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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
> 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.
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 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?
but yeah faiths are into faith
shrug
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.
There actually are, but they are famous homilies from famous Church Fathers rather then explicitly produced to be standard homilies.
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.
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 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.)
A homily about gambling would be right in line with religious teachings - the timing is really what is at the apex of your post.
(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'.
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
https://associationofcatholicpriests.ie/liturgy/sunday-resou...
But they will try, and they'll share a lot of potentially private information in the process.
But dull, empty homilies are (alas) very frequent.
I think right now it’s the exact opposite.
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.
Doubly-so since people are now apparently criticizing Christian pastors for quoting Christ.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A priest could use AI for a homily dealing with drug addiction, without specifying "Bob in row 3 is a methhead"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine a bunch of bushmen trying to perform the spell of rain. It doesn't matter what they sing, as long as it sounds like something that could pass as the spell of rain, because the goal here isn't to make rain happen, it's to strengthen the community through shared rituals. 99% of religious activities are exactly this.
I mean, not to dismiss your experience, but in my weekly Sunday going to church in Poland the priest would write an actual homily that felt relevant to the community. But then our small town had 3 churches, and each one had a different style - people would talk about preferring one over the other because they had more interesting "content".
But yeah, there was the message from the regional Bishop or the Archbishop of Poland or sometimes directly from the Vatican, then the reading from the old testament, then the homily which I'm 99% was written by the priest giving the mass.
>> I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying
Well, I wouldn't say not a single person did, but yeah, we had those 3 churches, probably 10k seats each, every one was rammed on the sunday, but I'd say 90% of people there were only there to tick it off and snoozed through the whole thing. But it's not because the homily was boring, it's because going to church on sunday was(maybe still is?) a thing you have to do or people will make fun out of you.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
lol
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.
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.
I can see how a strong disagreement can be dismissed as hate, though. It preserves the cognitive dissonance between reality and belief.
You just described what Silicon Valley wants to build lol
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.
As is Catholic tradition in the US
— ChatGPT.
Absolute worst was when an intelligent priest put in incredible effort, only for it to go over the heads of the yokels in their parish who want a simpler homily.
If it actually went over their heads, then the effort was wasted. I've heard 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.
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."
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”.
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.
'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.
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.
But if you like the idea: you don't need a priest for that at all! A QR code with a prompt will do just fine in this case.
There is no person in the world that is capable of weekly delivery of meaningful insight into your life. Or any topic, to be honest. AI won't solve that, it just "recycles old homilies".
In retrospect, I probably should have replied to a specific comment.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
A homily written by someone who spent the week reflecting on their community's struggles will always be more meaningful than a polished AI-generated one, even if the grammar is worse. The value of a sermon isn't in the prose quality — it's in the authenticity of someone who actually cares about the people listening.
Francis is basically saying: the medium is the message. If you outsource the thinking, you're outsourcing the caring.
Also I believe we're talking about Leo not Francis.
AFAICT, it is much harder to get a priest to reveal your confession than it is to get a log of your ChatGPT sessions.
¹) I first wrote "not sent to the cloud", but if God is all-knowing, records of all sins are already in the cloud, just not accessible by support staff.
I heard there is a GDPR'esque Right of access(SAR) to see your records if you ask for it nicely in person.
"God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."
"The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."
"The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization."
—Morpheus, Deus Ex
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.
We're already reliant on big tech regarding what information is presented to us and LLMs are just the next step in that direction.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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)
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 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.
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.)
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.
If you have to pay then it's either a purchase or a tax.
But you know this of course.
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.
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
> 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
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]
"ANTIQUA ET NOVA
Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence"
I was quite impressed at how much they "get it".
Based on their balance sheets I think they get it very, very, well.
Steve Jobs took a vow of poverty at Apple, too… somehow, some way, the dividends and stocks and private planes and fancy business dinners and everyone kissing his ass made a $1 salary survivable. Poor guy.
Which is an exaggeration, but makes you thinking. This institution still has a ton of power.
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.
Like some sort of critical thinking isnt there.
Now that I'm in my 30s and I know PhDs.... They are basically nepo babies who were not good enough for industry.
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.
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.
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.
Did you forget a "not"?
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
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...
Every honest description of Catholic Church, as any institution of this size and history, needs to be very nuanced. One of such nuances is a fact that it was one of the main, and sometimes strictly main, supporters and drivers of education and scientific progress. Other such nuance is that it very often punished and persecuted attempts to bring education and scientific progress.
