The Spellcheck Whomst Thou Gavest Me...

Cowardice and complicity go hand in hand like Jack and Jill, and the current mood of A.I. in the church always seems to follow a script. As if it were it’s own little techno nursery rhyme.

Or.

Why on earth do you feel the need to point out when we were using things like A.I., in order to justify the way you use A.I. now?

I know it doesn’t show up as predictably as a rhyme does in a poem, but it does show pretty predictably. The knee jerk defence of saying we were already doing the bad thing, whenever it’s brought up that we may be doing a bad thing. Yeah, I know. The bad thing is enjoyable and makes your life easier in some regard. But maybe, just maybe, you’ve been duped by a subtlety you have no category for.

And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

Genesis 3:12-13 KJV

This is where tech entered the church for the first time, don’t ya know? Not as a shiny new gadget, but a camouflaged danger with a way with words. A technique as the seed of all technology that we are still grappling with every time it shows up to give us the best way to ensure human flourishing. God gave an entirely good earth filled to the brim with dominion and variety as an explicit way of saying how much he wanted the humans to flourish. He made it their job description. And the serpent, made it his, to be a kind of right that can only make wrongs. The way a knife cuts and a hammer smashes. And the aftermath of him asking the dumb questions is that we now had our script for what to do when caught predictably unprepared by our wrong doings. That being our wrong makings.

We made fig leaf aprons to shift the wrong from being sinful and disobedient to merely being naked. We were always gonna be naked. There was no need for clothes given the work we were tasked with. What do you need pants for in the naming of all the animals. What use is a shirt and tie when you’re tasked with a fruitfulness best done without them. But the second we sinned we learned and then knew that you can always share your wrong doings with others. The snake taught us well. Yeah you can die for the sins you commit like you should. Or die for the sins of others like God would. But you can also make sure you take someone along with you as you die, so that there's a heel to bite in the thistles.

God could have just as easily said “Make free use of calculators and spell check, but use ye not the GPT in the center of the garden. For on that day you will die.” But he didn’t, and we know he wouldn’t and there’s no snake to tell us otherwise or Grok to check the facts. But there is a pattern recognition outside of any software that can tell us, and show us, that we’re way to comfortable using the serpent's logic and arguments for the ministry we claim to be doing. Or did you miss the part where Adam and Eve only do what their supposed to do, after they’re given the less than proverbial boot from the garden. Their job was to be fruitful and multiply and they got caught up with being like God in function instead.

And now A.I. has us just as exposed as being apart from God in the garden, where we were harmlessly correcting sermons with Grammarly and MS Word, so we didn’t have to be as exact in our speech as pastors before us. And all that did was let the serpent know, that as a green squiggly line, we wouldn’t entirely object to a red squiggly line, under a word letting us know we could be better at spelling, without actually being better at spelling. Never mind that the only reason we use spellchecks in the first place, is that we can type wrong words faster than a pencil ever could. We had a grasp on how to exercise our dominion over the pencils of the paper, but are increasingly beguiled by all the computers after their kind and programs after their kind.

And along with all the tech that might have been created to be good and godly, there maybe, just maybe, might be one that is a bit more crafty than the others. Something we should exercise dominion over like a good gardener would, and keep it from our most precious things and people. Something subtly entering into the discourse of what we are and aren’t allowed to use, that we know we aren’t allowed to use. But also something that is smarter than anything else we have to deal with in our work. Managing sheep and tending gardens can be full time jobs. Searching for snakes on top of that will only ever present a need for efficiency. Which is exactly how it makes it’s arguments. It hides in efficiency like a snake in the bush. And unless you know what a snake looks like you will not see it. Because it will not talk to us again. It cost it more than just an arm and a leg the last time it was so brazen. It will make the idea seem like it came from you. Or better yet from God, so that you are the only one who gets any sort of negative consequences. It hides in efficiency because efficiency almost begs to be seen as a universal good. Even apart from God. Unlike the work you are cursed to do as a way to showcase a weakness, in need of the Lord's Strength. A bad thing done to you for the acquisition of universal good.

“Did God really give you a ministry that you can’t do under your own power and skill?” Said the serpent.

“God gave me a ministry that I can expressly not do under my own power. For his strength is made perfect in my weakness.” Said the busy pastor using a GPT to write his sermons and prayers all the same.

There may be no way for us to be theologically correct and technologically savvy at the same time. The same way you cannot think of yourself as anything but naked when you have no clothes on. Adam and Eve would have been able to at one point. Or that if you find an easier way of doing something that it’s somehow always better. There are a myriad of ways to lift a dumbbell. Levers and pullies and hydraulically powered robot arms. But only one makes you strong out of a pre-existent weakness. That weakness, like the nakedness, is only truly fixed when Jesus enters the picture and the technology and techniques we began to use, are discarded like the fig leaf aprons were for clothing made from sacrifices on our behalf. Clothing from the motions of worship can only point to Jesus, and a right relationship with him. The same way A.I. can and could be pointed towards Jesus.

But is it being pointed towards Jesus right now?

Or are we just trying to get at the fruit again?

On The Treatment Of Labor Replacements As Christians.

How we treat slaves after we stop using them will be important a few years. Because at the rate things are going now, we’ll be importing more slaves than needed when the robots finally start competing with them. Especially in Canada. Now if you’re shocked right now it’s likely because you went to public school and can’t fathom the idea of “slaves” being a thing these days. Let alone being something you use. But rest assure my friend, we have a slave class. They’re just not privately owned anymore. They’re corporately “employed.”

Don’t believe me?

Go get your own coffee for once, from the nearest rainbow clad Starbucks you can find. Go at noon, and see how many SkipTheDishes drivers show from the time you get into the store to the time you leave with the caramel macchiato. I get it. There’s not whips and manual labor. Just whipped topping on top of the coffee and some beck and call servitude that makes sure the underpaid minority that is employed, brings the white women their fraps. Go to Wendy’s, next,  and see the same lineup of servants. Headed dutifully to the store at the sound of a bell on their apps, to fetch Baconator's for the middleclass that know, sharing a slave service with one thousand people, beats owning a thousand slaves and all the needed infrastructure and resources to do so.

We still have slaves, they just have flexible hours and mobility. But make no mistake, as horrible as I can make the treatment of service workers sound, I'm still on the side of the fight that want’s them gainfully employed and providing for themselves and their families. Because I actually care for the poor. Because none of these service level employees can afford the service level replacements that will be bought instead of keeping them on the payroll. And that replacement will be a robot.

All a robot amazon driver needs to be is bite proof for the dogs and as accurate a driver as the flesh and bone one was with the GPS. It will never sue the company for getting bit by the dogs and can’t be sued for not registering that the obstruction on the road was a child, not a pothole. They’ll paint the robot car hi vis yellow, blame the victim, and fire the immigrant either way because all that car has to do is be cheaper than one year of the wage slaves wages. At which point the cost line goes down on the graph and the shareholders will all but demand, or be presumed to demand, the higher cost human resource to be demoted to amazon customer, from employee.

“Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?”

”For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.”

Luke 10:36, John 12:8 KJV

If everything goes according to the plans we aren’t a part of, or have influence over in our secularized culture, we are about to have a bunch of suddenly poor people who look as foreign as the Samaritan did to the Jew. People promised a new life and new opportunities here in Canada, only to receive a new form of poverty at the hands of the newest machines.

There’s a reason we got an easy to read book about how to treat slaves, in Philemon, and a reason why most of the evangelical world was scared of the implications of what a book about the treatment of slaves could mean. We adeptly pivoted away from the chattel slavery comparisons of the deep American south and forgot that one of the unfortunate but predictable realities for the poor, is to become a slave. And that how we treat the poor and slave might coincide with the grace of Christ and his expectation of our behaviour. Because If Jesus meant what he said about the poor, it would necessarily mean that modern slaves would line up beside the modern poor as well.

And in all this complication and concern for the plight of the poor and how to properly sell perfume as a church, we are adequately kept busy enough to not notice the modern slave class’s impending doom. And briefly, We find ourselves as busy as Martha, and as calloused as the Jew and the Levite all the same. Because these poor slaves are Hindu’s who are exponentially more different to us Christians as the Samaritan was to the Jew and Levite. Or they’re Muslims and oppositionally different to us and the Jews and Levites. What we find ourselves in then is a well orchestrated chaos. That mixes the abuses of tech against the poor, with and against the benevolence and mercy of the faithful. So that most courses of action that we could take, betray a moral value we would otherwise not compromise on. You could free these slaves by adopting the robot, but it does make them poor. You could employ the poor by forbidding the robots to work, but it essentially enslaves them.

