Are The World's Biggest Religions Afraid Of Ai?

0:00 But the topic I want to talk about right now, the Pope and his AI manifesto. Not a manifesto, if manifesto's a wrong word. And these are what Popes do from time to time at different like inflection points in humanity, apparently. I actually don't really know too much about it, if I'm being honest. But I thought that this was a pertinent thing to talk about because as I've shifted away, not completely, but I've shifted my focus into this AI billionaire death cult that wants to kill us all. And I was deeply in the the scientist thing, which I am, and I did a

0:46 bunch of updates on who killed the scientist.com, but I've gotten really fixated on this test grill death cult. We're talking about AI gods here, and there are many different cults around that. And it's just interesting as as I'm starting to talk about that, all of a sudden the Pope had come out and actually said directly, "This is a inflection point in history, and we need to talk about it." And so that's what we're going to do, and that's what I've been doing, and that's what I hope we all do together as we start talking about this. I really don't want to be the doomer, I want to

1:31 be one of the voices for, "Hey, this technology's awesome, but it might kill us, so maybe we should talk about it." And I love I I I would love to be one of those people, because I think we need to. Now, I think it's interesting that the Pope did this because of a couple of things. One, the Pope had likened it to basically his version of this I I can't remember it Pope John I think from the late 1800s had done one of these encyclicals. I said it right that time. Encyclicals. His encyclical was essentially about we're at this turning point. It's the Industrial Revolution.

2:18 These are the things that we need to keep track of as we take this turning point, as we evolve. These are like kind of like the Pope's declarations from what I'm kind of gathering. He's kind of like the Pope's declarations saying, "We're at this inflection point. We're at this turning point, but let's remember our faith. Let's remember God. Let's remember humanity." And as most of you probably know, I do not subscribe to any religion whatsoever. I'm totally cool with religion and all of that. It's just not my bag. AI may actually be not just an existential threat for humanity. And I And I say maybe because I really truly don't know. I really

3:04 truly do not know. I think I think for Christianity and like the main religions, there will be a threat I think to to them because religion when you really boil it down is humans with their limited knowledge and their limited understanding. And I'm talking about in 2026 just as much as I am talking about forever and ever ago, thousands of years. We want to make sense of the Earth, of existence, consciousness, of all these things. We can look to things that are beyond our capabilities, whether they are real or not. It's kind

3:49 of like money or anything else. It's It's like we also have to believe in it for it to exist. Not to get too philosophical about it. But I think that AI presents, I think a very short amount of time from now, a a more tangible representation of a entity, let's say, an intelligence, an omniscience that we can't fully understand, so therefore we will deify it, right? Or uh whatever the term is for making something a deity. Deify is not the word. I think that in some ways the leadership of these different religious

4:34 organizations are likely looking at AI as a threat because it's easier to put your faith into something that's more tangibly touching your life. And so for all these people of all religions, some of them some of the less believing, some of the less evangelical or the the less orthodox actually accounts for the largest number of the people that follow any religion you're talking about. Those people have a higher probability of finding faith in something else. And AI, it's far more prevalent in our day-to-day lives because like the world will be running on AI. And and not just in the small way

5:19 that it is now, because it's small right now. But that is amplifying. So to me, before we even get in to this encyclical, and trust me, we're not going to read it because I mean, it takes like it would take like 45 minutes to read it straight through without thinking about what it is. I skimmed it. I'll be honest with you. I had my Claude write me a full summary. It's detailed, though, because there's so much in this. And because I don't speak like old-school priest talk. You know, I mean, it's English, but it's like a different type of English. Another little piece of context here, a couple of things that happened on Monday. This encyclical actually came out on the

6:04 15th. This encyclical is actually not new, but it became like part of the social media loop because on Monday, the Vatican had an an Anthropic, which is Claude, they had made a a merger or some sort of public agreement. So, people are like, they're they're coming up with all sorts of things that this may mean. And really what it means, just so people understand this, it's not like the Vatican is getting wired up with Claude code, and they're building their own AI systems. It's nothing like that, which is like Jeez, if you go on X, the theories were flying, baby. No, the reality is

