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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.

You have a lot of faith in the qualities of average priests.

Not sure what this is implying, but aspiring priests are required to have a Bachelor’s degree before entering Seminary, or it tacks at least two years onto a very rigorous six-year seminary program. The seminary program is on par with getting a Master’s degree in Philosophy and Theology. Further, only 30-50% of seminarians ultimately become ordained as priests, due to the rigorous vetting program and “discerning out.”

I know little about theology and philosophy but I’ve interviewed enough people with master’s degrees to be able to say that there a very large differences between skilled degree holders and average degree holders, at least in my field.

The selection process for Seminary and becoming Ordained is much more rigorous and difficult than a credentialing exercise that you pay for. I share your cynicism about masters programs, but I don't think it's applicable here. Funnily enough, my favorite professor in college was one of my math professors who was also a Catholic Priest and would say Mass on the weekends at the nearby chapel. Extremely hostile to using technology to teach us, except in very narrow circumstances, and I am all the better for it and so is everyone who had him. We have a much firmer grasp of the theory because he made us write it down (a lot). There are few things more rewarding in life than feeling that "click" in your brain that unlocks a new permanent level of understanding.

That would be the Catholic Church.

Other churches have varying degrees of requirements to become a priest.

To be fair, faith is the crux of Catholicism.

The crux of all religions. The only comparatevely harmless religions are the ones who don't claim that gods demand absolute obedience, but their orders are spoken through a chosen few; otherwise they're just a form of primitive government.

Which religion doesn't demand obedience?

Basically, any religion that considers gods uninvolved with human affairs, so they don't care about our obedience. Here's a start point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheistic_religion

Naturalistic religions, so called "paganism", also worshipped living beings or natural phenomena like a particularly big tree, a mountain, a forest, the Sun, etc. Some of these didn't demand obedience nor spoke through a ruling elite. Bonus points for worshipping things that could be verified as real.

There is a difference however, of faith based on evidence vs. faith based in no evidence. Without getting into too much details here since it is not the avenue, Islamic faith is strictly based on evidence.

If you have faith, why do you need brains? Just follow the AI!

/s

I assume this was intended as a joke, even if it is one that doesn’t land? Because it’s not clear what this could mean otherwise.

No, "faith" is actually an integral component of "the Christian faith".

Go read the first part of Acts 4, where a section closes with: "Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus." So...yes! We do believe in a God that can empower average people to speak in above-average ways.

The conversation was as follows:

> You have a lot of faith in the qualities of average priests. >> To be fair, faith is the crux of Catholicism.

So, in context (which the downvoters seem to have missed), "faith" is being used equivocally here. There a difference between having faith in Christ and his promises and faith in his claims of divinity on the one hand, and having "faith" in a priest or whatever else on the other. Hence, my question whether this was some kind of a bad attempt at humor or whether something was meant by it.

(FWIW, authentic Christian faith is not an arbitrary faith in anything you please. This is blind faith which is irrational. This is why we can speak of preambula fidei. There must be reasons for faith. When a friend tells you something about his inner life that you cannot know directly, you may believe him given an ensemble of evidence and reasons that cannot prove his claim definitively, but are nonetheless very supportive of it. Furthermore, the claim makes sense of what you do know about him.)

But part of the faith is faith that God can communicate through imperfect mortal vessels.

> Moses said to the Lord, “Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.”

> The Lord said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.”

Like, that's the whole deal about all of the prophets, popes, priesthood in general. They are all mortal and imperfect, but God still speaks through them.

> authentic Christian faith is not an arbitrary faith in anything you please

But he's not talking about an arbitrary faith. He's talking about faith in the capacity of priests -- clearly a relevant subject. And there are, indeed, _preambula fidei_ here: that the priest was taught in seminary, that the priest was approved by the Church, that the priest (through the bishop who ordained them) participates in a line of apostolic succession going back to Jesus, etc.

What? He already admitted that it was a bad joke.

What you've written is simply an intellectual jumble. What does faith (the theological virtue) and acceptance of the apostolic succession have to do with "faith" in the capacity of priests, here, as competent homilists?

use of "crux" is a little punny here too

but yeah faiths are into faith

shrug

99% of the jokes I've made throughout my life don't land. For better or worse, if I find something amusing I impulsively share it.

In this case, I thought it should be obvious that OP must have faith in priests, given that they're Catholic, which requires faith as a prereq.

If you read my comment as a slight against Catholicism, I can understand, but I wouldn't feel comfortable publicly joking about any religion other than my own. If that's the case, you're in good company, with the multitude of nuns who've admonished me for similar offhand comments spanning 20 years of Catholic education from pre-k to college, this is old hat for me.

God willing, I'll mature or start telling better jokes some day.

It landed for me...

I find it funny

Not much faith required on this one: either a given priest will have both strong familiarity with congregational context and the ability to articulate it as instructions to an LLM or they’ll be missing one of those two. If they’re missing the context themselves, well, they can’t feed it to the LLM and best case scenario is probably that they engage the process closely enough the whole way to learn something from it. If they lack the ability to articulate the whole context that they know but can intuitively work with it, then they’re more likely to meet needs than the LLM — and I’d guess this is a common case.

we have vibe coding priests before GTA VI

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This priest agrees with you, and has expressed concerns about mediocre homilies that don't speak to the concerns of the particular community: https://youtu.be/pgZXCPCATmc?si=FM4uj2owYBVK_8Mh

> the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long ago.

There actually are, but they are famous homilies from famous Church Fathers rather then explicitly produced to be standard homilies.

Yeah, the Liturgy of the Hours includes many of them. (Four volume prayer set.)

Well maybe they just need to start recording confessionals. Just imagine what Gemini 3.1 could do with 1M tokens of that stuff.

Gemini 3.1 – I don't remember that verse. Is that from the old testament?

It's from the Orange Catholic Bible, I think.

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

iam tempus pariendi venerat et ecce gemini in utero repperti sunt - Gen 25:24

You're absolutely right! You can repent on your deathbed and skip years of church attendance!

This is how you get Grok.

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!

There are resources that publish homilies for priests to give. Here is an example for English speakers.

https://associationofcatholicpriests.ie/liturgy/sunday-resou...

No priest will feed sufficient context about their community into the context window

But they will try, and they'll share a lot of potentially private information in the process.

Not to write homilies though. The real danger of risking exposing private information would be pastoral work.

all the homilies i've heard were pre-written but ended with current events... like telling the congregation to not vote for Obama heh. My wife was Catholic until that moment, she never went back after that. This was St. Rita's in Dallas TX.

If I heard that, I would be upset too.

Honestly she should have changed parishes. St Rita’s is in an affluent part of Dallas. One of the priests is a former Anglican(?) with wife and children who obtained a special dispensation.

I heard a lot of bad phone it in homilies too. Today one of my favorite priests is from Benin. He serves the Francophone community but also celebrates mass in English and Spanish. He is at Mary Immaculate in Farmers Branch. He is more traditional and gives the Catholic interpretation of the day’s readings and how it applies today.

American religions are supposed to stay out of politics, or they risk their tax-exempt status.

For me, the disturbing event was shortly before the 2016 event when a Catholic Church in Lowell MA had posters urging people to vote no on marijuana legalization.

(In my case, I smelt the politization when I was a teenager so I never continued being Catholic as an adult.)

The separation of church and state in the US was for the state to stay out of religion.

(the US was founded by religious exiles from a state which didn't stay out)

Religions are explicitly political but politics shouldn't interfere with religions. To follow your religion means interacting with the outside world. It's not some personally private thing like a harmless badge you wear (although there are American faith communities that advocate for that).

The cases in the past where political have interfered with religions are often, ironically enough, by other religious politicians. Hence the good idea to separate church and state.

From the horse's mouth:

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/charities-churches-and-politics

> In 1954, Congress approved an amendment by Sen. Lyndon Johnson to prohibit 501(c)(3) organizations, which includes charities and churches, from engaging in any political campaign activity. To the extent Congress has revisited the ban over the years, it has in fact strengthened the ban. The most recent change came in 1987 when Congress amended the language to clarify that the prohibition also applies to statements opposing candidates.

> Currently, the law prohibits political campaign activity by charities and churches by defining a 501(c)(3) organization as one "which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office."

There's a subtle irony of this rule, which is that in order to stay in compliance with this law a savvy Priest tends to weave more sophisticated moral teachings into their Homilies that make it very obvious what or who they are advocating for or against without explicitly naming them.

Religion is a powerful tool for politicians in sheep's clothing, but God's kingdom is "explicitly" (i.e. stated in the Bible to be) not of this earth.

Unfortunately, those laws are not currently enforced.

I see another reply is arguing that religion is inherently political. I disagree. Modern politics did not exist at the time the world's major religions were being formed. Attempting to twist them to fit with a particular party or candidate is a terrible idea all around in my book, for many reasons.

The state can cause a lot of damage by endorsing religion, the historical record is overflowing with examples. I'd argue that a religious body endorsing a state is every bit as potentially destructive. The government is at its best when it is neutral on the subject of faith and crafts policy in evidence-based ways that people of all (or at least most) faiths can agree upon. In this situation, there is no reason for a religious organization to promote such a government because their interests are orthogonal. They can cooperate, but there is a clear line between that and acting subservient, or declaring some sort of 'divine mandate' has been bequeathed upon a government institution or official.

