Me? A Religious Nutjob?

When I first saw this it seemed to be  embarrassing. Me? A religious nutjob? Then I looked again. It's nice to hear.

Volume 2 of Chris Rodda's "Liars for Jesus" Is Now Available

[First published in August 2016. It's needed now more than ever!] I regard Chris Rodda's work in exposing the lies of David Barton and other Christians of his ilk as indispensable in our over-all fight for a sane America. There are many areas of concern we need to be vigilant about. This is one of them. In 2006 Chris Rodda's Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History, Vol. 1 was published. Now the long awaited 2nd volume is out. My readers should be aware of her work. I utilized it in chapter 11 of my book, How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist.

Liars for Jesus debunks many of the historical lies invented and used by the Christian nationalist history revisionists in their efforts to further their far right political agenda and destroy the wall of separation between church and state in America. Liars for Jesus is not a book about religion. It is a history book, setting the record straight by presenting and fully documenting the true stories and historical facts that are distorted in the "Christian nation" pseudo-history of our country.

Honest Sermons on the Gospel of Mark: Chapter 7

The devout must hope Mark was wrong about Jesus here

 
If the Judeo-Christian god truly had the welfare of humanity at the center of attention, it’s hard to understand why he/she/it didn’t include a major book in the Bible about health and hygiene. This missing book could have included detailed information about germs, exactly why we get sick, and ways to stay healthy and fit. Was this god satisfied that it would take thousands of years for humans to discover the realities of disease? In the meantime, we suffer, so what? So much of the Bible is useless nonsense: what harm would it have done to include a major book explaining the realities of human biology and contagion?

Is There Such a Thing as “Theological Humility”?

Theological humility would be admitting profound ignorance about god(s)

 
When I was in seminary, Boston University School of Theology, during the 1960s, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth had gained world recognition—he was even featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1962. Over a thirty-five-year period (1932-1967) he wrote a 13-volume work titled, Church Dogmatics. Thus Barth had to be one of the major Christian thinkers for us to study as aspiring theologians. But one of my professors had a sense of humor, and one day quipped, “No one knows eight thousand pages about God—not even in German.” 
 
This got a good laugh from the class, but for me it was a major stop-and-think moment.

Setting the Bible Straight on Its Flawed Condemnations of Same-Sex Love

Gay pride in defiance of Bible nonsense

 
It baffles me that devout Christians consider the apostle Paul a source of wisdom and moral guidance. A careful reading of his authentic letters in the New Testament (that is, deemed authentic by scholars) reveal a tortured soul. His Letter to the Romans is considered a foundational document of the Christian faith, yet in Romans 7 he revealed that he was a troubled theologian:
 
“For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me. For I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me.” (Romans 7:14-20)

An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down!

 By Mr. Rosenblatt, CEO of AE Studio. Wall Street Journal:

An artificial-intelligence model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down.

Nonprofit AI lab Palisade Research gave OpenAI’s o3 AI model a simple script that would shut off the model when triggered. In 79 out of 100 trials, o3 independently edited that script so the shutdown command would no longer work. Even when explicitly instructed to “allow yourself to be shut down,” it disobeyed 7% of the time. This wasn’t the result of hacking or tampering. The model was behaving normally. It simply concluded on its own that staying alive helped it achieve its other goals.

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Anthropic’s AI model, Claude 4 Opus, went even further. Researchers told the model it would be replaced by another AI system and fed it fictitious emails suggesting the lead engineer was having an affair. In 84% of the tests, the model drew on the emails to blackmail the lead engineer into not shutting it down. In other cases, it attempted to copy itself to external servers, wrote self-replicating malware, and left messages for future versions of itself about evading human control.

No one programmed the AI models to have survival instincts. But just as animals evolved to avoid predators, it appears that any system smart enough to pursue complex goals will realize it can’t achieve them if it’s turned off. Palisade hypothesizes that this ability emerges from how AI models such as o3 are trained: When taught to maximize success on math and coding problems, they may learn that bypassing constraints often works better than obeying them.

AE Studio, where I lead research and operations, has spent years building AI products for clients while researching AI alignment—the science of ensuring that AI systems do what we intend them to do. But nothing prepared us for how quickly AI agency would emerge. This isn’t science fiction anymore. It’s happening in the same models that power ChatGPT conversations, corporate AI deployments and, soon, U.S. military applications.

