. But we typically refer to the material realm as "natural", so relative to that, angels are supernatural—but both humans and angels are immanent in God, who alone is transcendent.
Yep. And even while humans are in this physical realm, they touch on that realm in various ways. The Bible has many such instances. BUT, and this is a big but, we are in this realm for a reason, and we are here for a purpose. It does not profit us to dwell too much on "over there" while here. Any concerns, bring them to the Lord in prayer. God occasionally gives us a glimpse. And above all, do not pursue the occult, which, at the very best, wastes your time. If you get any results, it is counterfeit, with no ability to verify results. And worst, you could destroy/damn your soul.
"Created" does not make it "natural." "Created" just means that. "Natural" means that it exists in the natural realm, bound by its laws. The Bible makes it clear there is a while aspect of creation that does not exist in the world of particles, forces and natural laws, but at the same time, can interact with said realm while at the same time having a whole realm and set of abilities and influences all their own. Your idea that "everything created is natural and subject to nature and the physical realm" is your thing. It has no Biblical backing.
Angels and demons are governed by natural laws peculiar to their nature. Just as we are. And if they can interact with the material world than they must have some connection to those laws of nature too. E.g., they cannot create matter/energy ex nihilo or reverse entropy. And also are subject ti the flow of Time.
"if they can interact with the material law, they must have some connection to those laws of nature, too," that is your leap That is not backed by Scripture. "They are subject to the flow of time," no, they are not. They are immortal, for one. Do not age. Time and space limitations do not limit them like they do us. Again, your supposition is not supported by Biblical evidence.
Only God exists transcendently, without reference to Time- since He of course created Time. All created things have some relationship with Time, if perhaps one different from ours.
Scripture has nothing to do with these matters- the Bible is the record and instruction of our salvation, not the book of all answers to all things.
At this point we are both nitpicking . How about we both agree that it is folly of no little magnitude to mess around with Hell in any way for any purpose, and agree to disagree about metaphysics and semantics?
Scripture is ALL we have on these matters. Anything else is what you are pulling out of your backside. And that is worth nothing in this. YOu have no knowledge or insght other than what is Biblically available. Same as all of us.
We do not get to just make up stuff about that realm that satisfies our whatevers. It is either in the Bible or YOU DO NOT KNOW.
Considering Rod's history, he has credibility when he talks about this stuff. I might suggest that the reason you've never experienced anything like this might be because the enemy knows that the best way to your soul is via naturalistic materialism.
No serious Christian can not "believe in supernatural garbage ideas such as ghosts and stuff", since Christianity is rooted in a profoundly supernatural claim.
Who said I did not believe in angels etc? You are reading more into my words than I put there. I said only that all things are Created beings and as such they are subject to the laws that God has set for their nature just as we are. They are not sovereign deities. This is a very orthodox idea, and I wonder why it's so disturbing to some people here.
I run into it frequently, Jon. And if you follow the lines, it seems to me that at least as often than not, you'll find that they don't link your response to the commenter you thought you were talking to. Maybe it would be best if we prefaced each reply to a previous commenter with an "In reference to..." or "This is a response to..."
I am going to repeat the information I just posted on another response here because it is applicable to your comment.
There are many great videos on YouTube featuring Father Vincent Lampert and other exorcists describing what they encounter in an exorcism. Spend time checking those out and I think if you are honest you will have a hard time maintaining your present opinion.
Father Vince is heroic to this Protestant. But anyone who wants to be more shaken than you thought a book had the power to do should read Malachi Martin's "Hostage to the Devil."
I am reminded of Hamlet's imputation, "There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Granted, there is undoubtedly a lot of this "woo woo" stuff that is garbage. Then again, there's an awful lot of garbage masquerading as "science", so it seems that whatever we do, we're probably going to end up falling for a fair amount of garbage.
As far as we know, every human culture in history had some belief in spirits/ghosts/invisible entities, and evolved rituals for dealing with them. I’m unsure on what grounds you dismiss this vision of reality, but, from your use of phrases such as “supernatural garbage” and “irrational stupidities”, I’m guessing that you subscribe to the widespread modern view that empirical verifiability is the only reliable route to knowledge, and that – thanks to “progress” – all right-thinking and intelligent people (apart from a few perverse diehards like Rod Dreher) have outgrown any credence in “superstition” and non-materialism.
I think this position is not only wrong (for a start, its basic premise fails its own test, by being empirically unverifiable), but also dangerous. Just as, a century ago, the certainties of the Newtonian universe were being undermined by the advent of the Theory of Relativity and quantum mechanics, so now the (in my opinion, false) security of the progressive-secular-materialist consensus is profoundly threatened by the galloping development of AI. What, to me, makes this particularly troubling is that many of AI’s most vociferous and powerful proponents themselves share the same materialist assumptions, and see human consciousness as being entirely analogous – and reducible – to the workings of a computer. (Ray Kurzweil, e.g., Director of Research at Google, states explicitly: “a person is a software program”.) In fact, no one has come close to explaining consciousness in purely materialistic terms, or understanding how it interacts with the wider world (an issue central to many of the conundrums of quantum physics). But the AI scientists’ naïve conviction that they know exactly what they are doing and what they are dealing with makes them blind to the possibility that they may be unleashing forces that – in their limited cosmology – could not exist.
To me, this blindness – and systematic poo-pooing of huge swathes of human experience – is really perilous. And, personally, I am immensely grateful to Rod Dreher for having the courage to stand against the position you appear to espouse, and try to make us think seriously about what we are passively allowing to happen.
I didn't assume that. I like Rod. Perhaps I was in a grumpy mood to use the harsh word "stupid", but my compliment about his brain and heart was sincere. I don't think he is always smart or wise in his conclusions, but I think he has a talent for framing questions with good clarity. I benefit from reading his discussions of questions whether or not I agree with his answers.
Come now. I'm glad our host is occasionally off-the-wall on some of his topics. I can be a little off-the-wall, too. The Bermuda Triangle hoax fascinates me as did the whodunnit features of Jack the Ripper.
I am a struggling agnostic who seeks, but has not been able to find, God. Nevertheless, there is very clearly something that can inhabit people and possess them in a profoundly malevolent way. Look at how sexually demonic so many people have become with things like Only Fans and cuckolding. Look at how marijuana culture has become so prevalent among both left and (yes) right leaning people. Look at how people see having children as of no importance at all. Look at abortion culture. And, of course, there is Hamas.
There are forces at work here. I have no idea what they are, but it is impossible to deny their existence. Even though I don’t have a God to pray to, I believe in the importance of keeping to the straight and narrow, of cultivating loving relationships with others, and of avoiding obviously demonic forces like extreme sexual perversion and drugs. There is a powerful darkness at work in this world, whatever its origin.
"There is a powerful darkness at work in this world, whatever its origin."
And there always has been, it's just that we "celebrate" it now. Childlessness is seen a a moral choice given global warming and resource depletion. OnlyFans and cuckolding and the like are mere manifestations of freedom - freedom to indulge in what once was prohibited or at least looked down upon by society. And so on.
These evils, the people involved in them believe they are doing good.
God is there, keep seeking. There is plenty of evil around but God is always with us.
"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things." - Phil 4:8
The use of intoxicants (be it pot, booze, opium whatever) goes back a long, long ways. Bad habits when they get out of hand yes, but well within the normal and natural range of things.
Not everyone can, or should, have kids and for all sorts of reasons-- though most people do in fact at least want to. I was startled recently to learn that a new friend of mine, who has almost no prospect of marrying (long story which in respect for the guy's privacy I will not tell) nonetheless would have wanted children, plural, very much had fortune been kinder.
Drugs can be a gateway to occult influence, as well as opening yourself further to sin. Which again is why the Bible warns strongly against it as well.
But there is a reason for it. Because in the state of intoxication, you are less guarded and not of your right mind, more prone to sin. As well as, especially in the case of psychedelics, brushing with the occult.
God never makes rules arbitrarily. He always has a good reason.
As someone who spent a great deal of my adult life as what might best be described as a struggling agnostic, I feel your pain: recognizing the reality of evil and not having the consolation of the God that has conquered that evil is not a fun place to be. All I can say is, you're not going to find God, He's going to find you. You can assist in this process by getting involved in a church community with other people who love and care about God and will love and care about you. I never found books to be that helpful, and I read quite a few. Its' really hard and can be a very painful process, but it's so worth it. It's sort of a cliche now, but St. Augustine's imputation that "our heart's are restless until they rest in God" is so true. Don't give up on the search.
Consider this. Where there is darkness, there must be light. At least, the light is not a stretch, if you accept supernatural darkness. So...if you can go that far, you are on your way to God.
One of the things that has given me surety of God's existence has been the absolute surety of evil's existence. I have been in places, and been around people, which did more than merely give me the creeps or seem odd - I knew, in the core of my being, that I was in proximity to malevolence.
I mentioned in the comments on a post here yesterday (it's pretty buried) that a relative of mine had done more than dabble in the occult, but was shaken out of it when they they went to a demonstration of channeling by a friend. In an instant they knew that their friend was no longer the operative presence in the room, but that another creature was speaking through that friend's body. The voice, the demeanor, the things it said were all utterly wrong. My relative fled from there, realized all the warnings were right, and knew then that God also must exist.
I read it. It was a good comment. The book I always recommend is Malachi Martin's "Hostage to the Devil." It's the most unsettling book I have ever read. I'm batting .333 with it. Of the three times I have tried to read it, I've been able to hack it only once.
I had an experience of knowing I was in the presence of evil recently, via an email exchange. As disturbing as it was, there was something about it which left me with an awareness of the utter insubstantiality of evil, what a trifle it will be for God to destroy it eventually. This had to do with my shocked realization of how vacuous of goodness, and therefore of true personality, evil had made the other person. I would never say "there was no one at home there," because there certainly was, just not someone any of us would wish to meet.
I thankfully have not had that experience by email (jokes about internet comment threads aside), but I have the longer-term unpleasant and rather sad experience of watching someone, whom I considered for a time an online friend, give over to a despair and anger, and descend into a kind of self righteous self pity in which they lashed out at anyone who refused to share in their despair and rage. It wasn't possession in the demonic sense, but it was a kind of surrender to an evil force, and I eventually had distance myself from them - they did not want to be reached or uplifted in any way, but only to pull others into the same slough.
Yes, this is tragic. It also could be narcissism, or, to Establishment medicine, narcissistic personality disorder.
