No priest will feed sufficient context about their community into the context window - even if they were skilled enough to do so, unless the model was locally hosted, doing so would be a violation of their vows of silence.
Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind. If it were more effective to write a homily for a generic public, the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long ago.
I was raised Catholic and even though the last time I've been to a church could have been in 2019, I don't remember any priest who wouldn't just gloss over the religious content for the day (copied from an online source), itching to share his politics and the most recent ragebait he's got from Facebook at the end.
That's a bit harsh! I go to mass every Sunday (in France) and rarely have political stuff.
When there, it's most often about abortion or euthanasia (of course in a pro-life (or anti-choice) direction, "you shall not kill")
But dull, empty homilies are (alas) very frequent.
Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been three minutes since I shit posted on HN, and my greentext stories are famous on 4chan. Also, after lunch today I send 300 emails to Jeffrey Epstein using my work email and signed with my real name. What a great guy!
Its more than a nit. It only applies to confession so putting in other private information would not break a vow, but it would still be a very bad thing to do.
Bro as a kid I used to go to church every Sunday and I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying, including the priest himself, who was simply reading whatever higher-ups had given him. It was perfect slop because literally nobody cared about the content, it was all form - it needed to sound important and complicated enough to be able to be used in religious rituals. This is an excellent use case for LLMs because they excel at exactly that.
Imagine a bunch of bushmen trying to perform the spell of rain. It doesn't matter what they sing, as long as it sounds like something that could pass as the spell of rain, because the goal here isn't to make rain happen, it's to strengthen the community through shared rituals. 99% of religious activities are exactly this.
>>Bro as a kid I used to go to church every Sunday
I mean, not to dismiss your experience, but in my weekly Sunday going to church in Poland the priest would write an actual homily that felt relevant to the community. But then our small town had 3 churches, and each one had a different style - people would talk about preferring one over the other because they had more interesting "content".
But yeah, there was the message from the regional Bishop or the Archbishop of Poland or sometimes directly from the Vatican, then the reading from the old testament, then the homily which I'm 99% was written by the priest giving the mass.
>> I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying
Well, I wouldn't say not a single person did, but yeah, we had those 3 churches, probably 10k seats each, every one was rammed on the sunday, but I'd say 90% of people there were only there to tick it off and snoozed through the whole thing. But it's not because the homily was boring, it's because going to church on sunday was(maybe still is?) a thing you have to do or people will make fun out of you.
Not defending the use of AI, but plenty of people who grew up going to Mass on Sunday know that priests often recycle old homilies, deliver lazily written homilies or homilies that were clearly pulled from the internet, or just skip them if they couldn't think of anything that week or are running late for something.
Absolute worst was when an intelligent priest put in incredible effort, only for it to go over the heads of the yokels in their parish who want a simpler homily.
If it actually went over their heads, then the effort was wasted. I've heard hte goal of preaching described thus: "Address the mind to move the heart to change the will." If you haven't addressed the minds of the people you're speaking to, your preaching was a failure.
NB if the people in the parish don't want to change their will, and so close up their minds, that's a different issue.
Yeah I think that happened to me yesterday. We had a new priest (actually retired and visiting) and the homily was 10x more engaging than the normal ones. I fear that the rest of the congregation didn't like that he wasn't using cheap techniques like constant repetition and that the content was more elevated about what was really meant by the authors of part of Genesis.
How are bad human-written homilies worse than AI written ones?
But if you like the idea: you don't need a priest for that at all! A QR code with a prompt will do just fine in this case.
There is no person in the world that is capable of weekly delivery of meaningful insight into your life. Or any topic, to be honest. AI won't solve that, it just "recycles old homilies".
Again, not defending the use of AI. My comment was more as a general response to people who maybe don't have a real life experience of listening to Catholic homilies and have unrealistic ideas of how much effort priests would normally put into them pre-ChatGPT.
In retrospect, I probably should have replied to a specific comment.
The article seems to be overreacting to a small part of Pope Leo's talk. It seems to me his real point was that using AI to hasten writing homilies leads priests to treat this work as busy work instead of thoughtful, focused work.
