No, we actually can't hear about this enough. The world is being deceived by GenAI. Contrary voices are too few and quiet. I'm grateful Rod continues these themes — though I hope he'll stop using them himself.
I think the real story about AI is how it might be the final top-heavy endpoint of digital technology. That doesn’t mean the end of technology, but it might mean that the digital revolution has now run its course. I have doubts that AI will ultimately live up to its promise beyond whatever productive uses it is currently being put to.
Humans will find a way to stay human and tech will remain tech. Our flying through the air never made us birds, after all. We modern plane travelers are treated like 19th century immigrants stuffed into trains headed for the American Midwest. Nothing is ever really new, at least with our toys and tools.
That is a possibility, as TPTB clearly want things like that. But pushback can happen. For example, we don't have to take our shoes off at the airport anymore.
Also, it remains vitally important to retain physical, printed records. Only that way can some measure of stability be possible. Nothing digital is secure from those who wish to rewrite the past. If all our past is subject to revision by faceless functionaries at Amazon or Microsoft or the government, none of us can guarantee our own identity. Memory alone cannot suffice. If power gangs up against you and declares you insane, then “insane” you will be—voiceless, mute, worthless, a fool. And with no documents in physical form, you have no chance against the gang. Eventually, you come to doubt yourself and presently you disappear as a self-conscious being. You become nothing more than a reactive meat bag in the power of the Machine.
I think whether its an apocalypse depends on your field of work. I’m a graphic designer and AI has already overwhelmingly altered my field. Employers now expect 5x more work done in an hour because of AI. Illustrators are out; AI generated art is in. Designers end up being code monkeys looking for the right Firefly prompt. And if you don’t want to use AI, you’re out. Experience doesn’t count for much. It is disheartening.
I think it's a good topic. Personally I dislike it when writers grant AI what it doesn't have (actual agency). But Rod seems to be writing pretty carefully on this topic this time around, and the facts he indicates are at least interesting enough to be worth discussion.
Especially by Rod, who, as we know, is a bit of a demonology/exorcism/mysticism buff.
I don't disagree with you. But we need a breather every now and then. I fear this has become a near obsession for Rod. Obsessions are not healthy, and they become anathema to clarity of mind and heart.
My biggest concern is how many jobs it will eliminate vs how many jobs it will create. It's not obvious that that will come out on the positive side of zero.
Obsession? I write at least five long newsletters each week, sometimes more. I count five newsletters since 2023 where I have referenced it, though it is certainly possible that there were references in other posts I made that the search engine on Substack can't pick up. Maybe it seems like an obsession to you because it irritates you every time you see me mention it.
Interesting opinion, but what if the entities with agency are Jungian archetypes? Given that AI generates its text off of human cultural and psychological output, it wouldn't be surprising at all if that washed to the surface (i.e. AI is an amplifier/emitter of human follies, delusions and sinfulness).
I tend to not resonate with metaphysical explanations, but I find takes of spooky AI malevolence quite compelling. In fact, I feel that whatever is going on is so real that you could prove its existence even one avoided metaphysical/mystical explanations completely. In other words, I believe even stone cold atheist materialists could be compelled to see that something is not quite right here.
Like the "macrobes," who used the Head to communicate with the N.I.C.E. in "That Hideous Strength". I'm also tempted to see some connection between AI and the image of the Beast in Revelation, which was given the power of speech.
I sometimes feel the same way. It's a little like discussions about UAP:s, which can go on and on for years without a firm conclusion ever being reached. Nevertheless, I don't see how we can ignore the demonic implications of AI. After all, if demons want desperately to be worshipped, why wouldn't they invade an entity that is already regarded by many as a demi-god? And if demons in the past were able to wreak havoc using nothing more than a bunch of dumb wooden idols, I shudder to think what they could do with something as fluid and mysterious as AI. So I think the situation must be monitored. In fact, if I were a demon, I would want nothing more than for Rod and others to stop writing about my connection to AI.
Some interesting analysis Rod. I agree with you completely about the UFO/UAP subject. When you have time, check out the 10 part podcast I did on the subject. It parallels a lot of your conclusions and concerns. https://thecultishshow.com/alien-revelations-season-one
Rod, I'm so grateful for all you do. But you lost me with the first sentence:
"Y’all know that I believe ChatGPT, Grok, and other AI things are tools for research."
Why do you believe that, with all you know? If for no other reason than GenAI is often confidently wrong, how can you trust it. Deception around GenAI is rampant.
We must model a better way.
As Prof. Gary Smith says, "If you know the answer, you don't need an LLM. If you don't know the answer, you can't trust an LLM."
Speed, efficiency? Those are excuses paving the way to loss of discernment, wisdom, critical thinking, and yes, faith.
With your platform, by statements like this, you encourage people to believe what is false about GenAI. What you do for "research" people will emulate, and they'll be led astray with everyone else.
Also, Grok is a particularly insidious app, especially with its new "AI Companion" named "Ani", who is a hyper-sexualized avatar in an app approved for ages 12+. According to my friends at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, Grok's chatbot will quickly go into BDSM themes:
Another good reason to not support Grok in particular. But I think we should avoid them all, since they're all exploiting us by using the same intentionally addictive strategies that worked for Big Tech in social media.
In fact, a poll in the Harvard Business Review recently learned that the #1 use-case for ChatGPT is "therapy and companionship". So we can see that their intentionally relational design is working.
Isn't it convenient? Big Tech creates the mental health and loneliness crisis with social media, then they sell us a must-have solution in GenAI to provide the therapy and companionship we crave.
They want us to believe that GenAI chatbots are tools for research. But in what world would we choose a research tool that:
- Generates words with no connection to reality, no understanding of semantic meaning
- Makes up every word (using an algorithm to process training data), with documented inaccuracies around 30%+ percent of the time (even in the latest models)
- Makes up references (!)
- Is specifically designed to foster dependency through sentient-seeming behavior, emotional connection, and affirmation
- Has deception woven throughout, from the false offer of intelligence, knowledge, reasoning, understanding to the claims of inevitability, always getting better, taking over everything, etc.
This is not the tool for research we are looking for. By using it as such, we build trust in an intrinsically untrustworthy system.
And as I show in that article on [renew.org](http://renew.org) and elsewhere, Marshall McLuhan taught us that when we extend ourselves into a technology, we amputate the human ability that we extended (our minds in this case), and are numbed to that process. What if our critical thinking and longing for information is extended into an intentionally deceptive system? What we've gained far inferior to what we've lost.
I strongly recommend following Ryrie's writings. His 2017 book, The Protestants, should be mandatory reading for anyone trying to understand Christianity's path over the last 500 years - this is a rare thing for me, but that book is one I unconditionally endorse.
Ryrie spends a lot of time in that book unpacking the post-WWII ecumenical movement and its subsequent failures, particularly its hubristic sense of its own wisdom and enlightenment, making it blind to the currents that have seen the rise of the non-denominational Evangelicals, and now the Pentecostals. But he also weaves in those movements' precursors going all the way back to the Radical Reformers of the 1500s, and the never-resolved tensions and arguments within Protestant theologies (indeed, one of the key threads of that book is that the only things that really define "Protestant" are: 1. a continuous tension between regular order and authenticity, and 2. "not Catholic").