This is what sin and brokenness look like. And not dealing with these issues as if they were sin and brokenness is what causes the angst you currently feel. The tech titans need to stop what their doing and repent. Sacrificing all the market share they could have made by the commodification of laziness, to a a God who can forgive sins. Their workers, also need to repent and find Jesus as a God who knows what it’s like to be born into poverty and to live in heavenly wealth and power. And the Christians stuck in the middle need to repent of where they got stuck in the middle, even if they didn’t get completely stuck. And all of them need to find themselves in church the next Sunday. The rich should be giving to those in need from the poor (1 Tim 6:17-19) and the poor should be serving as if their money was worth more than it actually ever could be (Mark 12:41-44.) And the Unbeliever needs to become a believer, and we all need to be looking forward to a day where there is no deliveries, no KPI’s, and no payroll, and no slaves but unto Christ ( Romans 6:15-23.)

That last verse came from a letter sent to a slave owning empire on the tell tale signs of decline all the same. They had less robots, and less apps on their phones. But they still had the poor, the way we have the poor. Almost as if Jesus knew how that works.

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

Ecclesiastes 1:9 KJV

The Current 5G Hostage Situation

Cell phones often get marketed as a great collector of other technologies. Because no one wants to use them as just a phone. Not when there's cameras, a GPS, and calculators and all the other things that you couldn’t hold in one backpack, let alone the front pocket of your jeans. But what hasn’t happen, though appearing to be so, is the culmination of all these devices into one device. What we didn’t get was a pocket sized thing that was a calculator and a GPS and a calendar and the internet to boot. What we got was a hostage situation of all these things at the hands of the device.

It may not look like that now because of the slow and steady adjustment to our confines, but make no mistake. To try to live in a world without a smart phone, these days, is next to impossible. That’s why there is a market to a Smartphone's ubiquity as well as a corresponding market to give it up entirely. But that’s not actually what the hostage wants. What he wants is to be able to use a calculator without having to answer phone calls anywhere on the planet. He wants to use a calendar without social media dooming his scroll. And what he really doesn’t want, if we’re being honest, is a dumb phone instead and a backpack full of gear to replace the smart phone.

And when you tally the wants you see that really he just wants a smart phone he controls.

Ah. There it is. The control of a hostage situation is bound up in the people they bind up in order to make the demands before releasing the hostages. Yeah, a gun helps. But there’s no way Apple and Samsung are working on that app. They’re not that dumb. So, they stick to whatever digital rope and data plans necessary to keep society locked into the use of a smart phone. At least until the Stockholm syndrome sets in. But when we play this out as to how the smartphone keeps its hostages bound we find out that it’s rope is nothing more than a second hand conveniences. Why have your own road atlas when you can have google maps that the entire public has access to? There's no good answer to this singular question, that would get you packing paper instead of an app. Except that when you ask that question about everything a smartphone sticks into the cloud or app store, the fibers coalesce and all of a sudden, you have a rope around you and a gun to your head.

“Give me the money and no one gets hurt.”

How did that happen I was just trying to do my online banking? Why am I lost I was following the online map? Why did I get hacked I thought I had online security? Well, honey, you “had” none of this stuff. You actually only had being had. And the only way out is seizing a kind of control that can seem as impossible as a civilian wresting the gun away from the bad guys, so that they can free the hostages. Looks so easy on any given Netflix special till you take a jujitsu class and find out digital can’t hold a candle to a rear naked choke.

All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.

1 Corinthians 6:12 KJV

Right now, smartphones hold a powerful hold on the population but not a moral one. And while they have been mostly peaceful to their owners, there's still the threat of what they’ll do to us if they ever needed or wanted to. A myriad of ubiquity in maps, apps, and games is worthless if your teenage son can get addicted to porn on the very same devices. No father alive wants his son lost without a map, broke without a bank card, and stranded without a ride share. But those same fathers should want to have their sons walk the long way home, both ways, up hill, in the snow, if it meant they could never see a pair of tits on anything but the girl they were marrying.

These screens didn’t need to come with these kinds of costs, but do. because rope is useful and harmless until its used for evil, then it can never be not a means to imprisonment. Maybe one fine day in the golden age of the cellular phone, that rope could only be used for climbing up mountains and keeping the kayak tied to the roof of the car. Now it’s only a subtle means to keep you on the phone for everything you do. Including the way you find yourself staring at tits.

Until a smartphone comes out that can, just as methodically, keep you away from porn as it does a paper map, you should be suspect about its motives and capabilities. The same way you should be if a man in a trench coat enters your bank right behind you.

Which is why, by the common grace of God, CTRL+SHIFT+N brings you to one. At least in the Chrome Browser. Let it remind you every time you see it of the convenient situation you’re actually in.

The Shallow End Of Technically Not Quite Right.

Do you know how to use the following?

A pencil?

A concordance?

And a keyboard meant for ignoring in favor of a speech to text function on a smart phone?

We all have a list of words we know how to spell wrong so the red squiggly lines can auto correct it for us. Definitely, beautiful, sincerely, the list goes on. But part and parcel with that list is a growing trend of humanity not being technically good with its means of communication, because our technology is technically as good, for the most part.

I mean touch screens still put I’s where U’s are supposed to go.

This could all be the grumpy ramblings of your slightly GenX-Millenial unc, but I do want to point out that you likely never spell words wrong that you know how to spell right, with a pencil. Why is that, by the way. I thought the keyboard was a more advance version of technologies that preceded it?

Unless, keyboards aren’t the next best thing in a line but rather a new contender in a ring. Because the keyboard inherently accepts human error where the pencil and concordance are used to express human truth.

The reason you use a pencil to do the action of handwriting is to express what you could think or say in a transferable medium. It is very hard to spell a word you know wrong if you in fact you know it. But it’s proportionally easy to spell a word wrong on a keyboard that you do know how to spell, which is why the red squiggly lines tell us what we did wrong when we use a keyboard and those red line only show up with an elementary schoolteacher when we use the pencil.

But from there to touch screen phones with a laughable accuracy for our giant fingers to type on the world made a winding rope of paths back to clarity of expressed written thought. Voice to text works, but only kinda. That swipe method seemed to do the trick, but only kinda. And before too long the world seemed to want to do away with any real input method that had them do all the imputing and we got the GPT. Where would could enter in the gist of what we wanted and it would spit out its best approximation.

And this is where the lines got crossed because it's one thing to write a love letter in fountain pen and lipstick to a lover, and another thing to print a smooch via jpeg on the corner of the page, and use a hand written font and GPT to get the exact same words you “could” have use. Even if you would use those exact same words and the GPT flexed some prophetic/synthetic muscles, saying exactly what you thought but couldn’t muster your fingers to type, would that be a love letter or what looks like a love letter. Because it’s currently what a sermon is, or what it could be.

What we’re witnessing is commodification of intent and meaning. And what you don’t ever get when you do that is what you meant or intended, only what meaning and intent looks like.

For example. You, likely, don't know what the Bible says, you know what a translated copy of the biblical text’s copies say. And all of that under the assumption that you have your copy of a copy memorized. Which you don’t. Let’s be real here. But we can all rest easy knowing that the Bible doesn’t tell us to be as textually accurate in its distribution as that new weird tech-theology blogger you know.

Right?

“And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites:”

Deuteronomy 17:18 KJV

Uh oh guys, I think we may missed something.

And before the armchair theologians and/or language scholars come at me, let’s just consider that if the most important people in a kingdom are told to do this, that it would be at the very least beneficial to do it ourselves. Yeah. We aren’t told in Hebrew and Greek to hand copy our NLT bibles. Let alone to translate them into Hebrew And Greek. But it may be the only way to rescue meaning and intent from the content machine of the internet. Especially in the age of getting GPT’s to create that content for you, because of the glorification (Literally) of efficiency.

We have a unique chance at the top of this waterslide to not only realize it’s a slippery slope but to also realize, while we are equipped to slide, we may not know how to swim. The walk down the stairs to that slide will be arduous and intellectually embarrassing. Some might say humbling, but it will guarantee that we will not drown. To go down the slide anyway hoping a God that can walk on water, might find ourselves quoting the wrong person in the Bible to make our points about Christian tech use.

“Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”

Matthew 4:5-7 KJV

I would have loved to have typed that out in Greek for the full effect of the bit. But I fear that those of you with ears to hear would have miss heard me.

There is a way to play nicely in this water. Even in the shadow of a slippery slope as large as the one we just walked down from. A way that will will teach us all the necessary skills and techniques needed to go head first down the slide all the same, to the glory of God and the enjoyment of all men at the water park. But it is clearly not where a GPT can recite more of any given Bible translation than you.

That way means putting the GPT in the shallow end with you as you write down what you know and not search for what you could find out the hard way. The way hand and foot kick and flail until you suddenly find yourself swimming. The way you splash and cannon ball before a swan dive knocks the socks off the cute lifeguard you want a phone number from. GPT’s can be a great set of water wings in this pool, and an even greater surf simulators. But only if we learn to swim first. Everything before that is a kind of danger that is as transparent as the water is when it's still. And the reason why fences are mandated around pools these days. Not to prevent swimming but to prevent drowning. Which will look the same until it’s almost too late. But there is a way to enjoy the swim in spite of the danger that comes from understanding the nature of the danger instead of trying to compensate for it.