LLMs are amazing, I love them, but he is right. When it comes to interacting with your fellow humans, using AI just sucks the point and meaning out of life. If we wanted to know what Claude thought, we’d ask him. Don’t be a mouthpiece for AI.
This is true but seems to be orthogonal to the post you replied to.
At a further tangent, I encounter people saying "well it's on Google" as they seem to think Google has some authority or quality threshold.
There's an interesting parallel here with code generation. The best code written with AI assistance still requires someone who deeply understands what they're building. The AI is a tool for expression, not a replacement for thought.
A homily written by someone who spent the week reflecting on their community's struggles will always be more meaningful than a polished AI-generated one, even if the grammar is worse. The value of a sermon isn't in the prose quality — it's in the authenticity of someone who actually cares about the people listening.
Francis is basically saying: the medium is the message. If you outsource the thinking, you're outsourcing the caring.
When you stop to think of it, historically people have told their secrets to the church, now they also tell them to AI. There is some kind of relation there, the power that people willingly give to an organization. The Ads are coming so I guess people will start to think about it a bit more.
To the best of my knowledge, traditional confessions have always been processed locally, not sent upstream¹.
AFAICT, it is much harder to get a priest to reveal your confession than it is to get a log of your ChatGPT sessions.
¹) I first wrote "not sent to the cloud", but if God is all-knowing, records of all sins are already in the cloud, just not accessible by support staff.
The system in question is a distributed system, an interaction within that system such as "confession" involves ridiculous amounts of distributed processing, far beyond two nodes that were participating in that original exchange.
"The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."
"God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."
"The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."
"The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization."
for whatever merit it may achieve, concentrated attack upon religion fails to account for resultantly deprecated cultural aspects that are vital to continued functioning society, and this blind spot is not discussed often enough - in this case ,confession to a priest is significantly less evil than confession to sam altmans torture machine in the making
I am sorry if you read it as an attack on religion, it was an attack on big AI.
If religion sends or even needs to send data upstream is not part of my knowledge, but AI does. But church did have the best understanding of who is who in a local society and AI companies will use this data in a more concrete way. I just drew the parallel to get the gears spinning. I agree that the organized religion was crucial glue to society trough history.
The mind virus will not stop spreading, making corporations do your critical thinking is not a good path. People will become dependent on a subscription service for everyday life.
Right, that's why they have massive churches adorned with gold and intricate sculptures. Just because it technically isn't required to pay does not mean that years of brainwashing won't condition you to give your money away. I've only been a few times, but seeing old people queue up to give a sizable part of their pension to the church just made me sad.
Where does the money come from? Religious services are generally funded by donations, and these donations are usually done in the open, whereby (from what I saw) regularly attending and not donating the expected amount would put you in a socially uncomfortable situation.
No reason anyone would would feel social discomfort in my experience, which is mostly in Catholic and Anglican churches, and AFAIK money comes mostly from donations not made in public. I have not felt the least worried about what people would think when I have not had cash on me or about how much I put in.
Depending on the definition of services you are using (e.g. you only mean masses in a Catholic Church, or everything else churches do) lots of things are done without a link to donating: prayers and meditation of other kinds/formats, confession, pastoral care, food banks, religious education and discussion.... In poor countries often things like medical services.
Done the traditional way, no one can really see how much you put in the box and there is no reaction at all from anyone if you put nothing in. Only people right next to you can see anything at all.
Now churches in the UK offer envelopes on which you can write your name and postcode for tax reasons (they can reclaim part of the tax paid on the donation if you are a UK tax payer) so no one can see how much you put in if its in such an envelope.
As a massive hedge fund with insane holdings managed by complex legal nuances & historical treaties, juggling critically withheld information, and having an outsize political presence as an independent state (thanks Benito Mussolini!), The Vatican has great financial incentive to have smart quants, historians, lawyers, and others on the payroll.
Based on their balance sheets I think they get it very, very, well.
Steve Jobs took a vow of poverty at Apple, too… somehow, some way, the dividends and stocks and private planes and fancy business dinners and everyone kissing his ass made a $1 salary survivable. Poor guy.
The pope does hold a title, "pontifex maximus", that is older than Christianity itself and goes back to the foundation of Rome. For a while it was unified with the emperor seat.