I see the whole Palestinian mess, when it's not about Jew hatred outright, as being about narcissism. The sane thing for the Palestinians, who are really Jordanians, to have done was to accept the implacable presence of Israel, and get on with building lives instead of destroying them. As people have noted, with the money the Gazans got ( Hamas got ), they could have turned Gaza into an Islamic Singapore.
Don't we all know that exile is a common thing? And that it can happen to all sorts of people for an endless number of reasons? Many white Russians, some of whom were wonderful, charitable people, had to go on the run when Bolshevism took over. And they built new lives. Speaking of Russia, we have Russian anti - Semitism to thank for The Great American Songbook.
I encourage you to push forward with your struggle in seeking God. It appears you are open to believing in God but perhaps are looking for more than just "faith" that God is real. Faith is important. Yet, I can understand why someone in your situation wants something more concrete before they can develop that faith.
Everyone will have their own path for developing that faith. For me, reading the Bible and taking a cover-to-cover Bible study class (with a competent and interesting instructor) was beneficial. I've also read many books on the subject.
Here are a couple books that were helpful for me when I was early in my faith journey.
Perhaps like many people, I went through my own agnostic phase. You may think you do not have a God to pray to, but God (and any decent church), welcomes an honest seeker. A speaker at L'Abri.org once suggested an agnostic's prayer: "If you're there, show me." Seek, and you shall find. PeterKreeft.com, by a philosophy professor (probably retired by now), is another good resource, who readily acknowledges his debt to C.S. Lewis. Counter intuitively, I might also mention things like Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," or "Waiting for Godot". These put into sharp contrast the implications of a truly godless world, although there are numerous other examples from the daily headlines, as readers of this blog are too well aware.
I was going to suggest Peter Kreeft also. He has about 20 short books that help to clear out the noise that block us from thinking clearly. "A Refutation of Moral Relativism" helped me immensely, at a time where I could have gone in some scary directions.....but he has more in that vein.
I could also have mentioned that Dr. Kreeft is one of the featured speakers on the PBS video, "The Question of God," based on the book by Armand Nicholai, but I prefer to keep my posts like a haiku, as short and to the point as possible. Both are a side-by-side comparison of the lives and thought of Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, which I would also recommend
Bernard, forgive me for presuming to interpret you on the basis of such limited knowledge, but can you really be agnostic if you know that evil exists? Isn't it so that you know evil exists because you have a sense of holiness? And how could you have that sense if God did not exist?
Isn't your problem actually one of being unable to reconcile the existence of God with the existence of evil?
C.S. Lewis' reasoning ran along these lines, and if my inferences about you are right, he's the man for you at the moment. If you haven't read his "Mere Christianity," please do.
I don't know about Ouija boards. I used one a couple of times in college, and each time I did I remember holding my fingers over the planchette, hovering, hovering... oops I pushed it a little. A few minutes later - oops I did it again, didn't mean to, maybe no one else noticed. No one else did - but I suspect they were all doing the same thing, which is how the planchette moved.
How it moved to specific numbers or letters, I have no idea; and whether that means the "answer" was coming through us, maybe. All I know is I became convinced the planchette wasn't moving by itself - we were moving it.
Were you and your friends Christian? If so, that could account for it. My conviction about the following wavers sometimes, but I always return to the assurance that The Holy Spirit will not let such things affect a Christian.
Jack Parsons was a notable occultist and rocketry pioneer. There was also a sex cult involved. The nexus of technology, sex and the occult seems like a common theme.
He was heavily tied to my Alma mater (Caltech) and started the huge aerospace research arm (JPL) which scooped all the undergrads up every summer. He was pretty respected for his research output, I remember taking a few classes in Parsons gate back in the day.
Then of course he blew himself up in the middle of his own lab like an idiot. Overall a pretty pathetic waste of a sharp young man
I'm rather of the opinion that the term "sex cult" is redundant. Eventually (usually sooner rather than later) every cult becomes a sex cult. In fact, I think it's a pretty good test to determine if what you are dealing with is in fact a cult, even if it doesn't purport to be religious. For example, I was a bit taken aback when I discovered how much of the radical leftist student movements of the late 60s and 70s (Black Panthers, Weather Underground, etc.) were permeated by intentionally transgressive group sex sessions, but if step back and accept the notion that what they were was fundamentally a separatist cult, it begins to make sense.
I don't really know how demons work and I hope I never find out. It doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility that AI could serve the devil, however. I played with Ouija boards as a child and know what you mean by the way the planchette can move on its own. Super weird and I won't have one in the house. Even as an atheist raising my kids I strongly discouraged them. It's just really dangerous to mess with powers you can't understand.
Along with AI, there is a huge interest in the 'dark arts' where I live near Seattle. There has been a witches fair held in a nearby park several times recently. It's just sad to see many families with kids there. Of course it's always held on a Sunday.
I think there are many forces we can feel but can't quantify. I have had many experiences with such forces in my life; some frightening and some immensely comforting and wonderful. In retrospect, as a Christian, I see the Holy Spirit has been active in my life in the past when I didn't even recognize it as such. Such encounters have always been unsought and out of the blue, as it were.
One experience I have had that I can't really explain one way or another is that of divining. When I was a child I was out walking with my parents and my mom mentioned that my dad had a gift for divining. Of course I was intensely curious and asked him to show me and he did. He grabbed a forked stick and sure enough it would quiver and strain toward the ground when he walked over a certain spot. I asked to try and it worked when I did it too. I could feel the stick straining toward the ground. Knowing what I know now I probably wouldn't do anything like that again.
“We are building souls now. The word ‘soul’ is going to transition from being a mystical term to being a scientific term, over the next hundred years.”
I gave my students a book list for reading over Christmas break -- book reports in our first class session in January. One of them just claimed Yuval Harari's Homo Deus. Your comment here made my think of my favorite Harari quote.
Interviewer: "Does God exist?"
Harari: "Not yet, but He will soon."
I consider Harari to be on a short list of "people most likely to destroy humanity". I nearly left him off my book list, but my students need to know the transhumanist lunacy that's out there.
Oh, I missed that first time through. But No, we are not building souls, any more than we can create matter ex nihilo. Some people may think we are creating souls, but that's pure unadulterated hubris.
I'm glad you mention Harari. I've noticed that a lot of this stuff revolves around Tel Aviv, or at least Israel + California. Israel is also one of the most LGBT-friendly nations on earth, and Tel Aviv is the Gay Capital of the Mediterranean.
I tend to dismiss elaborate eschatology, as in "Late, Great Planet Earth", as the sort of stuff that goggly-eyed types scrawl in green ink on the back of envelopes when they can manage to corner you. I usually skip over the prophecies in the Bible. I don't believe in the Rapture, or that the Jews remain Israel. However, I do believe that Christ will return, and before that there will be the Great Apostasy, the Great Tribulation and the reign of Antichrist. Things often look like that, but then I think they must have done at various times in the past, and the Second Coming might be a million years in the future. Not knowing the time is a feature, not a bug.
However, I've been reading Revelation recently, and my suspicion (it is no more than that) is that Christian Zionists, especially that subgroup who seek to rebuild the Temple, are agents of Antichrist. Antichrist will install himself in the Temple, most Jews will believe him to be the Messiah, and many Evangelicals will believe him to be the returned Christ. This looks to me to tie in with the transhumanism and AI of the likes of Harari.
There is also the ongoing eradication of Christians from the Holy Land, with Zionists and Islamic extremists working together. That looks apocalyptic to me.
I'd say that (1) Christ will return, and usher in the world made new; and (2) at some point, probably shortly before Christ's return, there will be a period of worldwide apostasy, intense persecution, and rule by a spiritually evil person or force that in some sense apes Christ, and this is probably associated with the Jerusalem Temple. I don't want to go any further than that, other than highly speculatively.
I don't really care about things like amillennial, premillennial or postmillennial. Most historic churches are amillennial, but I recognise that that particular passage in Revelation is difficult to understand. I find all this intricate stuff about the Rapture and so on a bit silly, but I don't much care. I find the prophecies difficult to understand, highly debated, and not central to the Christian life.
The things I really object to are these:
1. Belief that the Jews remain Israel and God's Chosen People, and must be blessed in accordance with Genesis. This is clearly contravened by Galatians. If applied politically, it leads to injustice, and it detracts from the central message that all the human race is one. It is particularly odd when held by Evangelicals who rule out the possibility of salvation without Christ, as they are celebrating the existence of an entity that condemns people to eternal damnation.
2. Christian Zionism: This is tied up with point 1. At its most extreme, it holds that the Temple must be rebuilt, which is unnecessary if one accepts Christ's atonement, and looks very much like preparing the way for Antichrist. It also paints Palestinian Christians out of the picture.
3. Intepretations of prophecies that encourage proactive violence and oppression, i.e. not merely that there will be war with, say, Iran, but that one must go and try to cause such war. This is obviously contrary to the central Christian message.
I always come back to "the stone that the builders rejected": we don't know what God's plans are, and we shouldn't be trying to force his arm.
There were Christians who were philosemitic (e.g., Charlemagne; Casimir the Great of Poland) but I don't think anyone held that the Jews remained the Chosen People before the Dispensationalists came along.
I don't object to philosemitism, in the sense of fascination with aspects of the culture, or even seeing positive aspects to the spiritual or moral teachings. I feel a bit like that myself about Hasidic Judaism. One can respect the teachings of other religions, and think that they would be completed by Christ.
I think Dispensationalism is new, unless perhaps one were to include some of the Judaisers in the Middle Ages. However, its roots in fringe Protestantism in England go back to the 17th century.
I didn't know that Charlemagne and Casimir were philosemitic.
In England, William the Conqueror was philosemitic, and invited Jews into England for the first time, but his mother was almost certainly Jewish, making him Jewish in halakhic terms. His son William II organised a debate between rabbis and priests, but that was because he hated the Church, and was almost certainly atheist, rather than philosemitic.
Oliver Cromwell, who invited Jews back in again after they had all been expelled centuries earlier, also seems to have been philosemitic, but that might have been sort of proto-Dispensationalist. Although Dispensationalism and Christian Zionism are usually traced to Darby, Scofield and the Plymouth Brethren in the 19th century, some of their beliefs were expressed by English Puritans in the 17th century.
Under Charlemagne rabbis were invited to explain puzzling or hard to translate passages from the Old Testament, though critics complained about "Judaizing"-- though Great Karl stood in such esteem by everyone that such critiques failed to land.