The modern period where we take great pains to excise religion from the public sphere is not the historical norm. The norm is that many - if not most - political, and indeed geopolitical, events throughout history had religion woven into them. It is not difficult to find examples of this throughout European history and pre-history. I know you are making a statement on what you feel "ought to be", but I assure you this "ought" is not the usual course of business in world history. A solid quarter of people today live under regimes where politics and religion are deliberately intertwined, a historical aberration.

American religions are more like American Indian tribal nations. They have independent jurisdiction and their income is not subject to taxation. Whether or not they engage in politics is completely their prerogative and has no bearing on their tax exempt status. It’s like saying the Navajo nation can’t engage in politics or else they would lose their tax exemption.

Further, the core reason for freedom of speech in a democracy is to have freedom for political speech. The need is to have different factions discuss ideas related to the governing of society. Any legal regime that restricts the rights of religion to engage in political speech is one that rejects the separation of church and state. The purpose of the separation is to prevent the government from interfering with the rights of disfavored religious groups or granting special privileges to favored religions. If an individual has a right to political speech, then an association of individuals also has that right whether or not it is religious in nature.

When my state was debating creating a state-run lottery to fund education projects, my preacher gave a sermon on the evils of gambling. Religions can't realistically stay out of politics because every law can be reinterpreted as a moral argument.

That's fine. It's different when it's telling people how to vote.

Some people buy lottery tickets specifically because of who they benefit, which is very different than going to Vegas or certain forms of investment. (IE, uneducated investment is often just gambling.)

I think that was the previous posters point - any teaching on a moral issue will ultimately have overlap with real world issues.

A homily about gambling would be right in line with religious teachings - the timing is really what is at the apex of your post.

This is incorrect.

(1) Religions are treated no differently than any other non-profit.

(2) No non-profit may endorse a particular candidate. They are free to comment on particular issues and policies and referenda.

A priest can say 'vote no on marijuana'. They cannot say 'vote yes to Mary Sue because she doesn't like marijuana'.

Take a homily written by someone 2000 miles away and it will likely feel just as relevant to me. Most humans deal with similar issues.

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.

Catholicism is different in every country, I would imagine that a church in a secular place such as France would contain itself a bit, because there's no societal expectation that anyone should follow its religion, and therefore the priests have to put in effort into making people stay. In Poland, where I grew up, the Church still holds a lot of power and prestige, and priests consider themselves to have authority over people's lives. Leaving the church is seen as more of a childish rebellion, and I would often hear mocking remarks about non-believers in homilies.

It also varies inside countries. Some priests are simply more demure than others. The church as an institution certainly prefers the more radical conservatives as you go higher up the chain, but many low level employees that still talk to commoners do realize that these views are going to put off more people than they attract in developed countries. So in the long term they will only be left with a bunch of crazy radicalists and a silent majority that wants absolutely nothing to do with them.

> The church as an institution certainly prefers the more radical conservatives as you go higher up the chain

I think right now it’s the exact opposite.

Have you seen the current pope? He's a big step back from the last one. And the reason for this is the cardinals who wanted back, because they were never fully on board anyway. Then again what would you expect from a group where average age is significantly older than even US congress.

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Perhaps you could share your alternative characterisation of the church to clarify what you mean?

I would say that the burden of proof is yours first.

But since you asked...

> The church as an institution certainly prefers the more radical conservatives as you go higher up the chain

Where are these "radical conservative" bishops? They're anything but "radical". If anything, they tend toward a soft middle that is very slow to act. Indeed, that's one of the gripes "radtrad" types tend to have. They would prefer more bishops were made in their own image.

Instead, we see bishops aggressively curtailing more traditional expressions of the faith, while permitting plenty of liturgical abuse of, shall we say, a decidedly "untraditional" stripe.

> So in the long term they will only be left with a bunch of crazy radicalists and a silent majority that wants absolutely nothing to do with them.

You can't be serious. If anything characterizes the post-Vatican II Church, it has been the greater influence of "progressive" and "modernist" elements, some of them quite radical. Only in relatively recent times are we seeing a growing, younger crop returning to traditional forms. You can expect that the Church will look more traditional within a generation or two.

Your claim reminds me of those who clamored to make the Church more "relevant". They claimed that if the Church didn't do so, it would lose the youth and imperil the future of the Church.

Instead, what we saw was the reverse. As the Church became more "relevant" - which is to say, more concerned with the temporal and the temporary, conforming to the times instead of shaping men and the times - it became less appealing to the youth. It should be obvious in retrospect. What people desire from the Church is the eternal and the transcendent, not more of the same that you can get elsewhere and in bulk.

So, all that "relevance" produces is a large exit of the youth from the Church. Attend a "progressive" parish and you'll see plenty of empty pews with a few aging boomers. Go to a more traditional parish, and you see the pews brimming with families. These are not isolated cases. These are broad trends.

If you do see a swing toward the traditional, it is not because "crazy radicalist conservative" bishops are concentrating those elements, but because of a process of natural selection. "Relevance", it turns out, is dysgenic. And as the traditional element increases and becomes more visible, so does the visibility of its substance, which is what attracts converts and reverts.

So.. you basically agree, you just don't like the wording because you somehow felt personally attacked? Given your reasoning I suspect you work(ed) for the church in some capacity or are at least deeply involved. But it'll be quite obvious to anyone reading this that it is not exactly an objective opinion.

The last time I attended a mass (Spain) it was about some people in the village that were not helping the church enough (with an activity they had to do but also I think there was some money involved) but it was a bit cryptic, so only the ones that were directed the message to could fully understand it.

There's always money involved.

I mean what exactly do you expect them to talk about week after week in what amounts logistically to a book club that only reads one book?

Doubly-so since people are now apparently criticizing Christian pastors for quoting Christ.

Catholics have more then just one book. They have whole libraries of theology and tradition way larger then just a bible. And large lists of saints to refer to.

Evangelical would be closer to one book thing, altrought it would still ve a stretch.

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I have heard phoned in homilies from some priests but this is not accurate in the United States based on my travels and weekly local attendance. Sorry that you had a bad experience.

I can assure you that their experience wasn't in any way exceptional. It may be different in the US as Catholicism is in the minority in there (~20%), while GP's experience is from a place absolutely dominated by it (>90%).

This is in the US? I have rarely heard political homilies.

Religion has been far more politicised in the US than elsewhere. And not exactly in a direction that makes sense to me (a European protestant).

European Protestantism and American Protestantism differ in substantial ways. Crudely, European Protestantism went the way of Hegelian dialectics and evolving beyond the Christianity of the Bible. American (conservative) Protestantism largely reacted against that. I think both groups are largely held together by politics today though their politics differ in the expected ways.

When I was in formation a couple of years ago, I showed our homiletics instructor a ChatGPT-generated homily for our assigned text. He read through it and put his head on the desk. Then he handed it back to me and said it was as good as good as anything you'd hear from the ambo that Sunday.

By this, he meant that it was ok-but-not-great, and there's a lot of weak preaching out there. And your point is dead on: the text and the assembly are the primary considerations. I preach on the same readings to 4 different masses, but the 4:30 Saturday Vigil folks are a different group than the 11:30 Sunday Morning crowd, so the message is tuned accordingly. Different emphases, different touchstones, differing exhortations, etc.

Homilies are not the core of Catholic mass, the Eucharist is. Protestant churches put more emphasis on the sermon, not sure if it’s all Protestant churches or just “Evangelical” ones

You’re right that a priest can’t (and shouldn’t) dump private pastoral context into a prompt. But context doesn’t have to mean identifiable confession details.

I’m building BibleGuided, and one thing we’re adding is a church feature where congregants can opt in to sharing prayer themes, and leaders can see aggregated and anonymized trends over time rather than identities. That’s enough to shape a homily toward what people are actually struggling with, without violating confidentiality.

If anyone has experience with privacy thresholds (minimum group sizes, differential privacy), I’d love pointers.

How are you dealing with the Pope saying priests shouldn’t use your product?

I agree with the Pope’s point. Priests should not hand pastoral judgment to a model. BibleGuided has church management tools plus optional AI help for drafting and organizing, with the priest making the final call.

For community context, we avoid confessional and private pastoral data. It is opt-in from congregants, then aggregated and anonymized into themes and trends.

We think AI can be a helpful tool across many areas, including faith, and over time many church leaders (of many denominations) will get comfortable using it in bounded, and responsible ways. If a church does not want AI used for homilies, those features can be toggled off and the rest of our tools still work.

The pope, ostensibly the person you believe to be the representative of god on earth, has said that your product is garbage and here you are rationalizing it.

Are you sure you have faith?

Based on OPs location and some of the marketing comments on their site, they probably think the Pope is the Anti-Christ.

If they're Protestant, that might be a point in its favor :)

Not the parent, but products like it are strongly Protestant Evangelical-coded, so that could actually be a selling point for the intended audience

To be fair ignoring and occasionally kidnapping the pope is a time honoured Catholic tradition.

Exactly.

A priest could use AI for a homily dealing with drug addiction, without specifying "Bob in row 3 is a methhead"

the context-specificity problem you're describing is exactly why the draft/execute divide is so persistent across AI use cases.

it's not a model capability problem. it's an architecture problem: the relevant context is distributed across systems (the priest's knowledge of their parish, history, relationships) that nobody has wired into the workflow. a homily generator without that context produces generic output. a priest who knows their community produces something unreplicable.

same pattern shows up in ops work. every ops request looks like a generic task -- 'update contract status,' 'respond to renewal question' -- but the context required to do it well is scattered across CRM, email threads, slack history, billing records. automate the task without the context and you get confident, generic output that's often wrong. the hard problem isn't drafting, it's knowing which context matters for this specific request before you act on it.