There is no reason to doubt that Jesus lived in the Roman Empire, once you believe that he lived at all. And there is no reason whatsoever to doubt that the church formed in Rome. All known world was Rome at the time. From Britain to Morocco to the Middle East.
Huh, this was an absolutely fascinating read. Kind of feel like the Vatican nailed it with this one lol. Did not have that statement on my 2026 bingo card. Wise words and perspective.
I don’t know about popes, but many prominent mathematicians, philosophers and early scientists were priests or monks: Mendel, Copernicus, Bayes, Ockham, Bolzano... It was pretty much the only way to get the kind of education, intellectual culture, time and focus required for hundreds of years (at least in Europe), until the upper-middle class widened around the enlightenment and industrial revolution.
The friction between the church and science is a relatively new phenomenon, at least at the current scale. There are always exceptions like Galileo, but it took science a long time to start answering (and contradicting) some of the key questions about our world and where we come from that religion addresses.
> The friction between the church and science is a relatively new phenomenon, at least at the current scale
Current scale? What current friction do you have in mind. I honestly cannot think of anything with the Catholic church. Lots of friction with evangelical Biblical literalists, of course, but the Catholic Church is not literalist.
> There are always exceptions like Galileo
The Galileo case is more about personalities and politics. it is a very good example of why religious authority should be in the same hands as secular power, but it is not really about his beliefs - no one else (including Copernicus) faced opposition for the same ideas.
Every honest description of Catholic Church, as any institution of this size and history, needs to be very nuanced. One of such nuances is a fact that it was one of the main, and sometimes strictly main, supporters and drivers of education and scientific progress. Other such nuance is that it very often punished and persecuted attempts to bring education and scientific progress.
Both views of the Church are true. That's what nuance is.
More advancements... No being opposed to actual enlightenment, because it doesn't sit well with the institution of power...
I am talking about a real man of science here of course, not some egoistic, smart person that needs to be constantly prove they are the smartest or else their frail ego will collapse... Which there are plenty of in academia and science.
Exactly. We tend to forget that the crusades were an efficient way of assigning land (scarce) to the cadet branches of ruling families (abundant), or die trying.
the catholic church has traditionally been pro-science, the contrast with science is a modern development. There's a ton of Catholic clergy who were scientists[0], many of those well known (Mersenne, Mendel, Copernicus, Venturi etc).
Even the epitome of the science-church conflict, the Galileo story, started from a scientific disagreement before the religious one[1].
They often were. A lot of history has been retold more in a way to fit contemporary narrative than to maintain historical accuracy. For instance Galileo. The typical tale is something like Galileo dared claim the Earth is not the center of the universe, the Church freaked out at the violation of dogma, shunned him, and he was lucky to escape with his life. In reality the Pope was one of Galileo's biggest supporters and patrons. But they disagreed on heliocentrism vs geocentricism.
The Pope encouraged Galileo to write a book about the issue and cover both sides in neutrality. Galileo did write a book, but was rather on the Asperger's side of social behavior, and decided to frame the geocentric position (which aligned with the Pope) as idiotic, defended by an idiot - named Simplicio no less, and presented weak and easily dismantled arguments. The Pope took it as a personal insult, which it was, and the rest is history.
And notably Galileo's theory was, in general, weak. Amongst many other issues he continued to assume perfectly circular orbits which threw everything else off and required endless epicycles and the like. So his theory was still very much in the domain of philosophy rather than observable/provable science or even a clear improvement, so he was just generally acting like an antagonistic ass to a person who had supported him endlessly. And as it turns out even the Pope is quite human.
If you step outside and watch the stars, and map them, you'd also come to the conclusion of a geocentric universe yourself. The nature of the sky makes it appear that everything is regularly revolving around us. And incidentally you can even create astronomical predictions based upon this assumption that are highly accurate. You end up needing to assume epicycle upon epicycle, but Galileo's theory was no better there since the same is true when you assume circular orbits.