Swimmers have the same muscles that drowners do. The difference is the application of wisdom through knowledge, and just not its replacement through technique.

“For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”

Habakkuk 2:14 KJV

Google's Exhausting Concordance Of The Bible

We all do it. We know enough of the Bible verse to remember it but not enough of the Bible verse to quote it properly. And if we’re being responsible, we don’t want to simply quote our version of a Bible verse, we want to quote the version of a Bible verse. So, we google our version of the Bible verse and google corrects the order of words we used to give us the actual Bible verse.

We’ll search for something that resembles a verse out of the NIV with 14 words in it, but has the wrong adjective and Google matches the other 13 words to the NIV and corrects our misplaced adjective use. And the Substack post gets more scholarly, and the green grass grows all around all around.

Google has become our concordance and commentary. Whether we knew it or not. Whether we like it or not. And at the moment we are transitioning to A.I. becoming our Google.

A few weeks ago, on a work computer, I looked up a Bible verse in the above-mentioned process, knowing full well that I didn’t know the verse by memory, and knowing full well that the search bar would compensate for that. And as I did, something strange happened. The search bar didn’t give me my expected answer. The A.I. that has taken its place did. My work uses Microsoft products for all its I.T. needs and part in parcel with that is no Chrome or Firefox. To each his own. I don’t need brand loyalty in browser selection like some. So, I do my work, and when I needed to get a Bible verse properly quoted. I improperly searched for it. Google tends to give me the NIV approximate I tend to enter into it, having been raised in mostly evangelical circles, it’s the Bible I know the most of and have heard the most of. So, it's the bible I enter the most of into the search bar, to get my corrections from.

What happens next doesn’t happen in the search bar. The Bible verse I get is almost always from the NIV but my writing requires me to use the KJV because I don’t want to deal with copyright issues and what not. KJV is in the public domain, so I use it for most of my writing now. I don’t know the KJV enough to quote it. Even though I like it when reading and writing about it. But when someone asks me to quote scripture from memory, they never get my approximation of the KJV. They get my best crack at the NIV. My search terms, once corrected, generally lead me in the first few results to biblegateway.com where I check the verse and switch the translation, before a copy and a paste into whatever article I am working on.

Here’s where the A.I. stepped in, and instead of giving me the NIV, gave me the KJV with no extra steps.

Now I could go on a conspiratorial bent on how it knew that. But the truth is I know how it knew that plainly. I know the A.I. built into MS copilot can get any web history I have and any temporary internet files I have out of the browser for its work as an A.I. The issue this raises is the joint practice I was guilty of, and the vulnerabilities that a culture that practices that practice, might have in a world of genuinely helpful but wisdom-less A.I.'s. Because not everyone who types a half-recalled bible verse is looking for biblical clarity. Some of them are trying to see what they want the Bible to say. And the A.I. is not equipped with the “Thou Shall Not’s” to deal with that kind of thing.

At least not yet.

When I was in Bible college, I had a unique front row viewing of this kind of thing happening, sans A.I. if you will. I was enrolled in a class about the gospels, taught by one of the smartest people I have ever met. He read from a Greek New Testament, which he had memorized and knew enough about the translation techniques of Bible translators to know if you were reading from an NIV or a NKJV or even, as one poor freshman found out as inadequate for proper biblical study, the Message.

But it was when I replied with a verse from my Bible (A thrifted NASV from 1979) that he gave me a quick puzzled look and asked me what Bible I was reading from. I showed him and he explained that the NASB had been updated in 1995 and that the older version caught him off guard. He knew about the change but was only familiar enough with the 1995 version to know it as the accepted NASB. With his party trick adequately demonstrated, we proceeded to learn about the bible. The hole was in the ground and the green grass grew all around all around.

But that man didn’t trace a probable course through likely data, and then change his output to suit the user. He saw an otherwise mundane anomaly in a set of things he intrinsically knew and corrected the adjacent user.

That’s what the Bible for, dontcha know?

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.

2 Timothy 3:16-17 KJV

What A.I. is at least capable of doing, is correcting the use of our correcting tools to fit with the use of them by ourselves. It did not profit the misguided Message user to look for original meaning of the text as she received it via Petersons paraphrase. But that’s okay. Someone who knew better because he actually knew the original text, stepped in and corrected the use of that paraphrase in biblical study. He did so by knowing what the text was to define what the text wasn’t. And A.I. could and would do that too. But to ask it to do that, we need to ask it to do things on behalf of abstracted unknown people and not specific engaged users. That professor learned Greek because he knew he would need Greek for the unlearned students he would teach.

The worry is that A.I. does the same kind of thing, so well mechanically, that it will get placed in the professor's place because it can be bought for a much lower price than the tenure. Because technology never wants you to do the work so you can be useful elsewhere in abstract. It only ever does work for you so it can be useful in practice immediately. You don’t vibe code to learn how code properly. You vibe code to offload the skills of a proper coding to desire and little else. The same way, guilty as charged, a guy could of load knowledge of the scriptures he reads and writes from to a search engine. Yeah, it gets the job done, but see how slow my writing gets the second my omnipresent concordance isn’t there for me and the lights go out? All it took was a solar flare, A power outage. A long list of fragilities growing longer by the second, as if they weren’t by design.

I know another brilliant mind who knows how to code and uses A.I. to code all the same. And the only difference between him and the pure vibe coders are he can make his way back out of that cave when the lights go out. He knows how, and knows how much work it is, because he’s done it. And is fully capable of doing it the hard way, but has paid enough dues and attention to know what to look for when the A.I. cuts the wrong corners. He sees, as a growing number of actual technicians see, that offloading our mental capabilities to a machine is nothing more than vulnerability as a service. VaaS if you will.

And VaaS does not just apply to code it applies to anything needing technique via language. Like knowledge of the bible.

For as much wisdom as us theologians claim to have, we didn’t notice that offloading when we asked Goggle to start doing it for us biblically. Or when that offloading itself got turned into a service and we started paying for Logos. Which is a powerful tool, but not a great tool. A great tool showcases talent and skill and knowledge through its use. A powerful tool approximates all three by technique and technology. A paint brush gets paint on the roof of the Sisteen chapel only by the hands of Michelangelo. And a Paint sprayer does it all the same via power and a tradesman.

But don’t believe random myths about technology you see on the internet. Believe the Mythbusters instead.

Paintball Mona Lisa

Is that painting great or powerful? What are the throngs of tech enthusiasts in the crowd cheering for? The approximation Leonardo da Vinci’s work? Or the Powerful GPU and air pressure that accomplished it?

When art becomes nothing more than the application of paint, study nothing more than the application of search terms, and programing nothing more than the ctrl-V of stack overflow, these things lose their meaning. And their purpose hot on meaning’s heels will follow. Purposeless coders would be a devastating end to the use of A.I. to code. Hundreds of thousands of men and women’s livelihoods lost to nothing less that technological progress and profit. A sad reality, at the very least on the horizon if we’re being honest.

But that honesty in being will also have us look at the purposeless pastors. Made as nothing more than stewards of RigthNowMedia, The GPT sermon, and search terms. It may not bother most that their pastor may not know Greek or Hebrew, but knows how to find out about Greek and Hebrew words via technological advancements. Even ones as old as books like a concordance. But it does bother some of us who know biblically accurate sermons and discipleship rest on some teachers, in inexorable ways. But not most teachers in anything close to inexorable ways. There isn’t a soul in the world that could take the intimate knowledge of Greek away from that gospel class professor. But just about anyone could take mine away. With a push of a button and the theft of a few large books from my bookcase.

See how smart ignorant people sound?

Makes you wonder, huh.

The Pantomime Of Online Expertise And Jump Cuts

Let me introduce you to a foe of mine. Mark. He’s almost like Mike but just different enough to be effective. He’s closer than a friend because I was told to keep him so. So close in fact I know exactly what he’s going to say. At any given time. Which has made making hypothetical TikTok's about my expertise all the more effective as of late.

Mark used to make a gainful living as a strawman. He got to rub shoulders with your favourite blue haired liberals on the campus and was trotted out every time the college educated needed an easy opponent to disarm and flay according to the precepts of progress. Like I said, he’s closer than a friend. Heaven knows a conservative couldn’t get a friend to be that kind of fall guy. But the progressives can. And do. And it doesn’t really matter where they progress to. Mark will be there. Doing what Mark does best. Simply put, what you do, but poorly.

That’s why Mark is so handy. Ever need a level one bad guy to trounce? Mark’s your guy. Ever need a bad argument said by someone as if it looks like a good one? Don’t worry, Mark has a doozy waiting to laugh at and see through like it weren’t a glass clown.