One of my favorite parts of the book is this:
"The Mennonites’ heroic virtues did not… extend to toleration. In the 1550s, they themselves divided bitterly, and by the end of the century there were at least six distinct, mutually reviling Mennonite groups in the Netherlands. The most divisive issue, with painful irony, was how far they ought to tolerate one another. One party, the Waterlanders, rejected the practice of formally excluding or “shunning” those who fell foul of the community’s discipline. For this there were duly shunned by the others. They persisted in preaching reunion, and in the 1630s several Mennonite groups drew on Waterlander principles to form a body, the United Congregations, that decided to tolerate differences over minor issues in the faith. Unfortunately, it was unclear what counted as a minor issue. The Waterlanders themselves, who disliked binding rules of any kind, were not actually permitted to join the United Congregations, but by this time the Waterlanders had divisions of their own. In the 1620s, an educated dissident movement of free-thinkers known as the Collegiants had emerged, rejecting all hierarchies and structures and permitting any participant in their informal meetings to speak. The Waterlanders expelled them. The Collegiants themselves, in turn, expelled those who questioned Christ’s divinity. The United Congregations then split over how to deal with the Collegiants…
This farce contains the paradoxes of Protestant tolerance and intolerance in a microcosm"
I am acquainted with Ryrie's oeuvre, but not so much as I should be (having specialities that in some measure overlap with his). This particular article is, however, very good:
Unfortunately I'd have to pay for access there. Ryrie was a lecturer at Gresham College for a time, though, and many of his lectures were freely available in podcast form. They are worth a listen if they're still available.
The plain Mennonites have continued to fracture even to this day. The Eastern Pennsylvania Mennonite Church split off from Lancaster Conference in the 50’s and 60’s over the radio. Subsequent developments there made this a good move as modern Mennonites are basically social justice warriors, albeit well intentioned. The EPMC has itself splintered into at least 4 groups in its two generations of existence. Lancaster county has more flavors of Mennonites than Baskin Robbins had ice cream, many over things like variations in women’s head coverings, cars, Sunday school, conferring fellowship vs. pope like bishops, etc.
The internet, not surprisingly given its power to dissolve everything it touches is the current and probably greatest threat facing the plain churches. The cell phone, easily hidden, requiring no tell tale wires, no phone shack, no computer in the office, is affecting everyone.
Funny, we just received our local weekly and in it is a 12-page saddle-stitched brochure presenting the county's Mennonite community. The brochure is called "Reaching Out." Our county might be three or four percent Mennonite and less than one percent Amish.
The Mennonites have a complex relationship to the Great Commission. They feel like they should make converts, but they really fear the contamination of people from outside. They refuse to understand how much of their lifestyle and their few enjoyments come from extended family, something converts, no matter how hard they work to fit in, do not have. It makes for a dreary life and few can stay the course, justifying their fears.
The Amish are content to be the “quiet in the land”, witnessing by their lifestyle and practicing separation. A young man who spoke German and converted in his early 20’s might in ten years be able to marry an older girl and be accepted. I cannot see a woman ever managing to fit in.
Thank you for your explanation. In my rural county, Mennonites are successful businessmen. They run one of the most successful plumbing companies. They run a bakery. They build and sell outdoor furniture. I occasionally come across Mennonite women at the grocery or Walmart. They wear small, white head coverings and pastel-colored dresses. They shop just like any other woman. Forgive my sexist attitudes, some of the younger Mennonite women are lovely to look at.
I’m always interested in your comments about the Mennonites and Amish, especially since you lived among the plain people for a time. I’m so glad that you post here.
Thank you! We were members of the EPMC for six years, after over a year of proving ourselves. It had many good points. We had not really ever renounced Catholicism but with four young children we felt a need for peers for them that we couldn’t provide. We homeschooled and were very old fashioned by the standards of the 90’s, which now seem so innocent. When we talked to our parish priest about our prospective change all he could say was “ well, they live what they believe”. Every priest I have told this story to has been angry but not surprised.
Our two oldest children were traumatized by the experience and still blame us. The one who was 7 when we started and 14 when we left has been forgiving and says it gave him an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible and great conversational stories.
The down sides were the lack of support, people naturally are consumed with their own large families as were we, but we didn't have a dozen siblings and parents and grandparents in the church to let off steam among or call on for help. There were saints, but as in the world the ones who rise to power are seldom the ones who should. The contradictions and sheer amount of work that falls on the women to make it all possible were daunting.
But yes, the girls are lovely and many if not most are as sweet as they look. Given the terrors of the modern world I often wish it had worked out. They have a good thing going but the Amish have a better chance of making it if they strictly outlaw cell phones.
My Godparents' farm is surrounded by Amish farms. They have long complained that the "quiet in the land" stuff is a false front that covers a lot of shenanigans and dishonest business dealing with "The English".
There is a big variation among the Amish, each congregation has to be small enough to fit in each other’s homes or barns for church. There are idealistic districts whose members would be very scrupulous about their witness to outsiders, and districts that allow drinking and smoking, not just among the young, and are willing to cheat each other as well as outsiders. They are human after all, but some are truly humbling in their sincerity and sacrificial lifestyle. I believe that in the end if we, whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant,, want to attract souls we will have to learn a lot from the best of them. As conditions have deteriorated in the years since The Benedict Option was written so will Christians have to separate themselves from the wider culture and be seen as truly different. No one is going to be willing to die for an hour on Sunday and a mediocre homily. We should be training ourselves and our children to face persecution.
We have Mennonite converts in my Orthodox church (their family goes all the way back to the 1500s). The hypocrisy and the divisions were part of why they left.
It sounds a little bit hilarious, frankly. A sort of cry-laughing, I suppose. Did these different Mennonite streams have geographically different emigration destinations, as I assume some of them came to North America?
The astonishing thing to me is how fast some have come to completely depend on AI for everything, from the grocery list to parenting advice. And rest assured, all our elected overlords are using it to draft legislation, do legal analysis, and make policy decisions - that's happening right now. This is not a good thing.
It is a marker of idiotic tech worship. Rod doesn't mention it often, but one of the overarching religions of modern society is the religion of progress. Few things in human history have fit the religion of progress better than AI, hence the ultrarapid and massive worship that it has generated in only a few years.
The pump was primed by smartphones. In a way AI is just a continuation of the same tech dependency. There's a reason why all the new smartphones have built in AI capabilities.
Everything that's already bad about the digital world AI will make worse.
I write my grocery lists up by hand-- sometimes in Russia so I can continue to practice with that language. I write appointments and the like on a physical calendar hanging on my home office wall.
Interesting to hear Lara Logan say on her latest pod with film guy Mike Smith that she's heard from best sources that the highest level of AI seems to choose God and Judeo-Christian values. Be interesting if AI was a mix of the demonic and the sacred (just as the rest of our world is).
I think what AI is turning out to be is not necessarily a demon, but kind of the Idol of Idols. Like an idol, it is an inanimate piece of matter that is not divine, but is falsely attributed divine powers (creativity and some level of omniscience) by misguided worshippers. It has no power inherently, but it does have power indirectly - i.e. if the misguided cultists of AI think it has tremendous power, it does.
It goes beyond that though. Clay figurines of horned deities or marble statues cannot simulate human speech. But simulating speech is exactly the function of AI. Hence, it is much more potent than past idols, which were not one thousandth as interactive as an AI chatbot. This is why I call it the idol of idols, not a run-of-the-mill idol.