So what made Galileo decide otherwise was not any particular flaw with geocentricism, but rather he thought that he'd discovered that the tides of the ocean were caused by the Sun. That is incorrect and also led to false predictions (like places only having one high tide), so the basis for his theory was incorrect, as were many assumptions made around it. But it was still interesting and worth debating. Had he treated 'the other side' with dignity and respect, it's entirely possible that we would have adopted a heliocentric view far faster than we ultimately did.
The thing that made him question geocentrism was that Venus quite visibly orbits the Sun.
It has always been known that the tides are caused by the Moon. The hard part is to predict the tides in detail, as they depend on the geography as well. Some of the first computers were invented to predict the tides.
There were definitely two sides at the time in people's minds. He could have presented the geocentric position as being based on theories that were justified only by inductive reasoning, and contrasted that with his own observations and why they provide a more accurate view of the universe.
Neutral writing only means that it is not overtly prejudiced, and the weight of the evidence speaks for itself. That's definitely not what Galileo wrote. He was eventually widely considered to be right, but that didn't help him any.
I think incomplete would be a better description; it was roughly right for our solar system and far more right than thinking everything revolved around the earth.
Even better is, 'I aim at the Stars! (but sometimes I hit London)'.
"I Aim at the Stars" was the name of a real biographical movie made about him in the 60s. It feels like that exact title had to have been chosen, at least partly, tongue in cheek.
The Catholic Church was funding a lot of research for a long time. E.g the Elon Musk of his time, Galileo, was famously sponsored by it and when asked to contrast his theories against the established view, sperged out so hard against the people tasked with reviewing his publications, they tossed him under the carriage.
There is no face. The depictions of God the Father are relatively new (in the history of the church; it's still Renaissance). Some people used to have problem with them (Jesus can be depicted, as he was a man, but can be Father?) but then it calmed down.
If people think it's literally a face in the sky, they are probably mentally challenged.
You mean during the Napoleonic wars? Science was already fully embraced by then. Or do you think the Austrians and the French were casting spells against each other instead of firing cannon?
Google was designed to give you access to knowledge, not think for you and atrophy your brain..
LLMs will melt your brain, and that's by design. You will have no bargaining power , you will be inadequate without access to the Thinking for me SaaS that you allow your brain to become addicted too. You will become a technocratic feudal slave, a serf reliant on the whichever tech-oligarch lets you use their thinking machine. They will pay you pennies.
Guarding your heart with elegant nonsense you don't really mean is a classic defensive posture, and probably is directly impeding their ability to be present in emotionally intense (and often difficult) situations. It reminded me of this:
>There is a scene in the opening of Into the Abyss. Werner Herzog is interviewing a Reverend who in fifteen minutes will go in to be with a boy as the boy is led to the gurney to be executed by injection.
>The Reverend is talking about how the Lord works in mysterious ways, and so on—it is exactly the type of conversation you want to avoid. It is very ChatGPT. It is the Reverend repeating things he’s said before—words that protect him, that allow him to perform the role of Reverend, instead of being what he is: a man named Lopez, who will soon have to watch a boy die.
>At one point, the Reverend, as a part of a monologue about the beauty of God’s creation, mentions that he sometimes meditates on the beauty of the squirrels he sees on the golf course. Herzog, standing in a graveyard with nameless crosses, says, with mad Bavarian seriousness, “Please describe an encounter with a squirrel.”
>Lopez is a bit surprised by the question, but he takes it in a playful spirit—his voice lifts, joyously. He starts to talk faster. (This is where the conversation shifts into the type you want.) He is no longer saying versions of things he has said before, he’s not protecting himself, he’s just there.
>From that point on, it takes about ten seconds before he’s crying.
>In interviews, Herzog likes to mention this conversation to explain his craft. “But how on earth did you know to say that?” says the interviewer. “Were you just trying to say something unexpected to unbalance him?” “No, it was not random”, Herzog says. “I knew I had to say those exact words. Because I know the heart of men.”
I've been paying attention to Sherry Turkle since I caught this show over the summer. She was on a panel at Davos titled "Swipe Left on Reality" which was the first time I heard her use the phrase "frictionless relationships" to describe what interacting with Ai is like.