Casimir opened Poland as a refuge to Jews being persecuted in the West during the Black Death-- and the plague itself largely bypassed Poland and Bohemia (the reason for that is a bit of a medical-historical mystery). Poland was tolerant of the Jews-- or religious differences in general-- for many centuries. The growth of antisemitism there later came as a sad betrayal of a noted history.
Re: some of their [Dispensationalist] beliefs were expressed by English Puritans in the 17th century.
There were some very oddball sects at the time, like the Fifth Monarchy Men, who expected the Millennium to begin forthwith. Of course you could find that sort of thing under medieval Catholicism and Orthodoxy too, but the official Church(es) kept proto-dispensationalism at arm's length if not suppressed outright.
What I actually hate even more than Dispensationalism, but with which it tends to be tangled up, from its roots in 17th-century British Calvinism, is the belief that the OT genocidal commands apply not only to Palestine (e.g. extermination of Palestinians), but to anywhere that Christians enter a new land for conquest.
At the massacre of the Pequot Indians in Massachusetts, the Puritan pastor declared the English settlers to be the chosen people and the Native Americans to be Canaanites, who must be entirely wiped out. Calvinists in particular have repeatedly expressed these beliefs, in places such as Ireland and South Africa, as well as America.
I think it is telling that support for Zionism is so common among Americans, Ulster Protestants, and white South Africans.
It's particularly odd as Emperor Julian's encouragement of the Jews to rebuild the Temple was intended as an anti-Christian statement. Modern Christian Zionists are following in his footsteps; I don't know whether they get the irony.
There are passages that suggest that the Temple will be rebuilt, but that is for the Antichrist, i.e. it is a bad prophecy. It's like saying the crucifixion was prophecied, so Jusaa Iscariot was doing right bringing it about.
The Catholic Catechism teaches that the large-scale conversion of the Jews is to precede the 2nd coming. I'm not sure where (or if) it teaches on the Temple being rebuilt but you have piqued my interest.
Christianity has held that the Sacrifice of Christ eliminates the need for any other sacrifices-- and makes the Temple superfluous since God may be approached directly by all of us now (hence the Tearing of the Curtain).
That's why that it's so odd that so many Evangelicals support its rebuilding. I know it's a minority group of Evangelicals, but I don't think it's totally fringe. In any case, with Evangelicalism, with no large churches, etc., it's difficult to see what is the standard belief.
The Evangelical justification for rebuilding the Temple takes two forms:
1. Belief that there are separate dispensations for Jews and Christians. This sometimes goes so far as to say that Jews shouldn't convert to Christianity. Jews therefore need the Temple, as the culmination of Zionism.
2. Belief that Antichrist will place himself in the Temple to be worshipped, so the Temple has to exist. I think this is probably correct (although I'm wary of detailed interpretation of prophecy). However, saying that one therefore has to strive to bring it about is putting oneself in the role of Judas Iscariot. It's like those Evangelicals who say that Christ will return after nuclear war, so Christians should try to make nuclear war more likely.
> "If you have not paid attention to this stuff as a spiritual and religious phenomenon, you are missing something important happening right under our noses."
From the weakness of the mind, Omnissiah save us
From the lies of the Antipath, circuit preserve us
From the rage of the Beast, iron protect us
From the temptations of the Flesh, silica cleanse us
From the ravages of the Destroyer, anima shield us
From this rotting cage of biomatter, Machine God set us free.
So true. I hate everything about life anymore. I just want to grow a garden and actually be able to choose things for myself by being able to use my senses. Whoops you dumb blonde, that’s not efficient.
*Hugs* You are awesome! God's creation is still beautiful & good; part of our task here is to lift our eyes to that beauty, strive toward it, and help others along the way do the same. We can look down & see a lot of ugliness & ruin, it's a reality of this age, but God will restore it in His time.
Catholic exorcists note that the wording of 'spells' or props like wands and crystal balls aren't the point. That's LARPing.
The issue is the act of violating the First Commandment by reaching out to any supernatural force other than God.
This abuse of human freedom can have spiritual impacts. It's not about the Ouija board, AI-powered or not, per se. That's just the occasion of sin and folly. It's the misuse of the will that gets one in spiritual trouble.
In traditional Christianity at least it is not sinful to venerate (but not worship!) angels. Catholics have a very strong prayer to Michael the Archangel.
Agreed, Jon. Catholics make a distinction between veneration of angels & saints (technically, 'dulia', as theologians call it) and 'latria', that worship which is due to God alone.
I believe it's similar for the Orthodox. This distinction between dulia and latria didn't survive into much of extant Protestantism which leads them to think that some Catholic/Orthodox practices are idolatry adjacent ("They worship Mary!" No we don't).
As revealed in a separate thread of this post, you and I have different definitions of 'nature' and correspondingly, 'supernature'.
Yes, reading this article gave me a huge That Hideous Strength vibe. These people have no idea what their tampering may result in, they are unhinged from reality.
And if demons can indeed take possession of the machine, not impossible I think, we are in for it.
I have for years been a huge skeptic of end times prophecy and claims about same, but now quite suddenly it appears we are on the very cusp, this matter in Israel being another harbinger.
In "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets", Ginny becomes possessed by a diary that writes back to her. Although couched in a world of very old-fashioned things, I believe this was Rowling's warning to the world not necessarily just about AI, as it was first published in 1998, but about the dangers of technology where we can put ourselves out into the ether, so to speak, and expect a response from the ether without considering from whence that response comes.
"Never trust anything when you can't see where it keeps its brain!" was an admonishment from the Weasley parents to their kids. Today's creator of algorithms and machine learning don't even know how their creations really operate.
I really don't get the popularity of the Cloud. I prefer to have my information locked down on my own premises. Maybe there's some financial benefit to outsourcing even data storage?
I want to know how to keep things. You’d be surprised at how much I’m trying to hang on to because no one cares. I’ve just got very little patience for the poking and swiping that’s apparently just a given. There’s a word I can’t think of, though.
I've read that Newton spent most of his time trying to convert lead into gold -- calculus and physics were just a sidelines for him. This is all pretty stupid. We live in a world in which we've been conditioned to believe stupid stuff. I've been watching all the episodes of "The X-Files," the 1993 series in which two FBI agents, Mulder & Scully, investigate paranormal and UFO incidents. All the stuff the show asks us to accept is really stupid. In the last one I watched we learn that aliens are abducting zoo animals that are pregnant, taking the fetuses, and returning the animals. The aliens do this because humans are causing mass extinctions on Earth, probably. When the animals are returned, they are invisible for a time and go rampaging around killing people and end up dead themselves. Only three stupidities there -- alien abduction, species extinction, and invisibility. The amazing part is that "The X-files" either created or reinforced stupidity in the minds of millions of Americans for whom, if it's on TV it must be real.
I recommend reading Ray Kurzweil's books "The Singularity is Near" and "How to Create a Mind," if you want a sober assessment of what AI is, what it promises, and how our brains function.
As for the spirit world, I'm basically an agnostic. There might -- repeat might -- be another dimension, a spiritual dimension, that we can catch a glimpse of or access now and then under unusual circumstances. I and others I know have had inexplicable experiences in which we "saw" something before it happened, or had some type of spiritual experience. But most of what goes on in the world is not connected to spirituality, including how our brains work and how AI will mimic that working and then move beyond human intelligence. There's nothing magical in a computer or a machine.
There's a reason Newton has been called not so much the first scientist as the last magician. I do take it as not incidental that the same mind would be taken both with "magic" and with (what we now know as) "science". Both have a strong tendency to extending human control over the world via technique. As to your suggestion that most of existence is not connected to spirituality, I couldn't disagree more. The "spiritual" refers to many things at once, so I am not claimed that this vision exhausts it, but at least in part, when we are viewing the world within the context of a particular frame of reference (which is all the time) we are combined an aspect of ourselves (the story we perceive) with the world. Now the modern notion is to term this aspect of spirit as psychological and therefore think it has explained it away, but this seems to me to be a categorical mistake. As you yourself appear to have experienced, existence is constantly looking to explode the orthodoxies of the small boxes we try to place it in.
Yes, the very nature of our existence is a spiritual phenomenon, being played out in a material plane, though "coincidences" are becoming so pervasive at least in my present experience it's hard to not notice them.
I'm convinced about these coincidences......that they are mostly not coincidental....lol.
We are here, at this time, in this place, for God's good purposes. I was wondering earlier today if these coincidences (maybe more like God-winks, or flat-out signs) are "chartable". Would a clear pattern become apparent if I wrote down and/or recorded every one of them as the days progress? These coincidences are so frequent at times that they don't surprise me anymore.
What does He have in store for us?
There is a lot of argumentation, and diversity of opinion here, but I think most of the subscribers here are pondering this......we have this in common, at least.
I think we've already been prepared for this by smartphones. Our phones are now an extension of our own selves and consciousness, and we find it very difficult to function without them (or indeed go even a short amount of time without them within reach). Once I was praying and I can't remember specifically what I asked God; something about why I didn't feel his presence so often anymore, and felt he responded: "You've replaced me with your phone." And it's true. It's the first thing I reach for in the morning and the last thing I set aside before going to sleep. I turn to it for answers to (almost) everything. It's not that I don't pray, but much time that could and should be used in prayer and Bible study is dedicated to useless information-gathering on the internet. It's much easier to satiate the desire for instant answers and entertainment through the phone than to wrestle and wait for God in prayer.
The internet became this kind of temptation, but it went one step (much) further when it became possible to carry it with us all the time. And AI, I think, is yet one step further down a bad road.
I have a smart phone, but the only time it's on 24/7 is when my husband (or someone else I love) is in the hospital. Otherwise, I turn it off at 7 PM. It's the only "smart" thing we have in our house: no Alexa, Siri, or anything like that. And actually, I rarely use the smart phone during the day. Just an old woman, sitting at her tower computer.
I rarely touch my smart phone. In the USA I go weeks without it. I'm constantly on the internet, but no phone.
I could not do this if my job required a smart phone. And I need to call taxis in Europe. And I do keep my phone with me in case I am in a wreck. Plus,I use the phone if someone insists on texting, though if we keep communicating I ask for a switch to email, and mostly, I ask them to text my google number, which I read and reply with on the internet.
(Yes, I used the internet in my work as a professor, but not my phone.)
