apologetics

The rise and fall of the AI 'Father Justin' is a technology parable for our time

The rise and fall of the AI 'Father Justin' is a technology parable for our time

The penitent crafted the perfect sin to confess to a virtual priest: "Bless me father, for I have sinned. … I have had anger in my heart about the deployment of AI chatbots in inappropriate places."

"Father Justin," a 3D AI character created by the San Diego-based Catholic Answers network, offered biblical advice for wrestling with anger.

"God is merciful and loving, my child," the bot concluded. "For your penance, I ask you to pray the Our Father three times, reflecting on God's infinite mercy and love. And now, I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."

Legions of cyberspace believers pounced. One tweeted this cry: "HAIEEEEEEE." Susannah Black Roberts of Plough Magazine noted: "Hey @catholiccom, your AI 'priest' is offering absolution. Might want to kill it with fire and never do anything like this again."

Online detectives found other flaws. The National Catholic Register noted the app struggled when turning voices into printed words, translating "Eucharist" as "caressed" or even "you, you, you," while "Communion" became "commute." The Pillar asked if it was possible to baptize "my baby with Gatorade in an emergency" and Father Justin affirmed that option.

"I say this with nothing but respect for you guys and your work, but ... this should've just been a plain search engine," tweeted Father Mike Palmer of the Congregation of Holy Cross. "Dressing it up as a soulless AI avatar of a priest does absolutely nothing except cause confusion and invite mockery of your otherwise excellent work."

Catholic Answers President Christopher Check quickly confessed that his team "received a good deal of helpful feedback." Thus, "Justin" lost his clerical collar.

'Good men' vs. 'Real men' -- Do religious leaders understand the difference?

'Good men' vs. 'Real men' -- Do religious leaders understand the difference?

The 18-foot granite Titanic Memorial in Washington, D.C., shows a robed man rising from the waves, his arms extended like a cross.

Once a year, at the precise time on April 15, 1912, when the liner was declared doomed, the Men's Titanic Society gathers at this statue, which is hidden behind Fort McNair after being moved to make way for the Kennedy Center. Members wear tuxedos, to honor the passenger who donned evening clothes in order to "die like a gentleman."

A toast in the rite includes: "Chivalry, gallantry, bravery and grace. … To the young and old, the rich and the poor, the ignorant and the learned, all who gave their lives nobly to save women and children. To those brave men."

No one debates the values that inspired that sacrifice.

"Men seem to instinctively treat masculinity as the call to die so that others may live -- the highest form of sacrifice," noted Nancy Pearcey, in "The Toxic War on Masculinity," her latest work of Christian apologetics. "That principle seems to be built into men's created nature."

However, Pearcey noted that sociologist Michael Kimmel has offered clues as to why many activists now condemn "traditional masculinity."

Kimmel asked West Point cadets to describe a "good man," and heard "honor," "duty," "integrity," "sacrifice," "do the right thing," "be a protector" and similar responses. When he asked what it means to "man up" as "a real man," cadets said, "tough," "never show weakness," "win at all costs," "suck it up," "get rich" and "get laid."

Pearcey calls the "good man" credo the "software of God's creation," while the "real man" stereotype reveals the "virus of sin."

A hard truth: Most American Catholics no longer worry about saving souls

A hard truth: Most American Catholics no longer worry about saving souls

As a rule, evangelists from Texas don't go shopping for bourbon before a speech.

But that's what Marcel LeJeune and some friends did when the Catholic Missionary Disciples leader spoke at a Franciscan University conference last summer in Steubenville, Ohio. Things turned serious, while chatting with a saleswoman, when he asked how she was doing and she bluntly replied, "I wish I wasn't on this earth."

There was no easy response. The woman was angry, LeJeune said, "because something was hurting." He offered to pray, and she fired back, "Oh, don't do that. You're talking to a rabid atheist, and I don't want your prayers."

LeJeune returned to discussing bourbon options and, as he left, the woman smiled and laughed when he said, "Look, I'm going to pray for you, but you just pretend I'm not. OK?"

That's really all that could happen in that setting, stressed LeJeune, a veteran of years of campus ministry near Texas A&M University. The saleswoman was candid, and he tried to show sincere concern.

Truth is, the woman he met "when I was buying bourbon was … easier to evangelize than the people who go to my parish who don't know Jesus Christ."

Catholic leaders need to understand that, a decade ago, Pew Research Center numbers were already warning that 13% of American adults are ex-Catholics, with 6.5 former Catholics for every Catholic convert. Waves of "nones," the religiously unaffiliated, cannot be ignored.

Meanwhile, LeJeune has stressed another sobering reality -- that nearly half of church-going Millennials think it's morally wrong to seek converts. Among Catholics, many assume that "evangelism" is a Protestant concept and the same thing as "proselytism" that pressures people to convert.

The reality is that more and more churchgoers are, at the practical level, "universalists" who assume people go to heaven, no matter what, he noted.