Both views of the Church are true. That's what nuance is.
Often? Very rarely, and the motive was never to stop progress - it was side effect of something else.
More advancements... No being opposed to actual enlightenment, because it doesn't sit well with the institution of power...
I am talking about a real man of science here of course, not some egoistic, smart person that needs to be constantly prove they are the smartest or else their frail ego will collapse... Which there are plenty of in academia and science.
And started(?) Jews being killed in Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres
Moral virtue has nothing to do with being a man of science, and many men of science lacked it completely.
The Pope encouraged Galileo to write a book about the issue and cover both sides in neutrality. Galileo did write a book, but was rather on the Asperger's side of social behavior, and decided to frame the geocentric position (which aligned with the Pope) as idiotic, defended by an idiot - named Simplicio no less, and presented weak and easily dismantled arguments. The Pope took it as a personal insult, which it was, and the rest is history.
And notably Galileo's theory was, in general, weak. Amongst many other issues he continued to assume perfectly circular orbits which threw everything else off and required endless epicycles and the like. So his theory was still very much in the domain of philosophy rather than observable/provable science or even a clear improvement, so he was just generally acting like an antagonistic ass to a person who had supported him endlessly. And as it turns out even the Pope is quite human.
The geocentric position is silly and wrong. There are no two sides here.
So what made Galileo decide otherwise was not any particular flaw with geocentricism, but rather he thought that he'd discovered that the tides of the ocean were caused by the Sun. That is incorrect and also led to false predictions (like places only having one high tide), so the basis for his theory was incorrect, as were many assumptions made around it. But it was still interesting and worth debating. Had he treated 'the other side' with dignity and respect, it's entirely possible that we would have adopted a heliocentric view far faster than we ultimately did.
It has always been known that the tides are caused by the Moon. The hard part is to predict the tides in detail, as they depend on the geography as well. Some of the first computers were invented to predict the tides.
[1] - https://galileo.library.rice.edu/sci/observations/tides.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system
Was already a thing, though.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
If people think it's literally a face in the sky, they are probably mentally challenged.
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.
> treat women as property, condone slavery
Any examples in Church writings?
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.
>The first use of firearms as primary offensive weapons came in the 1421 Battle of Kutná Hora.
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.
It requires "belief"
"AI" believers claim to know the future
Relentless prognostication and effort to gain followers
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.
>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.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/07/pope-leo-xiv-d...
Let's be honest, the entire concept depends on advertising like nothing else.
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.
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™
https://encourageandteach.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
LLMs will melt your brain, and that's by design. You will have no bargaining power , you will be inadequate without access to the Thinking for me SaaS that you allow your brain to become addicted too. You will become a technocratic feudal slave, a serf reliant on the whichever tech-oligarch lets you use their thinking machine. They will pay you pennies.
“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.”
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.
"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.
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.
Peak post-modern world, where everything is more real than real, yet doesn't have any friction of the real.
Message from Pope Leo XIV on the 60th World Day of Social Communications
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.
create-homily skill?
jesus mcp?
/request-transfer-to-Servants-of-the-Paraclete
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.
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.
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.
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.
Has anyone actually directly encountered a single vatican sponsored charity or program in the wild? It seems quite a morally bankrupt organisation to me, and i’m not sure what if anything it really has to do with Christianity or Christians anyore.
Just yesterday I went to see a presentation of a priest appointed to a massive parish in the rural area of South Sudan, setting up schools and bringing in aid.
Hm. In germany Catholic day care is funded by the state ie taxes by over 90%. Military chaplains 100%. Would be surprised if the difference is bigger in schools and hospitals. I heard that in France there is an actual separation of church and state and as a result the church is rather poor.
In the rest of the world the church is poorer but is still a leading provider of education and healthcare, especially in poor countries.
Hey, so does Peter Thiel!
And despite what you think, most of us can tell apart AI generated content from the genuine thing. I am, however, starting to believe AI bros are being sincere when they tell us that they can’t. Every time someone gives me that tired “well how do you know we’re not just stochastic parrots too!” crap, I’m getting a little closer to taking their word for it. Maybe they are just that.
They simply follow (an)other god(s)... One of them clearly being Mammon.
Only one, and this doesn't apply only to AI grifters.
That AI can do it better - by what dimension? - than the priests is arguable, but the reason for a priest to write one is reflection, connection..
Have you ever considered that possibly performing something is not only a mean to some output but that the process is the thing?
That may or may not translate to your coding analogy, but for the article comment you pose, I think you are way off.
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?