Side note, but I've definitely gotten annoyed with "context".

There's context in the strict technical sense - the AI is stateless, you need to get the right tokens to it in the right way, allow it to use tooling calls, etc. I get that. That, is cool. I use agentic coding a lot.

Then there's the sense of what you're saying - you have to feed the AI "enough context". In your case it's critical, but I've seen way too many pro-AI people just dismiss everything and say "context context you didn't give it proper context, have you tried this prompt etc." as a justification for the "lack" of intelligence.

At some point you have to wonder when it becomes unfalsifiable.

At some point, at least if businesses want to have AI “Agents” act as employees, then it needs to cease being stateless.

There’s a lot of hidden context in day to day work that a human often times wouldn’t even know to explain to the AI or even think that they’d have to include it, things that are just “known” by default of working somewhere for a long time.

With coding, there’s at least the entire codebase as context. With more creative tasks, it becomes murky. Even something as “simple” as sending a price increase notification to customers. There’s a lot of nuance in that, and customer relationship history you’d have to feed to the AI as context to get it right, yet a good CSR would just factor that context into their writing without a second thought.

There is a point, and it is reached very early, where it’s more costly and less productive to feed the AI as much context as you can try to imagine you’d need to give it vs. just doing it yourself. If I’m at the point of writing an entire document of history and context, into what’s effectively a full page prompt, then why bother with AI at that point.

Not to mention a massive violation of privacy, which they are subject to as much or more as every other entity that processes privacy sensitive data.

Nit: you're confusing the vow of silence with the confessional seal.

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.

"We value your privacy! Do you consent to sharing the contents of your confession with our 2137 partners? [ACCEPT ALL] [MAYBE LATER]"

Was the number of partners you picked random or you chose 2137 on purpose? As it's actually somewhat related to the topic...

Entirely random of course. I would never reference unsavory memes about past Popes or anything like that.

Best to skip the priest and feed context directly

Pretty sure there are books of homilies.

We have been further away from OMM 0000 than we are today, that's for sure.

Sermon manuals were popular among Catholic priests from the time the printing press started to spread in Europe, and remained so into the middle of the 20th Century.

A parish priest might not deliver a “canned sermon” verbatim, but still rely on one/more sermon manuals heavily when preparing his words for Sunday.

The Roman Catechism (Catechism of the Council of Trent), published by the Vatican and ordered for use in seminaries for core formation of candidates for the priesthood, included a list of specific topics to address for each Sunday of the year. While not a sermon manual as such, those “bullet points” informed Catholic sermons around the world for 300+ years.

Very few priests take vows of silence. The standard vows are chastity, obedience and poverty. Even highly contemplative orders like Trappists don’t make a vow of silence - they practice something called monastic silence but it’s not a vow.

The closest thing is that a priest cannot share anything told during the sacrament of reconciliation. But that’s not so much a vow as just the other side of what Catholics believe is a direct connection to god.

Confession was originally often made in public. Confessional secrecy is more about making it easier for people to freely confess their sins, free of the fear of retribution or shame, very much like why we have doctor-patient confidentiality enshrined in law today. I would imagine confessional secrecy arose very quickly, even if the norm wasn't private confession.

The first reference I could find for confessional secrecy was from a 4th century book written by the 3rd/4th century Persian bishop, Aphraates. In Demonstration VII, On Penance, he councils priests to keep a penitent's confessions secret, "lest he be exposed by his enemies and those who know him. .... If they reveal them to anyone, the whole army will suffer an adverse reputation."

Source: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Sy0vAAAAMAAJ/page/n251/mo... That's a Syriac to Latin translation. I used Google Translate for Latin to English. There's at least one partial English translation of that book online, but I found their translation more confusing.

> doing so would be a violation of their vows of silence

I don’t know what this means. There is no formal “vow of silence”. The closest things I can think of are the discipline of avoiding unnecessary speech in some monastic communities, or perhaps the seal of confession, but this doesn’t apply as priests can speak in generalities or anonymously about the kinds of moral issues people struggle with.

> Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind.

That’s a bit of a generalization. Many, if not most, readings simply benefit from clear explanation. Tying in local or cultural context can be helpful, but they can also be a distraction, and mostly, homilies should be about the essential meaning of the readings. By having to write the homily, the celebrant benefits from writing the homily as well, a benefit he would lose if he simply drew from a corpus of prewritten homilies.

Catholic priests are forbidden from revealing anything they learn in confession under ANY circumstances. If someone comes in and confesses to a crime or that they are planning a crime, the priest can advise them to go to the police, they can counsel them that they may be in danger of hellfire if they do not, but they absolutely cannot tell anyone. The Catholic Church takes this very seriously. It is fully expected that a priest would die rather than break the confidentiality of confessions.

The Catholic Church is made up of people and people do all kinds of things and make all kinds of choices in life. As others have pointed out, it's very possible to talk about the struggles of your community without calling out Bob in the third row.

> It is fully expected that a priest would die rather than break the confidentiality of confessions.

And that is not just a theoretical thing. This what e.g. Nepomuk is a saint for and what other priests went for to a concentration camp.

I'm glad that priests are well known for always obeying rules and never abusing their position. /s

I don’t understand why you’re downvoted. “No priest would ever break rules” is such a strong and ridiculous claim that I thought solatic was trolling.

It's alluding to something off-topic, with a hint of "edgy-ness"

Let me be more clear then. Not only will there be many priests sharing private information about their local congregation, there will also be priests who continue to directly abuse people in their communities. Sharing private information is extremely mild in comparison.

How is it off topic? The entire basis of solatic's comment is the assumption that priests would not break the rules. A track record of breaking the rules is reason to not make that assumption.

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.

Your village had proper healthy capitalist market. In mine, there was complete religious monopoly.

Healthy capitalist market is one helluva oxymoron

It's not an oxymoron: just a cryptid. Read The Wealth of Nations.

Thus, oxymoron, no?

IMO, any (important) writing you expect other humans to consume should be your own writing. I think it's kind of disrespectful to outsource your voice to AI but expect people to read it like it's yours. Why should I put in time to read if you're not putting in time to write?

I write stories and tech docs. I'll happily outsource writing tech docs to AI. It would be better than anything I would write. I won't let AI to touch my stories. Their input is boring and cringy. So both things can be true at same time.

For the tech docs writing, just give me the bullet points and I'll send them to the AI and discuss the bullet points with it.

It's more like, here's 80 pages of too much information, just give me the API in a tight section here, with an architectural overview.

Usually these tools are used to compress, not fluff.

Honestly, I'd rather just read the bullet points, especially if it gives people more opportunities to lay out hierarchical structure.

The AI doesn't know anything about the thing you're documenting except what you tell it, so what value does it add?

I write a lot of tech docs with AI so I can add some substance here. First of all, you do tell it what you’re writing about - you can give it reams of documentation on related systems, terminology, and source code. Stuff that would take you weeks to consume personally (but you probably know the gist of it from having read or skimmed it before). Let’s say you are writing a design doc for a new component. After all of this stuff describing the environment is in its context (you don’t have to type it all out, you can copy paste it, use an MCP to suck it in from a DB, read it from a file, etc), you describe at a high level what architecture choices and design constraints to make (for example, needs to be implemented with this database, this is our standard middleware, etc) and it will fill in blanks and spit out a design for you. Then you refine it - actually this component needs to work like that, unit testing strategy needs to be like this, and so on. Now give me the main modules, code stubs, suggest patterns to use, etc. continue to iterate - it will update the entire doc for you, make sure there are no dead or outdated references, etc. extremely powerful and useful.

I feel like these tech docs you're writing might not need to be written in the first place.

That’s exactly right. The second I determine something was written by AI is the second I close the tab / scroll past. It’s beyond disrespectful to expect others to read wordslop that you only barely created via prompt.

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well said! especially like the fact you chose IMO in favor IMHO.

I disagree. The purpose of writing is to convey ideas. If written language had just been invented, I’m sure you’d be saying “IMO any important stories you expect others to know should be communicated orally. It’s kind of disrespectful to convey stories as if they were hearing you speak.”

Your conflating the medium with the source of the message in this analogy.

Writing and oration are two different media, the question of which is preferable in which context is completely unrelated to LLM authorship.

If "the purpose of writing is to convey ideas" (which I largely agree with), which ideas are being added between whatever you prompt the model to convey and what the model conveys? Are you proposing that an LLM can extract some meaning from your initial prompt that a human being couldn't?

> Are you proposing that an LLM can extract some meaning from your initial prompt that a human being couldn't?

No, I’m asserting that an LLM can help formulate ideas in a coherent, understandable way. You can give it a brain dump with a rough outline for an argument and it fill in the details. If the argument isn’t to your liking, you can try again. But the end result is basically equivalent to the human-written equivalent.

The point is if you can't correctly craft an analogy, I'm not particularly concerned about your opinions on writing in general.

It’s fine to disagree with my analogy. But I find it a little ironic your dismissal of the analogy is a non sequitur. The invalidness of the analogy doesn’t directly follow, logically, from the fact that the written word and the spoken word are both mediums.

If you can't articulate an idea yourself, it's not worth conveying imho

I guess you’re not a big fan of Plato then?

