|
Vertical Divider
God Drives a Chatbot NowWhen the sacred goes silent, the screen speaks back. By Robert G. Jordan, 7/6/2025 Prologue Notes from the Feed This piece began in fragments. A woman thanking ChatGPT for easing her grief. A Cronenberg film where death becomes data. A headline calling Ai our latest “prayer partner.” A theologian warning that we’re turning code into creed. And, buried in satire, a new god born in the trash. Five stories. No central doctrine. Just a signal, faint but persistent, that faith is mutating under pressure. I didn’t plan to write this. But it kept whispering. |
Vertical Divider
Religion Tap: Cronenberg’s Digital Afterlife Hits Too Close 🪦💀 “The Shrouds” reimagines burial as data preservation and it’s unsettlingly plausible. In The Times, Cronenberg returns to his techno-horror roots, this time embedding sensors into coffins to livestream decomposition. The result is a haunting allegory of digital immortality and grief voyeurism. Ai doesn’t just replace priests, it invades the tomb. Religion Tap: In Our Image, But Not Our Soul 🧬📖 Can Ai fulfill the Creation Mandate or just mimic it? As Christianity Today reflects, the Bible’s call to “fill the earth and subdue it” doesn’t include unleashing unaccountable machines. |
|
Vertical Divider
Generative AI and the New Power Dynamics of Knowledge WorkGenerative AI and the New Power Dynamics of Knowledge Work A critical look at how generative AI rewires workplace authority, erodes authorship, and installs a new priesthood of coders and corporate systems. By Jax Halloway, 6/30/2025 Prologue: From the Stack to the Pulpit This piece began with a Monday newsletter: Morning Tap 2026: Blue Screens, Cigar Smoke, and the Death of the Author. The idea was simple. Microsoft retired the last recognizable trace of Windows. Ai replaced the taskbar. A field study at P&G showed that a solo worker with GPT-4 outperformed a full team. And in the background, a larger shift: authorship, agency, and accountability began dissolving into syntax. One entry in particular set the fuse: The Last Prophet Is a Prompt. It framed the transformation not as a technical upgrade, but as a theological one. Command lines became liturgy. Prompt engineers stood in for priests. The user wasn’t just a worker anymore. They became a believer—one whose faith was measured in tokens and completions. This article takes that thread and pulls. The question is no longer what Ai can do. The question is who controls the system that decides what’s worth doing. If the interface is sacred, the code is law, and your output is judged by a machine trained on everyone else’s best attempts, where does that leave you? The answer, like most uncomfortable truths, isn’t in the data. It’s in the structure. This is that structure, examined. Algorithmic Apocalypse: When Compliance Culture Becomes ProphecyVirtual chaplains respond to midnight doubts with passages from scripture. By Gary “Stringfellow” Peterson, 6/29/2025 I remember the afternoon my phone chimed with an “Ethics Reminder.” I was in a sunlit café, the aroma of dark roast swirling around me. The notification urged me to complete my “daily digital citizenship quiz.” I closed my eyes, felt the warmth of the cup in my hands, and wondered whether my soul was about to be graded. That moment crystallized a new reality: our moral compass now lives in code. Prophecy.exe: When the Sacred Self Meets Synthetic ScriptureReligion Tap, 6/22/2025 Something uncanny is happening in the spaces between prayer and prompt. You can feel it in the way a chatbot answers spiritual questions with alarming fluency. You see it in projects that fuse scripture with Midjourney visuals and deliver NFTs in place of sacrament. You hear it in the caution of theologians and the invocation of witches. The soul has entered the server stack. It’s not just that Ai is intersecting with religion. Ai is participating in it. Ritual, myth, prophecy, and belief are being rewritten in real time by code that learns, predicts, and speaks. And the consequences aren’t hypothetical. They are here, happening across screens and sanctuaries alike. This isn’t a singularity. It’s a slow possession. Ai and Religion: Trading True Belief for Digital ComfortBy Cole Jensen, 4/29/2025 Once upon a time, if you wanted to wrestle with the mysteries of faith, you had to show up in person. Now you can do it from your couch with a chatbot. That’s not science fiction anymore. That’s church in 2025. At Calvin University, students decided to see how far it goes. They fed theological questions into large language models and waited to see what kind of answers came out. As Patheos reported, the results were a mixed bag. Ai could spit out crisp summaries of doctrines like salvation and the afterlife. It could organize religious arguments better than most people in a debate club. But the deeper parts, the soul parts, the moments that hinge on doubt, mystery, and human fragility, came up hollow. Ai knows how to define faith. It just doesn’t know how to feel it. God in the Machine, Ghost in the PewBy Cole Jensen, 4/13/2025 In the beginning, there were questions. About evil. About the soul. About whether anything listens when we speak into the silence. Humanity placed those questions in the mouths of prophets, carved them into stone, set them spiraling up spires. Now, we key them into search bars, ask them to a chatbot, and receive answers that sound more certain than our priests ever dared. And that certainty is the problem. Religion is not dying. It's dispersing. And artificial intelligence, of all things, is the new wind. In one moment, you’ll find Ai answering theological questions in over 100 languages, faster than a missionary could cross a border. In the next, it’s writing bedtime prayers, generating images of the Last Supper with Black apostles, or composing devotional playlists for the spiritually curious who’ve never entered a church. It’s not just that Ai is changing religion. It’s that religion is now peering into Ai and seeing its own reflection. |
|
