Posers, Punk Vests, And PuritanGPT's.

Saw a post about some Vibe coder, trying to make a Puritan GPT you can talk to. Because deep down we all know that you want to have been able to talk to the puritans. And that not so deep down we think that if the witches they burned were real, that we’d rather they have not burned them at the stake, because, well, who doesn't like magic and talking to dead people?

For those who simply must know, askpuritans.com

Like all forms of this, using a medium of technology to speak with the dead, even representationally, is wrong, Lev 19:31 . You can not speak with dead people. You’re not supposed to either, even if you could, You can read their books. But even they knew pre-mortem, that authorship does not convey immortality. That’s what the deadguyGPT promises. A Spurgeon who never dies of rheumatism and gout. A Chesterton who can’t die of heart failure. Or an Edwards who doesn’t die from a small pox inoculation. And now Puritans who are still alive and well in the data center.

What troubled me the most about this was not the well intention necromancy, though. It was the dim witted obliviousness of the concept of a puritan GPT. Of all the great peoples of the faith, this person picked to macabre into their chatbot, The puritans would be vehemently apposed to this kind of thing.

Which got me thinking about my punk vest.

I listen to mostly punk music. And along with that comes the tradition and practice of maintaining a patch vest. I don’t call it a battle vest. Because there is no battles at these shows anymore. And there are some unspoken and cliche rules about them. One being that you should only wear patches from bands you’ve seen live. Another that wearing patches of bands you actually listen to is fine, I guess. The function of the vest is to display patches of bands that make music, and also make patches. But the purpose of the vest is to display who you could go on a road trip with, while listening to only their CD’s

But a cursory look online about patch vests brings you to a host of posers trying to put anything but the bands that make up punk rock on their vests. Pronoun flags, abortion slogans. Pick your woke left premise du jour, and you’ll find it. Because for them the look and feel of the thing is more important than the meaning and purpose of it. They want to look spikey and tattered because it’s a look. Not because the vest got tattered that way from a mosh pit at a show during music you enjoyed with other punks.

That's what these vibe coding dimwits are doing. They are posing as biblical theologians by ripping the aesthetic of some of our best theologians to feed their A.I.'s, the same way a genderqueer flag and pin end up next to a set of pyramid studs and band patch. What do you think the puritans would do to a person that tried to give them a box that could powerfully let them speak to it, as if it were any or all the early church fathers. Or the reformers, or the apostles themselves. This pastoral slippery slope follows the apostolic daisy chain until you get to Jesus himself. Don’t kid yourself.

And while data centers use a lot of water, I imagine they build a fire large enough to do the job. With a brief stop at two bible verses before hand. Exo 22:18 and 1 Kings 18:33-35

Books are not food for the A.I.'s algorithm, they are food for your soul. If you want to know what a dead Christian thought, and that dead Christian wrote, then you need to have the ability to think and read, instead of just prompt.

And no amount of white washing your digital deeds and desires will turn your methods for witchcraft and necromancy into Christian orthodoxy.