Every word of hers is dripping with wisdom, and I feel not enough people are paying attention to her. She talks of "artificial intimacy" and "pretend empathy" and how people are addicted to ChatGPT and its ilk primarily because of the pretension / sycophancy, and choosing that over the real-life friction, disagreements and negotiation required and necessary for healthy relationships IRL. And how social media is a gateway drug to chatbots.
I'll accept your perspective and try to learn from it.
However I think that the comment is relevant, and you can see from the replies gathered before it was flagged that it did spark a relevant discussion.
Reminding that the speaker is a spiritual leader and not an authority on the use of technology is not a sneer and and not an ideological statement. In any context other than religion, which I understand is sensitive, a statement of that sort would be considered a contribution to the discussion, not an ideological battle. And that's precisely the problem - censoring a discussion about the relevance of religion to the matter is the ideological act.
The phrase “supernatural woowoo” is clearly against the guidelines I cited, as is age-old cynicism about the validity of religion or intellectual merits of anyone who believes in it. We're here for intellectual curiosity, not the same old predictable thing.
Thanks for clarifying. I can see the point. Would a phrasing like "The pope believes in and promotes supernatural claims that are not supported by evidence" work better? On reflection I would have preferred that too.
I agree. I personally listen to Sam Altman on these types of matters. He's someone with much more extensive qualifications than the pope!
Edit: it looks like I was wrong about this and Sam Altman has no formal qualifications. I still think he has probably picked up a lot of life experience over the years.
They could even finally be a source for good if they’d actually use some of the billions they collect.
Has anyone actually directly encountered a single vatican sponsored charity or program in the wild? It seems quite a morally bankrupt organisation to me, and i’m not sure what if anything it really has to do with Christianity or Christians anyore.
From the Wikipedia page on the Catholic Church: "By means of Catholic charities and beyond, the Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world."
Just yesterday I went to see a presentation of a priest appointed to a massive parish in the rural area of South Sudan, setting up schools and bringing in aid.
> the Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world.
Hm. In germany Catholic day care is funded by the state ie taxes by over 90%. Military chaplains 100%. Would be surprised if the difference is bigger in schools and hospitals. I heard that in France there is an actual separation of church and state and as a result the church is rather poor.
I don't know enough about the current Vatican affairs. But as an anecdotal experience, I was born at a catholic hospital at a small town in Southeast Asia. And they're the best managed hospitals in the area. I'm not even religious or catholic but I respect what they did here
I do believe (believe, not know) that consciousness is something bigger than we know, I can even believe in panpsychism sometimes but I don't think any religion have any real clue about the nature of consciousness.
It's not something we can pinpoint in any experiment, even not clear how to design one in theory. Yet we know by our very personal experience that it exists. Sounds pretty supernatural to me.
Hm, how does one not get into that conclusion? Most everyone would agree we have the concept of "selfness", yet I don't think there's a scientific theory to explain how a set of physiochemical processes can have that endresult to an observer, any more than a computer has the idea of "me".
I'm not religious in the least bit, but this is a case where I'll take of the words of a guy with significant influence saying we shouldn't let a machine make our minds irrelevant as a win.
The AI bros believe in and promote superficial woowoo. They are cult leaders and con men, not an authority on anything else. I wouldn't take advice from them on anything.
People can tell. The premise is false. It’s sometimes hard to tell, obviously it’s hard to ascertain false negatives and false positives, but it’s usually pretty obvious.
I genuinely don’t understand AI people anymore. Like the cognitive gap is so huge that I feel like I’m from another planet now. Im not religious, but automating religion is so absolutely meaningless that it boggles my mind. You could have a machine emit million of prayers up to heaven per second, but why would you?
And despite what you think, most of us can tell apart AI generated content from the genuine thing. I am, however, starting to believe AI bros are being sincere when they tell us that they can’t. Every time someone gives me that tired “well how do you know we’re not just stochastic parrots too!” crap, I’m getting a little closer to taking their word for it. Maybe they are just that.
I used to worry that the problem was that LLMs allowed you to be stupid, but I recently realized the actual problem is that they reward you for being stupid.
Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind. If it were more effective to write a homily for a generic public, the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long ago.
But dull, empty homilies are (alas) very frequent.
But they will try, and they'll share a lot of potentially private information in the process.
https://associationofcatholicpriests.ie/liturgy/sunday-resou...