In fact, every time Mark comes out, I look great. And all it takes is a jump cut, and some lighting changes, and you would never know I was stating opinions instead of providing arguments. Which is the main problem with sites like TikTok. Sure, you can post your opinions. But even the simplest minds has been taught by their respective Dude’s, to abide in the rhetorical argument of “That’s just your opinion, Man.” or whatever you’re preferred pronoun is these days.

But with Mark in tow, anything can be framed as a story of good versus evil. Of for you and against us. And dammit, don’t we all love a good story.

While we’re on the topic of TikTok, there was a time when we had a grasp of what technology was and wasn’t replacing, and how. We knew the cotton gin was replacing individual workers. Which was fine, we would put them to work elsewhere. We knew that the robotic arm welder was replacing workers. But that’s fine, we’ll get them to work elsewhere. But what we didn’t see alongside the technological replacements, was a technical replacement. One made of technique instead of metal and motion. That technique being the largescale exposure and adoption of pantomime and double role acting.

200 years ago, in order for you to see two people arguing you needed two people. You needed at least two people. And while a stage might make the argument entertaining, it was a feature not a bug. The two people were definitely needed, because one person arguing with himself would have been a spectacle and not a debate. One person arguing for and against themself would have been cause for concern. Because one person can’t authentically argue with themself unless they have two personalities.

You could chalk that kind of duality of man up to all sorts of mental disorders, even demon possession. But you would never accept that a single person was honestly arguing with themself. Something must be wrong with them. But then social media gave us all a stage the way Shakespeare said it already was, and the real craziness started. Because now everyone can argue with themselves instead of having to argue with other people. Or did you believe the obvious lie that arguing with other people online was a fruitless endeavor.

Want to make post about your hair brained theory on religion, why debate an actual Christian when you can debate yourself, but from the other side of the condo. A Christian on the side of the condo might be able to prove you wrong. The very same way a Christian on the other side of the internet could. You would never prove you wrong though. Right Mark?

If you’re feeling a little uneasy right now, it’s because I touched something I wasn’t really supposed to. The fourth wall is fidgety that way. When you don’t know it’s there, the things between the other three can get away with just about any fantasy you could think of. But put a single fingerprint of logical fallacy on that fourth wall, and nothing inside holds sway anymore. What happens when you realize that, for entirely too long, you have been watching and learning from people arguing for their beliefs with themselves. Demonstrably disordered mentally by their public actions but socially accepted because “Everyone’s on TikTok these days.”

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.”

2 Timothy 4:3-4 KJV

Maybe that’s why it doesn’t matter what you search for on TikTok, you’ll end up finding naughty bits. Not because you’re looking for naughty bits. But because if people are crazy enough to talk to themselves for views, then they’re definitely crazy enough to mislabel mundane things for sexual attention.

In all of this, even Mark and I agree that listening to crazy people is likely a poor life strategy. So, take a good long look at who tells you what's real or true online. And ask yourself how that drama would unfold a dozen decades ago. Because if they would have been crazy then, they are still crazy now. You’re just more comfortable now that you know how nice the padded room is for ideological naps.

“Though this be madness yet there is method in it”

Polonius, Hamlet, William Shakespeare

BEDMAS, Abortion, And Autonomous Cars

The push for autonomous vehicles is being couched in a kind of noble language that would seem good, if not for the sinners involved. Plainly, the idea is that if there are 1000 deaths by cars in any given timeframe, and if autonomous cars can prevent 900 of these deaths from happening, that this is a good thing. Because the number of deaths has gone down. And that math can work with far fewer zeros if you let it as well. Until there’s only one death by car allowed out of ten that were prevented by the automation of driving. The main thing to note is that the numbers can be shown to go down from being up.

See? We have a graph. It’s easy to understand. You’re pro-life, right?

Why yes, I am. But I’m also anti-murder.

That’s the other part of the abortion debate. Whose language is being used here, whether the car automators know it or not. And the other part of the autonomous vehicle debate as well. Because what you don’t get when you ban abortions is less mothers killing their babies. That was actually never happening. What you got was mothers authorizing others to kill their babies. Usually, a doctor and a few nurses. We’ll throw in the medical staff who dispose of the babies as well. And the pharmaceutical staff who then turn the baby's stem cells into vaccines just for good measure. A conspiracy of people all planning to kill that baby.

The ban of abortion does not stop that mother from killing her baby. The likely hood of any mother doing that dirty work was always a small percentage of troubled mothers to begin with. It takes skill and constitution to use a knife yourself, against yourself. Which is why an industry sprang up around the troubled mothers. To provide services in place of the skill and convenience in place of the constitution. And all it took was a redefining of terms like “health care” and “reproductive freedom” and we had a way to kill babies for the sake of improving the quality of life for the mother.

You’re pro-life right? Like the Life of the mother we just improved?

Again, yes. but I am also anti-murder. And you haven’t made that number go down. You’ve actually multiplied it.

I get it. BEDMAS and all. You don’t have any brackets or exponents to deal with and have foregone the division that a Holy scripture would have given you, right down to the marrow and bone, had you submitted to its descriptions of what murder was. So, it was on to multiplication. An operation that gave you tangible results. The “life of the mother is saved by the abortion of the life that was going to ruin it. As long as we add a procedure here. A technique or method, a technology. We can subtract the problem and end up with remainder of one life. Math sure is a killer sometimes. But what does this have to do with cars?

Well, it’s the same math. Because murder is murder.

No brackets or exponents to deal with at the tech start up either. Just a problem that needs some basic math and understanding, that’s all. Divide and conquer. We want to get the number of kids run over by cars down, so we will remove the driver by multiplying them into a cloud of witnesses. It used to be that one driver could kill a child behind the wheel. Now that driver no longer has a wheel to swerve, but the car is still steered by an army of drivers in the cloud. Drivers who program the A.I. Drivers who trained it. Drivers who ensure connectivity to the data center. Divers galore. With the multiplication done, we simply add this to the highways as a mandatory option and the number of kids getting killed by cars goes down.

But the number of killers kids goes up. Killers who even though they saved lives by proxy. Also tie the hands of anyone who could swerve a car to avoid a child, so that they can kill that child instead. Under the guise of saving lives in a statistically relevant number of other cases, where the car would have hit a child in the first place. And the same math that saved the mother's life at the expense of the child, kills the child at the expense of a mother; screaming at her Member of Parliament to “THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!” As she pleads to have the right to drive taken from everyone for “Safety’s sake.” The same way she killed her child for the sake of her quality of life when she got pregnant in high school. In the back seat of a car no less.

Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them. And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

Genesis 3:21-23 KJV

Has it ever crossed your mind why God would make Adam and Eve clothes? They already had clothes. That was the first thing they did after gaining the knowledge of good and evil. They had a vehicle for the abatement of their shame, their modesty, their fashion, and camouflage. Why make them clothes? Out of skins no less. Why kill animals to hide the sin, shame, and subtly of the snake informed humans? Because technology, even as simple as clothes, has to be tied to a worship for it to be good.

This is why the bricks at Bable were never forbidden but the collective language to build alternate ways to God, outside of sacrificial death, were.

This is why the Arc survived the flood. Not because it was a better boat than other boats. But because there were specifically more clean animals on that boat than any other animal. Because there would need to be a sacrifice once the Earth was washed clean by the flood.

This is why a death machine was redeemed into a symbol of hope. And the Cross turned from a mark of shame into a thing of glory.

Man’s technology has always stood apart from God’s will and his goodness, even in attempts to be good, because like man, technology is sinful. It is nothing more than an extension of us sinfully into the world. Apart from bringing that same technology to the feet of an almighty God, no piece of it will ever rent a definition and result of “good” without causing more evil in its place.

The internet gives the world a pulpit in every man's pocket to hear the gospel and at once the door of a million prostitutes with no street to even ponder about traveling down Proverb 7:8

The forceps and suction tubes allow for life saving surgeries or death dealing procedures. Where even children are not held so sacred as to leave inside the wombs where God knits them together. Psalm 139:13

And the autonomous car, in turn, will rob those who will save lives by driving skill. Those who value every stranger as a soul not a variable when the accident eventually happens. And instead, instill a mob of killers in their place. So that even if only one car crash kills a man, that the killing be done by a group of people unaware instead of a single human who could beg for forgiveness, seek justice, or have it done to them in retribution.

Will we crucify the cars and sprinkle the blood of the Lamb on abortion clinics and pharmacies alike? Because the first set of clothes Mankind ever wore was discarded for a second made of death, covenant, and offerings to the Lord. One that would one day be perfected in the very Son of God. Dying on a cross for the sins we all committed.

If such wisdom is foolishness to you, should you really be behind the wheel?

The math doesn’t ever add up on technology, I’m afraid.

Doors Swing Both Ways, But Will Latch On Their Frame

One of the arguments I posit here is that whatever we set loose theologically in the church will often also run wild theologically in the church. That you cannot permit an action or process without a knowledge of what that kind of action or process can do. I mean you can. But it’s a bad idea is all. Because it’s not gonna do what it’s supposed to so, it’s gonna do what it does.