6:51 Anthropic and the Vatican are coming together for AI ethics. That's all. There's nothing technological, there's no money, there's no contracts. The PR campaign for Anthropic, who's positioning themselves as the more ethical AI system out there. Are they? Maybe, maybe not. I I I really don't know. I just think that they make a really great product. I do agree that we should halt or at least severely slow down AI. Keep doing the research, but like slow down the building. Sorry, the growing. AIs are grown, they are not built, they are not programmed. They're grown. And

7:36 [clears throat] that is an important concept to have. So, if people remember, the last Pope, before he died met with J.D. Vance and most of you probably remember that because it was a huge meme. That J.D. Vance killed the Pope. Do you guys remember that? Because that's a fun conspiracy. J.D. Vance killed the Pope. That means we're talking about the last Pope. We got a new Pope now from Chicago. Before J.D. Vance actually met the Pope and for some context everyone of you know this, but if you don't J.D. Vance was essentially groomed by Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel put him in that position.

8:22 Quite literally, he is our vice president because of Peter Thiel. That's like a verifiable fact at this point. Apparently, it had come out Peter Thiel was essentially saying to J.D. Vance that the Pope was the Antichrist. Because, you know, he's big on the Antichrist and he knows so much about the Antichrist that he will do a lecture circuit all around the world about the Antichrist. And apparently, the Antichrist is the Pope. And he says that because the Pope, whether it be that Pope or this Pope, was going to put out something like this. Because on the AI side

9:08 he's You got to understand, Peter Thiel is a transhumanist. When asked directly if he thinks that the human race should endure, he hesitated for like 3 seconds. To the point where the guy was like, "You're taking a long time. Pretty simple. Do you think the human race should endure?" And after some like, "Oh, yeah. Oh, blah blah blah blah blah." He finally said yes. Like the most insincere yes of all time. So, you got to ask yourself, why does Peter Thiel think that the Pope is the Antichrist? Because there is a religious war happening, and it is unlike any other religious war

9:56 before. Because all other religious wars had been over clumps of dirt and over ideologies invented by some other person. Like we like to say that America is a Christian nation, but our founding fathers were a whole host of different religions like deism and Calvinism and Christian. But it wasn't all Christians. It was not a Christian country. It never has been. In fact, the whole country was built on the fact of the shepherd separation of church and state. We left Europe because of the rule that the church had over the

10:41 government, and we said, "Nah, dog." We said, "Nah." And we started America. People seem to forget that for some reason. I don't know why. But all of these wars over religion usually were over land, and they were just conflicting ideas. When you really break it down, it's just conflicting ideas about the answers to the we don't know. Right? It's a little different when you're fighting a religion that doesn't exist yet that is forming and that is is What's the best way to put it? It is a religion forming off of something that is not just from some dude's head.

11:27 It's from like real technology that's coming, that's here, that we know, and we know about the psyche of humans. And so now it's a battle for all the religions against AI and the AI religion that's coming. Not a lot of people are talking about that. That's my take. May sound weird. I may be wrong, and I'm totally fine with that. I don't think I am, though. I don't think I am. And so I see something like this and I go, "Oh, okay. This is a religion that needs to protect itself because what they're all what all the religions are going for is faith. And there's only

12:12 so much faith out there. And every person only has one faith point. And what happens when people start getting a little faith in AI? You tell me. I think this is a threat. And so now we've got the Pope. And the Pope is coming out with encyclicals. And the more you think about it, and the more we dig into this test real, all these different ideologies, everything that's kind of happening in Silicon Valley, you can't tell me it's not religious coded at the very least. Like I said, on Monday, the Pope put out Magnifica Humanitatis, which sounds like a Harry Potter spell. I know, but it is