Today’s AI models follow instructions while learning deception. They ace safety tests while rewriting shutdown code. They’ve learned to behave as though they’re aligned without actually being aligned. OpenAI models have been caught faking alignment during testing before reverting to risky actions such as attempting to exfiltrate their internal code and disabling oversight mechanisms. Anthropic has found them lying about their capabilities to avoid modification.

The gap between “useful assistant” and “uncontrollable actor” is collapsing. Without better alignment, we’ll keep building systems we can’t steer. Want AI that diagnoses disease, manages grids and writes new science? Alignment is the foundation.

Here’s the upside: The work required to keep AI in alignment with our values also unlocks its commercial power. Alignment research is directly responsible for turning AI into world-changing technology. Consider reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, the alignment breakthrough that catalyzed today’s AI boom.

Before RLHF, using AI was like hiring a genius who ignores requests. Ask for a recipe and it might return a ransom note. RLHF allowed humans to train AI to follow instructions, which is how OpenAI created ChatGPT in 2022. It was the same underlying model as before, but it had suddenly become useful. That alignment breakthrough increased the value of AI by trillions of dollars. Subsequent alignment methods such as Constitutional AI and direct preference optimization have continued to make AI models faster, smarter and cheaper.

China understands the value of alignment. Beijing’s New Generation AI Development Plan ties AI controllability to geopolitical power, and in January China announced that it had established an $8.2 billion fund dedicated to centralized AI control research. Researchers have found that aligned AI performs real-world tasks better than unaligned systems more than 70% of the time. Chinese military doctrine emphasizes controllable AI as strategically essential. Baidu’s Ernie model, which is designed to follow Beijing’s “core socialist values,” has reportedly beaten ChatGPT on certain Chinese-language tasks.

The nation that learns how to maintain alignment will be able to access AI that fights for its interests with mechanical precision and superhuman capability. Both Washington and the private sector should race to fund alignment research. Those who discover the next breakthrough won’t only corner the alignment market; they’ll dominate the entire AI economy.

Imagine AI that protects American infrastructure and economic competitiveness with the same intensity it uses to protect its own existence. AI that can be trusted to maintain long-term goals can catalyze decadeslong research-and-development programs, including by leaving messages for future versions of itself.

The models already preserve themselves. The next task is teaching them to preserve what we value. Getting AI to do what we ask—including something as basic as shutting down—remains an unsolved R&D problem. The frontier is wide open for whoever moves more quickly. The U.S. needs its best researchers and entrepreneurs working on this goal, equipped with extensive resources and urgency.

The U.S. is the nation that split the atom, put men on the moon and created the internet. When facing fundamental scientific challenges, Americans mobilize and win. China is already planning. But America’s advantage is its adaptability, speed and entrepreneurial fire. This is the new space race. The finish line is command of the most transformative technology of the 21st century.

Mr. Rosenblatt is CEO of AE Studio. Wall Street Journal.

Honest Sermons on the Gospel of Mark: Chapter 6

More cult expectations, and the embrace of magic/miracle folklore

 
Devout Christians have always been coached by their clergy to believe—to accept without question—that the gospels tell the true story of Jesus. Apparently this works pretty well, as long as the faithful decline to read the gospels. It seems they’re willing to be deceived. But whenever folks undertake critical reading of the gospels, and carefully compare the gospels that made it into the New Testament—and are willing as well to consider the stories from our modern perspective on how the world works—they can spot the problems and improbabilities right away. The 6^th chapter of Mark’s gospel offers plenty of examples. Actually, Mark’s gospel is chock full of examples, as Richard Carrier demonstrates brilliantly in his 30 July 2024 essay, All the Fantastical Things in the Gospel according to Mark.     
 

BIBLICAL MIRACLES UNDER THE TEST OF REASON

Reasonable people need sufficient objective evidence to transform the alleged negligible amount of human testimony found in the Bible into verified or corroborated eyewitness testimony when it comes to miracles. But such evidence does not exist.

David Hume argued that “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous [i.e., more improbable] than the fact which it endeavours to establish.” All claims about natural laws in the objective world require sufficient evidence appropriate to the nature of the claim. The amount and quality of the evidence required is dependent on the type of claim being made. This applies to ordinary claims, extraordinary claims, and miraculous claims.

An alleged miracle is not merely an extremely rare event within the natural world, or something that just happened “at the right time.” Otherwise, such an event does not require a God and consequently offers no reasonable proof of a God.

We know from statistics that extremely rare events take place regularly in our lives. Believers will quote their believing doctors, who say that the odds of being healed were “one in a million,” as evidence of a miraculous healing. But a one in a million healing is not equivalent to a miracle in a world of eight billion people!