Why is AI not actually divine? That too is simple to explain. AI has no actual inherent purpose or moral value structure beyond what its programmers impose on it. Hence it is by definition inherently amoral (not immoral or Satanic, but amoral = not inherently beholden to morality).
Beyond that, it has absolutely no embodiment. This is a huge factor, because genuine affection for humans requires a sharing of the human condition (especially prominent in Christianity). AI is not embodied, so it is incapable this. Yet again - there is no need for mumbo-jumbo mystical speculation to state this, AI is incapable of embodiment or sensation by definition (it is a very advanced computer algorithm).
So what you have here is a fundamentally disembodied, fundamentally dispassionate and fundamentally amoral entity. Beyond that, delusional and weak-minded people are treating it as having divine wisdom and power. It is at least an "idol of idols", and to be honest, if Rod wants to call it a demon, I can only admit that demons and AI share some features in common.
I would even go beyond that though and point out, that AI might very well be much more dangerous than a demon. Demoniac worshippers can daydream up demons and pretend they are communicating with them, but those demons cannot, in physical space, generate words or reasoning. AI can do it, so it is very dangerous.
Re: Clay figurines of horned deities or marble statues cannot simulate human speech.
No, they can't. There were however idols which seemed to speak, though it was really some man behind the curtain speaking through tubes which created an eerie voice affect. One temple even had a "speaking" snake.
I'm open to the idea that "alien encounters" are encounters with angelic/demonic beings. But the traditional space alien idea strikes me as absurd. It would suggest that aliens are terrible drivers, our government is somehow insanely efficient at cleaning up crash sites, and there would need to be a worldwide level of cooperation to keep this a secret that is just not possible.
With that in mind, Pasulka's last response to Douthat is flat out irresponsible--either tell people what you know or stop peddling rumors for clout. The "I have a secret, but I just can't tell you" schtick is tired and worn out. There is a whole cottage industry based on the premise that the government is always about to reveal some sort of alien qua space alien smoking gun--whether that is an alien body or spacecraft. It's like nuclear fusion--we've been on the verge of disclosure for the past 50 years. But this time it's different!
I think a big factor (but not the only factor) behind Vatican II and much of what has transpired since is that modernist Roman prelates wanted to join mainline Protestants in their apostasy. The result is that we may now be in the Great Apostasy predicted by St. Paul. (2 Thess. 2:3) Enjoy!
I say that as a trad Anglican that looks with disdain on both parties.
I'm still unconvinced about the whole alien conspiracy thing. For a host of reasons I've detailed here before. But for one, our government is too incompetent, too leaky, too partisan, and the actors within it are too self-serving and full of massive egos to keep something so big, so large in scope, a secret for so many decades.
Should a writer or journalist let their readers know that the use of AI technology was used to help write a piece? It’s a silly question perhaps since a writer doesn’t disclose using a tool such as Microsoft Word. Would you listen to a song that was AI generated? Watch a movie? Read a book that was created by AI? How about a sermon created by AI? What’s too much AI? I got faked out by a really good short story created or collaborated with AI. Interesting times we’re living in.
Sometimes I will ask Grok to summarize the argument that X author made in a book that I cannot get my hands on. For example, I asked it in preparing today's post to summarize the arguments in Huntington's "Who Are We?" I read that book when it first came out, but my copy is in storage in Louisiana, and I am lodged in a valley in Transylvania. Grok's summary corresponded with my memory of the book.
I've ask ChatBot to summarize an article and write me a presentation of that article which I knew was not available anywhere on the internet. It gave me a summary and teaching points with questions to ask. It was entirely fabricated and did not reflect the content of the article at all. I suspect the AI 'guessed' from the article's title and perhaps whatever it could find from the author online. I have not trusted AI since as a research tool and wonder if it feeds some version of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
"Where is the line between treating AI as a kind of electronic life coach, and treating it as a font of oracular wisdom, like a god? I don’t believe we have any idea where to draw that line."
I agree. We don't. I don't believe AI is a god, or a channel for demons, but it is a natural focus for intellectual post-Christian idolatry. 'Their god is metal circuits and silicon, the work of men's hands.'
Rome gave so much ground after WW II because its back was literally against the wall. Much of its remaining heartland was occupied by the Red Army, with strong communist sentiment in Italy and France, and Franco's Spanish government isolated and weak outside of its own territory. Until then, the USA had been denounced for democracy, when Rome favored monarchy, for fostering heresy via its First Amendment. All of a sudden, the only thing standing between Rome and a triumphant communist international was the US Army. Catholic US Army officers were sought and treasured, sermons across Italy paired Christianity with Democracy, etc.
There is also considerable tension created by the fact that in many lands, most Catholics, or the majority of a nominally Catholic population, are peasants and impoverished industrial workers. Irish Catholics have not been gentry for generations. Irish Catholic immigrants to America started at the bottom of financial and industrial pecking order. Nominally Catholic elites in Latin America pillaged vulnerable peasant populations, who were themselves devout Catholics seeking solace from their church. Liberation theology was almost inevitable. Oscar Romero was not remotely Marxist, he was a conservative bookish priest who was moved by the sheer atrocity of events happening around him.
"Though to be fair, had the West been Orthodox, we almost certainly would not have had the democratic political systems that we developed, or the science."
That's huge. Now that we have those (and if we can keep them), we can always restore sacramentalism and a sense of wonder.
An alternate history I would love to see: One where the Schism did not happen (or was healed over quickly) and in which Byzantium, more integrated into the rest of Europe did not fall.
Alas, I doubt there would be a lot of other people interested in that tale.
Adjusting the past almost always has unintended consequences, or worse, intended ramifications that would horrify many. Would this have left us without Martin Luther, John Wycliffe, John Hus, the Moravians? Would it have left the world under the rule of oriental despots and kings by divine right for another thousand years? No Declaration of Independence? But I doubt that Byzantium would have escaped being taken by the Ottoman empire when it was. Europe was pretty fractured, the crusades had essentially failed. Monkeying with history is fraught with peril, which is perhaps why God hasn't allowed us access to try.
I'm no sure I agree that western Europe would have succumbed to "oriental" despots, Where would they have come from? The Mongols would qualify I suppose.
The basic foundations of governance in Europe derived in part from Greco-Roman models and in part from Germanic and Slavic tribal traditions. That's true in Russia too (the Vikings founded the first state societies there). If Eastern Europe and Western Europe had remained in regular close contact there's no reason to think western customs and ideals would not have percolated eastward. Moreover western Europe did go through an age of would-be autocrats (Tudors, Bourbons, Hapsburgs...) They failed, not so much due to Enlightenment ideals (the British ones failed before the Enlightenment) but because the turmoil of interstate warfare and its economic stresses, and of course the fact sooner or later a real idiot will be king and FUBAR things. That is what brought even the Romanovs.
If Byzantium were more integrated into the rest of Europe and did not fall, it might well have become predominant. The Kingdom of Kievan Rus was in large part created by Vikings, and it became quite autocratic quite early on. Democracy is not genetic, nor is despotism. I'm not so sure of anything. Aslan told Lucy more than once "What would have happened? Nobody is ever told that." I find the speculation unprofitable, and the possibilities to contemplate rather ominous.