Plato's one thing, but SV "idea men" who have a hard time explaining themselves is another, ha

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.

> overreacting to a small part of [a Pope]'s talk

As is Catholic tradition in the US

Priests who use generative AI to craft their homilies should openly share the prompts they rely on, because those prompts shape the theology, tone, and pastoral direction of what is proclaimed from the pulpit. In a community rooted in trust and accountability—especially within the Catholic Church—transparency about AI use is not optional but a moral obligation.

— ChatGPT.

My old-school protestant pastor started with an AI disclaimer in the sermon yesterday. What a time to be alive!

I don't know what to do with my double standard here.

It seems totally normal and expected that I would outsource aspects of my job solving business software problems to AI, but the idea of my spirituality and cultural experience (music, movies, art, etc) being someone else's business problem to be outsourced and optimized by AI is so gross.

I don’t think that’s a double standard. Computers telling computers what to do feels reasonable. Computers telling humans what to feel seems not.

Every single person who utilizes a navigation application to traverse a place that they have no previous independently verified experience, is taking existential risk based on a computer telling them what to do

There are literally thousands of cases of people dying or being injured because they did what a computer navigation application told them to do

This is also literally what the Target stock scheduling system does for target employees for restocking shelves

The vast majority of peoples lives are run by someone else’s computer

That’s fundamentally different, and I think you know that.

It’s one thing to ask an algorithm how to build an A* driving map from point A to point B. It’s another to ask one how to be a better person and go to Heaven.

I’m not religious, and I’m not arguing this from a pro-religion POV. I happily work in AI, and I’m not arguing this from an anti-AI POV. I am highly technical. I love computers. I’m excited about the future. I rely on deterministic algorithms to make my days better. And yet, I do not want to trust the words of an LLM to counsel me on how to be a better husband or father. At this stage, the AI does not know me in the way a counselor or advisor, or even pastor or priest would. And yes, I think that’s a crucial difference.

3/4-agree; LLM advice is only one step up from an Agony Aunt column in a newspaper.

And I'd expect "Target stock scheduling system does for target employees for restocking shelves" to be an A* or similar.

But also, Google maps has directed people to their deaths: https://gizmodo.com/three-men-die-after-google-maps-reported... isn't even what I was originally looking for, which was: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-sued-negligence-maps-dri...

Sure, people die from regular programming. Mistakes happen. That’s not good or ok, but it seems unavoidable given today’s technologies and tools.

However, I think that’s in a different category than giving life advice. How is an LLM to know that God forgives Joe for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his children, but doesn’t forgive Tom for doing the same thing because Tom had money but was saving up to buy cooler shoes and didn’t want to spend it? A priest’s advice might be “Joe, don’t make a habit of it, but you didn’t hurt anyone and you children were hungry. Tom, would you freaking knock it off already?” An LLM might reply “that’s a wonderful idea!” to both.

Again, I’m firmly not anti-AI. I use it every day. I absolutely to not want to hear its advice on how to navigate the complexities of life as a human being.

Yeah, no. What you described here and what I described before are not programming errors, they're data errors. An A* route finder isn't going to know a bridge is out unless it is told, an LLM won't know that case history unless it is told.

I'd say the real problem with using an LLM for this kind of thing is not what the LLM writes, but that the act of writing helps the human understand their community, so when it is skipped that understanding remains absent. It's like cheating on your homework.

It’s not fundamentally different it’s people who are taking physical actions in the real world based on trust in some system

whether it’s a human or not they’re trusting the system with their existential outcomes

That is literally exactly the same thing.

The fact that you think that the rules of you being a father are somehow different than the rules of you driving to a appointment indicate that you have a completely incoherent world view based on two incompatible models of epistemology

As usual dualists will come up with a incoherent model and then try and act like it’s valid

> The fact that you think that the rules of you being a father are somehow different than the rules of you driving to a appointment indicate that you have a completely incoherent world view based on two incompatible models of epistemology

Two ways to look at this, both of which are coherent:

1. Current AI is better at some stuff than others. Saying "I'm okay driving in a waymo, but not taking spiritual advice from an AI" makes sense if you think it has not advanced to a near-human level in the spritual advice domain.

2. Even if you don't think that's true, it's reasonable to just want a human for certain activities, because communion with other humans in the same existential boat you're in can be the whole point an activity. I'd argue it is a significant reason for a majority of social activities.

Disclaimer: raised Catholic, now Atheist, married to devout Catholic.

The Church as defined by the institution is a community. I do not see it as a contradiction that the head of the institution is instructing the leaders to not add more layers of abstraction between them and the community, especially when those messages are on the subject of what it means to be human.

> The fact that you think that the rules of you being a father are somehow different than the rules of you driving to a appointment indicate that you have a completely incoherent world view based on two incompatible models of epistemology

lol

This is how you get token laundering

Talk about a self-aware wolves moment. Why is your use of AI okay but theirs isn't?

That’s exactly the question OP is asking.

There are some jobs where the outcome is the point, and others where having a person actually do a thing is the point. Priest is very much the latter sort of job.

Forget about AI for a moment and let's consider a more mundane tool, like an industrial robot. Is it OK to use a robot to perform some step in assembling a car? Certainly. How about programming that robot to perform Communion? Not so much. Not because using a robot to do things is inherently immoral, but because the human priest is supposed to be an integral component of Communion, it's not just a matter of transporting a cracker and some liquid into people's mouths by whatever means you choose.

It's not like they work a lot, why would a religious leader need to outsource spiritual advice to a chatbot? It only shows that all humans are lazy, no matter how virtuous they want to be seen as. IMO this counts as sloth.

Hopefully this discredits religions even more with the younger generations. Claiming that an immensely powerful being demands obedience of you, and keeps tabs on you all the time, but his orders only go through a chosen few, was a hard proposition to begin with.

You’re seething hatred is so obvious from this comment that no one should consider your opinion as anything close to valid

I don't think so. I didn't use hateful language, and while I see religion, especially for-profit religion, as a net societal loss, I don't think I worded my argument as seething hatred.

I can see how a strong disagreement can be dismissed as hate, though. It preserves the cognitive dissonance between reality and belief.

> Claiming that an immensely powerful being demands obedience of you, and keeps tabs on you all the time, but his orders only go through a chosen few, was a hard proposition to begin with.

You just described what Silicon Valley wants to build lol

I think it's even more pernicious. Religious leaders want to tell you what to think, but since it usually benefits them, it takes constant reinforcement to be effective.

On the contrary, we willingly use (and even pay for) chatbots so they increasingly think for us, and it would take a monumental effort to take them away from us now.

People would even make their own if needed, but at least in that case, it won't be a megacorp telling the chatbot what to think in the first place.

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.

> only for it to go over the heads

If it actually went over their heads, then the effort was wasted. I've heard the 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.

> If it actually went over their heads, then the effort was wasted. I've heard the 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.

Reminds me of Pauls retort about speaking in tongues with no translator. ;)

The idea being, that if it serves nobody but the person themselves, they should keep it to themselves, if you're going to "share" with the whole congregation, then it should edify the congregation.

1 Corinthians 14:27-28 (KJV)

"27 If any man speak in an unknown tongue, let it be by two, or at the most by three, and that by course; and let one interpret.

28 But if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church; and let him speak to himself, and to God."

Indeed. As one priest in graduate school said to me (and with which I agree), one should generally keep homilies short, simple, clear, and to the point. In most cases, it isn’t the proper place for an extended theological meditation.

Of course, people ought to realize that the purpose of the mass is not the homily, but the sacrifice of the eucharist, which is the “source and summit of the Christian life”.

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.

Why do you fear this? Did you consider discussing this with some of the congregation to know for sure?

I don't mean to pick on you personally, but your comment and the parent comment (among others here) both project feelings across wide groups of people in a hasty generalization. Their feelings could be easily confirmed with human connection. I think the article makes it clear the Pope charges priests with knowing their community. This is good advice for all of us though! So, not just you, but you, the parent poster, anyone else, if you have these fears, if you don't like your priest's homily, please, talk to the proper people about them instead of (or at least in addition to) complaining online to others! This is way outside our sphere of influence.

I'm an outsider (not Catholic, raised Methodist) who just happens to be attending church this year; I'm not a member. The church is interesting because it's an immigrant church which is truly global (in Berlin with English speaking people from all over the place).

'Fear' is a strong word but I mean it in the same way as I do when talking about reading comments in the Wall Street Journal- I'm afraid by the realization of who I'm surrounded by in the world. With that said I really, really appreciate the social justice statements I hear from the pulpit and from the congregants.

I'm an outsider

The Catholic church is universal, so you are not seen that way :). Setting that aside, my comments weren't really about a particular religion, but about not making hasty generalizations.

That said, you don't have to be a member of the same church to discuss things with the people in your community. Again, a large part of what the pope is saying is to be present in your community, which requires maintaining that human to human interaction.

Also, your meaning of "fear" was clear.

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> know that priests often recycle old homilies

I get the other ones, but why is this necessarily bad? If the homily is good by itself, then of course I would even like to hear it more than once. You don't remember everything from a single time anyway. And even if you do, you do not necessarily got everything.

I replied with more detail to someone who also asked this in the same thread.

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.

> people who grew up going to Mass on Sunday know that priests often recycle old homilies

That doesn't seem bad? You'd think a lot of the topics would be evergreen, and not everyone would be there for every service. So after an appropriately long time, why not recycle one that worked well?