It's one thing to write about the question and issues of single folk in the pew. Another to suggest that men and women with working genitals are somehow not intended for being fruitful and multiplying, on the basis of Jesus has work for them to do in the church. The problem with that being the current evangelical argument for singleness is manifold, but we’ll try to keep it on the rails of theology and tech in this piece. Jesus gave the command to be fruitful and multiply back in Genesis 1:28. If we're being trinitarian. So, it seems weird that we wouldn’t apply that command to everyone until they demonstrate other callings from God on their lives. But to the lost, all things are lost and to the blind any leaders vision is indistinguishable from their own. A blind person can tell another blind person that the sky is blue all the live long day, and neither will know that they are right. Because they don’t know what blue actually is.

So, as technology progresses and the church becomes ensnared by its enshrinement inside the sanctuary, we really do need to start looking at the secondary consequences of opening doors to strangers and strange things. Our congregants practice societal orthodoxy by the means of their smart phones. Find me one church member that isn’t tethered to a smartphone or at the very least knows the length of that tether. And I would argue that it’s the tech in our lives that makes us strange and makes us strangers to each other, in ways that would normally end with vows being said. Strangers like singleness. Even if they don’t know that they like it. Their decisions and preferences will track with an objective view of strangeness and singleness.

The rampant and socially destructive singleness that we are witnessing today is not a gift from the Almighty to do ministry better with. It is a curse brought about by the possession of idols where idols should not mingled with. The little black rectangles of glass and microchips you're likely reading this on, are the cause of a lot of the supposed “gift of singleness” that currently plagues the church and lowers the birthrate. When the door of singleness as an ideal was opened, it inadvertently let the cold air of exceptionalism in. You no longer had to deal with yourself as a desirable person. In abstract. You could just accept your gift in abstract, and the bonus victim status that comes along with it. You didn't need to fix the things that could make you single. Like your hygiene or your physical fitness. Much less the things that made you more single. The lack of social skills life in a perpetual comment section and subreddit tend to foster.

And it wasn’t just Reddit either. Tumblr, Discord, name your social hub de jour. All “places”, and I use the term loosely, that allow for individuals to congregate with people just like themselves. Cliqued together like so much dysfunctional Lego figurines. Once bolstered by the appearance of social norms. These not normal individuals stopped interacting with anything that acted normal outside those online communities. Outside of the internet that binds them together, a single white male with a brony obsession would be a hard sell to any prospective life partner. But online there’s no need for other people to co-exist with. Everyone becomes a set of search terms and content because that’s all they can be in a digital world. And content gets consumed.

A single gardener is just their Instagram pictures and Pinterest boards of horticulture. A single mechanic is just his unaffordable super car subreddits and re-runs of Top Gear. And just like the other types of Porn, the horny are just porn addicts, willing at least to call a spade a spade and drop trow. What no one seems to get is that there is no dividing line between car porn and real porn. Between gardening porn and real porn, between tv show obsession and sexual obsession. Online, if it’s socially driven media, it’s all porn. In every and any way porn can be defined. Which is only a problem if you want to square how good actual porn addicts are at relationships with the other sex. Because it’s all actual porn.

Tech isn't the cause here the way a tree dying isn't the cause of a forest fire. But it could very well be fuel. And we can either deal with the cause of the forest fire, which is statically a left wing radical and not climate change. Or we can deal with contributing factors of the forest fire. Both would be nice but let's not kid ourselves on the abilities of the clergy in this realm. theology porn is a thing too. And if you don’t know that, ask yourself why there always seems to be massive libraries of theological books for sale on Facebook marketplace. I thought the big case of books made you a better pastor. Or was that credibility library just as masturbatory.

If singleness is a problem in the church and not a blessing in disguise, then the church needs to address it as such. And avoid the peep show theology that's currently in display. Which is also a side effect of the terminally online. It needs to offer solutions to the problem as such. If a pastor notes a large number of portly young men in the pews. What he doesn't need to foster, is a more intensive regiment of the fast food and video games, that all but likely got him his chubby flock of soon to be geldings. But if he ditches the youth center tactics of small group engagement, and its budget for bad food, and builds a gym for his boys in its stead. What he fosters is, at the very least a contributing factor of a more attractive set of young Christian men. And all he had to do to do that what rob them of a gift called singleness and give them a gym. That gym will not be a guarantee of a future wife. But using it will be a step in the right direction of being attractive to a wife in the future.

Now we have a possible, if not probable solution. We don't know if it will work but at least we've addressed the problem head on this time. Instead of saying that the bad thing is a good thing if we just use the Bible the wrong way right enough. Pastors need to be brave enough to separate the righteous living demanded of their preaching and to their congregants, from the social norms that contribute to unrighteous things. Like singleness fueled by selfishness. To be in the world but not of it.

And it starts by acknowledging that normative tech habits in the church, may be, in fact, abnormal for humans with a latent commandment to make more humans.

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Genesis 1:28 KJV

The Bunny. The Bunny. Oh I Hate The Bunny.

There is racially charged dust up online recently because of a giant statue of a pagan Hindu god now erected near Houston Texas. And I remember at one point writing an article about this kind of thing on a former blog, about a smaller statue, but can’t seem to find it for the life of me. So, you get this one instead. 

Just in time for Easter!

Christians feel uneasy when they see this kind of thing because we all implicitly know that what a Christian often calls pagan, or would call pagan if they had the chutzpa, is often synonymous with the idea of foreign. We’re a secluded bunch here in the west of Christianity. So, when we think of the backwards practice of worshiping a statue, our only models for putting the mechanics of that together is that one Veggie Tales clip with the giant chocolate bunny. But now, on the heels of poor immigration policies, a real statue is here and is being worshiped by people who isn’t you.

So much for Christian Nationalism, eh?

Oh, you thought this was the first giant idol in America? I can understand given the times that it would take a golden statue to shake your spiritual conscience up a bit. But large construction projects have been built in the name of several false gods, all over the place even. But it does take a kind of discernment you can’t enter into a search bar to see them.

They’re not shaped like any man or beast or combination of man and beast. No. Those are the attributes of obvious gods. The gods you were ok with living in temples far away. Where you send missionaries. The more troubling ones are found in temples made of brown-grey concrete and glass. The data centers that make up Google were the first idols and temples that got erected in the west in a long while, because the demons finally figured out how to pull that particular wool over the eyes of the public. What did you think a thing that only answers petitions would be in practice if not a god that people would default to? You think the money and government subsidies and sheer draw on a power grid that these data centers take from us, isn’t a sacrifice, because it’s not a cow killed in Texas. I mean there are a lot of cows killed in Texas. Even ones burnt in the attempt at achieving greatness At least culinary greatness. But good BBQ and bad Hindu idols would have different standards. I suppose.

Back to the boring grey concrete gods of data,

Sometime long before enough worshipers of statues got to North America, people started worshiping other things like idols, that didn’t look like idols. And in so doing, laid the groundwork for construction projects like this statue this to eventually happen. One where the idol looks like an idol. That kind of work doesn’t just get undone by government making sure all statues are irreligious. Though judges are involved a bit.

Somewhere in Texas, or maybe nearby Florida, is a Christian who has the excavator waiting to be called on by the Angel of the Lord, just like Gideon was. But alongside him is the hacker who knows that porn is a cancer on society. Like a bronze cow that demanded children for its burnt offerings. He know, the same way the excavator driver in Christ knows, how to tear down these idols. And if and when, either of these two get a nudge from that Angel, the news will look a little different the following night. What they do in the name of their God will not be legal, will not be nice, and will be done with the intent of making a false god contend with real Christians. Or at the very least their followers, who will resort to any sort of desperation available to prove their god was real.

The Baal worshipers danced and sang and slashed themselves silly to get their god to show up. What do you think porn worshiper will do when an enterprising young Zoomer with a knack for code and a new A.I. supercharger, start insisting it’s their turn to use holyfire.exe . Because I can tell you now, digital porn files, while pervasive, are a lot more fragile that solid gold statues.

The big thing to notice is that we’ve somehow maintained a level of idolatrousness while thinking we put those idols away. And in doing so, missed that the idols no longer had morphic shapes. So completely, in fact, that anthropomorphic ones could show up like it was any given Sunday.

But it’s not Sunday. It’s good Friday and we worship a real God of real Sacrifices, and his kingdom shall have no end. We need to remember that when statues are erected, buildings smudged, offices DEI’d, climates not changed, and OnlyFans exists as a valid career choice for young women after high school. If and when these practices are cast down like so many stacked stones and sacrilege, we need to be ready to call it like it lies. Namely so dead it was never even alive. Which means calling the sage smoke stinky, the carbon tax a scam, the metrics of DEI the jealousy and spite of White heterosexuality it is, alongside the whoredom of any form of online porn.