Upon Friar Review -- Looking for valid spiritual questions in popular culture

Upon Friar Review -- Looking for valid spiritual questions in popular culture

During the 1990s, legions of kids could quote chapter and verse from the "X-Files" adventures of FBI special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

Scully was the skeptic who put her faith in science, while Mulder plunged head-first into the supernatural. But in one case, Scully experienced mysterious visions that helped her save a life. Stunned, she returned to church. Confessing to a priest, she asked why she witnessed a miracle, but her partner did not.

Maybe, the priest said, God was only speaking to her. "With the Lord, anything is possible. Perhaps you saw these things because you needed to. … Why does that surprise you?"

Scully answered: "Mostly it just makes me afraid. … Afraid that God is speaking, but that no one is listening."

Father Casey Cole grew up in that era. While he wasn't an "X-Files" fan, many of his friends were, hooked by the show's mantra, "The truth is out there." Thus, this confession scene has become one of many video clips he uses as chaplain at three schools in Macon, Georgia.

When exploring pop culture, the young Franciscan friar is looking for good questions – the kinds of questions he thinks the church needs to hear.

That's easier with some forms of entertainment than others. It's possible for savvy pastors, youth leaders and teachers to respond to high-quality movies and television programs, especially those that address spiritual issues, said Cole, describing the approach used in the "Upon Friar Review" videos he makes with Father Patrick Tuttle of Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Macon.

Then there are "times when Father Patrick closes his eyes and says, 'This is awful.' … There are times when I want to say, 'This is the worst thing ever.' But when we're at our best, we can say, 'Let's take a step back and let's analyze this. What question is being asked here?

Jordan Peterson's secular approach to the soul and the sacred (Part II)

Jordan Peterson's secular approach to the soul and the sacred (Part II)

It isn't every day that a University of Toronto psychology professor is asked to perform a wedding.

Then again, Jordan Peterson has outgrown the role of bookish academic, evolving into a digital-culture guru whose fame is measured in millions of online clicks.

The logical thing to do was hit the Internet and get ordained. Within minutes, the author of the bestseller "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos" was the "metropolitan" of his own church -- with a one-doctrine creed.

"If you are a member of my church, you cannot follow stupid rules. That's a good rule, because it's an anti-rule rule," said Peterson, during an Orthodox School of Theology forum at Toronto's Trinity College.

This 2017 event -- "Resurrection of Logos: The Divine, the Individual and Finding Our Bearings in a Postmodern World" -- offered the scholar's unusual mix of science, art and theology. What matters to online seekers is that it's on YouTube, where debates about ultimate issues never end.

Not all rules are stupid, stressed Peterson. Consider this one: Don't tell lies.

"You certainly know when you lie, and you know how to stop doing that. So, I would say … stop lying. Try it for a year and see what happens," he said. "It also means that you have to not act in a way that you wouldn't speak truthfully about it."

Attempting to live a good life, he stressed, will force many people to realize that they are not inherently good.

"You cannot conceive of how good a human being might be until you can conceive how evil a human being can and will be," he said. "The pathway to Paradise is through hell. … If you don't go there voluntarily, you'll go there accidentally. So, it's better to go there voluntarily, because you can go with hope."

The online Catholic bishop pays a visit to 'Court of the Gentiles' at Facebook

The online Catholic bishop pays a visit to 'Court of the Gentiles' at Facebook

In Jerusalem's ancient temple of King Herod, there was an outer courtyard in which Greeks, Romans and non-Jews could gather to pray, pose questions and debate with any religious authorities willing to do so.

Whether modern clergy want to admit it or not, Facebook has turned into a "Court of the Gentiles" for two billion-plus users, said Bishop Robert Barron of the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, speaking recently at Facebook headquarters near San Jose, Calif. Social media is where people air their doubts and convictions, hatreds and hopes.

Religion is often a bone of contention on Facebook, said Baron, an auxiliary bishop known for years of work online and in mass media. However, these digital faith fights rarely offer constructive arguments that produce clarity and understanding, as opposed to anger and confusion.

What the Internet needs is better arguments about religion, he said, in a talk that featured numerous lessons from St. Thomas Aquinas, but only one allusion to President Donald Trump.

"Some people say, 'Why are you encouraging people to have arguments?' By 'argument,' I mean something very positive," he said, in a talk that, logically enough, has been posted on Facebook. "If you go on much of social media -- I've been doing this now for much of the past 10 years, doing evangelization through the Internet -- you'll see a lot of energy around religious issues. There'll be a lot of words exchanged, often very angry ones -- a lot of energy, but very little real argument about matters religious. …

"That's a serious problem, because if we don't know how to argue about religion, all we're going to do is fight about religion."

Many Facebook combatants act like they can force other people into agreement, he said. Others "throw up their hands" and assume it's impossible to make progress when dealing with religion. True arguments take place in the middle, among people who believe faith and reason can work together.

Seeking a logical key to unlock mysteries of atheist Christopher Hitchens

Seeking a logical key to unlock mysteries of atheist Christopher Hitchens

The Shenandoah Valley was a spectacular place to spend Labor Day, even when rushing by car from Washington, D.C., to a public debate in Birmingham, Ala.

