But its god, like thousands of others, will end up on the scrapheap of history Many years ago I was the pastor of a small church in a small town in Massachusetts. I did the baptisms, marriages, and funerals. When a middle-aged woman in the congregation died, I officiated at the funeral, then at the burial. It was a beautiful day, sunny with a scattering of clouds. I so vividly recall that a sister of the deceased proclaimed, “She’s up there already, pushing the clouds around.” I was struck by the naivete of this comment. Was she just joking? I don’t think so. Here was a woman who apparently accepted the concept of the cosmos embodied in the Bible: we’re down here, and god is up there—somewhere—on his throne above the clouds. And because of this close proximity, the Christian god can keep a close watch on everyone and everything. He knows how many hairs are on our heads, he monitors all of the words we utter, and even knows what every human is thinking (how else would prayer work?) There are Bible verses to back up all of these ideas about god. But human discoveries about the cosmos have moved us far beyond these naivetes.
If truth was the product of belief, we would be living on a flat earth at the center of the universe. I'm not opposed to every religion . . . only those involving people.
I wonder how many demons inhabited each pig. Just one per pig? More than one? And I also don’t understand this: if the goal was to kill the demons, why not just send them into the ocean to drown?...
“Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding, and the unclean spirits begged him, ‘Send us into the swine; let us enter them.’ So he gave them permission. And the...
There is also the rapid development of the economies of these countries, plus the explosion of the media helped break the isolation of the believers and the Church's grip on their...
But no religion would survive if its own marks were able to take an outsider's perspective to their own received faith. Therefore every religion must already contain built-in...
I think less well-educated people all over the world say with great admiration things like, "Wow ! That guy is a genius. When he talks, nobody understands a word he is saying !!"
The majority of MAGAt's are too stupid to even understand what an AI is telling them, that's even if they had the nous to be able to use it. Though I've seen enough ex-MAGAt's...
One should not confuse intelligent with knowledgeable. AI is knowledgeable because of the vast data center that supports it. It can help people who are already open to get more knowledgeable. Ditto...
You told us this story once before, and it's good hearing it again. Far out! As Charles Ryder's father says in Brideshead Revisited, "Such a lot of nonsense."
As I replied to josephpalazzo, my comment was not produced by ChatGPT alone, so its intelligence in this particular case is not to be measured by its reply. I merely asked it to structure the ideas...
There is also the rapid development of the economies of these countries, plus the explosion of the media helped break the isolation of the believers and the Church's grip on their minds.
I think everyone here is aware of that, except the Jasons of this world. I actually fed ChatGPT the content and just asked it (him?) to write it all down nicely for me. I don't know what...
It serves the interest of religious authorities that their sacred texts be obscure. For distinction between authority and clarity, Martha Nussbaum’s “The Professor of Parody,” New Republic,...
I've tried to explain that I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic, or perhaps I am optimistic and pessimistic by turns, depending on which set of assumptions I project from. (Sort like...
I wonder how much of this erosion of Roman Catholic Church moral authority results from the collapse of geocentrism playing out. The Catholic Church took a bold stand for the geocentrism of the...
If the "I" (Intelligence) part of "AI" (Artificial Intelligence) holds true, then ever since late 2022 when ChatGPT triggered the current wave of public-facing AI LLM chatbots,...
Just a reminder: ever since I've been posting on DC, I have said many, many times that (any) religion is based on a fairy tale. So comparing religion to movies and cartoons, it's not...
Well, sadly I don't share your optimism about AI. Sure it will do away with trucking jobs and other similar jobs but it won't raise human intelligence. There's a saying going around,...