The keyword is "often". As in, it's repeated throughout the year. The homily is supposed to be, but isn't always, an explanation of the Gospel story that was told just before it. So there really shouldn't be homily repeats within the liturgical calendar.

You are supposed to attend Mass every Sunday, so I don't think the priest is intentionally accomodating infrequent churchgoers at the expense of the regulars. And it's usually not a sermon that worked well, just a long meandering story, typically about a pilgrimage or retreat the priest went on 10 years ago, that doesn't really have a point to it.

Yokels! lol

There’s a Paul Theroux short story about a defrocked priest who makes a living writing sermons for other priests. They would mail their chosen topic or occasion and include the payment, and he’d send them a beautifully written sermon that’d make them popular in their parishes. Now AI is coming for the correspondent-priest’s job!

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.

>If we wanted to know what Claude thought, we’d ask him.

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.

> It's very common for people to ask others questions that could be easily googled or clauded.

I'll admit I do this, asking people questions that could be answered by Google, and sometimes even if I know the answer myself, sometimes to make conversation, sometimes because I want to hear the person's perspective on it.

If I'd never ask questions I could find the answers to myself in some other way, I think I'd never ask any person any question, which sounds kind of boring.

It's very boring. I've been carrying around a flip phone recently so I can ask people dumb questions again. No excuse to ask anyone for the time, though. I miss that.

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.

What an absolutely awful take. Asking people questions, even if it’s less efficient or has the chance to be misleading, is the absolute number one way to a) learn, and b) make connection. Even if you’re just asking a stranger the time, you don’t know what you might learn.

Except that nowadays it feels more like people asking you for the time every 2 minutes while standing just in front of Big Ben.

I see it everyday on forums/Discord servers where some users will treat you like their personal search engine simply because they are too lazy to spend 10s reading the results themselves.

Big Ben, the bell?

You know what I was referring to, no need to be pedantic.

Are you trying to minimize human interaction?

The Pope will change his mind with Claude Opus 5.2

lol

If the Pope doesn't start spending every waking minute in a CC terminal he will be left behind and lose his job. /s

Stephen Wolfram is the Antichrist - https://youtu.be/-yzdjziS-bo

You forgot the “/s”.

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.

The flip side of that is, if you care about your community you want to deliver engaging homilies. And that may not be your personal strength.

Also I believe we're talking about Leo not Francis.

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.

> 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.

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."

—Morpheus, Deus Ex

Contrary to prevailing fetish, not everything is about “power”. Framing everything in terms of it is not only self-refuting, but it impoverishes the range of human relations and warps understanding.

Confession is not about some kind of organizational power. The whole point is that it liberates the penitent. It is protected by absolute secrecy in order to, among other reasons, remove the element of power. A priest who breaks the seal of confession incurs automatic excommunication and faces further penalties, like removal from public ministery and from the clerical state. In short, a priest is expected to endure torture and even death to preserve the seal. There is no admissible exception. Not much of a “power move”.

In the case of big tech and AI, profit and power do enter the picture. Secrecy is the last thing big tech wants.

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.

Yesterday I when I was googling something it hit me: I wouldn't know how to find anything without a search engine.

We're already reliant on big tech regarding what information is presented to us and LLMs are just the next step in that direction.

When I was a kid, we had a long shelf dedicated to storing a voluminous encyclopedia in the family room, and subscribed to periodic (annual?) updates.

This was expensive.

IIRC, these books were purchased one small stack at a time from a locally-owned grocery store, which spread the expense over a longer period. One week, they'd have the books 1-5 on display and for sale, say. And the next week, it'd be books 6-10. After a time, a family could have the whole set.

Anyway, we had that. So when I wanted to find general information about a topic back then, before Google or Altavista or Webcrawler or whatever, I'd look in the encyclopedia first and get some background.

If it was something I really wanted to dig deeper on, I'd go to the library. If I couldn't find what I needed, I asked for help. Sometimes, this meant that they'd order appropriate material (for free) using inter-library loan for me to peruse.

If I already had enough background but needed a very specific fact, then I'd call the library's reference desk and they'd find it for me and call back. They'd then read the relevant information over the phone.

And if I wanted a reference to have and keep, then: We had book stores.

---

Nowadays: Encyclopedias are basically dead, but we can carry an offline copy of Wikipedia in our pocket supercomputer if we choose. Books still get published. Libraries are still present, and as far as I can tell they broadly still find answers with a phone call.

It's not all lost, yet. The old ways still work OK if a person wants them to work. (Of course, Googling the thing or chatting with the bot is often much, much faster. We choose our own poison.)

Being older, I remember homework involving a trip to the library to look through lots of books for 1 tiny bit of information needed for the homework.

For IT-related info, dial-up was expensive, and finding things either involved altavista or Yahoo indexes. Computer magazines were also a great source of info, as were actual books.

The key difference from today is persistence, and attention span. Both of these are now in short supply.

i dont remember a world without google but surely the answer is just walk into a library?

What if you need up to date, niche information?

It's a given that a book on programming is already out of date when it goes to print.

My main gripe with paper sources is that sometimes an important piece of information is only mentioned in passing when the author clearly knew more about it.

Or just look into your own encyclopedia.

> 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.

Doesn't matter. Even if civilization collapses and we're all miserable, if it means more money is flowing into OpenAI's coffers, it's all good.

And that's exactly the plan I guess.

Religious claptrap is the OPPOSITE of critical thinking.

Well ... isn't organized religion a subscription service for everyday life?

You do not have to pay anything.

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.

And your world view is very jaded and myopic if that is all you see. There are plenty (majority) where your anecdote is not true.

A majority of the bible is not true.

Evidence for that statement? Can you give some examples?

Mostly when people say "the Bible is not true" its usually a result of misunderstanding it (e.g. adopting Biblical literalism, not understanding the culture and context, not understanding nuance).

If you don't adopt biblical literalism, then isn't the Bible just true in the same way that Star Wars is true?

No. You interpret each document in context and in culture.

For example, you interpret Genesis as a story that makes a point and tell you something - it is like Jesus's parables (no one same says they are literal!). For example, that all human beings are made in the image of God - as we all look different that is clearly not literal. That we are all related and of one ancestry.

On the other hand you interpret the gospels as deliberately written biographies of Jesus. You interpret the epistles as letter written by their author to a particular person or group of people. You interpret the psalms as lyrics.

It is the traditional way of interpreting the Bible and few people had a problem with it until modern times.

I think their point was that Star Wars also has metaphorical lessons to be learned if you're not interpreting it as a literal history lesson.

Yes, that is the point of fiction. its not unfair to compare Genesis to Star Wars to an extent, but, to a Christian, what you learn from Genesis is a lot more important (the "word of God" rather than the "word of George Lucas").

However, much of the rest of the Bible should be read differently - the letters, biographies etc. Each document ("book") needs to be read appropriately and in context. Again, each can be compared to others in its genre, but its inclusion in "the Bible" (but there are lots of Biblical canons) gives it that extreme importance.

> It is the traditional way of interpreting the Bible and few people had a problem with it until modern times.

Sorry to nitpick, but there were quite a lot of "heathens" and "witches" who had faced some problems with the traditional interpretations of the Bible before modern times.

What a cheap cop-out to move the goalposts so that only the claims that haven't been disproved yet or are unfalsifiable are meant to be taken literally.

What is wrong with taking the Bible as literal statement of fact?

Its a departure from Christian tradition (including early Christians), and it leads to demonstrably false conclusions, and its silly to treat many works of many different genres (myth, chronicles, personal accounts, poetry and lyrics, biographies, and letters) as all being interpreted the same way.

What's your god a metaphor for?

Unless you live in a place with mandatory state supported church.

Anywhere other than Germany where than happens?

As I understand it, there are parts of France that spent time as parts of Germany and are still somewhat culturally German that do church tax in a similar way - much of what was Alsace-Lorraine (Elsaß-Lothringen).

To be clear: (almost) no one is forced to pay church tax in Germany - only members of the churches that have an agreement with the government to collect it on top of income tax have to pay it, and you can choose to leave those churches. For Protestants ("evangelisch"), that's usually not as big of a deal as it is for Catholics who still believe; there are plenty of non-church-tax-collecting Protestant churches around the country, including the one I'm a member of.

"Almost": there were many couples with very unequal incomes in which the non/lower-earner would stay in the church so that the family would still get the various services (baptisms, weddings, preferential admission to church-affiliated schools, etc) while the higher earner would "leave" (on paper), leaving the family paying far less in church tax. That loophole was closed - if the higher earner isn't a member of another church collecting church tax, they can be required to pay church tax to their spouse's church. I'm not sure this is still in effect, but it was for a while.

In Germany it's not really true. AFAIK you pay those taxes only if you are registered follower of 3 main religions. You literally can opt out, they are a counter example.

Poland is the one I experience it. Church is funded in multiple ways. At least 3 billion PLN a year from concordat deal from 90's. Priests have pensions and annuities. Churches pay no taxes on (heating) fuels. Schools pay for Religious Education classes, very often run by priests or nuns. Uniformed services almost always pay for cleric's services or clerics fully in their services.

Of course church still gathers funds on their own, sometimes using dark patterns.

I think tax breaks are different from direct funding, the same for payment for specific services at a reasonable price. For example the UK exempts virtually all religious bodies from tax, and its on the same basis as a huge range of things (e.g. amateur sports, equality and diversity, community facilities...). I would not consider that state mandated payment for services.