Imagine a bunch of bushmen trying to perform the spell of rain. It doesn't matter what they sing, as long as it sounds like something that could pass as the spell of rain, because the goal here isn't to make rain happen, it's to strengthen the community through shared rituals. 99% of religious activities are exactly this.
I mean, not to dismiss your experience, but in my weekly Sunday going to church in Poland the priest would write an actual homily that felt relevant to the community. But then our small town had 3 churches, and each one had a different style - people would talk about preferring one over the other because they had more interesting "content".
But yeah, there was the message from the regional Bishop or the Archbishop of Poland or sometimes directly from the Vatican, then the reading from the old testament, then the homily which I'm 99% was written by the priest giving the mass.
>> I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying
Well, I wouldn't say not a single person did, but yeah, we had those 3 churches, probably 10k seats each, every one was rammed on the sunday, but I'd say 90% of people there were only there to tick it off and snoozed through the whole thing. But it's not because the homily was boring, it's because going to church on sunday was(maybe still is?) a thing you have to do or people will make fun out of you.
Absolute worst was when an intelligent priest put in incredible effort, only for it to go over the heads of the yokels in their parish who want a simpler homily.
If it actually went over their heads, then the effort was wasted. I've heard hte goal of preaching described thus: "Address the mind to move the heart to change the will." If you haven't addressed the minds of the people you're speaking to, your preaching was a failure.
NB if the people in the parish don't want to change their will, and so close up their minds, that's a different issue.
But if you like the idea: you don't need a priest for that at all! A QR code with a prompt will do just fine in this case.
There is no person in the world that is capable of weekly delivery of meaningful insight into your life. Or any topic, to be honest. AI won't solve that, it just "recycles old homilies".
In retrospect, I probably should have replied to a specific comment.
You would be surprised how many people don't do this. It's very common for people to ask others questions that could be easily googled or clauded.
A homily written by someone who spent the week reflecting on their community's struggles will always be more meaningful than a polished AI-generated one, even if the grammar is worse. The value of a sermon isn't in the prose quality — it's in the authenticity of someone who actually cares about the people listening.
Francis is basically saying: the medium is the message. If you outsource the thinking, you're outsourcing the caring.
Also I believe we're talking about Leo not Francis.
AFAICT, it is much harder to get a priest to reveal your confession than it is to get a log of your ChatGPT sessions.
¹) I first wrote "not sent to the cloud", but if God is all-knowing, records of all sins are already in the cloud, just not accessible by support staff.
I heard there is a GDPR'esque Right of access(SAR) to see your records if you ask for it nicely in person.
"God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."
"The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."
"The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization."
—Morpheus, Deus Ex
We're already reliant on big tech regarding what information is presented to us and LLMs are just the next step in that direction.
Depending on the definition of services you are using (e.g. you only mean masses in a Catholic Church, or everything else churches do) lots of things are done without a link to donating: prayers and meditation of other kinds/formats, confession, pastoral care, food banks, religious education and discussion.... In poor countries often things like medical services.
Done the traditional way, no one can really see how much you put in the box and there is no reaction at all from anyone if you put nothing in. Only people right next to you can see anything at all.
Now churches in the UK offer envelopes on which you can write your name and postcode for tax reasons (they can reclaim part of the tax paid on the donation if you are a UK tax payer) so no one can see how much you put in if its in such an envelope.
"ANTIQUA ET NOVA
Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence"
I was quite impressed at how much they "get it".
Based on their balance sheets I think they get it very, very, well.
Steve Jobs took a vow of poverty at Apple, too… somehow, some way, the dividends and stocks and private planes and fancy business dinners and everyone kissing his ass made a $1 salary survivable. Poor guy.
Which is an exaggeration, but makes you thinking. This institution still has a ton of power.
The friction between the church and science is a relatively new phenomenon, at least at the current scale. There are always exceptions like Galileo, but it took science a long time to start answering (and contradicting) some of the key questions about our world and where we come from that religion addresses.
Current scale? What current friction do you have in mind. I honestly cannot think of anything with the Catholic church. Lots of friction with evangelical Biblical literalists, of course, but the Catholic Church is not literalist.