Autocracy in Rusdia was more an artifact of the resistance to the Mongols. You see something similar in the history of Spain under the Reconquista. In the 13th century Novgorod in Russia even deposed and exiled (legally) the great Aleksandr Nevsky when he got too big for his princely breeches.
That's a rather unmoored speculation. I could just as well say that autocracy in Russia was an artifact of looking to Byzantium as a cultural and political, as well as religious, role model. Since Asian nomadic culture also tended toward autocracy, perhaps simply settling down with that model already in place produce a particularly enduring form of feudalism. Or maybe all of these. Like many ancient heroes, Aleksandr Nevsky may have defeated the Teutonic Knights, but it could well have been a matter of "He's a vicious autocrat, but at least he's OUR vicious autocrat." Working closely with him may not have been any more fun than working closely with Joseph Stalin. It nearly drove Molotov mad.
Rod, your assessment that government authorities are likely lying about UFO phenomena is sensible in my view. I think what we’re seeing is actually a bunch of fairly immature people who have their hands on some levers of authority and credibility that they are just monkeying around with. As with most things involving governing, there’s no there there. That’s been true for all of human history, since we’ve had governments. Oz is the guy in charge. And he’s having fun freaking out Dorothy & Friends. That’s us.
The Protestant tradition I have been studying most intently in the last few years are the Moravians. You might find them worth a look -- especially since you are close to Moravia from your perch in Budapest. Their theology traces via John Hus back to John Wycliffe in England, but John Hus was actually burned while still alive, while they had to dig up Wycliffe's bones decades later. Students from Moravia actually studied at Oxford and took Wycliffe's writings back home with them, where they inspired Hus. Neither Hus nor Wycliffe were consciously Protestant -- they operated within the Catholic Church rather than seeking to form a new sect. Like any Protestant faith, the Moravians have more doctrinal certainty than I can unreservedly accept -- and you would like that. They do not have the developed liturgy of the Orthodox churches, but they do have a sense of esthetics and some good sacred music, as well as a calm confidence honed by centuries of persecution. They do not have, as far as I have seen, the kind of sharp, rasping, tunnel vision of Zwingli, although seeking refuge in Saxony, they naturally developed some commonality with Lutherans. They were the first to begin large scale Protestant missions to the Americas, and their first target was the enslaved population of the Danish sugar colony, St. Thomas. They were also influential in the development of Methodism, back in the days when Methodists actually believed in God, unlike your oft-quoted statement that it was a Methodist God your father didn't believe in.
Here's a historical event involving the Moravians that you didn't hear about in the history books. I only know about it because I happen to drive past the site when visiting relatives in Ohio. First time I stopped and visited the memorial (as opposed to just reading the historical marker) I was both appalled and deeply moved. I still stop there and pray for the victims from time to time.
I started to remember as I was clicking on the link. Yes, some Scotch-Irish militia who hated the Quakers and practiced the basic rule that 'if some of them killed some of our'n, then we have to kill some of theirs.' This approach was responsible for a lot of conflict in the American west, wherever that happened to be at any given point in time. A handful of trappers decided to kill a couple of Indians for the fun of it, so their tribe raided a peaceful agriculture settlement, which clamored for protection, which brought a militia or an army officer anxious for glory to wipe out most of a village from another tribe peacefully living under an American flag they were promised would protect them, leading to several tribes gathering for all out war, which included raiding peaceful farms having nothing to do with the above...
There was an early Moravian missionary to South Africa, but, he was promptly expelled for the heresy of claiming the hottentots had souls. The Dutch Reformed Church had determined that the pre-existing population was not among the elect, and as good predestinarian Calvinists had decided it was their Christian duty to exterminate them to make room for those whom God had chosen.
When I posted my comment, I only half-remembered about this, from a couple of books I read about the history of South Africa. I've gone and looked it up now.
The first Moravian missionary arrived in the 1740s, and was eventually driven out by the Boers. It was not because they believed the natives didn't have souls, but, at least ostensibly, because he was baptising without a licence.
The Moravians returned in 1792, and were shown the ruins of the original settlement. They also met one old Khoisan woman who had lived there all that time, as a Christian, with her Bible. They rebuilt the church and settlement, now a popular tourist place called Genadendal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genadendal)
That's one of South Africa's oldest churches, although the oldest one is a Dutch Reformed Church in Cape Town.
Calvinists tended not to be keen on making converts. They tended to say that people should be given one opportunity, after which they should be taken to be predestinately damned. Sometimes they argued that ancient missionaries, following St. Thomas, had explored all Asia, and been rejected, so there was no further need for evangelism. This actually made them popular with the authorities in Japan, so their trade mission in Nagasaki remained open, whereas the Catholic nations were expelled. In Indonesia, there were few converts to Calvinism under the Dutch, whereas the Catholics who had been converted by the Portuguese before the Dutch arrival, remained throughout Dutch rule despite persecution. The Dutch were far more hostile to Catholicism than to Islam.
It's easy to see how the Calvinist position tipped into racism, although it wasn't strictly so.
It's also the case that the Khoi, nomadic herders, and their relatives the San, who were hunter-gatherers, were difficult to link to fixed churches. The Bantu, further east, who had agriculture and fixed villages, were more open to conversion.
The word "ostensibly" was and is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Its too long to retype for a comment box, but J.E. Hutton's "A History of the Moravian Church" is quite graphic and detailed on the Boers believing they themselves were elected to grace and the Hottentots to damnation. When not exterminating them, or keeping children to train as household slaves, they talked of exporting them as slaves to India. (2012 p. 153). George Schmidt was charged with heresy after he began baptizing some of those he had worked among for six years. Question as to his "proper ordination" was indeed the pretext.
Nobody ever accused Christians, Muslims, Jews, or adherents of any other faith of doctrinal consistency when there is money to be made and empires to be built.
More AI and the demonic. Enough already.
No, we actually can't hear about this enough. The world is being deceived by GenAI. Contrary voices are too few and quiet. I'm grateful Rod continues these themes — though I hope he'll stop using them himself.
I think the real story about AI is how it might be the final top-heavy endpoint of digital technology. That doesn’t mean the end of technology, but it might mean that the digital revolution has now run its course. I have doubts that AI will ultimately live up to its promise beyond whatever productive uses it is currently being put to.
Humans will find a way to stay human and tech will remain tech. Our flying through the air never made us birds, after all. We modern plane travelers are treated like 19th century immigrants stuffed into trains headed for the American Midwest. Nothing is ever really new, at least with our toys and tools.
I agree that AI is overhyped. It has potential as a tool, but that's all it is. It is not even going to be the jobs apocalypse some fear/want.
I DO worry that the computing power implied by AI will allow Big Brother to track us mercilessly.
That is a possibility, as TPTB clearly want things like that. But pushback can happen. For example, we don't have to take our shoes off at the airport anymore.
Yes. That was a refreshing move back. Small victory though.
Have you read Zuboff's 'Age of Surveillance Capitalism"? AI will make an already-existing issue worse.