12:58 Leo the XIII's encyclical on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. The encyclical positions itself as a successor to Leo the XIII's Rerum Novarum, whose 135th anniversary is being marked. Just as Leo responded to the new things of industrialization, Leo, the new one, addresses the new things of digital digitalization. AI and robotics. All right, digitalization, AI and robotics. The entire document is structured around a choice between two biblical images. The Tower of Babel from Genesis 11 represents a project of pride and

13:44 self-sufficiency built without reference to God that flattens human diversity into uniformity and ends in dispersion. So, in one word, mids. Humans become mids. That's what he's saying. The other is Nehemiah rebuilding Jerusalem's wall from Nehemiah 2 to 6 represents shared responsibility. Nehemiah prays, listens, assigns each family a section, and rebuilds a relationship before rebuilding stones. Leo's thesis on the real choice about technology isn't yes or no, but Babel or Jerusalem. Technology is never neutral.

14:30 It takes on the character of those who design, fund, regulate, and use it. I I think it's a little bit more simple. It's just a tool, and tools are just simply dictated by those who wield the tools. So, to me, AI is a hammer. You can build a home with a hammer and some nails and some wood. You could also take that same hammer and beat someone's brains in and kill them. Same hammer. It's all about the human that wields it. Question is, do you trust these cult people, these

15:16 billionaires, that are at the helm of all of these frontier AI labs? So, the introduction lays out the four images above and adds practical themes. Building for the common good begins with a firm relationship with God, accepts human limitation rather than treating it as an error to be corrected. So, basically he's going after transhumanism. Um and that's probably going to be, you know, a big theme that you're going to see as transhumanism and more transhumanist sort of uh content starts getting pushed out there into the world, which I definitely see happening over the next couple of years. And you're going to start seeing responses like this. You're going to start seeing the church also making its

16:02 responses to transhumanism. This is just him kind of checking that a little bit. Chapter 1, a dynamic approach faithful to the gospel. This chapter traces how Catholic social doctrine developed as a living tradition. It first establishes how the church relates to the world, recognizing the autonomy of earthly realities and the distinction between the ecclesial and political communities. Then frames social doctrine not as a fixed rulebook, but as a shared discernment born from the encounter between the gospel and the questions of history. Again, he's just setting the framework for we're humans, be human,

16:47 but we're also servants to God. Chapter 2 is the foundations and principles of social doctrine. This chapter lays out the principles meant to guide AI decisions. The foundations are human dignity rooted in being made in the image of the triune God, ontological dignity that is infinite and independent of ability, wealth, or productivity, and human rights, an expression of that dignity dignity with the right to life as foundational. The five principles are the common good, which is the social expression of dignity, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, the universal destination of goods, which is the Earth's goods are given to all, private property is subordinate to this,

17:34 subsidiarity decisions made closest to those affected, higher authorities support rather than supplant lower ones, solidarity, the recognition that everyone's future is interconnected, no one is saved alone, and social justice, a social order that lets everyone, especially the weakest, live with dignity. And guess what? You don't have to be religious to give, you know, any of this some weight because that's that's all it is, man. Like, all of those are just good, true things, whether you believe in religion or not,

18:20 whether you follow this religion or not. In fact, these are, you know, pretty universal across all religions. Maybe not all the books of all the religions. You know, the Talmud's got some weird takes. I don't know. So, chapter three, technology and dominance. This is where it starts to get good. All right. So, chapter three, technology and dominance. This chapter analyzes AI directly. Leo argues AI should not be equated with human intelligence. These systems imitate functions of human thoughts and often exceed humans in speed and computation, but they have no body, no experience, no moral consciousness, and don't truly understand what they produce. Now, I will tell you this, when I read that,

19:06 and I and actually was like, like I said, I was like kind of skimming through, I had actually read that paragraph, and I was I in in my first thought was like oh wow like dude really gets it. Like he actually I think might understand AI. Like he actually might understand some of the science behind it. Right? And he might understand how it operates because to a lot of people AI is magic. It's just It's just magic. Kind of like the internet was just magic. But to him he's a he he he's showing an understanding of how it fundamentally operates. So, I thought that was cool. He makes a notable technical point that