> There are always exceptions like Galileo
The Galileo case is more about personalities and politics. it is a very good example of why religious authority should be in the same hands as secular power, but it is not really about his beliefs - no one else (including Copernicus) faced opposition for the same ideas.
Every honest description of Catholic Church, as any institution of this size and history, needs to be very nuanced. One of such nuances is a fact that it was one of the main, and sometimes strictly main, supporters and drivers of education and scientific progress. Other such nuance is that it very often punished and persecuted attempts to bring education and scientific progress.
Both views of the Church are true. That's what nuance is.
Often? Very rarely, and the motive was never to stop progress - it was side effect of something else.
More advancements... No being opposed to actual enlightenment, because it doesn't sit well with the institution of power...
I am talking about a real man of science here of course, not some egoistic, smart person that needs to be constantly prove they are the smartest or else their frail ego will collapse... Which there are plenty of in academia and science.
And started(?) Jews being killed in Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres
Moral virtue has nothing to do with being a man of science, and many men of science lacked it completely.
Even the epitome of the science-church conflict, the Galileo story, started from a scientific disagreement before the religious one[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_Mersenne
[0] https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...
The Pope encouraged Galileo to write a book about the issue and cover both sides in neutrality. Galileo did write a book, but was rather on the Asperger's side of social behavior, and decided to frame the geocentric position (which aligned with the Pope) as idiotic, defended by an idiot - named Simplicio no less, and presented weak and easily dismantled arguments. The Pope took it as a personal insult, which it was, and the rest is history.
And notably Galileo's theory was, in general, weak. Amongst many other issues he continued to assume perfectly circular orbits which threw everything else off and required endless epicycles and the like. So his theory was still very much in the domain of philosophy rather than observable/provable science or even a clear improvement, so he was just generally acting like an antagonistic ass to a person who had supported him endlessly. And as it turns out even the Pope is quite human.
The geocentric position is silly and wrong. There are no two sides here.
So what made Galileo decide otherwise was not any particular flaw with geocentricism, but rather he thought that he'd discovered that the tides of the ocean were caused by the Sun. That is incorrect and also led to false predictions (like places only having one high tide), so the basis for his theory was incorrect, as were many assumptions made around it. But it was still interesting and worth debating. Had he treated 'the other side' with dignity and respect, it's entirely possible that we would have adopted a heliocentric view far faster than we ultimately did.
It has always been known that the tides are caused by the Moon. The hard part is to predict the tides in detail, as they depend on the geography as well. Some of the first computers were invented to predict the tides.
Neutral writing only means that it is not overtly prejudiced, and the weight of the evidence speaks for itself. That's definitely not what Galileo wrote. He was eventually widely considered to be right, but that didn't help him any.
The Tychonic model was probably the one best supported by evidence.
its worth bearing in mind that the Copernican model is also badly wrong - the sun is not the centre of the universe, just the solar system.
"I Aim at the Stars" was the name of a real biographical movie made about him in the 60s. It feels like that exact title had to have been chosen, at least partly, tongue in cheek.
It turns out that scientific brilliance has basically zero overlap with ethical wisdom. Science is great, but it’s not a replacement for philosophy.
If people think it's literally a face in the sky, they are probably mentally challenged.
>The first use of firearms as primary offensive weapons came in the 1421 Battle of Kutná Hora.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_firearm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_wheel
https://encourageandteach.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
LLMs will melt your brain, and that's by design. You will have no bargaining power , you will be inadequate without access to the Thinking for me SaaS that you allow your brain to become addicted too. You will become a technocratic feudal slave, a serf reliant on the whichever tech-oligarch lets you use their thinking machine. They will pay you pennies.
create-homily skill?
jesus mcp?
/request-transfer-to-Servants-of-the-Paraclete
On the other hand; the local parishes often love posting AI generated devotional pictures, and the laity loves it even more; and they look horrible.
I saw sooo many AI Marys.
>There is a scene in the opening of Into the Abyss. Werner Herzog is interviewing a Reverend who in fifteen minutes will go in to be with a boy as the boy is led to the gurney to be executed by injection.