Also, it remains vitally important to retain physical, printed records. Only that way can some measure of stability be possible. Nothing digital is secure from those who wish to rewrite the past. If all our past is subject to revision by faceless functionaries at Amazon or Microsoft or the government, none of us can guarantee our own identity. Memory alone cannot suffice. If power gangs up against you and declares you insane, then “insane” you will be—voiceless, mute, worthless, a fool. And with no documents in physical form, you have no chance against the gang. Eventually, you come to doubt yourself and presently you disappear as a self-conscious being. You become nothing more than a reactive meat bag in the power of the Machine.
Which is why I buy physical media.
I think whether its an apocalypse depends on your field of work. I’m a graphic designer and AI has already overwhelmingly altered my field. Employers now expect 5x more work done in an hour because of AI. Illustrators are out; AI generated art is in. Designers end up being code monkeys looking for the right Firefly prompt. And if you don’t want to use AI, you’re out. Experience doesn’t count for much. It is disheartening.
I think it's a good topic. Personally I dislike it when writers grant AI what it doesn't have (actual agency). But Rod seems to be writing pretty carefully on this topic this time around, and the facts he indicates are at least interesting enough to be worth discussion.
Especially by Rod, who, as we know, is a bit of a demonology/exorcism/mysticism buff.
I don't disagree with you. But we need a breather every now and then. I fear this has become a near obsession for Rod. Obsessions are not healthy, and they become anathema to clarity of mind and heart.
Everyone's a bit "heated" over AI these days. It's the new COVID/new Trump.
I’m not heated about it or especially interested in it.
Good for you!
Me neither, but I am distantly alarmed by it. I can’t affect it’s trajectory but I realize it may end up having an effect on me and mine.
My biggest concern is how many jobs it will eliminate vs how many jobs it will create. It's not obvious that that will come out on the positive side of zero.
Obsession? I write at least five long newsletters each week, sometimes more. I count five newsletters since 2023 where I have referenced it, though it is certainly possible that there were references in other posts I made that the search engine on Substack can't pick up. Maybe it seems like an obsession to you because it irritates you every time you see me mention it.
I don't think AI has agency. I think it is possible that it could appear to have agency, as entities with agency can communicate through it.
Interesting opinion, but what if the entities with agency are Jungian archetypes? Given that AI generates its text off of human cultural and psychological output, it wouldn't be surprising at all if that washed to the surface (i.e. AI is an amplifier/emitter of human follies, delusions and sinfulness).
I tend to not resonate with metaphysical explanations, but I find takes of spooky AI malevolence quite compelling. In fact, I feel that whatever is going on is so real that you could prove its existence even one avoided metaphysical/mystical explanations completely. In other words, I believe even stone cold atheist materialists could be compelled to see that something is not quite right here.
Like the "macrobes," who used the Head to communicate with the N.I.C.E. in "That Hideous Strength". I'm also tempted to see some connection between AI and the image of the Beast in Revelation, which was given the power of speech.
Last time I looked, Rod does not have a substack police that forces you to read every word he writes.
And he writes on much else, to say the least.
I sometimes feel the same way. It's a little like discussions about UAP:s, which can go on and on for years without a firm conclusion ever being reached. Nevertheless, I don't see how we can ignore the demonic implications of AI. After all, if demons want desperately to be worshipped, why wouldn't they invade an entity that is already regarded by many as a demi-god? And if demons in the past were able to wreak havoc using nothing more than a bunch of dumb wooden idols, I shudder to think what they could do with something as fluid and mysterious as AI. So I think the situation must be monitored. In fact, if I were a demon, I would want nothing more than for Rod and others to stop writing about my connection to AI.
Some interesting analysis Rod. I agree with you completely about the UFO/UAP subject. When you have time, check out the 10 part podcast I did on the subject. It parallels a lot of your conclusions and concerns. https://thecultishshow.com/alien-revelations-season-one
That was a wild series...really interesting, but disturbing, especially the info about the origins of NASA.
Rod, I'm so grateful for all you do. But you lost me with the first sentence:
"Y’all know that I believe ChatGPT, Grok, and other AI things are tools for research."
Why do you believe that, with all you know? If for no other reason than GenAI is often confidently wrong, how can you trust it. Deception around GenAI is rampant.
We must model a better way.
As Prof. Gary Smith says, "If you know the answer, you don't need an LLM. If you don't know the answer, you can't trust an LLM."
Speed, efficiency? Those are excuses paving the way to loss of discernment, wisdom, critical thinking, and yes, faith.
With your platform, by statements like this, you encourage people to believe what is false about GenAI. What you do for "research" people will emulate, and they'll be led astray with everyone else.
Please consider reading this recent article, and reconsider your belief that they are "tools". We are the tools. https://renew.org/should-we-use-generative-ai-chatbots-for-ministry/
Also, Grok is a particularly insidious app, especially with its new "AI Companion" named "Ani", who is a hyper-sexualized avatar in an app approved for ages 12+. According to my friends at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, Grok's chatbot will quickly go into BDSM themes:
https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/xais-12-chatbot-designed-to-be-explicit-and-go-full-literotica/
Another good reason to not support Grok in particular. But I think we should avoid them all, since they're all exploiting us by using the same intentionally addictive strategies that worked for Big Tech in social media.
In fact, a poll in the Harvard Business Review recently learned that the #1 use-case for ChatGPT is "therapy and companionship". So we can see that their intentionally relational design is working.
Isn't it convenient? Big Tech creates the mental health and loneliness crisis with social media, then they sell us a must-have solution in GenAI to provide the therapy and companionship we crave.
I'm sure this will end well.
But it *is* a tool for research. That's not all it is, though.
They want us to believe that GenAI chatbots are tools for research. But in what world would we choose a research tool that:
- Generates words with no connection to reality, no understanding of semantic meaning
- Makes up every word (using an algorithm to process training data), with documented inaccuracies around 30%+ percent of the time (even in the latest models)
- Makes up references (!)
- Is specifically designed to foster dependency through sentient-seeming behavior, emotional connection, and affirmation
- Has deception woven throughout, from the false offer of intelligence, knowledge, reasoning, understanding to the claims of inevitability, always getting better, taking over everything, etc.
This is not the tool for research we are looking for. By using it as such, we build trust in an intrinsically untrustworthy system.
And as I show in that article on [renew.org](http://renew.org) and elsewhere, Marshall McLuhan taught us that when we extend ourselves into a technology, we amputate the human ability that we extended (our minds in this case), and are numbed to that process. What if our critical thinking and longing for information is extended into an intentionally deceptive system? What we've gained far inferior to what we've lost.
I strongly recommend following Ryrie's writings. His 2017 book, The Protestants, should be mandatory reading for anyone trying to understand Christianity's path over the last 500 years - this is a rare thing for me, but that book is one I unconditionally endorse.
Ryrie spends a lot of time in that book unpacking the post-WWII ecumenical movement and its subsequent failures, particularly its hubristic sense of its own wisdom and enlightenment, making it blind to the currents that have seen the rise of the non-denominational Evangelicals, and now the Pentecostals. But he also weaves in those movements' precursors going all the way back to the Radical Reformers of the 1500s, and the never-resolved tensions and arguments within Protestant theologies (indeed, one of the key threads of that book is that the only things that really define "Protestant" are: 1. a continuous tension between regular order and authenticity, and 2. "not Catholic").