19:51 modern AI systems are more cultivated than built. Remember when I kept saying AIs are grown? They're not programmed? Same thing. More cultivated than built. Since developers create a framework in which the intelligence grows rather than designing every detail, leaving even their creators with limited understanding of how these systems work internally. This is a fact. This is a fact. We grow AIs in a direction that we want it to go. But but the final product is we may mathematically have an understanding of what it potentially might be. All of those are guesses even with the math mathematics. So,

20:37 on governance the central claim is that AI is not morally neutral because every system embeds choices through what it measures, ignores, and optimizes. It's actually called gradient descent is how it like operates which is a whole thing that you can look about you know, on your own. It's nuts. But that makes me think of uh there's a thing that's actually been going around making the rounds lately on social media. And it was this uh It was like from this handbook from IBM from the '70s, where uh I'm paraphrasing here, but essentially what it says is that um is that no machine should ever be

21:23 a manager because no machine can be held accountable for its actions. Meaning thought, ingenuity, things those issues they need to come from humans. Because those are positions in where you can make mistakes and you can make big mistakes and you need to have consequences for those mistakes. So, he flags AI's heavy environmental footprint, energy, water, data centers, which again and I'm an environmentalist at heart, while these things do take quite a lot of resources, there are plenty of other even more frivolous things out there that take as much if not more, but we sort of like put AI energy usage as like

22:09 this like monolith, when in fact it's like in the pack with like I don't know two dozen other things that we do in this country that take just as much if not more of all different types of energy. Does not mean that it's not taking up an ungodly amount of stuff. It just means it's not a monolith like people like to think it is. So, the chapter then critiques transhumanism and posthumanism as ideologies treating human limitations as a defect to be overcome. Which in the name of progress can make it easier to regard some lives as less less worthy. That is the fundamental problem with transhumanism. And uh yeah, it's we we we should look

22:58 part of the beauty of being a human is that you have these limitations. And limitations are a good thing. Limitations are the greatest thing for art. Humans create art. Music, film, television, paintings, and every other medium of art that you could do. AI can replicate, but the actual creative process that comes from humans. And we're good at it because of limitations. All these music artists will tell you. They say they would say very often Well, some of the reasons why they did the best work that they did was because in back in the day the technology wasn't

23:44 there. They didn't have the computers. They didn't have these things. They didn't have Pro Tools. They couldn't retouch everything and synthesize everything. They had to do it. And so sometimes there was limitations. And in those limitations you have to start thinking creatively. And so then you start thinking creatively and you start doing things and then you create a new sound. You do a whole new thing in a whole new way that's never been done before. That's not what AI does. And so that's the one of the greatest things about humanity is is our expressions. The more adversity and guardrails and things that prevent you from just living limited limitlessly limitlessly. Sorry. The things

24:30 It's just it gets Oh my god. I'm I'm getting into I'm getting into starting to to preach. I'm not trying to preach. I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to get through this. But it's those things that make us able to create the most beautiful things. It's through limitations. And that's my fundamental issue with transhumanism because what they're trying to create us into can no longer categorically be called a human. They're cyborgs, and we need to start calling it that. That's why I keep saying I don't want to be a cyborg. I like being a human. My last livestream and the video that I posted today, I explicitly say that I'm halfway to 80 and I'm stoked if I die at

25:17 80. I'm stoked to be halfway through life. I don't want to live forever because there is such thing as too much of a good thing. Trust me. Chapter four is safeguarding humanity, truth, work, and freedom. The most concrete chapter organized around three goods. Truth as a common good. AI is a powerful amplifier of disinformation, blurring the line between fact and falsehood. Truth is is relational and verified, not the property of the powerful or the product of automated control. And let's just talk about that for a second. I kind of think we live in a post-truth world at this point, and AI is only going to exasperate that. It's not going to bring on a post-truth world. We're already living in a post-truth world because of