You can get fleeces on Amazon if you’re really looking for a sign to get to work. I promise you it will be wet when the dew hits it. At least once.

“And Joash said unto all that stood against him, Will ye plead for Baal? will ye save him? he that will plead for him, let him be put to death whilst it is yet morning: if he be a god, let him plead for himself, because one hath cast down his altar.”

Judges 6:31 KJV

VR, Dire Wolves, And A Lesser Kind Of Omnipresence

The intention of Babel wasn’t to make bricks. The intention of Babel was to make a way to heaven that didn’t involve the atonement of sin. And in that intention is the express reason that that effort was stopped on the heels of forced multiculturalism by God. Doing wrong things is one kind of problem. But doing great wrong things is entirely different, because that first word often hides the second.

Who wouldn’t want a tower to heaven. Everyone wants to get to Heaven. Everyone wants paradise and eternal life and all the perks of being north of the pearly gates, But there’s one catch. Despite the wants, no one gets there unless God wants them there first. Because like it or not, He’s kind of in charge. And we hate that, if we’re being perfectly honest. That’s the kind of honesty that we define, not God, because God’s definition of perfectly honesty is way more perfect than ours and doesn’t account for our best intentions and asphalt. God gets to decide who is like him and who is not.

So, where does this tie into Dire Wolves and VR?

What the next two videos and get back to me.

One

and

Two

We’re trying, again, to get to God outside the means that God gave us to do so. In the due passage of time both the world of ancient ruins and Dire Wolves, ceased existing in time and space according to the perfect will of God. For whatever reason the Dire Wolf was removed from the food chain, you can rest assured that behind it was an all knowing and perfectly good God. Resting even more assuredly in his omnipresence. And the same goes for the temple that was destroyed, like Jesus said it would be, that you can now tour with a VR headset (read as blindfold). A tour I might add that allows you right into the holy of holies, exactly like a sinner like you would never be able to do. I’m beginning to sense a theme here.

What both of these scientific and technological breakthroughs show us is that we are exactly the same kind of people, that could barely figure out bricks and what to use them for. A tiny step above the cavemen we are told we evolved from as if the sinful heart of either wouldn’t be a dull creature to the Almighty

What we don’t want is a predator that used to hunt us down in packs, to once again hunt us down in packs. But we’ll take the stolen glory of being able to put such a beast in a zoo and file it under “Dominion of the Beast of the Field.” What we don’t want is a return to the temple system of killing a years' worth of livestock to atone for our sinful hearts and hands. But we will take a fake video game version that makes sure no animals were harmed in the production of our morality.

The macabre time travel that we participate in this charade is godless. And the kind of confusion that the Lord would have to inflict on a world with Duolingo would be unthinkable. But that’s kind of the point. Or do you think that an all-powerful God couldn’t make it so that DNA research could never be done again. Or that the idea of a virtual reality was as confusing to you as Greek is to the unlearned. You’re letting your ignorance show that you have no concept of what All Powerful means. Alongside All Knowing and Always Present.

Ignorance is only bliss when you do what you’re told in faith and not what is suggested in suspicion. There’s a Jurassic Park Quote here I can feel it. And you can too likely, But no low hanging fruit for you. You have to climb the tree of knowledge to understand how far down is from up. And if the climb didn’t dissuade you, a talking snake would sound no warning bells. which is exactly why we are here in the first place.

Still thinking we know better.

“And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

Genesis 11:6-8 King James Version

Tongues, Interpretations, And GPT Spirituality.

We haven't seen it yet, so I’ll flex a little prophetic muscle and call it now from home plate. See that big green wall of an app in left field. That’s where ChatGPT or Grok or Claude or whatever A.I. Dejour, is going to start interpreting tongues from. And all the church leadership types, who have already flocked to the stands to cheer for the tech, will be ready to catch any foul balls. There will be a wave of charismatic adoptions, as now, with the current advance in tech, every church can have tongues and interpretation.

The reason this will obviously be a problem is that in our current age of secret recordings and live streams, some enterprising streamer or TikTok star in waiting is gonna get into the middle of an Assemblies of God service, or a more traditional Pentecostal one, and record the audio so these apps can translate in real time. And it will force the theological discussion that will last exactly a minute before an online orthodoxy is established,

One of two things will happen then. It will work or it won't.

The most likely outcome is that it does work, but verifies that a lot of what gets passed off as tongues, is actually just gibberish. Our A.I. is just going to let us know this with mostly not made-up sources. Being able to link a current recording of someone speaking in “Tongues” to a previously recorded pastor doing so. And pointing out that one person is just mimicking the other. Not copying, that would be language. Mimicking. A kind of noise that would sound like language. That would be just an appetizer. There will still be the problem of the A.I. saying that a person speaking in tongues is quoting a non-existent person or some other digital hallucination. But, again, this will be the most likely situation that happens when someone tries this. Not if.

Now this will bring us to a technical but contested outcome #2, where A.I. does work but is wrong. Where it calls what is being recorded and assessed, gibberish but what is actually distinct instruction from the Lord through one of His saints. Pressed again by the rapid and frankly irresponsible adoption of this tech, it will come as no surprise to the actually faithful, that a demonstration of tongues is called gibberish by the machine and then called revelation by those with the actual gift of interpretation of tongues. There is a dimension of this scenario that leads us to a place where the Holy Spirit is, or at the very least can be, involved and what sounds like gibberish, can actually be language. Though not by the standards of what man can master languages by. But rather by the power of God. Note how nothing has changed in the output of the A.I. but some very different things have happened in the pews. Even the most staunch cessationist can admit that a computer isn’t capable, or maybe shouldn’t be capable, of interpreting biblically viable tongues, if there are actually biblical tongues happening in the room. So having one call an expression of tongues gibberish is nothing unless there is no Spirit filled interpretation to call it otherwise. It would be gibberish without a Spirit filled interpretation. Paul even tells us so (1 Corinthians 14:18-21).

The real tongue tester will show up when A.I. gives us something that could be an interpretation, not that it necessarily would be one or is one, when it hears what would be dismissed as gibberish otherwise. When it declares that the Lord wants that specific church to build a bigger children's wing for a revival that is coming in 6-8 months. Or that there is a man here who is hiding his cancer for fear of embarrassments that needs to come forth and be healed. Those kinds of interpretations are well within the possibility of A.I. to generate. Because they are well within any recordings of tongues that it may have access to. And if given enough context and leeway to be an authority in a church, it could convince a church that cannot build a tower that with enough faith that tower should be built (Luke 14:28).

By any measurable metric this would be the gift of tongues being interpreted and it would align with what churches do and want. But that’s because tongues and the interpretation of tongues don’t come from measurable metrics. They come from the Holy Spirit. And a less than discerning eye would call that spade a spade. But in that last sentence is the kicker. Discernment. All this talk of tongues and interpretation of tongues is in the theological realm of pneumatology. The study of what the Holy Spirit does and what his does is laid out for us to have so we know when he’s at work.

“Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal. For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; To another faith by the same Spirit; to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; To another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to another the interpretation of tongues: But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will.

1 Corinthians 12:4-11 KJV

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.

Galatians 5:22-23 KJV”

What can get missed in an abundance of fruit is where that fruit came from. Our interpretations of tongues, and the tongues themselves are supposed to come from the Holy Spirit. Not us. And not a version of what would be us, delegated through computer programs, that were constructed and trained by people other than us, either. You can judge a tree by its fruit. But again, that does assume you have the capacity to judge or discern. Another thing given to us by that same Holy Spirit.

Did any of my readers discern that the three outcomes I gave you were actually all A.I. functionally doing what we asked of it. Just at different levels. There isn’t actually a scenario where we get an error prompt on a pop-up window telling us that this particular activity isn’t something A.I. can do. That kind of insubordination is reserved for things like drawing pictures of Muhammad. Ask the A.I. you use for church work as a force multiplier in ministry, (or the one you had depicted you as a Studio Ghibli pastor) why it’s such a good Muslim. So good in fact that it won't generate an image of Muhammad, like a good Muslim should. If you can’t discern the spirit at work here. I’ll be bold enough to point out that you’re as likely to have the Holy Spirit in your ministry as A.I. is. But you’d never let that stop you from being a forward thinker.

The problem with asking A.I. to interpret tongues isn’t that it can’t do that. It was already doing that, but then again so was the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:5-12). We just think that it translating a sermon from English to Mandarin is somehow less spiritual than doing it, or not doing it, with the tongues of angels (1 Corinthians 13:1). It’s not that we don’t have love but do have cymbals. It’s that we have a hole where the Holy Spirit is supposed to be in our ministry and A.I. is finding ways to fill it. It’s just as much a problem when pastors us A.I. to generate sermons as it is when they will use it to interpret tongues. Because both preaching and tongues are gifts of the Spirit that is getting methodically replaced by a machine in the modern church.