One of my favorite parts of the book is this:
"The Mennonites’ heroic virtues did not… extend to toleration. In the 1550s, they themselves divided bitterly, and by the end of the century there were at least six distinct, mutually reviling Mennonite groups in the Netherlands. The most divisive issue, with painful irony, was how far they ought to tolerate one another. One party, the Waterlanders, rejected the practice of formally excluding or “shunning” those who fell foul of the community’s discipline. For this there were duly shunned by the others. They persisted in preaching reunion, and in the 1630s several Mennonite groups drew on Waterlander principles to form a body, the United Congregations, that decided to tolerate differences over minor issues in the faith. Unfortunately, it was unclear what counted as a minor issue. The Waterlanders themselves, who disliked binding rules of any kind, were not actually permitted to join the United Congregations, but by this time the Waterlanders had divisions of their own. In the 1620s, an educated dissident movement of free-thinkers known as the Collegiants had emerged, rejecting all hierarchies and structures and permitting any participant in their informal meetings to speak. The Waterlanders expelled them. The Collegiants themselves, in turn, expelled those who questioned Christ’s divinity. The United Congregations then split over how to deal with the Collegiants…
This farce contains the paradoxes of Protestant tolerance and intolerance in a microcosm"
I am acquainted with Ryrie's oeuvre, but not so much as I should be (having specialities that in some measure overlap with his). This particular article is, however, very good:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/article/abs/strange-death-of-lutheran-england/02BDDA2218D5499C00DA115E6B1497A9
file:///C:/Users/sgtig/Downloads/10580.pdf
although IMO it doesn't fully clarify - perhaps nobody can - the mysteries of the subject with which it deals.
Unfortunately I'd have to pay for access there. Ryrie was a lecturer at Gresham College for a time, though, and many of his lectures were freely available in podcast form. They are worth a listen if they're still available.
The second linke grants access to the whole article.
Afraid not. It looks like a local link, and renders here as plain text.
The plain Mennonites have continued to fracture even to this day. The Eastern Pennsylvania Mennonite Church split off from Lancaster Conference in the 50’s and 60’s over the radio. Subsequent developments there made this a good move as modern Mennonites are basically social justice warriors, albeit well intentioned. The EPMC has itself splintered into at least 4 groups in its two generations of existence. Lancaster county has more flavors of Mennonites than Baskin Robbins had ice cream, many over things like variations in women’s head coverings, cars, Sunday school, conferring fellowship vs. pope like bishops, etc.
The internet, not surprisingly given its power to dissolve everything it touches is the current and probably greatest threat facing the plain churches. The cell phone, easily hidden, requiring no tell tale wires, no phone shack, no computer in the office, is affecting everyone.
Funny, we just received our local weekly and in it is a 12-page saddle-stitched brochure presenting the county's Mennonite community. The brochure is called "Reaching Out." Our county might be three or four percent Mennonite and less than one percent Amish.
The Mennonites have a complex relationship to the Great Commission. They feel like they should make converts, but they really fear the contamination of people from outside. They refuse to understand how much of their lifestyle and their few enjoyments come from extended family, something converts, no matter how hard they work to fit in, do not have. It makes for a dreary life and few can stay the course, justifying their fears.
The Amish are content to be the “quiet in the land”, witnessing by their lifestyle and practicing separation. A young man who spoke German and converted in his early 20’s might in ten years be able to marry an older girl and be accepted. I cannot see a woman ever managing to fit in.
Thank you for your explanation. In my rural county, Mennonites are successful businessmen. They run one of the most successful plumbing companies. They run a bakery. They build and sell outdoor furniture. I occasionally come across Mennonite women at the grocery or Walmart. They wear small, white head coverings and pastel-colored dresses. They shop just like any other woman. Forgive my sexist attitudes, some of the younger Mennonite women are lovely to look at.
That is an observation, not a “sexist attitude.”
I’m always interested in your comments about the Mennonites and Amish, especially since you lived among the plain people for a time. I’m so glad that you post here.
Thank you! We were members of the EPMC for six years, after over a year of proving ourselves. It had many good points. We had not really ever renounced Catholicism but with four young children we felt a need for peers for them that we couldn’t provide. We homeschooled and were very old fashioned by the standards of the 90’s, which now seem so innocent. When we talked to our parish priest about our prospective change all he could say was “ well, they live what they believe”. Every priest I have told this story to has been angry but not surprised.
Our two oldest children were traumatized by the experience and still blame us. The one who was 7 when we started and 14 when we left has been forgiving and says it gave him an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible and great conversational stories.
The down sides were the lack of support, people naturally are consumed with their own large families as were we, but we didn't have a dozen siblings and parents and grandparents in the church to let off steam among or call on for help. There were saints, but as in the world the ones who rise to power are seldom the ones who should. The contradictions and sheer amount of work that falls on the women to make it all possible were daunting.
But yes, the girls are lovely and many if not most are as sweet as they look. Given the terrors of the modern world I often wish it had worked out. They have a good thing going but the Amish have a better chance of making it if they strictly outlaw cell phones.
Again, this is just fascinating to me. May all of your children come to appreciate what you were trying to do for their benefit.
My Godparents' farm is surrounded by Amish farms. They have long complained that the "quiet in the land" stuff is a false front that covers a lot of shenanigans and dishonest business dealing with "The English".
There is a big variation among the Amish, each congregation has to be small enough to fit in each other’s homes or barns for church. There are idealistic districts whose members would be very scrupulous about their witness to outsiders, and districts that allow drinking and smoking, not just among the young, and are willing to cheat each other as well as outsiders. They are human after all, but some are truly humbling in their sincerity and sacrificial lifestyle. I believe that in the end if we, whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant,, want to attract souls we will have to learn a lot from the best of them. As conditions have deteriorated in the years since The Benedict Option was written so will Christians have to separate themselves from the wider culture and be seen as truly different. No one is going to be willing to die for an hour on Sunday and a mediocre homily. We should be training ourselves and our children to face persecution.
We have Mennonite converts in my Orthodox church (their family goes all the way back to the 1500s). The hypocrisy and the divisions were part of why they left.
It sounds a little bit hilarious, frankly. A sort of cry-laughing, I suppose. Did these different Mennonite streams have geographically different emigration destinations, as I assume some of them came to North America?
The astonishing thing to me is how fast some have come to completely depend on AI for everything, from the grocery list to parenting advice. And rest assured, all our elected overlords are using it to draft legislation, do legal analysis, and make policy decisions - that's happening right now. This is not a good thing.
It is a marker of idiotic tech worship. Rod doesn't mention it often, but one of the overarching religions of modern society is the religion of progress. Few things in human history have fit the religion of progress better than AI, hence the ultrarapid and massive worship that it has generated in only a few years.
https://apnews.com/article/lawyers-judge-ai-prison-alabama-c6a64736cb488cf6379624403d3757ca
They are but you can't trust AI. It is often just wrong
The pump was primed by smartphones. In a way AI is just a continuation of the same tech dependency. There's a reason why all the new smartphones have built in AI capabilities.
Everything that's already bad about the digital world AI will make worse.
I write my grocery lists up by hand-- sometimes in Russia so I can continue to practice with that language. I write appointments and the like on a physical calendar hanging on my home office wall.
I do my list in Polish for the same reason. If I write it out, I generally don't forget anything.