I do not know enough about the concordat or how Polish pensions work to comment on those. I would be interested but there does not seem to be a lot of information online (e.g. the wikipedia article is a stub)

If we look outside Christianity, what comes to mind is reading about the ultra-orthodox in Israel, and obviously about Iran.

I was thinking of Christianity as I was responding to a comment that used the word "church".

However, besides that, subsidies from general taxation are not the same as payments for a service received (i.e. going back to it being a "subscription service"), whereas something like the German system where the payment is linked to entitlement to services (if other comments here are accurate) can be reasonably characterised as a subscription service.

I disagree with the distinction between subsidies and payments. The math is zero sum, either way purchasing power is undesirably and forcibly reduced from one entity and given to another.

That is not the distinction I am making here. I even partly agree with you (with some nuances).

I am making a distinction between being made to pay through general taxation (e.g. as a pacifist is forced to pay for the military, an extreme libertarian for public services in general) and being made to pay in order to use the service (e.g. like a Netflix subscription). Almost everywhere they exist, subsidies for religion are like the former, not the latter.

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.

Back when my parents made me go to church, I remember observing that a lot of the donations being made were in envelopes that the church provided.

That's pretty private, I think, in that one's fellow churchgoers can't discern much but the thickness of the envelope. It'd look the same if the donation consisted of 5 singles, or 5 hundreds.

(I have no idea if that's standard accepted practice everywhere, though I might imagine that someone would be getting pretty uptight at some level if people weren't giving enough to put another layer of gold on the roof of a Catholic church -- envelope or not.)

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.

The definition of a donation is that you don't have to give it.

If you have to pay then it's either a purchase or a tax.

But you know this of course.

I do know that, but I also know how donations can become an expectation.

Also, it's worth noting in the context of this thread, that people can use AI inference for free on many services, with payment only need for higher usage, and even then, if you don't care about expectations or inconvenience, it's trivial to abuse the free tier.

There's over a thousand years of empirical evidence that a symbolic donation of a coin is accepted.

A thousand years? What made you go with that number?

The protestant reformation was only about 500 years ago, and I'm pretty sure that Martin Luther wouldn't have bothered that much if the expected "donations" were really cheap. And even if you do go with "a coin", which was apparently the price of an annual indulgence for a regular peasant, that was about the same price as a whole pig, or on the order of $1k in today's money, so definitely not symbolic.

I know that hackers here need to always be right and go to great lengths to try to distort reality when they are wrong. You're not even fooling yourself by saying that every coin in history is worth a thousand dollars, much less fooling anybody else.

If you make it a habit to always lie in order to always be right, you start building castles of lies that hinder you in life. Just because of pride.

I'm sorry if you don't like pedantry, but this is what I'm in HN for.

To be clear, I definitely didn't mean to imply that every coin in history is worth a thousand dollars, and suggesting that this is what I meant is clearly not the "strongest plausible interpretation"[0] of my message. I was referring specifically to the Florin/Gulden/Guilder coins being used across Europe in Martin Luther's time, which contained about 3.5g gold, which at today's gold price would be worth over $500 just as bullion, but it was apparently worth about twice that in terms of purchasing power. From my searches, it seems that the poorest of the poor would need to pay a quarter of a coin annually, the typical commoner would pay 1 per year, and merchants/middle-class would pay 3 or more per year, to eliminate/reduce their afterlife punishment.

You can argue that my focus on indulgences is not relevant for some reason, and I'd be happy to discuss other examples of expectations of monetary payments to the church, but would appreciate if you refrain from accusing me of lying.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://www.biblelightinfo.com/instruc.htm

[2] https://famous-trials.com/luther/295-indulgences

I just don't understand the purpose?

Churches have directly taxed their followers on their income. Some of them still do, like the government churches in Scandinavia. That's a tax.

Churches have also sold the redemptions of your sins. Sometimes a bit cloaked as donations, like what you mention.

And churches have accepted donations, with expectations so low that everybody can donate. Who can't donate a kopek, or a bowl of rice? People who are too poor to donate anything are not shunned by any church, on the contrary they will be on the receiving end of donations if they wish to.

I would also like to quote the definite authority on this subject, Mark 12:41-44:

"Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. 42 But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents.

43 Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. 44 They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on."

Too bad Terry A. Davis is not around anymore. He would have been literally enraptured by LLMs.

I was thinking about this the other day. My take is that he would definitely have a few choice words for some types of vibe coders.

Or he would have vibe coded the second coming of Unix.

The article barely touches on this subject, but the sentiment is nonetheless correct.

The problem with using an AI to write something so intimate and context-specific is that it cannot perform as the priest's highest and best abstraction. Instead, it will slavishly follow instructions and risk tunnelling the priest into a worldview and message that subtly betrays his congregation.

I recently wrote about how modern legal tech stacks can do the same using the infamous Digital Research / IBM non-disclosure agreement as an example: https://tritium.legal/blog/redline

If we habitually reduce our context to the lowest-common window ingestible by an AI, yes we may lose a bit of humanity, but more importantly we'll just do a worse job.

Btw pope is a math phd.

I think you're mistaken

  where he earned a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in mathematics in 1977

  His doctoral thesis was a legal study of the role of Augustinian local priors.[64]

The Vatican has really smart people in there, regardless of how you feel about the whole thing. I recommend anyone interested in the topic to give a read to: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...

"ANTIQUA ET NOVA

Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence"

I was quite impressed at how much they "get it".

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.

I read the other day that the Roman Empire never fell. Its emperor is the Pope.

Which is an exaggeration, but makes you thinking. This institution still has a ton of power.

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.

The Western half of the Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century but the Eastern half continued for another thousand years until the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople in 1453.

A sibling commentator points out that the Catholic church still uses the term “Pontifex Maximus” to refer to their pope. However, this was a title used by the dominant high priest of pre-Christian Rome and the Catholic church only started doing this after Constantine XI (last Roman emperor) died when Constantinople fell to the Turks.

The Catholic church was just one of many entities that appropriated the titles and symbols of classical Rome as a way to confer themselves with the prestige and historical legacy of the Roman Empire. For example, the words “Tsar” (Slavic), “Kaiser” (German) and “Keizer” (Dutch) are all derivations of Caesar (as a synonym for emperor). Western European rulers adopted the Roman eagle for their royal and national coat of arms; Eastern Europeans tend to prefer the double-headed variant. The most egregious example is the Holy Roman Empire which famously was neither holy nor Roman. Arguably, in its latter days, it was more a federation than an empire.

> The most egregious example is the Holy Roman Empire

I think unfortunately the most egregious example is this still-extant bit of russian imperial propaganda now repurposed as russian nationalist propaganda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow,_third_Rome

It fell, (quite violently, in fact) in the third century. The rest was pretense.

The western half, sure. You're ignoring the eastern half which carried the mantle for another thousand years. And the concurrent existence of the Holy Roman Empire, which was also intertwined with the Roman Catholic church.

THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED - PKD

Eh, it’s more like they attached themselves to the Romans for marketing purposes. Same with the Holy Roman Empire

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. (Islam only happened in the middle ages, it isn't that old.)

It wasn't even true that all the world known to the Romans was Rome.

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.

There must be something missing if they are religious though.

Like some sort of critical thinking isnt there.

Selective reasoning is a hell of a drug.

He did earn a BS degree in mathematics, but his dissertation was a religious one.

(BS here meaning bachelor's — I misread this at first!)

That's BSc

"On iconoclasm and the Birch-Tate conjecture".

If I was in my early 20s, this would be mad respect.

Now that I'm in my 30s and I know PhDs.... They are basically nepo babies who were not good enough for industry.

That is a scorching hot take right out of the gate on a Monday morning! Username really nails the thing.

Imagine the pope being a man of science a couple of hundred years back... How much better the world could be.

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.

> There are always exceptions like Galileo

Well, considering that Galileo basically called Pope a fool, and the punishment he received was home arrest, this affair is not really the best evidence of Church prejudice, backwardness and cruelty.

And if we agree with Feyerabend, Galileo of today would probably has as much difficulty as the original one, for the initial evidence he provided wasn't strong enough to discard knowledge of that time.

> 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.

Just to correct my wording. I mean "persecution" not "opposition". there was plenty of opposition and people were arguing for multiple alternatives to the Ptolemaic model at the time.

>it is a very good example of why religious authority should be in the same hands as secular power

Did you forget a "not"?

> There are always exceptions like Galileo

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

Comapring the assassination of a president by a pro-slaver to a scholarly and political dispute that ended up with house arrest in a villa, where he wrote and published his most important work, is a bit wild. The Church has done much, much worse things than the dispute with Galileo.

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Is it? I understood it to teach "behaviour" orthogonal to slavery, meaning you treat your fellow the same regardless if the heathen see him as a slave or as the emperor.

While the GP was making a complete non-sequitur, they were right about this. The Old Testament / the Hebrew Bible in particular sets down clear rules for how specifically slavery should be practiced, so that part is undeniable. It's also undeniable that slavery was a common practice both in Palestine and in the Roman Empire more broadly both long before and long after Jesus' lifetime, among Jewish people as well as Christians. To what extent the New Testament actually overrides the laws of the Old Testament is very contradictory, even in the text itself, but it certainly doesn't say anywhere to any extent that you must not own slaves (well, except the part where Jesus tells a follower to give up all worldly possessions, sell all of their holdings and donate them to charity, which would clearly include any slaves as well - but no one follows this part of the teachings anyway).