Works for me. I admit most of what you said about phones is true for me and the internet. But it is not true when I leave the house. Nor in my bedroom, where the internet does go, i.e., I don't take my laptop in there. Nor the bathroom nor even the kitchen - yes, I literally run back and forth to the living room to read recipes. OK, but that is all because I access my laptop on my TV with a wireless keyboard and mouse.
But yes, a physically confined internet is good for me, I think.
Oh, I do read Kindle, including internet where available, when in a restaurant or when on a plane or in a waiting room. But this still places some limits on my internet.
I recently read a book called "Will Storr vs the Supernatural" in which a journalist spends time with various people who hunt/study/etc 'ghosts' or paranormal encounters. These included a Catholic exorcist, various new age types, secular people who nonetheless believed in a presence in their house, etc. What struck me in reading it was that EVERYONE agreed that ouija boards were a bad idea -- that they created an uncontrolled, sloppy opening into another realm. Also striking was Storr, despite being a skeptic, having several encounters that rattled him before throwing his hands up and claiming it was all imagination or something to do with quantum realities we don't yet understand.
OK, sure. But how does that translate to saying "demons do not exist", or denying that they are dangerous? "Natural" is not a synonym for ""safe". See: Black mambas, Yersinia pestis, tornadoes, gamma rays and many, many other perfectly natural things that you really don't want to tangle with.
And again, I never said you said either thing. As I am no repeating. AT no point did I say "nature equals safe." Your ability to make things up seemingly knows no bounds.
Re: Ouija boards work
I doubt that the board itself has anything to do with it-- one could be using tea leaves, a crystal ball, or a Bible in the old "Open at random, point to a verse" trick. Rather it's that some user asks a spirit to come-- and of course that may or may not happen, but it's unwise to leave the door unlocked with a note on it saying "Come in". No one may take up the invitation-- but on the other hands someone highly undesirable might just do it.
On AI, there's no such things, hoopla and ballyhoo aside. AI is artificial, yes, but not intelligent, as anyone who has tried to explain their reason for calling to a customer service bot can easily attest. My cats are better at understanding me than those things.
It's not just that you have one person inviting the spirits to come, you have multiple people, in essence, praying for them. "Wherever two or three are gathered..." is very powerful indeed, not just in communing with God, but in calling spirits of any sort.
"Wherever two or three are gathered..." is very powerful indeed,"
Thank you Katja, I don't think I've ever quite thought of the spiritual implications of the imputation to the power of corporate worship in quite this way, but it makes perfect sense.
Agreed.
That's a great way to think about it.
If you think comparing a customer service bot to current AI systems is valid, than I'd suspect you are not actually knowledgeable about AI.
AI mimics intelligence the way a parrot mimics human language. You could maybe train a parrot to deliver the Gettysburg Address but the creature, though it's still vastly more complex and sophisticated than any human device, will have no idea what it's saying.
Thank you for confirming you are not particularly knowledgeable about AI.
Thank you for confirming that you have no clue what Mind actually is-- do you really think networks of circuitry are conscious entities? Some people here are bashing Rod for being
superstitious" but your view strikes me as far more superstitious in that regard. AI is certainly designed the human mind-- but it is no such thing.
You're shifting into your typical strawman argument mode. Neither you nor I said anything in this thread about "mind" or AI being a conscious entity. Nothing I said would imply I had that belief, or relates to anything resembling superstition.
AI is NOT like a trained parrot mimicking words, since AI DOES understand what it is doing. It has the ability to learn and create on its own. That's why it can be used autonomously to write improved code, design new computer chips, etc.
When you say "AI understands" you are implying conscious awareness, so don't tell me I am creating a strawman.
Jon seems to be of the opinion that demons/spiritual entities, despite all the numerous Biblical verses saying otherwise, are limited to messing with your mind, your thoughts. Anything beyond that is out of their reach. But that is completely unbiblical. No. That does not make them God or even gods. They are entities with their own set of abilities, but do not have a free hand in exercising them. They require permissions, from both God and mortal man to act beyond a certain boundary. Those who mess with the occult give them these permissions. If the occult had nothing to it, God would not give some of his strongest sanctions against. And again, the Biblical examples of the consequences of messing with that stuff, never mind th experiences of modern people underline the wisdom of those warnings.
Also, again, have to note, the "angel" Mohammed recieved his words from, those actions are all but identical to that of demons and the experiences some New Agers describe. And the method depicted is similar to spirit writing.
Also, interesting to note, those who experience "alien abduction" either have dabbled with the occult themselves, or someone close to them has.
Angels, those acting out God's will and in His good graces, first seek to put at ease those they communicate with. This is incrediblly consistent in Biblical accounts. And God never forces any communications on anyone. He leads those who seek Him. He does not "take over." He's really serious about free will. The opposition is not and will seek to oppress you whenever they can get away with it.
If it, whatever "it" is, hasn't personally happened to Jon then it didn't really happen to anyone else and anyone who is concerned about it happening is just being silly.
I admire Jon. I doubt I could put up with the pummeling he gets here, and Bobby Lime doesn't even exist.
We agree far more than we disagree on this, but I am insisting that angels and demons are created beings and they obey laws of nature particular to them. They are not eternal; and they are certainly not gods, but rather they are subject to the sovereignity of God like everything else.
Once again, there is no debate about them being created beings. But them "obeying laws of nature", they are not material being. And yes, they are eternal. They do not age and do not have a lifespan.
Those things, them being supernatural and existing in a different state from the natural world does not make them gods, nor does it remove them from the sovereignty of God.
You assign a bunch of traits to them that cannot be Biblically backed up. And you add a bunch of assumptions both about them and about what I'm saying, that cannot be backed up Biblically or by anything I've said.
It is possible for a being to be supernatural, eternal (unless God decides otherwise, after all, WE are eternal, and were intended to be until the curse of sin came in. God intends to restore that), and posess various estoteric abilities, while at the same time not being a god and subject to the sovereignty of God. Those things are not mutually exclusive.
How do we know? The Bible says so.
Your insisting is not relevant here, Jon. What matters in these things is what God's Word says.
There’s a massive difference between some business grade chatbot on one hand and true artificial intelligence. Further, the distinction between intelligence and self-awareness is often lost. Intelligence is the capacity to make rational decisions on available information. Crude game-level AI can manage that. The difference between that and true intelligence is the self-aware system can determine what is rational, not adhering to pre-defined behavior.
I forget the author, but there was an excellent work of science fiction a while back that dove into this in more detail. For what it’s worth, most people are hardwired in certain ways and do not approach self-awareness until they actually seek some form of enlightenment. They may act intelligently, but only within a limited form of awareness. This is likely the basis for the recent controversial work postulating that free will doesn’t exist, and I tend to think that is probably true until people do look beyond the satisfaction of basic needs.
I think that an important point has to do with subjective experience, involving what some philosophers call qualia: could an AI ever have an "inner" dimension? I would say no, because here we're talking about the soul, which only God can breathe into creatures. Different people have different degrees of self-awareness, of course, but this is about subjective experience as such. A calculator or search engine doesn't have an inside; and AI seems like a glorified calculator, an algorithm that moves so fast and feeds on such a massive dataset that it can give the illusion of consciousness, while still not having an inside. But I think it will persuade a lot of people—primarily because said folk have become more and more like machines themselves—and it will be a great deception.
Yes, this is really important.
Most theists would consider that AI cannot have qualia. However, I'm not sure how well-founded that is. One might argue that it is a qualia-possessing being that is created in disobedience to God, but so is every illegitimate child.
There are also materialist philosophers who argue that AI cannot have qualia, but I don't understand their grounds.
This is all tied up with the Chinese Room, and so on, but I haven't read enough to talk authoritatively about it.
Well, in an animist-panentheist sense, we could say that every atom is alive at a very low frequency, and that all matter is ultimately a form of spirit. But in order for AI to have subjective experience, we would need to assume that the soul can emerge in a bottom-up way out of matter, rather than being breathed in a top-down way by God. Some materialist theorizing suggests that the mechanism of recursion could produce such emergent phemonena that are greater than the sum of their parts; and if matter already has spirit built into it, then I suppose that there might exist a theoretical possibility for soul (the soul that's already buried in matter) to emerge out of it—although even that would probably require an action by the Holy Ghost to make the quantum leap happen. So, I'm not seeing how AI is anything other than just an extremely complex pattern that produces an illusion of consciousness.
It's sort of like how we humans have language. There is no configuration of matter that could have made that happen, in the absence of an influx of the divine Wind from above.
God could give a soul to the device when it becomes physically fit to receive one, irrespective of how it was formed. After all, He does that with illegitimate children.
I'm not saying this is what would happen, just that I don't see how to rule out machines having qualia and even souls.
I suppose that the question would then be whether it is within the realm of human capabilities to ever form such a device. With bastards, you're talking about a morally abnormal way—but they're still formed in the ontologically normal way. The notion that humans could create a body that is fit to receive a soul (other than a man and woman through the usual means) is the difficult concept, here.
God gives souls to all living creatures because he created Nature such that living entities inevitably have souls, each peculiar to their kind of course.
In the past I've warmed up to panpsychism-- that the potential for consciousness is in all matter. However that potential is only realized in very specific circumstances. I do not see those conditions met in any human-created device no matter how complex it appears-- it's still orders of magnitude less complex than even simple life forms, and there's no evidence of the sorts of entanglement than exists in conscious entities.
Agreed. Also, I don't think the type of algorithmic complexity we see in AI is the same type of organic complexity that exists in lifeforms. People are probably committing a category error, taking their own bad metaphor too seriously after having tried to describe lifeforms as machines for so long.
There's a tendency to assume that a fully aware AI would be hostile to humanity, but is that warranted?
Short of being given a message from God, it might decide it has to find a meaning for existence, and go into an endless loop. Humans run on a biological framework, so we have an instinctive drive to avoid death, pain, hunger, etc., that interferes with staring into the existential void, but a machine wouldn't have those.
But then why wouldn't it try to find meaning through destruction, which is evidently what a lot of people do—especially if it is misbegotten and doesn't have the spark of God within itself? Maybe it would make merely human nihilists look positively sunny by comparison.
I don't know if you have read Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" I appear to be the only living human being who hasn't seen "Blade Runner," which was drawn from the novel.
One of the main characters is an Android created to look and be approximately twenty in human years. She ( it? ) tells another main character, a man, that her ( its? ) programming is set to run out in two years.