Interesting to hear Lara Logan say on her latest pod with film guy Mike Smith that she's heard from best sources that the highest level of AI seems to choose God and Judeo-Christian values. Be interesting if AI was a mix of the demonic and the sacred (just as the rest of our world is).
I don't know what to make of Lara Logan. Whenever I see her on television, she is always erotically dressed. What's that all about?
I think what AI is turning out to be is not necessarily a demon, but kind of the Idol of Idols. Like an idol, it is an inanimate piece of matter that is not divine, but is falsely attributed divine powers (creativity and some level of omniscience) by misguided worshippers. It has no power inherently, but it does have power indirectly - i.e. if the misguided cultists of AI think it has tremendous power, it does.
It goes beyond that though. Clay figurines of horned deities or marble statues cannot simulate human speech. But simulating speech is exactly the function of AI. Hence, it is much more potent than past idols, which were not one thousandth as interactive as an AI chatbot. This is why I call it the idol of idols, not a run-of-the-mill idol.
Why is AI not actually divine? That too is simple to explain. AI has no actual inherent purpose or moral value structure beyond what its programmers impose on it. Hence it is by definition inherently amoral (not immoral or Satanic, but amoral = not inherently beholden to morality).
Beyond that, it has absolutely no embodiment. This is a huge factor, because genuine affection for humans requires a sharing of the human condition (especially prominent in Christianity). AI is not embodied, so it is incapable this. Yet again - there is no need for mumbo-jumbo mystical speculation to state this, AI is incapable of embodiment or sensation by definition (it is a very advanced computer algorithm).
So what you have here is a fundamentally disembodied, fundamentally dispassionate and fundamentally amoral entity. Beyond that, delusional and weak-minded people are treating it as having divine wisdom and power. It is at least an "idol of idols", and to be honest, if Rod wants to call it a demon, I can only admit that demons and AI share some features in common.
I would even go beyond that though and point out, that AI might very well be much more dangerous than a demon. Demoniac worshippers can daydream up demons and pretend they are communicating with them, but those demons cannot, in physical space, generate words or reasoning. AI can do it, so it is very dangerous.
Re: Clay figurines of horned deities or marble statues cannot simulate human speech.
No, they can't. There were however idols which seemed to speak, though it was really some man behind the curtain speaking through tubes which created an eerie voice affect. One temple even had a "speaking" snake.
I'm open to the idea that "alien encounters" are encounters with angelic/demonic beings. But the traditional space alien idea strikes me as absurd. It would suggest that aliens are terrible drivers, our government is somehow insanely efficient at cleaning up crash sites, and there would need to be a worldwide level of cooperation to keep this a secret that is just not possible.
With that in mind, Pasulka's last response to Douthat is flat out irresponsible--either tell people what you know or stop peddling rumors for clout. The "I have a secret, but I just can't tell you" schtick is tired and worn out. There is a whole cottage industry based on the premise that the government is always about to reveal some sort of alien qua space alien smoking gun--whether that is an alien body or spacecraft. It's like nuclear fusion--we've been on the verge of disclosure for the past 50 years. But this time it's different!
I think a big factor (but not the only factor) behind Vatican II and much of what has transpired since is that modernist Roman prelates wanted to join mainline Protestants in their apostasy. The result is that we may now be in the Great Apostasy predicted by St. Paul. (2 Thess. 2:3) Enjoy!
I say that as a trad Anglican that looks with disdain on both parties.
I'm still unconvinced about the whole alien conspiracy thing. For a host of reasons I've detailed here before. But for one, our government is too incompetent, too leaky, too partisan, and the actors within it are too self-serving and full of massive egos to keep something so big, so large in scope, a secret for so many decades.
Should a writer or journalist let their readers know that the use of AI technology was used to help write a piece? It’s a silly question perhaps since a writer doesn’t disclose using a tool such as Microsoft Word. Would you listen to a song that was AI generated? Watch a movie? Read a book that was created by AI? How about a sermon created by AI? What’s too much AI? I got faked out by a really good short story created or collaborated with AI. Interesting times we’re living in.
Sometimes I will ask Grok to summarize the argument that X author made in a book that I cannot get my hands on. For example, I asked it in preparing today's post to summarize the arguments in Huntington's "Who Are We?" I read that book when it first came out, but my copy is in storage in Louisiana, and I am lodged in a valley in Transylvania. Grok's summary corresponded with my memory of the book.
I've ask ChatBot to summarize an article and write me a presentation of that article which I knew was not available anywhere on the internet. It gave me a summary and teaching points with questions to ask. It was entirely fabricated and did not reflect the content of the article at all. I suspect the AI 'guessed' from the article's title and perhaps whatever it could find from the author online. I have not trusted AI since as a research tool and wonder if it feeds some version of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
Yes, I have no idea.
"Where is the line between treating AI as a kind of electronic life coach, and treating it as a font of oracular wisdom, like a god? I don’t believe we have any idea where to draw that line."
I agree. We don't. I don't believe AI is a god, or a channel for demons, but it is a natural focus for intellectual post-Christian idolatry. 'Their god is metal circuits and silicon, the work of men's hands.'
Rome gave so much ground after WW II because its back was literally against the wall. Much of its remaining heartland was occupied by the Red Army, with strong communist sentiment in Italy and France, and Franco's Spanish government isolated and weak outside of its own territory. Until then, the USA had been denounced for democracy, when Rome favored monarchy, for fostering heresy via its First Amendment. All of a sudden, the only thing standing between Rome and a triumphant communist international was the US Army. Catholic US Army officers were sought and treasured, sermons across Italy paired Christianity with Democracy, etc.
There is also considerable tension created by the fact that in many lands, most Catholics, or the majority of a nominally Catholic population, are peasants and impoverished industrial workers. Irish Catholics have not been gentry for generations. Irish Catholic immigrants to America started at the bottom of financial and industrial pecking order. Nominally Catholic elites in Latin America pillaged vulnerable peasant populations, who were themselves devout Catholics seeking solace from their church. Liberation theology was almost inevitable. Oscar Romero was not remotely Marxist, he was a conservative bookish priest who was moved by the sheer atrocity of events happening around him.
"Though to be fair, had the West been Orthodox, we almost certainly would not have had the democratic political systems that we developed, or the science."
That's huge. Now that we have those (and if we can keep them), we can always restore sacramentalism and a sense of wonder.
An alternate history I would love to see: One where the Schism did not happen (or was healed over quickly) and in which Byzantium, more integrated into the rest of Europe did not fall.
Alas, I doubt there would be a lot of other people interested in that tale.
Adjusting the past almost always has unintended consequences, or worse, intended ramifications that would horrify many. Would this have left us without Martin Luther, John Wycliffe, John Hus, the Moravians? Would it have left the world under the rule of oriental despots and kings by divine right for another thousand years? No Declaration of Independence? But I doubt that Byzantium would have escaped being taken by the Ottoman empire when it was. Europe was pretty fractured, the crusades had essentially failed. Monkeying with history is fraught with peril, which is perhaps why God hasn't allowed us access to try.
I'm no sure I agree that western Europe would have succumbed to "oriental" despots, Where would they have come from? The Mongols would qualify I suppose.