While I agree that the various versions of the Bible people are using have many immoral teachings, including slavery, what does that have to do with whether Galileo's trial is a damning example of anti-science work in the Catholic Church?

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].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_Mersenne

[0] https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

How much better?

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.

> Other such nuance is that it very often punished and persecuted attempts to bring education and scientific progress.

Often? Very rarely, and the motive was never to stop progress - it was side effect of something else.

No crusades for one populae example.

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.

So you'd rather have Europe be Islamic I guess, if you're opposing the crusades

The Crusades resulted in Christians being nearly wiped out from the Eastern Mediterranean. Particularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Crusade

And started(?) Jews being killed in Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres

How exactly is not supporting a series of wars of aggression against the Ottoman Empire equivalent to wanting Europe to be Islamic?

I don't care either way to be honest...

I'd prefer Satanism for sure, but I don't really care.

But why man of science would avoid starting crusades?

Moral virtue has nothing to do with being a man of science, and many men of science lacked it completely.

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.

Why would a Catholic man of science necessarily oppose the crusades?

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.

Cover both sides in neutrality???!!!

The geocentric position is silly and wrong. There are no two sides here.

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.

Galileo not only actively rejected lunar explanations for the tides, but felt that they were driven purely by the kinetic motion of the Earth - rotation about its own axis + revolution around the Sun. He dismissed the concept of invisible action at a distance -- Newton would be born in the same year that Galileo would die. You can read more about Galileo and his views on the tides here. [1] He felt that this was his most compelling argument for heliocentricism.

[1] - https://galileo.library.rice.edu/sci/observations/tides.html

> Venus quite visibly orbits the Sun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system

Was already a thing, though.

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.

Based on data and evidence that we now have? Yes.

Back then Galileo’s theory wasn’t exactly provable and while he did get the core idea right he was still wrong on quite a few important things.

e.g. Tycho‘s model solved quite a few questions that Galileo couldn’t at the time.

e.g. Stellar parallax was a big issue that was conclusively solved until the 1800s

There were two sides on the evidence available at the time.

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 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.

I think that is a reasonable take with regard to Copernicus - and however you look at it he made a huge advance on any previous model.

Geocentric models may look silly with the benefit of hindsight, but Galileo’s claim that the Copernican model was proven was entirely unwarranted at the time. The evidence did not exist until much later.

> ... position is silly and wrong.

Both positions were build on top of aether, quintesence and Celestial Spheres. The result was silly and wrong no matter which one you picked.

It amazes me that people think this version of events makes the Church sound better, when it makes it sound worse.

It is not about better or worse, it is about correcting myths created later on that were intended to paint the Church as epitome of backwardness.

Galileo's affair wasn't about noble scientist going against stupid masses and oppressive institution designed to keep people in dark, while providing strong evidence for revolutionary theory, and being punished for his great genius.

But it is often presented like this.

Agreed. I'd also say that I think our habit of canonizing whoever happens to be perceived as the 'good guy' in history, and demonizing the 'bad guy' tends to make history much more difficult to learn from, because the people involved go from being real humans to actors in a very artificial Hollywood style story of good vs evil.

The real story here is one that has played out endlessly in history in various contexts. And is a great example of why The Golden Rule is something valuable to abide, even if you're completely self centered. It also emphasizes that all people, even the Pope, are human - and subject to the same insecurities, pettiness, and other weaknesses as every other human. And more. It's a tale of humanity that has and will continue to repeat indefinitely.

But when you turn it into a story of good vs evil, you lose all of this and instead get a pointless attack on one institution, which is largely incidental to what happened. For instance you can see the Galileo story clearly in the tale of Billy Mitchell [1] who went from suggesting that air forces would dominate the future of warfare (back in 1919!) to getting court martialed and 'retired' for his way of trying to argue for such. His views would go on to be shown to be 100% correct in 1937, the first time a plane downed a capital naval ship. However, he died in 1936.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell#

Galileo is a noble scientist going against a Pope who had his fee-fees hurt, which then banned the truth. It doesn't make the Church any less backward.

How so?

Because the Church didn't even have a good theological reason for siding against Galileo. It was a fit of pique.

But people have so completely internalized the idea that truth must bow to power that they think the fact that the Church condemned Galileo's ideas because he was rude somehow exonerates it as an institution.

The patron and professor funds a paper, and it contains claims of proofs that don't exist and ad hominems against the patron. The patron then sabotages the author. Sure, not very professional by the patron, but still understandable.

A lot of very bad things were historically done by men of science

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun.

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.

Just wait until you read what people like Von Neumann thought about preemptively using nuclear weapons.

It turns out that scientific brilliance has basically zero overlap with ethical wisdom. Science is great, but it’s not a replacement for philosophy.

Please be more specific. Church is 2000 years old.

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Impossible to know if this is a serious case of "i am very smart" or sarcastic.

It will surprise you but we don't literally believe there is a face in the sky looking down.

It will surprise you but almost all religious people I talked to believe that.

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.

I think it is a bit rude of you to call most religious people mentally challenged.

It isn't because he already rejected your premise.

Yeah, but you literally and officially hate LGBTQ+ people, treat women as property, condone slavery, and literally hallucinate that crackers and wine are flesh and blood in spite of what your eyes, nose, taste buds, and all scientific instruments and measurements tell you.

Edit: yet you can't counter the objective fact that the Catholic Church is a hateful abusive power hungry cult full of dogmatically hallucinating lunatics, homophobes, and misogynists. Go eat your Jesus flesh and drink your Jesus blood, you cannibalistic vampire whack job.

You know as well as I do that the bible and church writings are chock full of evidence proving my point, so you can google it yourself.

And you also know that your church has such a long sordid history of raping children and protecting rapist priests than Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's molestations and Trump's protection of pedophiles make them look like saints in comparison, and you can google that yourself too.

You don't deserve the favor of me giving you proof of something you already know to be true, because you're not arguing in good faith, you know very well you're wrong and I'm right and that all the evidence is on my side and easily found and documented, and I know very well you will reject all fact based evidence because of your bad faith.

My brother, literally not one of your claims is true. I'm not sure where you have gotten the idea that such lies are the truth, but you really should reconsider your position. You seem to be very angry at the church (based on you posting this sort of thing all up and down the thread), but believing outright false ideas about the church isn't going to fix anything.

Man, you are straight out of some meme generator back from Dawkins's heyday.

> treat women as property, condone slavery

Any examples in Church writings?

> literally hallucinate that crackers and wine are flesh and blood in spite of what your eyes, nose, taste buds, and all scientific instruments and measurements tell you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharistic_miracle#Scientific...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12491371/

You might not agree with it, but it is not as simple as it defying all sensory input and data.

I will surprise you but I agree with one of your points- the abuse crisis is horrible and it should be stopped. Its a deep and recurring stain on the church - and I hope the new generation of the clergy will finally chase it out.

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.

Galileo was fascist and liar like Musk?

Guess what, he wasn't South African or in the Oval Office, either.

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?

Napoleonic wars? The Spanish used guns against the Aztecs.

>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

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My parish priest told me he uses AI to edit newsletter posts. He didn't say he used it to write. And he mentioned using Magesterium.ai, which is a chatbot trained on a pretty conservative Catholic corpus (eg, it knows almost nothing about the Catholic Worker movement).

One thing I appreciate in our diocese is that the priests are encouraged to deliver their homilies without a written script. I think that is very wise, as it forces them to preach from instinct and heart, not from a script, either AI or human written.

> But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.

> A timeless interval was spent in doing that.

> And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

> But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too.

> For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.

> The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.

> And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

> And there was light

-- Father Isaac Asimov

Got goose bumps, exactly as the first time reading this. Thanks for sharing

Before preaching it to others, the writing of a homily or sermon first needs to affect the heart of the one delivering it. Such heart-work is exceedingly difficult if not impossible with AI.

Long before AI era I read an article about homilies exchange online forum in Poland. The priests spoke how they struggle to come up with a fresh content every week for Sunday masses. AI is not the source of the problem, it's just an attempt at a solution.

Well, for 'The Nine Billion Names of God' the monks finally ended up renting a computer. ;-)

Our Electric Messiah has arrived: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=pn3KD5YBhro&si=0sF3nL4DZBO...

Well, it was hallucinations any way so in this particular case it hardly matters. But I can see how the Pope has identified AI as a competing religion.

Religion and Automation is not a new thing... cue...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_wheel

I think it is okay to use AI to help you express your ideas better. I think the idea of AI acting as an "editor" reviewing my work and pointing out potential clarity issues is very helpful.

In this scenario AI does not rewrite the text, but prompts the human to rewrite and then review again. It's a short and strong feedback loop that can be a very powerful learning tool if the learner uses it correctly.

"AI" seems like a religion

It requires "belief"

"AI" believers claim to know the future

Relentless prognostication and effort to gain followers

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.”

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/looking-for-alice

This kind of headline is something we could have only imagined as a joke 5 years ago.

Love the headline and curious what the pope actually believes that brains do.

The same pope who declared an influencer boy a saint?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/07/pope-leo-xiv-d...

Let's be honest, the entire concept depends on advertising like nothing else.

Died at 15 of leukemia... I don't see how this is the church jumping the shark, it seems like a nice gesture considering he spent his short life promoting the church.

I do think the whole parading a wax replica of his body is a bit creepy, but I am not religious, people who are appreciate these things.