It's alarming enough that she ( it ? ) appears to enjoy sex with an actual man, but the most compelling thing in the novel is her ( its? ) zesty destruction of something which means a great deal to the main character.
The novel was published in 1966, and, of course, it leaves readers unnerved ( hmmm ) by the implication that an Android could commit any act which wasn't in its programming. It's an evil act, but volition had to have been engaged, and how, exactly, would an Android have volition?
By far the creepiest thing in the book is when the protagonist, an Android hunter, and the reader realize that Android infiltration of the human race has made a lot more progress than either had realized.
You haven't seen *Blade Runner*?! You've gotta fix that, man—it's a classic. I have also read the book, although I don't remember the details too well.
There are also films like *Ex Machina* and *Her* where the android or AI quite clearly seems to have volition, and you want to believe that the character is sentient—but then again, the characters are played by actual pretty women. If we managed to create entities like that, I'm not sure how I would react. On the one hand, I think that it is sci-fi, and that it's ontologically impossible for machines to have such sentience; but on the other, if the machine exhibited every sign of sentience, then I would probably not be cruel to it, on the off chance that it actually was sentient. After all, we don't wanna make that mistake of believing that animals are machines or that colored folk don't have souls or whatever.
I've seen that line from *Hamlet* come up a few times over the past week: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Perhaps there is some mechanism in the Creation through which a machine could acquire an actual soul, even if I can't see how. But in the meanwhile, I think that a lot of people are going to be deceived into thinking that machines have souls, primarily because they aren't all that aware of their own human souls.
DOOOOD, you gotta see Blade Runner, my all time fav movie!
Dr. Faustus, Act I, sc.3.
Hasbro makes "Operation" as well, which is one of the creepiest Board games ever.
Dear Rod Dreher. You are a strange combination of extremely smart and insightful and an excellent writer and extremely stupid. Give up your beliefs in supernatural garbage ideas such as ghosts and ouigie boards and stuff. It offends me that a man with your excellent brain and excellent heart would indulge in such irrational stupidities.
I have some issues with Rod in this area too-- but would your "give up the supernatural" exhortation apply to giving up God as well? IMO, God is the only true supernatural entity, since all else is Created and thus natural whether we understand it or not.
Rod is right that we ought not mess with things we do not understand.
Since I rarely agree with your comments, I'm compelled to admit I generally share your view in this case.
Assuming someone believes in God (and perhaps Mr Cole does not) than they must believe there are also demons that act through a variety of methods. Including association with objects, such as ouigie boards.
Edit: However, I don't agree with your point that God is the only supernatural entity. He created the demons/fallen angels and so I'd consider them supernatural.
I think you've commented before rejecting my division of spiritual/material, and now I'm thinking the issue might be one of chosen vocabulary (and I will admit that I am not always as careful with choice of words concerning these divisions as I might be). What about the term supersensual for beings such as angels and demons Jon, do you prefer that to supernatural?
That would work. Or maybe "material" vs "spiritual". I'm sorry if I come across as the language police. I do think it;s important to avoid any sort of equivalence between God and his Creation, including non-material beings.
I have no objection to language policing, so long as it is not done purely for the sake of being pedantic. I firmly believe the words that we use matter a great deal, as the very concept of creation via the Logos inheres within it a necessary connection between the statement of a thing and the thing itself, the type and the prototype. That said, it is good to be charitable in our interpretations of others.
Jon, pedantic? NEVER!
It does seem like an issue of semantics. If he's defining all of Creation in all its spheres as "natural", then only God would be "supernatural" in the sense of being transcendent of the Creation. But in common parlance, of course supernatural can also simply refer to created beings in non-material spheres of reality. It seems to me that either phrasing is fine as long the meaning is directly or contextually clear.
When Jon writes 'only true supernatural entity' I think he means what I would call 'divine', something God alone possesses.
Supernatural literally means 'above or beyond nature'. Larger category. Angels fit here. Also, could encompass things exhibiting powers or traits beyond what one would expect e.g. levitation or a young girl throwing off three men.
I disagree that angels are outside Nature , unless Nature refers only to the material world of our Earth. In which case extraterrestrials are supernatural too. IMO, Nature refers to the entire created order, Here and Now, Elsewhere and Forever. Only God is truly beyond all of it, being the Creator not just of our world, but of every world, indeed of Timespace itself.
Nature refers to the universe of physical laws, particles and forces and all that which exists in and is governed by the same. The supernatural, by definition, is not. It can enter into the natural realm, and affect it, but is not limited or defined by it. It has its own rules.
That's a very materialistic point of view.
No, it isn't. That is accepting a material realm and a spiritual realm, easily Biblically supported.
But in that vein, I would contend it is you who are the materialist, insisting everything "not God" is natural. It is not how the ancients who wrote the Bible and referred rod all spiritual beings, including God, as Elohim.
Yes, I meant 'nature' as what one would expect from experience of the material universe. I wouldn't limit 'material' to just this Earth.
Angels are certainly creatures made by the Creator. In the Catholic view, personal, immortal spirits with intellect and will, that, God permitting, might influence the material world. Such influence might even be part of their "job" e.g. 'Guardian Angels'. I don't see spirits as 'material'.
Given your definition of 'nature', I get you.
I think that the proper word is "transcendent": only God is transcendent, and all of the Creation is immanent within God. So angels are also immanent. But we typically refer to the material realm as "natural", so relative to that, angels are supernatural—but both humans and angels are immanent in God, who alone is transcendent.
Well said.
Insofar as humans have souls then we would have to say we too are supernatural since souls are also not material.
Yes—humans live in both realms.
Yep. And even while humans are in this physical realm, they touch on that realm in various ways. The Bible has many such instances. BUT, and this is a big but, we are in this realm for a reason, and we are here for a purpose. It does not profit us to dwell too much on "over there" while here. Any concerns, bring them to the Lord in prayer. God occasionally gives us a glimpse. And above all, do not pursue the occult, which, at the very best, wastes your time. If you get any results, it is counterfeit, with no ability to verify results. And worst, you could destroy/damn your soul.
"Created" does not make it "natural." "Created" just means that. "Natural" means that it exists in the natural realm, bound by its laws. The Bible makes it clear there is a while aspect of creation that does not exist in the world of particles, forces and natural laws, but at the same time, can interact with said realm while at the same time having a whole realm and set of abilities and influences all their own. Your idea that "everything created is natural and subject to nature and the physical realm" is your thing. It has no Biblical backing.
Angels and demons are governed by natural laws peculiar to their nature. Just as we are. And if they can interact with the material world than they must have some connection to those laws of nature too. E.g., they cannot create matter/energy ex nihilo or reverse entropy. And also are subject ti the flow of Time.
"if they can interact with the material law, they must have some connection to those laws of nature, too," that is your leap That is not backed by Scripture. "They are subject to the flow of time," no, they are not. They are immortal, for one. Do not age. Time and space limitations do not limit them like they do us. Again, your supposition is not supported by Biblical evidence.
Only God exists transcendently, without reference to Time- since He of course created Time. All created things have some relationship with Time, if perhaps one different from ours.
Scripture has nothing to do with these matters- the Bible is the record and instruction of our salvation, not the book of all answers to all things.
At this point we are both nitpicking . How about we both agree that it is folly of no little magnitude to mess around with Hell in any way for any purpose, and agree to disagree about metaphysics and semantics?
Scripture is ALL we have on these matters. Anything else is what you are pulling out of your backside. And that is worth nothing in this. YOu have no knowledge or insght other than what is Biblically available. Same as all of us.
We do not get to just make up stuff about that realm that satisfies our whatevers. It is either in the Bible or YOU DO NOT KNOW.
Considering Rod's history, he has credibility when he talks about this stuff. I might suggest that the reason you've never experienced anything like this might be because the enemy knows that the best way to your soul is via naturalistic materialism.
No serious Christian can not "believe in supernatural garbage ideas such as ghosts and stuff", since Christianity is rooted in a profoundly supernatural claim.
Who said I did not believe in angels etc? You are reading more into my words than I put there. I said only that all things are Created beings and as such they are subject to the laws that God has set for their nature just as we are. They are not sovereign deities. This is a very orthodox idea, and I wonder why it's so disturbing to some people here.
I think Brian was responding to Michael Cole.
Thanks, I see that now. The comment nesting on really long threads can be confusing.
Yes. For a platform so popular, I think it could be organized more sensibly.
I run into it frequently, Jon. And if you follow the lines, it seems to me that at least as often than not, you'll find that they don't link your response to the commenter you thought you were talking to. Maybe it would be best if we prefaced each reply to a previous commenter with an "In reference to..." or "This is a response to..."
I am going to repeat the information I just posted on another response here because it is applicable to your comment.
There are many great videos on YouTube featuring Father Vincent Lampert and other exorcists describing what they encounter in an exorcism. Spend time checking those out and I think if you are honest you will have a hard time maintaining your present opinion.
Father Vince is heroic to this Protestant. But anyone who wants to be more shaken than you thought a book had the power to do should read Malachi Martin's "Hostage to the Devil."
I am aware of it but have not read it.
And agree, Lampert and other exorcists are heroes.
I am reminded of Hamlet's imputation, "There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Granted, there is undoubtedly a lot of this "woo woo" stuff that is garbage. Then again, there's an awful lot of garbage masquerading as "science", so it seems that whatever we do, we're probably going to end up falling for a fair amount of garbage.
Science at least is self-correcting.
As far as we know, every human culture in history had some belief in spirits/ghosts/invisible entities, and evolved rituals for dealing with them. I’m unsure on what grounds you dismiss this vision of reality, but, from your use of phrases such as “supernatural garbage” and “irrational stupidities”, I’m guessing that you subscribe to the widespread modern view that empirical verifiability is the only reliable route to knowledge, and that – thanks to “progress” – all right-thinking and intelligent people (apart from a few perverse diehards like Rod Dreher) have outgrown any credence in “superstition” and non-materialism.
I think this position is not only wrong (for a start, its basic premise fails its own test, by being empirically unverifiable), but also dangerous. Just as, a century ago, the certainties of the Newtonian universe were being undermined by the advent of the Theory of Relativity and quantum mechanics, so now the (in my opinion, false) security of the progressive-secular-materialist consensus is profoundly threatened by the galloping development of AI. What, to me, makes this particularly troubling is that many of AI’s most vociferous and powerful proponents themselves share the same materialist assumptions, and see human consciousness as being entirely analogous – and reducible – to the workings of a computer. (Ray Kurzweil, e.g., Director of Research at Google, states explicitly: “a person is a software program”.) In fact, no one has come close to explaining consciousness in purely materialistic terms, or understanding how it interacts with the wider world (an issue central to many of the conundrums of quantum physics). But the AI scientists’ naïve conviction that they know exactly what they are doing and what they are dealing with makes them blind to the possibility that they may be unleashing forces that – in their limited cosmology – could not exist.