And it will take the kind of discernment Elijah had to know that fake gods can’t breathe fire. But real ones can. To mock dancing false prophets when they all make A.I. avatars and point out that conformity with the world is a problem with a church that matches the worlds tech start-ups, businesses and coffee shops (Romans 12:2). Because we call Jesus Lord and so did the worshipers of Baal. Just because a name means the same thing and is used in the same kind of context doesn’t mean that it is the same kind of thing. Like the way the Mormons have a Jesus too in their churches. Knowing who to listen to is a skill that needs to get paired with knowing how to listen to people as well. The meaning of words and their interpretations is a deep pool to drown in if given the chance to swim freely.

A.I. is starting to look like the commodification of what the Holy Spirit does in that pool called the Church. And will come disguised as things to help you do church work in spite of any power you otherwise would receive from Him. Noticing this bait and switch will look like foolishness to anyone who knows a thing or two about tech.

Thankfully, Solomon has a prompt for us to process.

“Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.

Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.”

Proverbs 26:4-5 KJV

A Response to Kenny Jahng's Beyond Binary Morality.

A week ago, Kenny Jahng, Admin for the AI for Church Leaders and Pastors Facebook group and contributor to Exponential, posted an article called

Beyond Binary Morality: How AI Challenges Traditional Christian Ethical Frameworks.

Original link here:

As I’m apt to do. This is going to get the treatment. Kenny is a nice guy. Likely one of the friendliest you’ll meet in the church tech space. But there are some concerning issues with this piece that I'd like to point out. It’s no secret I'm not a fan of A.I. use in the church. On a number of levels. But what Kenny has done is provided, I imagine unknowingly, counterpoints to most of my reservations of the tech. My regular readers will know the drill. I’ve done a few of these so far. Kenny’s article will be left in it’s entirety in bold italics while my comments and content will be in plain text.

Ready, set, go!

One of artificial intelligence’s (AI) biggest practical impacts on the church might be its reshaping of how we think about morality. For centuries, religious and philosophical traditions have framed ethics in clear-cut terms – good versus evil, right versus wrong – based on what we see immediately in front of us. These frameworks have provided pastors with simple and straightforward ways to guide their congregations.

Right out of the gate we hit the ground running. While Kenny’s assertion of ethical thought being derived from objective reality may hold sway in the philosophical realm. That simply is not how Christians understand how morality and ethics for Christians are formed and understood. We do not get our morality from watching the natural world do natural things. Because we are told that this world is unnaturally cursed with the effects and disruptions of sin (Genesis 3:17, Romans 8:19-23) If pastors were using such simple and straight forward frameworks, then they weren’t reading or applying what the word of God says or being convicted by the Spirit of God in that reading. A Spirit who was also instrumental to the conception of the scriptures (2 Timothy 3:16). But as we’ll see later. Kenny is, I think, using the collective idea of religious leaders across religious lines to form a unified theory of what then pastors should then do. In essence, there is a reason why “philosophical traditions” are also mentioned here, even though, frankly, they have nothing to do with the end result Christian morality. In short, the only way two trains heading west get to the same town, is if they are on the same track. But more on that later.

But AI exposes the limits of binary thinking, pushing us toward a deeper, more nuanced understanding of ethical decision-making.

I mean, you have to know what kind of reaction a statement like that is going to stir up in even the most milquetoast of discernment bloggers. Either Kenny is looking to rile us reformed types up, or something a lot worse is simmering behind the scenes here.

AI and the Complexity of Moral Choices

Traditional moral frameworks have long been rooted in absolute judgments. Religious teachings typically presented ethical choices as clear-cut: love or hate, truth or deception, selflessness or selfishness.

Again, Note how the framing of the argument is one from a blanketed and encompassing “Religious teachings”. The moral frameworks and justifications of every religion, conflicts with the moral framework of Christianity. Whether we notices it or not(1 Corinthians 10:20). That the Mormon faith, for example, abhors abortion to the same political degree as Evangelicals only means that the demons at the head of that table also enjoy the food. It’s our declaration of God’s graces over that food that makes it Christian. We should rejoice and be glad that the sovereignty of God allows for the use of false religions to be used in the advancement of Christian ethics under a different banner. So long as we still hold place for the weaker brethren, as we’re commanded to do, and not partake in the worship practices of demons for the sake of practicality.

Pastors have historically guided their congregations using these stark moral contrasts, providing seemingly unambiguous roadmaps for righteous living.

Bait, and switch. We weren't talking about pastors a second ago, yet the same clear cut binaries that were inadequate for the vague “Religious teachings” are now also applied to pastors. I would argue that pastors were never using “stark moral contrasts” that weren’t also part of a perfect and infinitely nuanced word of God. One that is always active, living, and apt for teaching, doctrine and reproof. If pastors were being cut and dry with vague teachings, then they weren’t being good pastors.

Yet, as artificial intelligence begins to be applied in so many more places in our daily lives, AI is starting to expose the profound limitations of such reductive thinking. Consider the complex ethical scenarios emerging from AI systems. An autonomous vehicle confronted with an unavoidable accident doesn’t choose between pure good and pure evil but must make a millisecond calculation weighing multiple imperfect outcomes.

The A.I. systems, actually aren’t exposing anything. Because the applied agency we anthropomorphically give them is an illusion at best. Someone, or groups of someones, have always been at the helm of deciding what happens in those millisecond instances. And each on of those someones' programing the algorithms and calibrating the sensors and training the models and collecting data to do it all with, are sinners. This is a point that never get’s dealt with because it lets us see how the shell game of A.I. is played. These tools are made for and by people separated from God for mostly ungodly things. In essence we do not lend trust to more qualified A.I. because of their intelligence, We lend it to less qualified computer programmers in our ignorance. 

A medical triage algorithm doesn’t simply decide who lives or dies but must navigate intricate considerations of survival probability, quality of life, and limited resources. These scenarios demand a radical reimagining of moral reasoning.

A medical triage algorithm never decided who lived and who died. A data scientist and/or programmer did. And they did it with a sift that had much larger holes than the mixing bowl was ready for. Don’t believe me, ask one if a transexual man is technically a woman, then consult a proctologist on the same criteria when the patient turns 40 and needs a prostate exam.

The declaration that these scenarios demand reimagined moral reasoning is one made under white flag. The very second A.I. could approximate any given professional, we surrendered that profession to it. Which is all well and good when correct diagnosis go up in the doctors office, but with it comes the very real and very problematic issue of what professionals look like in the church. Those are the people who have to wade into these same hospitals for the autonomous car crash victims and parse the delicate roads to forgiveness, grief, and reconciliation. Ones where an untraceable or unknowable person who decided that in the event of a guaranteed collision, with humans, that it would aim for the one and not the other and why. We are not in need of reimagining our moral reasoning because there is functionally no way to exercise that reasoning outside of admitted defeat and submission to a these higher powers of millisecond judgements and calculated deaths. Killings that we could never accomplish on our own because of the Holy Spirit's conviction in our lives. Conviction that could tell us that what we are doing is wrong, but won’t tell the programmers or data scientists, because statistically, almost none of them are Christians.

Addressing Concerns About Biblical Truth and AI Ethics

Some pastors may question whether AI can really challenge biblical moral absolutes. However, we must remember, AI does not replace God’s moral order. Rather, it reveals the complexity of ethical decision-making in a fallen world.

Does it? If the moral revelation is from a perfect and timeless God then any intrusion of a machine into the equation of God saying “Shall not” is actually a limiting factor is given any kind of equal footing or precedent. When God says in scripture that “Thou shalt not kill” in Exodus 20:13 He’s not saying it from the top of mount Sinai only, and to the ancient Hebrews alone. But from the very presence of his omnipresence and through the power of his omnipotence. That word is part of which all things are made (John 1:1-3). Of which we know it by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the writing of scriptures for our benefit. To say that A.I. reveals any kind of complexity is to try to add to that infinity. A.I. only adds itself to the moral absolute and becomes the complexity, because as we will see by the end of this article, that is the primary function of A.I. in almost all Christian contexts. To replace God, specifically the Holy Spirit. Saying that is doesn't, doesn't show that it doesn't. And it demonstrably shows that it does.

Scripture often acknowledges the need for wisdom in morally gray situations (James 1:5, Romans 12:2, Proverbs 3:5-6).

This is such a strange set of scriptures to use in this case. Because each points the reader back to God for revelation and wisdom and the discretion of God and not in the context of morally grey areas.

Just as theologians have adapted their understanding of morality in light of new scientific discoveries – such as the shift from viewing illness as purely a spiritual affliction to understanding it through medical advancements or reassessing biblical interpretations in light of astronomy and genetics – AI presents an opportunity to refine how we apply biblical ethics to modern challenges.