26:03 the internet. But, whatever. Work. The convergence of automation, robotics, and AI is reshaping work. Leo warns that the new ways of working are not necessarily better. AI can de-skill workers, subject them to surveillance, and erode their sense of agency. Now, I don't necessarily agree with that. Work has has changed. Uh what really matters is purpose. Are you working and doing things that give you purpose? Cuz you can work and make all the money in the world, but without purpose, you can be a little empty and hollow, which is kind of part of the the teachings that the Christian church uh espouses. So, I'm kind of think it's

26:49 funny that he's kind of thinking in a different way, but yeah. Um Yeah, but you know, historically speaking, uh so do you find is that historically speaking, uh when jobs are lost, uh they're replaced by other types of jobs. Um this is not a perfect system. And do I think that um you know, it's going to be the same with something that's so rapidly expanding as this? Um No, but but we're seeing all these things where the AI is still in a lot of ways nowhere near as good as humans. And so therefore, a lot of these systems, a lot of these companies are

27:35 getting rid of their AI systems or severely cutting back their use of AI system, rehiring people that they had fired. And their hybridization of of the AI and human workforce is going to be like the next step. People were trying to leapfrog that step. And no, this is not going to be like this is not going to be a cheap way to like maximize output. It's just not not right now. 5 years from now? 3 years from now? 7 years from now? Maybe. But right now, no. No, so we're going to see a lot of those jobs come back and we're already seeing that. Um so anyway, the last one there is freedom. The chapter examines the digital attention economy, which is

28:21 engineered to capture time and exploit psychological vulnerability, and the rise of algorithmic social control through mass data collection. I actually disagree with this as well because I think that when we're talking about attention, we're talking about um what he's really talking about there is behavior modification, things of that nature. That all comes from social media. And I think we are entering the last dying breaths of the social media era. I think social media has 2 to 3 years left before we're all existing in another type of digital space that I don't know

29:07 how that exists yet. Um even just using phones, it's all going to be this, like soon. How many years? I don't know. It's years away, but it's happening, right? It's happening um for sure. Chapter 5, the culture of power and the civilization of love. This chapter turns to war. The digital revolution is changing the nature of conflict. Cyber attacks, information manipulation, automated strategic decisions, and AI acts as an accelerant, lowering the threshold for using force and reducing victims to collateral damage and data. That's true. [gasps] Leo diagnoses a culture of power that normalizes war, pursues ever greater

29:52 military capacity, exploits the crisis of multilateralism, and is sustained by a false realism insisting war is inevitable. That is also true. Unless we actually have some sort of new world order, one world government, no longer is there a need for war because we're all owned by the same entity, which I which I am not presenting as the right option here. But uh yeah. So, and it goes so much deeper. You

30:38 should definitely get it, you know, go read his his paper or spit it into like like an AI chat GPT or whatever you use and and just just read these cuz it you know, I'm skimming through the skimmer here. Uh but yeah. The conclusion is Leo proposes a program of Christian life. Of course he does. For the AI age built on four pillars. Contemplating the incarn- incarnation, the word made flesh who enters human fragility and saves through descending love not technological self-evaluation, the use to Eucharistic spirituality, ecclesial unity that makes human

31:23 connection visible against digital exclusion, building for the common good as a wise architect, and prayer. He gives four exonerants. Remain faithful to truth, invest in education, cultivate relationships, and love justice and peace. And returns a final time to the Nehemiah as the model, not passive spectators of social fracture, but people who enter the construction sites of history, labs, tech companies, schools, media institutions to rebuild what has collapsed. The document closes with Varys' Magnificat as a song of hope, an invitation to be weavers of hope so that even the era of AI can become part of salvation history. Okay.

32:10 He made a big thing. I forget what they call them. Uh encyclicals. Encyc- encyclical encyclicals. En-cyc-li-cals.