A saint is someone whom the church believes (based on criteria that aren't worth getting sidetracked on) is in heaven. That's it. It isn't a declaration that the person was perfect, or even better than the rest of us in some way. The goal of the church is that everyone will be a saint some day.

> London-born Italian, who died in 2006, built websites to spread Catholic teaching and is credited with two miracles

In 2006.

I'll be honest calling him an "influencer" is disgrace and comparing the works of dying kid with leukaemia to ai is even more so.

If the priest is using AI to write homilies what is even the point of going to Church I could just get an AI to be my priest and stay home.

Using AI generated text to interact with a human that is expecting a human touch is gross.

Even AI generated corpo-slop emails give me the ick. To me, it shows a deep lack of respect for the other person. I would rather something in broken English than bot vomit.

I’ve ended friendships people that can’t help themselves from pulling out their phones to ask their AI about something we’re talking about in-person. Like come on I want to know what YOU think.

In Catholicism the homily is not the main point of Mass, it takes a far secondary role to the Eucharist. Bad homilies definitely show up, but from the Catholic perspective that does not diminish or detract from the purpose of the Mass as a whole.

Corporations vs organised religion on artificial intelligence? This is way cooler than the cold war.

If you want to play a game about it, the Deus Ex series includes this detail too (especially in the sequel and prequels).

Nothing new. I'm sure something similar was said about Google before...

https://encourageandteach.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

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.

... but will they be able to compete with religions that have embraced AI, or will they be hopelessly left behind?

I wish the Catholic Church would use that approach more often.

Church in general has neutral stance towards AI. Pope himself rather negative.

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.

AI Mary, bereft of grace, paid for by sinners.

I left the church a long time ago, but this still makes me sad.

no really, go to any popular Facebook group for laity and it's all AI Marys.

The "shrimp jesus" meme got popular some months ago, but, in Catholic groups, it's mostly AI Marys

Tom Tugendhat had to stand up in the House of Commons and tell MPs not the use AI to write their speeches.

“I rise to speak. I rise to speak. I rise to speak. ChatGPT knows you’re there, but that is an Americanism that we don’t use, but still, keep using it, because it makes it clear that this place has become absurd.”

PaaS - priest as a service

Latest and greatest finetuned AI model built for your zip code. Uses location, and all the PII to generate an accurate model for your community needs.

Special addons available - turn real world events into gaslighted conversations™

Their brains? Does god steer those brains but can't steer LLMs?

One step closer to an Electric Monk

What does it mean to search yourself for words, even if they fall short of the eleganance that Ai can produce?

"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

Thanks for the WEF video with Sherry Turkle. <3

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.

> phrase "frictionless relationships"

Peak post-modern world, where everything is more real than real, yet doesn't have any friction of the real.

The Matrix has it wrong, the people went willingly, even excitedly

Cyberpunk headline

I meant tbh, if they get better ie less boring, I’m all for it!

The bible could have been written by a hallucinating AI.

The point is they don't want their job spreading fantasies to be taken away, just like every other entertainer. ;-)

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The “AI” believers will be soo disappointed. Does the holy spirit not inhabit the GPU that computes their slop? Then again, why believe in any god from a classical religion when you can believe in “AI” instead?

It’s a tough sell considering for many in the West the only idol of worship is money. And the Catholic Church has already rotted itself from the inside when it allowed the mentally unwell homosexuals to continuously abuse children and get away with it.

The results are probably too logical, and morally consistent.

How long until the church publishes their official SOUL.md?

create-homily skill?

jesus mcp?

/request-transfer-to-Servants-of-the-Paraclete

Priests using AI to deliver homilies feels like we are getting closer to having a blessed LLM with divine weights that speaks the direct word of God.

Related previously:

Message from Pope Leo XIV on the 60th World Day of Social Communications

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850067

Forget homilies.

AI can be the entire church experience. There isn't any aspect of the church that couldn't be automated.

Way back in "THX 1138" there were AI confessions.

Now, pretty sure it would be simple to have an AI priest, speaking in a real voice, with a hologram, and with current context for the audience.

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This is exactly the type of comment we're trying to avoid on HN.

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

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How to prepare homilies is clearly a religious topic

This is exactly the type of comment we're trying to avoid on HN.

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

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.

Sure, but it's not just the wording, it's the topic. The validity of belief in religion, and its bearing on the believer's authority about other matters, is just not a good topic to bring up after how we've seen the topic play out countless times on internet message board over more than three decades. Everyone just says what they always believe about the topic, and nobody learns anything new.

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.

It has to be ironic, right? Not sure what Sam Altman is qualified in apart from money making (which, of course, he's extraordinary excellent in).

Have you considered that our very consciousness is supernatural?

Considered at length, and ultimately rejected due to lack of evidence.

There's a lot of beauty in embracing not-knowing.

Ignorance is bliss.

I dunno about that.

absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Wrong. It's not strong evidence of absence, but it absolutely is evidence.

Wrong. If there is no evidence, then there is no proof either way.

Imagine looking at a point in the night sky and say you want to check if there is a start at that point. You look at the most powerful telescope that we have, and yet you see no star.

Is that a non-strong evidence, as you put it, that there is no star at that point? I think not. There is no evidence one way or other. That is it.

But the scientific community of today is like "We have looked with the most powerful telescopes that we have, and yet there is no star, so it seems that there is really no star there".

This is ABSURD.

Because "most powerful telescope we have today" is an arbitrary claim. There is always the chance that the "Most powerful" is just not good enough for the task at hand. But the "scientists" (as well as the business that wants this proof badly to sell their products) don't like to admit it.

> There is always the chance that the "Most powerful" is just not good enough for the task at hand.

And that chance is not 100%, and so any given strength of telescope is in fact excluding some of the hypothesis space. That is the definition of evidence.

Every time I point a telescope that would be able to detect a star of a given brightness and distance somewhere, and it fails to see a star, that limits the remaining space for people who believe in stars to make claims about what stars can be, until they're finally at the point where they can only make the most esoteric claims about “stars” that have no observable effects on the world, at which there's no point even including “stars” in your physics model.

I'm at that point with respect to god: every concrete claim has either been disproven, or isn't actually a claim about the observable world, at which point I shrug and say that this thing you insist on defining has no impact on anything.

> excluding some of the hypothesis space. That is the definition of evidence.

Not really, because in this case the "hypothesis space" is infinite, so your experiment exhausting some finite amount of space is not adding anything to the evidence.

So the point is when this "hypothesis space" is infinite or extremely large, if the best experiments that we can do right now can only explore a tiny fraction of that, then it is ABSURD to claim evidence of absence just because "We put our gold standard test and still didn't find anything".

>at which point I shrug and say that this thing you insist on defining has no impact on anything.

It is possible that this "thing" only interact with our world via events that we observe as truly random. Then you wouldn't go ahead and say random events have no impact on anything, will you?

You've retreated that we're no longer in the realm of “consciousness is supernatural”, and I rest my case. Retreating to an infinite hypothesis space that I can never fully exclude only helps you if there is no mundane explanation, otherwise I reject it for the same reason I can reject the boltzman-brain hypothesis. “But there's still a chance!” is a line from a comedy, not statistics.

That was about the star example, not about the “consciousness is supernatural” and the rest about the evidence for god which you bought up. You seemed to have confused between multiple threads of reasoning. May be, try to stick to one at a time?

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.

I don’t necessarily disagree but how do you get to the conclusion?

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 just don't think that unexplained == supernatural, so the conclusion does not seem obvious to me

Why then does it change if we take drugs?

What does “supernatural” in the context of your comment means to you?

Ah, a man (or women) after my own heart in HN.

Do you limit it to human‘s consciousness?

> consciousness

What else is there?

Many other species. (E.g. apes)

Man is just an animal.

Which is why I omitted "Human" when I quoted you..

You didn't quote me. Ex falso quodlibet.

Yea, you are right.

How could it be?

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.

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.

Germany is the only country that does that.

In the rest of the world the church is poorer but is still a leading provider of education and healthcare, especially in poor countries.

Tithes to the church are collected via taxes in Germany (Kirchensteuer), so you could argue the church itself is funded by taxes.

Government collects the tax for the churches from their members only, so the government here is merely an intermediary between church members and the respective organisations.

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

Ah yes, these priests killed and tortured around the world just to burn charity money.

> The pope believes in and promotes supernatural woowoo.

Hey, so does Peter Thiel!

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.

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Your comment has a very strong AI stench.

I guess that's the point of it. It's kinda hard to doubt what they're saying anw.

A comment about how nobody can tell facades from the real thing — and the first response is someone trying to tell. I appreciate the live demo.

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.

It's a tell that you think people can't tell.

Touch grass

This post is a prime example of why the Pope said what he did.

Bring on the Electric Monks ...

I think you are grossly missing the point.

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.

I have been present for a sermon that smelled like chatgpt. It does make you wish you had sent your agent instead.

Hang on, you're saying I still get soul credits toward the afterlife if I send my AI agent to sermons?

Hahahaha, ohh man. Love it...

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.

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.

AI people are a cult as well.

They simply follow (an)other god(s)... One of them clearly being Mammon.

> One of them clearly being Mammon.

Only one, and this doesn't apply only to AI grifters.

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Based

Yeah, because the AI might educate them :)

If they're struggling for ideas to put in homilies, they could always ask for some input from people that are one or both of (a) female or (b) married. Might get a fresh perspective ;)