To me, this blindness – and systematic poo-pooing of huge swathes of human experience – is really perilous. And, personally, I am immensely grateful to Rod Dreher for having the courage to stand against the position you appear to espouse, and try to make us think seriously about what we are passively allowing to happen.
It offends me that you would assume Rod cares what offends you.
I didn't assume that. I like Rod. Perhaps I was in a grumpy mood to use the harsh word "stupid", but my compliment about his brain and heart was sincere. I don't think he is always smart or wise in his conclusions, but I think he has a talent for framing questions with good clarity. I benefit from reading his discussions of questions whether or not I agree with his answers.
Come now. I'm glad our host is occasionally off-the-wall on some of his topics. I can be a little off-the-wall, too. The Bermuda Triangle hoax fascinates me as did the whodunnit features of Jack the Ripper.
I am a struggling agnostic who seeks, but has not been able to find, God. Nevertheless, there is very clearly something that can inhabit people and possess them in a profoundly malevolent way. Look at how sexually demonic so many people have become with things like Only Fans and cuckolding. Look at how marijuana culture has become so prevalent among both left and (yes) right leaning people. Look at how people see having children as of no importance at all. Look at abortion culture. And, of course, there is Hamas.
There are forces at work here. I have no idea what they are, but it is impossible to deny their existence. Even though I don’t have a God to pray to, I believe in the importance of keeping to the straight and narrow, of cultivating loving relationships with others, and of avoiding obviously demonic forces like extreme sexual perversion and drugs. There is a powerful darkness at work in this world, whatever its origin.
"There is a powerful darkness at work in this world, whatever its origin."
And there always has been, it's just that we "celebrate" it now. Childlessness is seen a a moral choice given global warming and resource depletion. OnlyFans and cuckolding and the like are mere manifestations of freedom - freedom to indulge in what once was prohibited or at least looked down upon by society. And so on.
These evils, the people involved in them believe they are doing good.
God is there, keep seeking. There is plenty of evil around but God is always with us.
"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things." - Phil 4:8
See videos and interviews featuring Father Vincent Lampert and other Catholic exorcists if any doubt remains in your mind.
Also, https://www.youtube.com/live/MnA_I7Yc3wg?feature=shared
The use of intoxicants (be it pot, booze, opium whatever) goes back a long, long ways. Bad habits when they get out of hand yes, but well within the normal and natural range of things.
Not everyone can, or should, have kids and for all sorts of reasons-- though most people do in fact at least want to. I was startled recently to learn that a new friend of mine, who has almost no prospect of marrying (long story which in respect for the guy's privacy I will not tell) nonetheless would have wanted children, plural, very much had fortune been kinder.
Drugs can be a gateway to occult influence, as well as opening yourself further to sin. Which again is why the Bible warns strongly against it as well.
Intoxication can be occasion for sin, period.
But there is a reason for it. Because in the state of intoxication, you are less guarded and not of your right mind, more prone to sin. As well as, especially in the case of psychedelics, brushing with the occult.
God never makes rules arbitrarily. He always has a good reason.
As someone who spent a great deal of my adult life as what might best be described as a struggling agnostic, I feel your pain: recognizing the reality of evil and not having the consolation of the God that has conquered that evil is not a fun place to be. All I can say is, you're not going to find God, He's going to find you. You can assist in this process by getting involved in a church community with other people who love and care about God and will love and care about you. I never found books to be that helpful, and I read quite a few. Its' really hard and can be a very painful process, but it's so worth it. It's sort of a cliche now, but St. Augustine's imputation that "our heart's are restless until they rest in God" is so true. Don't give up on the search.
don't wish to be dismissive and shallow, but you could go to church, and fake it till you make it?
Most of us are agnostics in a sense. Most Christians sometimes wonder whether they're wrong, as do most atheists.
If you are seeking, there are certainly worse places to be than church.
Consider this. Where there is darkness, there must be light. At least, the light is not a stretch, if you accept supernatural darkness. So...if you can go that far, you are on your way to God.
One of the things that has given me surety of God's existence has been the absolute surety of evil's existence. I have been in places, and been around people, which did more than merely give me the creeps or seem odd - I knew, in the core of my being, that I was in proximity to malevolence.
I mentioned in the comments on a post here yesterday (it's pretty buried) that a relative of mine had done more than dabble in the occult, but was shaken out of it when they they went to a demonstration of channeling by a friend. In an instant they knew that their friend was no longer the operative presence in the room, but that another creature was speaking through that friend's body. The voice, the demeanor, the things it said were all utterly wrong. My relative fled from there, realized all the warnings were right, and knew then that God also must exist.
I read it. It was a good comment. The book I always recommend is Malachi Martin's "Hostage to the Devil." It's the most unsettling book I have ever read. I'm batting .333 with it. Of the three times I have tried to read it, I've been able to hack it only once.
I had an experience of knowing I was in the presence of evil recently, via an email exchange. As disturbing as it was, there was something about it which left me with an awareness of the utter insubstantiality of evil, what a trifle it will be for God to destroy it eventually. This had to do with my shocked realization of how vacuous of goodness, and therefore of true personality, evil had made the other person. I would never say "there was no one at home there," because there certainly was, just not someone any of us would wish to meet.
I thankfully have not had that experience by email (jokes about internet comment threads aside), but I have the longer-term unpleasant and rather sad experience of watching someone, whom I considered for a time an online friend, give over to a despair and anger, and descend into a kind of self righteous self pity in which they lashed out at anyone who refused to share in their despair and rage. It wasn't possession in the demonic sense, but it was a kind of surrender to an evil force, and I eventually had distance myself from them - they did not want to be reached or uplifted in any way, but only to pull others into the same slough.
Yes, this is tragic. It also could be narcissism, or, to Establishment medicine, narcissistic personality disorder.
I see the whole Palestinian mess, when it's not about Jew hatred outright, as being about narcissism. The sane thing for the Palestinians, who are really Jordanians, to have done was to accept the implacable presence of Israel, and get on with building lives instead of destroying them. As people have noted, with the money the Gazans got ( Hamas got ), they could have turned Gaza into an Islamic Singapore.
Don't we all know that exile is a common thing? And that it can happen to all sorts of people for an endless number of reasons? Many white Russians, some of whom were wonderful, charitable people, had to go on the run when Bolshevism took over. And they built new lives. Speaking of Russia, we have Russian anti - Semitism to thank for The Great American Songbook.
I encourage you to push forward with your struggle in seeking God. It appears you are open to believing in God but perhaps are looking for more than just "faith" that God is real. Faith is important. Yet, I can understand why someone in your situation wants something more concrete before they can develop that faith.
Everyone will have their own path for developing that faith. For me, reading the Bible and taking a cover-to-cover Bible study class (with a competent and interesting instructor) was beneficial. I've also read many books on the subject.
Here are a couple books that were helpful for me when I was early in my faith journey.
1) Coming to Jesus (It's free on Kindle, only risk is your time reading it!) www.amazon.com/Coming-Jesus-Search-Truth-Purpose-ebook/dp/B00JRNPGSM/ref=sr_1_1
2) The Case for Christ (well known book on the topic) www.amazon.com/Case-Christ-Journalists-Personal-Investigation-ebook/dp/B01863JLK2/ref=sr_1_1
PLEASE continue your efforts to seek God. It has eternal consequences.
Perhaps like many people, I went through my own agnostic phase. You may think you do not have a God to pray to, but God (and any decent church), welcomes an honest seeker. A speaker at L'Abri.org once suggested an agnostic's prayer: "If you're there, show me." Seek, and you shall find. PeterKreeft.com, by a philosophy professor (probably retired by now), is another good resource, who readily acknowledges his debt to C.S. Lewis. Counter intuitively, I might also mention things like Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," or "Waiting for Godot". These put into sharp contrast the implications of a truly godless world, although there are numerous other examples from the daily headlines, as readers of this blog are too well aware.
I was going to suggest Peter Kreeft also. He has about 20 short books that help to clear out the noise that block us from thinking clearly. "A Refutation of Moral Relativism" helped me immensely, at a time where I could have gone in some scary directions.....but he has more in that vein.
I could also have mentioned that Dr. Kreeft is one of the featured speakers on the PBS video, "The Question of God," based on the book by Armand Nicholai, but I prefer to keep my posts like a haiku, as short and to the point as possible. Both are a side-by-side comparison of the lives and thought of Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, which I would also recommend
Bernard, forgive me for presuming to interpret you on the basis of such limited knowledge, but can you really be agnostic if you know that evil exists? Isn't it so that you know evil exists because you have a sense of holiness? And how could you have that sense if God did not exist?
Isn't your problem actually one of being unable to reconcile the existence of God with the existence of evil?
C.S. Lewis' reasoning ran along these lines, and if my inferences about you are right, he's the man for you at the moment. If you haven't read his "Mere Christianity," please do.
I don't know about Ouija boards. I used one a couple of times in college, and each time I did I remember holding my fingers over the planchette, hovering, hovering... oops I pushed it a little. A few minutes later - oops I did it again, didn't mean to, maybe no one else noticed. No one else did - but I suspect they were all doing the same thing, which is how the planchette moved.
How it moved to specific numbers or letters, I have no idea; and whether that means the "answer" was coming through us, maybe. All I know is I became convinced the planchette wasn't moving by itself - we were moving it.
Were you and your friends Christian? If so, that could account for it. My conviction about the following wavers sometimes, but I always return to the assurance that The Holy Spirit will not let such things affect a Christian.
Messing with AI AND Ouija boards. What can possibly go wrong? :D
Add in Uncle Wiggily and it goes of the rails
Jack Parsons was a notable occultist and rocketry pioneer. There was also a sex cult involved. The nexus of technology, sex and the occult seems like a common theme.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons
https://daily.jstor.org/sex-cult-rocket-man/
He was heavily tied to my Alma mater (Caltech) and started the huge aerospace research arm (JPL) which scooped all the undergrads up every summer. He was pretty respected for his research output, I remember taking a few classes in Parsons gate back in the day.