>The Reverend is talking about how the Lord works in mysterious ways, and so on—it is exactly the type of conversation you want to avoid. It is very ChatGPT. It is the Reverend repeating things he’s said before—words that protect him, that allow him to perform the role of Reverend, instead of being what he is: a man named Lopez, who will soon have to watch a boy die.
>At one point, the Reverend, as a part of a monologue about the beauty of God’s creation, mentions that he sometimes meditates on the beauty of the squirrels he sees on the golf course. Herzog, standing in a graveyard with nameless crosses, says, with mad Bavarian seriousness, “Please describe an encounter with a squirrel.”
>Lopez is a bit surprised by the question, but he takes it in a playful spirit—his voice lifts, joyously. He starts to talk faster. (This is where the conversation shifts into the type you want.) He is no longer saying versions of things he has said before, he’s not protecting himself, he’s just there.
>From that point on, it takes about ten seconds before he’s crying.
>In interviews, Herzog likes to mention this conversation to explain his craft. “But how on earth did you know to say that?” says the interviewer. “Were you just trying to say something unexpected to unbalance him?” “No, it was not random”, Herzog says. “I knew I had to say those exact words. Because I know the heart of men.”
https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/looking-for-alice
"What to do when Ai says 'I love you'?" discusses this conundrum
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/g-s1177-78041/what-to-do-when...
I've been paying attention to Sherry Turkle since I caught this show over the summer. She was on a panel at Davos titled "Swipe Left on Reality" which was the first time I heard her use the phrase "frictionless relationships" to describe what interacting with Ai is like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C9Gb3rVMTg
Every word of hers is dripping with wisdom, and I feel not enough people are paying attention to her. She talks of "artificial intimacy" and "pretend empathy" and how people are addicted to ChatGPT and its ilk primarily because of the pretension / sycophancy, and choosing that over the real-life friction, disagreements and negotiation required and necessary for healthy relationships IRL. And how social media is a gateway drug to chatbots.
Recommended watch. (Thanks!)
Her book _Alone Together_ is also worth reading.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
However I think that the comment is relevant, and you can see from the replies gathered before it was flagged that it did spark a relevant discussion.
Reminding that the speaker is a spiritual leader and not an authority on the use of technology is not a sneer and and not an ideological statement. In any context other than religion, which I understand is sensitive, a statement of that sort would be considered a contribution to the discussion, not an ideological battle. And that's precisely the problem - censoring a discussion about the relevance of religion to the matter is the ideological act.
Edit: it looks like I was wrong about this and Sam Altman has no formal qualifications. I still think he has probably picked up a lot of life experience over the years.
Has anyone actually directly encountered a single vatican sponsored charity or program in the wild? It seems quite a morally bankrupt organisation to me, and i’m not sure what if anything it really has to do with Christianity or Christians anyore.
Just yesterday I went to see a presentation of a priest appointed to a massive parish in the rural area of South Sudan, setting up schools and bringing in aid.
Hm. In germany Catholic day care is funded by the state ie taxes by over 90%. Military chaplains 100%. Would be surprised if the difference is bigger in schools and hospitals. I heard that in France there is an actual separation of church and state and as a result the church is rather poor.
In the rest of the world the church is poorer but is still a leading provider of education and healthcare, especially in poor countries.
What else is there?
Man is just an animal.
Hey, so does Peter Thiel!
And despite what you think, most of us can tell apart AI generated content from the genuine thing. I am, however, starting to believe AI bros are being sincere when they tell us that they can’t. Every time someone gives me that tired “well how do you know we’re not just stochastic parrots too!” crap, I’m getting a little closer to taking their word for it. Maybe they are just that.
They simply follow (an)other god(s)... One of them clearly being Mammon.
Only one, and this doesn't apply only to AI grifters.
That AI can do it better - by what dimension? - than the priests is arguable, but the reason for a priest to write one is reflection, connection..
Have you ever considered that possibly performing something is not only a mean to some output but that the process is the thing?
That may or may not translate to your coding analogy, but for the article comment you pose, I think you are way off.
Hrm, this seems to be slop. Claude, gonna leave my phone in the pew, listen and give me a summary when it's over, I'll be in the car.