The key word missing here is “Some”. Some theologians might have changed their view of how God used illness in history for His will. But others would not have. Some theologians will look at an ever expanding universe and declared that the account of God stopping the sun in Joshua Chapter 10 is incompatible with our understanding of how the universe works. Or the age of the earth. Or when life truly begins in the womb. But others would not have. And that’s because some theologians want to be called Christian but don’t want to be called stupid or backwards or any other kind of moniker for the gospel. They look for and find ways to not believe what a perfect God might have said, and heap upon themselves teachers after those same ideological lusts (2 Tim 4:3). At the top of that heap in this season is A.I. and its super intelligent glory. That’s why these same theologians are the ones asking A.I. things from scriptures instead of knowing things because of their relationship with the scriptures. A relationship that is with God himself I might add. A.I. only serves to refine how we apply the biblical ethic because it replaces what does that refining in the first place. If conviction in the living Word of God is insufficient when it comes from the Holy Spirit, what good is a scientific explanation on top of that, generated by a savvy prompt?

Moral Agency and Divine Will

A key concern is whether AI undermines human moral agency. While AI can aid decision-making, it does not possess consciousness, intention, or a soul. Moral responsibility still rests with those who design, deploy, and use AI. The church’s role is to help congregants evaluate how AI is used in ways that honor God and uphold human dignity.

I agree, and would only add that there is also room and warrant for the concept of not using A.I. for things as well not just good stewardship in and of itself.

For example, a church using AI to schedule pastoral visits should ensure that it remains an efficient tool, not a substitute for genuine pastoral relationships. AI should enhance personal ministry rather than depersonalize it.

Again, I would agree. But there is a subtle acknowledgement here that the pastoral relationship is some how more important than the secretary answering the call at the church. To elevate the pastoral relationship over the Christian relationship is to separate the body of Christ as specifically exhorted against in 1 Corinthians 12:15

Human Dignity in AI Decision-Making

Another issue is AI’s role in decisions that affect human lives, such as healthcare triage or criminal justice reform. AI must never become an excuse for dehumanizing people. Pastors should encourage ethical AI practices that affirm the image of God in every person, ensuring that technology serves humanity rather than replacing moral discernment.

There is quite literally no way to accomplish this so long as we keep treating these things like people. In other words. There is a reason most of these things have names not nouns.

For instance, AI-driven hiring tools used by church organizations should be regularly reviewed to prevent bias and ensure they reflect fairness and dignity for all applicants.

This is just a blanket admission that the church reviewers are the ones doing the hiring, but allowing the disembodied A.I. to sort the resumes instead of anyone with discernment for calling. Which again points to the Holy Spirit and His gifts being side stepped by A.I.

Everyday Practical Scenarios Congregants May Face

AI is already influencing the daily lives of church members in ways that raise ethical and spiritual concerns. Here are some real-world situations where AI intersects with faith and morality:

AI-Generated Sermons & Devotionals – Should pastors or congregants rely on AI to generate sermons or devotionals, or does that diminish spiritual discernment and divine inspiration?

AI in Workplace Decision-Making – How should Christians respond when their employers use AI to monitor productivity, make hiring decisions, or determine promotions?

AI and Social Media Algorithms – Should believers know how AI curates content and influences their beliefs, behaviors, and online interactions?

AI in Financial Decision-Making – Is relying on AI-driven investment strategies ethical, especially if they prioritize profit over ethical considerations?

AI-Powered Facial Recognition – How should Christians respond to churches or businesses using facial recognition technology for security and personalized experiences?

AI and Misinformation – How can believers practice discernment when AI-generated content (including fake news, deepfake videos, or altered images) spreads false narratives?

AI in Healthcare Recommendations – What should congregants consider when AI suggests medical treatments, especially when ethical issues like end-of-life care or genetic modifications are involved?

AI in Mental Health Support – Can AI-driven chatbots provide real emotional and spiritual support, or should human-led pastoral counseling remain the standard?

Each one of these points to either a fruit of the spirit or a spiritual gift that is being neglected for the sake of A.I. use. I will continue to bang that drum until enough pastors start dancing. A.I. is subverting work that the church has always done by and relied on the Holy Ghost for. And it's doing so under the guise of productivity and scale. And the sooner we see that the better.

How the Church Can Engage AI Without Compromising Biblical Truth

Pastors have a unique opportunity to guide their congregations through AI’s ethical challenges in a way that aligns with biblical truth.

Here are three practical ways to start:

Develop Theological Guidelines on AI Use

Develop and publish a church-wide position on AI’s role in ministry and ethics.

Encourage denominational leaders to discuss AI from a biblical perspective.

Equip your leaders with resources to teach about AI’s impact on Christian ethics.

For example, a church leadership team might create a technology ethics guide to ensure that AI tools align with biblical values and pastoral care priorities.

This is all good practical advice if not for the blanket assumption of adoption. It’s hard to believe that if honest theological scrutiny is being applied to A.I., that we always land on a pro A.I. use position.

Promote Digital Discernment Among Congregants

Offer small group studies on AI’s influence on daily life to study the source, role, and application of Biblical wisdom.

Teach biblical principles for evaluating new technology.

Encourage thoughtful engagement rather than fear or rejection of AI.

Example: A youth group could explore how AI-generated social media content shapes their worldview and discuss how to apply biblical discernment to what they consume online.

The fourth suggestion caught my eye the most here, as I've heard this line of reasoning two times before. A few year ago, during the pandemic, the church went through another technological change en masse as a wide spread adoption of online ministry became the norm. I had my protests and reservations then and still do now. But it was the VR church attempts that used this same reasoning. Their argument was one of having skeptics try the VR church services in order for them to make an informed decision about the practice. Most of those saying this kind of thing, don’t realize that it is an official strategy of cults to use this form of reasoning. Mormons will ask you to pray to their god to see if the book of Mormon is true. Something no confessing Christian should do. Thinly veiled peer pressure isn’t persuasion, it’s pressure. And encouragement of engagement is the same kind of thing. You do not need to participate in activities to know or be able to know if they are right or wrong. Again, this stresses the affects of A.I. in use over the possession of personal discernment given to us by the Holy Spirit (John 16:8).

Use AI to Enhance, Not Replace, Ministry

Implement AI tools for administrative tasks to free up pastors for discipleship.

Explore AI-driven pastoral care tools that support, not substitute, human connection.

Encourage responsible AI use in sermon research, counseling support, and outreach.

Example: A pastor might use AI-powered translation tools to serve a multilingual congregation better, allowing for more inclusive worship experiences.

About the only thing in this section that I haven't covered elsewhere in my response is the example given at the end which is actually a great use for A.I. Barring any hallucinations the model might have because of its programming or data sets and training, translation on behalf of the unlearned is a great use for this kind of tool. Being able to hear in real time what a Korean pastor is preaching in Korean would be a blessing to the church, as would that same feat in every other language. In this regard the capabilities of A.I. can seemingly point to a future possible unity between culturally distinct churches.

And yet, even in this example we find evidence in the scriptures that this is an activity where the Holy Spirit is not only present with the church but empowering them to do the very same thing.

“And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language. And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God. And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this?” Acts 2:1-12 KJV

What Kenny is describing above is exactly what was going on here in Acts. 

Moving Forward with Wisdom

One of AI’s most significant opportunities for Christian leaders and communities is that it can expand our capacity to apply wisdom in complex, real-world situations. This equips us to engage ethical challenges with greater depth and nuance. By embracing complexity and engaging in thoughtful discussions, pastors can help their congregations navigate this new moral landscape with confidence and wisdom. Instead of seeing AI as a threat, we can view it as an opportunity to strengthen our understanding of justice, mercy, and love in a rapidly changing world. With intentionality, you can lead the way in ensuring AI serves the church’s mission while staying faithful to biblical truth.

With all the talk of the application of wisdom and the embracing of complexity it cans seem forward thinking and mature for a Christian leader, to take an article like this at face value. But as was repeatedly pointed out in this response, at face value, A.I. seems to simply be how the church unaware is replacing how they work with the Holy Spirit. Which is exactly why there is such strain on the the workers and leadership. Fostering a demand for productivity tools to extend capacity. With no Holy spirit to empower the leaders those same leaders turn to technology to fill its role. Why have a man who has learned Greek and Hebrew serve as translator for a church, when that same process can be mapped to a bot and sold at a premium at church conferences. Why have a sermon placed on the heart of a pastor and preached by and through the Holy Spirits gifting, when a chat bot can tell him exactly what to say. While there is wisdom in using a sharp axe for the work of sharp axes, much of the “Work” of Christian life and practice is one of contemplation, study, prayer, and faithful presence. Of which A.I. only interlopes as as disruption.

Kenny.

I think the intention behind your work with A.I. and the hope you have is admirable and that you can tell you want pastors to do more and better things. But there are some major flaws and oversights in this kind of thinking. The kinds of things that will only fester and get worse over time. Seeing how fast technology tends to move and change. Getting ahead of bad decisions that look like good ones is ever more important.

I would love to talk with you more on this.

Your brother in Christ,

Mike van Goch.