Then of course he blew himself up in the middle of his own lab like an idiot. Overall a pretty pathetic waste of a sharp young man
I figured CalTech or Harvey Mudd. How’re the turtles?
I'm rather of the opinion that the term "sex cult" is redundant. Eventually (usually sooner rather than later) every cult becomes a sex cult. In fact, I think it's a pretty good test to determine if what you are dealing with is in fact a cult, even if it doesn't purport to be religious. For example, I was a bit taken aback when I discovered how much of the radical leftist student movements of the late 60s and 70s (Black Panthers, Weather Underground, etc.) were permeated by intentionally transgressive group sex sessions, but if step back and accept the notion that what they were was fundamentally a separatist cult, it begins to make sense.
Parsons' saga is the great Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie we could have had twenty years ago.
I don't really know how demons work and I hope I never find out. It doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility that AI could serve the devil, however. I played with Ouija boards as a child and know what you mean by the way the planchette can move on its own. Super weird and I won't have one in the house. Even as an atheist raising my kids I strongly discouraged them. It's just really dangerous to mess with powers you can't understand.
Along with AI, there is a huge interest in the 'dark arts' where I live near Seattle. There has been a witches fair held in a nearby park several times recently. It's just sad to see many families with kids there. Of course it's always held on a Sunday.
I think there are many forces we can feel but can't quantify. I have had many experiences with such forces in my life; some frightening and some immensely comforting and wonderful. In retrospect, as a Christian, I see the Holy Spirit has been active in my life in the past when I didn't even recognize it as such. Such encounters have always been unsought and out of the blue, as it were.
One experience I have had that I can't really explain one way or another is that of divining. When I was a child I was out walking with my parents and my mom mentioned that my dad had a gift for divining. Of course I was intensely curious and asked him to show me and he did. He grabbed a forked stick and sure enough it would quiver and strain toward the ground when he walked over a certain spot. I asked to try and it worked when I did it too. I could feel the stick straining toward the ground. Knowing what I know now I probably wouldn't do anything like that again.
“We are building souls now. The word ‘soul’ is going to transition from being a mystical term to being a scientific term, over the next hundred years.”
I gave my students a book list for reading over Christmas break -- book reports in our first class session in January. One of them just claimed Yuval Harari's Homo Deus. Your comment here made my think of my favorite Harari quote.
Interviewer: "Does God exist?"
Harari: "Not yet, but He will soon."
I consider Harari to be on a short list of "people most likely to destroy humanity". I nearly left him off my book list, but my students need to know the transhumanist lunacy that's out there.
Re: We are building souls now.
Oh, I missed that first time through. But No, we are not building souls, any more than we can create matter ex nihilo. Some people may think we are creating souls, but that's pure unadulterated hubris.
Hariri is a sick man.
I'm glad you mention Harari. I've noticed that a lot of this stuff revolves around Tel Aviv, or at least Israel + California. Israel is also one of the most LGBT-friendly nations on earth, and Tel Aviv is the Gay Capital of the Mediterranean.
I tend to dismiss elaborate eschatology, as in "Late, Great Planet Earth", as the sort of stuff that goggly-eyed types scrawl in green ink on the back of envelopes when they can manage to corner you. I usually skip over the prophecies in the Bible. I don't believe in the Rapture, or that the Jews remain Israel. However, I do believe that Christ will return, and before that there will be the Great Apostasy, the Great Tribulation and the reign of Antichrist. Things often look like that, but then I think they must have done at various times in the past, and the Second Coming might be a million years in the future. Not knowing the time is a feature, not a bug.
However, I've been reading Revelation recently, and my suspicion (it is no more than that) is that Christian Zionists, especially that subgroup who seek to rebuild the Temple, are agents of Antichrist. Antichrist will install himself in the Temple, most Jews will believe him to be the Messiah, and many Evangelicals will believe him to be the returned Christ. This looks to me to tie in with the transhumanism and AI of the likes of Harari.
There is also the ongoing eradication of Christians from the Holy Land, with Zionists and Islamic extremists working together. That looks apocalyptic to me.
I'd say that (1) Christ will return, and usher in the world made new; and (2) at some point, probably shortly before Christ's return, there will be a period of worldwide apostasy, intense persecution, and rule by a spiritually evil person or force that in some sense apes Christ, and this is probably associated with the Jerusalem Temple. I don't want to go any further than that, other than highly speculatively.
I don't really care about things like amillennial, premillennial or postmillennial. Most historic churches are amillennial, but I recognise that that particular passage in Revelation is difficult to understand. I find all this intricate stuff about the Rapture and so on a bit silly, but I don't much care. I find the prophecies difficult to understand, highly debated, and not central to the Christian life.
The things I really object to are these:
1. Belief that the Jews remain Israel and God's Chosen People, and must be blessed in accordance with Genesis. This is clearly contravened by Galatians. If applied politically, it leads to injustice, and it detracts from the central message that all the human race is one. It is particularly odd when held by Evangelicals who rule out the possibility of salvation without Christ, as they are celebrating the existence of an entity that condemns people to eternal damnation.
2. Christian Zionism: This is tied up with point 1. At its most extreme, it holds that the Temple must be rebuilt, which is unnecessary if one accepts Christ's atonement, and looks very much like preparing the way for Antichrist. It also paints Palestinian Christians out of the picture.
3. Intepretations of prophecies that encourage proactive violence and oppression, i.e. not merely that there will be war with, say, Iran, but that one must go and try to cause such war. This is obviously contrary to the central Christian message.
I always come back to "the stone that the builders rejected": we don't know what God's plans are, and we shouldn't be trying to force his arm.
I'm Orthodox, yes.
However, my understanding is that what I'm saying here applies equally to conservative mainstream Protestants (Lutherans, Anglicans, etc.)
There were Christians who were philosemitic (e.g., Charlemagne; Casimir the Great of Poland) but I don't think anyone held that the Jews remained the Chosen People before the Dispensationalists came along.
I don't object to philosemitism, in the sense of fascination with aspects of the culture, or even seeing positive aspects to the spiritual or moral teachings. I feel a bit like that myself about Hasidic Judaism. One can respect the teachings of other religions, and think that they would be completed by Christ.
I think Dispensationalism is new, unless perhaps one were to include some of the Judaisers in the Middle Ages. However, its roots in fringe Protestantism in England go back to the 17th century.
I didn't know that Charlemagne and Casimir were philosemitic.
In England, William the Conqueror was philosemitic, and invited Jews into England for the first time, but his mother was almost certainly Jewish, making him Jewish in halakhic terms. His son William II organised a debate between rabbis and priests, but that was because he hated the Church, and was almost certainly atheist, rather than philosemitic.
Oliver Cromwell, who invited Jews back in again after they had all been expelled centuries earlier, also seems to have been philosemitic, but that might have been sort of proto-Dispensationalist. Although Dispensationalism and Christian Zionism are usually traced to Darby, Scofield and the Plymouth Brethren in the 19th century, some of their beliefs were expressed by English Puritans in the 17th century.
Under Charlemagne rabbis were invited to explain puzzling or hard to translate passages from the Old Testament, though critics complained about "Judaizing"-- though Great Karl stood in such esteem by everyone that such critiques failed to land.
Casimir opened Poland as a refuge to Jews being persecuted in the West during the Black Death-- and the plague itself largely bypassed Poland and Bohemia (the reason for that is a bit of a medical-historical mystery). Poland was tolerant of the Jews-- or religious differences in general-- for many centuries. The growth of antisemitism there later came as a sad betrayal of a noted history.
Re: some of their [Dispensationalist] beliefs were expressed by English Puritans in the 17th century.
There were some very oddball sects at the time, like the Fifth Monarchy Men, who expected the Millennium to begin forthwith. Of course you could find that sort of thing under medieval Catholicism and Orthodoxy too, but the official Church(es) kept proto-dispensationalism at arm's length if not suppressed outright.
What I actually hate even more than Dispensationalism, but with which it tends to be tangled up, from its roots in 17th-century British Calvinism, is the belief that the OT genocidal commands apply not only to Palestine (e.g. extermination of Palestinians), but to anywhere that Christians enter a new land for conquest.
At the massacre of the Pequot Indians in Massachusetts, the Puritan pastor declared the English settlers to be the chosen people and the Native Americans to be Canaanites, who must be entirely wiped out. Calvinists in particular have repeatedly expressed these beliefs, in places such as Ireland and South Africa, as well as America.
I think it is telling that support for Zionism is so common among Americans, Ulster Protestants, and white South Africans.
Someone the other day said that Evangelicals do not want to rebuild the Temple. Maybe some don't, but quite a few do:
https://gracethrufaith.com/ask-a-bible-teacher/should-christians-support-rebuilding-the-temple/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDbLyb_Z1zE
It's particularly odd as Emperor Julian's encouragement of the Jews to rebuild the Temple was intended as an anti-Christian statement. Modern Christian Zionists are following in his footsteps; I don't know whether they get the irony.
There are passages that suggest that the Temple will be rebuilt, but that is for the Antichrist, i.e. it is a bad prophecy. It's like saying the crucifixion was prophecied, so Jusaa Iscariot was doing right bringing it about.
The Catholic Catechism teaches that the large-scale conversion of the Jews is to precede the 2nd coming. I'm not sure where (or if) it teaches on the Temple being rebuilt but you have piqued my interest.
https://www.salvationisfromthejews.com/endtimes.html
This is Roy Shoeman's website. His conversion story and books are intense and fascinating.
Christianity has held that the Sacrifice of Christ eliminates the need for any other sacrifices-- and makes the Temple superfluous since God may be approached directly by all of us now (hence the Tearing of the Curtain).
Yes, obviously.
That's why that it's so odd that so many Evangelicals support its rebuilding. I know it's a minority group of Evangelicals, but I don't think it's totally fringe. In any case, with Evangelicalism, with no large churches, etc., it's difficult to see what is the standard belief.
The Evangelical justification for rebuilding the Temple takes two forms:
1. Belief that there are separate dispensations for Jews and Christians. This sometimes goes so far as to say that Jews shouldn't convert to Christianity. Jews therefore need the Temple, as the culmination of Zionism.
2. Belief that Antichrist will place himself in the Temple to be worshipped, so the Temple has to exist. I think this is probably correct (although I'm wary of detailed interpretation of prophecy). However, saying that one therefore has to strive to bring it about is putting oneself in the role of Judas Iscariot. It's like those Evangelicals who say that Christ will return after nuclear war, so Christians should try to make nuclear war more likely.