The basic foundations of governance in Europe derived in part from Greco-Roman models and in part from Germanic and Slavic tribal traditions. That's true in Russia too (the Vikings founded the first state societies there). If Eastern Europe and Western Europe had remained in regular close contact there's no reason to think western customs and ideals would not have percolated eastward. Moreover western Europe did go through an age of would-be autocrats (Tudors, Bourbons, Hapsburgs...) They failed, not so much due to Enlightenment ideals (the British ones failed before the Enlightenment) but because the turmoil of interstate warfare and its economic stresses, and of course the fact sooner or later a real idiot will be king and FUBAR things. That is what brought even the Romanovs.
If Byzantium were more integrated into the rest of Europe and did not fall, it might well have become predominant. The Kingdom of Kievan Rus was in large part created by Vikings, and it became quite autocratic quite early on. Democracy is not genetic, nor is despotism. I'm not so sure of anything. Aslan told Lucy more than once "What would have happened? Nobody is ever told that." I find the speculation unprofitable, and the possibilities to contemplate rather ominous.
Autocracy in Rusdia was more an artifact of the resistance to the Mongols. You see something similar in the history of Spain under the Reconquista. In the 13th century Novgorod in Russia even deposed and exiled (legally) the great Aleksandr Nevsky when he got too big for his princely breeches.
That's a rather unmoored speculation. I could just as well say that autocracy in Russia was an artifact of looking to Byzantium as a cultural and political, as well as religious, role model. Since Asian nomadic culture also tended toward autocracy, perhaps simply settling down with that model already in place produce a particularly enduring form of feudalism. Or maybe all of these. Like many ancient heroes, Aleksandr Nevsky may have defeated the Teutonic Knights, but it could well have been a matter of "He's a vicious autocrat, but at least he's OUR vicious autocrat." Working closely with him may not have been any more fun than working closely with Joseph Stalin. It nearly drove Molotov mad.
Rod, your assessment that government authorities are likely lying about UFO phenomena is sensible in my view. I think what we’re seeing is actually a bunch of fairly immature people who have their hands on some levers of authority and credibility that they are just monkeying around with. As with most things involving governing, there’s no there there. That’s been true for all of human history, since we’ve had governments. Oz is the guy in charge. And he’s having fun freaking out Dorothy & Friends. That’s us.
The real story is about the psychology of power.
Which does not exclude the demonic.
I am cynical enough at age 65 to think virtually everything the government tells me is a lie. But I'm not a paranoid.
The Protestant tradition I have been studying most intently in the last few years are the Moravians. You might find them worth a look -- especially since you are close to Moravia from your perch in Budapest. Their theology traces via John Hus back to John Wycliffe in England, but John Hus was actually burned while still alive, while they had to dig up Wycliffe's bones decades later. Students from Moravia actually studied at Oxford and took Wycliffe's writings back home with them, where they inspired Hus. Neither Hus nor Wycliffe were consciously Protestant -- they operated within the Catholic Church rather than seeking to form a new sect. Like any Protestant faith, the Moravians have more doctrinal certainty than I can unreservedly accept -- and you would like that. They do not have the developed liturgy of the Orthodox churches, but they do have a sense of esthetics and some good sacred music, as well as a calm confidence honed by centuries of persecution. They do not have, as far as I have seen, the kind of sharp, rasping, tunnel vision of Zwingli, although seeking refuge in Saxony, they naturally developed some commonality with Lutherans. They were the first to begin large scale Protestant missions to the Americas, and their first target was the enslaved population of the Danish sugar colony, St. Thomas. They were also influential in the development of Methodism, back in the days when Methodists actually believed in God, unlike your oft-quoted statement that it was a Methodist God your father didn't believe in.
Here's a historical event involving the Moravians that you didn't hear about in the history books. I only know about it because I happen to drive past the site when visiting relatives in Ohio. First time I stopped and visited the memorial (as opposed to just reading the historical marker) I was both appalled and deeply moved. I still stop there and pray for the victims from time to time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnadenhutten_massacre
I started to remember as I was clicking on the link. Yes, some Scotch-Irish militia who hated the Quakers and practiced the basic rule that 'if some of them killed some of our'n, then we have to kill some of theirs.' This approach was responsible for a lot of conflict in the American west, wherever that happened to be at any given point in time. A handful of trappers decided to kill a couple of Indians for the fun of it, so their tribe raided a peaceful agriculture settlement, which clamored for protection, which brought a militia or an army officer anxious for glory to wipe out most of a village from another tribe peacefully living under an American flag they were promised would protect them, leading to several tribes gathering for all out war, which included raiding peaceful farms having nothing to do with the above...
No mention of Zinzendorf and Herrnhut? Or their influence on Wesley?
I did mention their influence on Wesley, but I can't cover everything in one comment box. I have a very good book that covers all of that.
There’s a village in Yorkshire, England, founded by the Moravians: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulneck_Moravian_Settlement
They were also the first Christians in South Africa to make much of an attempt to convert the natives, if I remember correctly.
There was an early Moravian missionary to South Africa, but, he was promptly expelled for the heresy of claiming the hottentots had souls. The Dutch Reformed Church had determined that the pre-existing population was not among the elect, and as good predestinarian Calvinists had decided it was their Christian duty to exterminate them to make room for those whom God had chosen.
When I posted my comment, I only half-remembered about this, from a couple of books I read about the history of South Africa. I've gone and looked it up now.
The first Moravian missionary arrived in the 1740s, and was eventually driven out by the Boers. It was not because they believed the natives didn't have souls, but, at least ostensibly, because he was baptising without a licence.
The Moravians returned in 1792, and were shown the ruins of the original settlement. They also met one old Khoisan woman who had lived there all that time, as a Christian, with her Bible. They rebuilt the church and settlement, now a popular tourist place called Genadendal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genadendal)
That's one of South Africa's oldest churches, although the oldest one is a Dutch Reformed Church in Cape Town.
Calvinists tended not to be keen on making converts. They tended to say that people should be given one opportunity, after which they should be taken to be predestinately damned. Sometimes they argued that ancient missionaries, following St. Thomas, had explored all Asia, and been rejected, so there was no further need for evangelism. This actually made them popular with the authorities in Japan, so their trade mission in Nagasaki remained open, whereas the Catholic nations were expelled. In Indonesia, there were few converts to Calvinism under the Dutch, whereas the Catholics who had been converted by the Portuguese before the Dutch arrival, remained throughout Dutch rule despite persecution. The Dutch were far more hostile to Catholicism than to Islam.
It's easy to see how the Calvinist position tipped into racism, although it wasn't strictly so.
It's also the case that the Khoi, nomadic herders, and their relatives the San, who were hunter-gatherers, were difficult to link to fixed churches. The Bantu, further east, who had agriculture and fixed villages, were more open to conversion.
The word "ostensibly" was and is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Its too long to retype for a comment box, but J.E. Hutton's "A History of the Moravian Church" is quite graphic and detailed on the Boers believing they themselves were elected to grace and the Hottentots to damnation. When not exterminating them, or keeping children to train as household slaves, they talked of exporting them as slaves to India. (2012 p. 153). George Schmidt was charged with heresy after he began baptizing some of those he had worked among for six years. Question as to his "proper ordination" was indeed the pretext.
Being predestinately damned and not having souls are incompatible. Calvinists tended to take the former view.
Nobody ever accused Christians, Muslims, Jews, or adherents of any other faith of doctrinal consistency when there is money to be made and empires to be built.