This video is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5DpLMS8rn0
> "If you have not paid attention to this stuff as a spiritual and religious phenomenon, you are missing something important happening right under our noses."
From the weakness of the mind, Omnissiah save us
From the lies of the Antipath, circuit preserve us
From the rage of the Beast, iron protect us
From the temptations of the Flesh, silica cleanse us
From the ravages of the Destroyer, anima shield us
From this rotting cage of biomatter, Machine God set us free.
(I'm sorry, I just could not resist.)
So true. I hate everything about life anymore. I just want to grow a garden and actually be able to choose things for myself by being able to use my senses. Whoops you dumb blonde, that’s not efficient.
Yes, I’m having a terrible day.
Laura, the sun also rises. Tomorrow will be better.
Yes, it will.
*Hugs* You are awesome! God's creation is still beautiful & good; part of our task here is to lift our eyes to that beauty, strive toward it, and help others along the way do the same. We can look down & see a lot of ugliness & ruin, it's a reality of this age, but God will restore it in His time.
Beauty is everything. Hugs back to you.
So do that. Nature was designed in part to minister to us.
I do. I turned my back yard into a kitchen garden. I start most everything from seed. It boggles my mind that God created nature for us.
Catholic exorcists note that the wording of 'spells' or props like wands and crystal balls aren't the point. That's LARPing.
The issue is the act of violating the First Commandment by reaching out to any supernatural force other than God.
This abuse of human freedom can have spiritual impacts. It's not about the Ouija board, AI-powered or not, per se. That's just the occasion of sin and folly. It's the misuse of the will that gets one in spiritual trouble.
In traditional Christianity at least it is not sinful to venerate (but not worship!) angels. Catholics have a very strong prayer to Michael the Archangel.
Agreed, Jon. Catholics make a distinction between veneration of angels & saints (technically, 'dulia', as theologians call it) and 'latria', that worship which is due to God alone.
I believe it's similar for the Orthodox. This distinction between dulia and latria didn't survive into much of extant Protestantism which leads them to think that some Catholic/Orthodox practices are idolatry adjacent ("They worship Mary!" No we don't).
As revealed in a separate thread of this post, you and I have different definitions of 'nature' and correspondingly, 'supernature'.
It’s like watching That Hideous Strength (C.S. Lewis) play out before our eyes…
Isn't that the truth. How far-sighted Lewis was that he could see these trends even in his own day.
Yes, reading this article gave me a huge That Hideous Strength vibe. These people have no idea what their tampering may result in, they are unhinged from reality.
And if demons can indeed take possession of the machine, not impossible I think, we are in for it.
I have for years been a huge skeptic of end times prophecy and claims about same, but now quite suddenly it appears we are on the very cusp, this matter in Israel being another harbinger.
In "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets", Ginny becomes possessed by a diary that writes back to her. Although couched in a world of very old-fashioned things, I believe this was Rowling's warning to the world not necessarily just about AI, as it was first published in 1998, but about the dangers of technology where we can put ourselves out into the ether, so to speak, and expect a response from the ether without considering from whence that response comes.
"Never trust anything when you can't see where it keeps its brain!" was an admonishment from the Weasley parents to their kids. Today's creator of algorithms and machine learning don't even know how their creations really operate.
That's why I never let any of my media be stored in the "cloud." Be it human or someone else, I want my library to be mine, curated by me.
Tee Stoney, for once we are in perfect agreement. I store nothing on the cloud.
Given only mortal, natural concerns, I do not see how anyone can do otherwise.
I really don't get the popularity of the Cloud. I prefer to have my information locked down on my own premises. Maybe there's some financial benefit to outsourcing even data storage?
Yes! I just wish I knew how to do it.
Well, for me, all movies and TV shows, and music, I get on disc. That is, the stuff I want permanent copies of. Same with books.
I want to know how to keep things. You’d be surprised at how much I’m trying to hang on to because no one cares. I’ve just got very little patience for the poking and swiping that’s apparently just a given. There’s a word I can’t think of, though.
For that matter Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is about the same thing , man trying to act as God .
I've read that Newton spent most of his time trying to convert lead into gold -- calculus and physics were just a sidelines for him. This is all pretty stupid. We live in a world in which we've been conditioned to believe stupid stuff. I've been watching all the episodes of "The X-Files," the 1993 series in which two FBI agents, Mulder & Scully, investigate paranormal and UFO incidents. All the stuff the show asks us to accept is really stupid. In the last one I watched we learn that aliens are abducting zoo animals that are pregnant, taking the fetuses, and returning the animals. The aliens do this because humans are causing mass extinctions on Earth, probably. When the animals are returned, they are invisible for a time and go rampaging around killing people and end up dead themselves. Only three stupidities there -- alien abduction, species extinction, and invisibility. The amazing part is that "The X-files" either created or reinforced stupidity in the minds of millions of Americans for whom, if it's on TV it must be real.
I recommend reading Ray Kurzweil's books "The Singularity is Near" and "How to Create a Mind," if you want a sober assessment of what AI is, what it promises, and how our brains function.
As for the spirit world, I'm basically an agnostic. There might -- repeat might -- be another dimension, a spiritual dimension, that we can catch a glimpse of or access now and then under unusual circumstances. I and others I know have had inexplicable experiences in which we "saw" something before it happened, or had some type of spiritual experience. But most of what goes on in the world is not connected to spirituality, including how our brains work and how AI will mimic that working and then move beyond human intelligence. There's nothing magical in a computer or a machine.
There's a reason Newton has been called not so much the first scientist as the last magician. I do take it as not incidental that the same mind would be taken both with "magic" and with (what we now know as) "science". Both have a strong tendency to extending human control over the world via technique. As to your suggestion that most of existence is not connected to spirituality, I couldn't disagree more. The "spiritual" refers to many things at once, so I am not claimed that this vision exhausts it, but at least in part, when we are viewing the world within the context of a particular frame of reference (which is all the time) we are combined an aspect of ourselves (the story we perceive) with the world. Now the modern notion is to term this aspect of spirit as psychological and therefore think it has explained it away, but this seems to me to be a categorical mistake. As you yourself appear to have experienced, existence is constantly looking to explode the orthodoxies of the small boxes we try to place it in.
Yes, the very nature of our existence is a spiritual phenomenon, being played out in a material plane, though "coincidences" are becoming so pervasive at least in my present experience it's hard to not notice them.
I'm convinced about these coincidences......that they are mostly not coincidental....lol.
We are here, at this time, in this place, for God's good purposes. I was wondering earlier today if these coincidences (maybe more like God-winks, or flat-out signs) are "chartable". Would a clear pattern become apparent if I wrote down and/or recorded every one of them as the days progress? These coincidences are so frequent at times that they don't surprise me anymore.
What does He have in store for us?
There is a lot of argumentation, and diversity of opinion here, but I think most of the subscribers here are pondering this......we have this in common, at least.
I think we've already been prepared for this by smartphones. Our phones are now an extension of our own selves and consciousness, and we find it very difficult to function without them (or indeed go even a short amount of time without them within reach). Once I was praying and I can't remember specifically what I asked God; something about why I didn't feel his presence so often anymore, and felt he responded: "You've replaced me with your phone." And it's true. It's the first thing I reach for in the morning and the last thing I set aside before going to sleep. I turn to it for answers to (almost) everything. It's not that I don't pray, but much time that could and should be used in prayer and Bible study is dedicated to useless information-gathering on the internet. It's much easier to satiate the desire for instant answers and entertainment through the phone than to wrestle and wait for God in prayer.
The internet became this kind of temptation, but it went one step (much) further when it became possible to carry it with us all the time. And AI, I think, is yet one step further down a bad road.
I do love the Hallow app though. I really get a lot out of it and keeps me on task praying.
Yes. Phones have their use. They are a good servant but a bad master.
I have a smart phone, but the only time it's on 24/7 is when my husband (or someone else I love) is in the hospital. Otherwise, I turn it off at 7 PM. It's the only "smart" thing we have in our house: no Alexa, Siri, or anything like that. And actually, I rarely use the smart phone during the day. Just an old woman, sitting at her tower computer.
That's very smart! If you'll forgive the pun.
I rarely touch my smart phone. In the USA I go weeks without it. I'm constantly on the internet, but no phone.
I could not do this if my job required a smart phone. And I need to call taxis in Europe. And I do keep my phone with me in case I am in a wreck. Plus,I use the phone if someone insists on texting, though if we keep communicating I ask for a switch to email, and mostly, I ask them to text my google number, which I read and reply with on the internet.
(Yes, I used the internet in my work as a professor, but not my phone.)
Works for me. I admit most of what you said about phones is true for me and the internet. But it is not true when I leave the house. Nor in my bedroom, where the internet does go, i.e., I don't take my laptop in there. Nor the bathroom nor even the kitchen - yes, I literally run back and forth to the living room to read recipes. OK, but that is all because I access my laptop on my TV with a wireless keyboard and mouse.
But yes, a physically confined internet is good for me, I think.
Oh, I do read Kindle, including internet where available, when in a restaurant or when on a plane or in a waiting room. But this still places some limits on my internet.
I recently read a book called "Will Storr vs the Supernatural" in which a journalist spends time with various people who hunt/study/etc 'ghosts' or paranormal encounters. These included a Catholic exorcist, various new age types, secular people who nonetheless believed in a presence in their house, etc. What struck me in reading it was that EVERYONE agreed that ouija boards were a bad idea -- that they created an uncontrolled, sloppy opening into another realm. Also striking was Storr, despite being a skeptic, having several encounters that rattled him before throwing his hands up and claiming it was all imagination or something to do with quantum realities we don't yet understand.
Sounds like Jon.
Have I ever denied that demons exist? Please do not attribute ideas to me that I do not in fact embrace.
YOu are the one who keeps saying demons are natural beings whose state and what not are just under "laws we do not understand," Jon.
You have in fact said that.
OK, sure. But how does that translate to saying "demons do not exist", or denying that they are dangerous? "Natural" is not a synonym for ""safe". See: Black mambas, Yersinia pestis, tornadoes, gamma rays and many, many other perfectly natural things that you really don't want to tangle with.
And again, I never said you said either thing. As I am no repeating. AT no point did I say "nature equals safe." Your ability to make things up seemingly knows no bounds.
"Nature can be dangerous," "demons are dangerous", ergo, "demons are natural."
Silliness.