It helped that Larry Taunton of the Fixed Point Foundation had a lively conversationalist in the passenger seat during that 2010 road trip -- atheist provocateur Christopher Hitchens. And as the mountains rolled past, they worked their way deep into St. John's Gospel.

Taunton called this exchange a "Bible study." Hitchens called it "mutual textual criticism."

So here was the author of "god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," reading glasses perched on his nose, reading some of Christianity's most cerebral words in his rich British baritone, a voice abused by countless cigarettes and smoothed by rivers of Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch. He kept a glass -- damn the highway open-container laws -- locked between his knees throughout the drive.

Thus Hitchens read: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." At one point, Taunton suggested that Hitchens record this text to sell as an audiobook.

"With that voice, Christopher would have done an amazing job. … You can only imagine the shock this would have caused among atheists and Christians, alike," said Taunton, reached by telephone. Hitchens, however, "knew that he didn't have much time left and he had so much that he wanted to do."

The Shenandoah road trip is a pivotal scene in Taunton's new book, "The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World's Most Notorious Atheist," which is causing fierce debates on both sides of the Atlantic.

C.S. Lewis: Still too popular after 50 years

Even though it has been 50 years since his death, the faithful at Headington Parish Church in Oxford, England, are constantly reminded of the loyal, but rather quiet, parishioner who always occupied the same short pew hidden by a sanctuary pillar. Going to church was never easy for C.S. Lewis, even before he became one of the world's most famous Christian writers, noted the Rev. Angela Tilby, in a recent service in memory of the Oxford don's death on Nov. 22, 1963 -- the same day as the death of British author, Aldous Huxley, and, of course, President John F. Kennedy.

Lewis considered church organ music far too grand and thought the words of most popular hymns were "a literary disgrace," said Tilby. Illogical sermons irritated him no end and he was highly critical of liberal trends in theology and biblical scholarship. As a former atheist, Lewis believed that far too many people in the modern world were slipping into an "easy," "fashionable" agnosticism.

In particular, Lewis was "aware of the way belief in an afterlife had come to be ridiculed by critics of Christianity as 'pie in the sky when you die' -- an imaginary compensation for those who had a raw deal in this life," she said, in a service broadcast on BBC Radio. "Lewis' response was to argue that hope for a better world could never deliver unless it was grounded in something more than the here and now."

Lewis lived to see his popular fiction -- especially "The Screwtape Letters" and "The Chronicles of Narnia" -- become bestsellers in England, America and around the world. Meanwhile, most of his Oxford University colleagues rolled their eyes at what they considered the merely popular Christian apologetics of his BBC commentaries and books such as "Miracles," "The Problem of Pain" and "Mere Christianity."

The bottom line: Lewis was considered a dinosaur from an earlier age and far too popular to be taken seriously. Half a century later, that verdict remains popular among many academics and liberal religious leaders.

Yet half a century after his death, to the day, a small stone marker in honor of Lewis was added in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, in the south transept near a variety of memorials for Geoffrey Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, John Milton, John Keats and many others.

Meanwhile, the entire Lewis canon is as popular as ever, with so many books in print, with so many publishers, that researchers struggle to total the numbers. More than 100 million copies of the seven Narnia books have sold worldwide, in 40 languages. HarperOne's C.S. Lewis Signature Classics series -- the non-Narnia Lewis works -- was created in 2001 and sales are nearing 10 million volumes. An estimated 18 million copies of "Mere Christianity" have sold in the United States alone since its publication in 1952.

Memorial stones are fitting, but it's significant that Lewis is best known for his books, said the Rev. Alister Edgar McGrath of King's College in London, who will soon return to Oxford to teach science and religion. He is the author of the recent "C. S. Lewis -- A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet."

"In the 1930s, Lewis declared that a writer is not a spectacle, who says, 'Look at me!' Rather, a writer is more like a set of spectacles, who says, 'Look through me.' ... The Christian faith, Lewis discovered, gave him a lens that brought things into focus," said McGrath, in the text for his sermon during the Headington Parish service.

This focus -- in his writing, in the classroom and in life -- included an unashamed belief in the reality of heaven and eternal life. Yet Lewis argued that focusing on heaven was the best way for believers to be truly serious about the actions and decisions that make up everyday life.

The ultimate goal for Lewis, said McGrath, was to "raise our horizon and elevate our expectations, and then to behave on earth in the light of this greater reality. ... The true believer is not someone who disengages with this world in order to focus on heaven, but the one who tries to make this world more like heaven.

"Lewis is surely right when he declared that the 'Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.'"

Zombies are US, 2013 edition

It seems to happen whenever Steve Beard hangs out with friends -- especially folks who don't go to church -- talking about movies, television and whatever else is on their minds. "It may take five minutes or it may take as long as 10, but sooner or later you're going to run into some kind zombie comment," said Beard, editor of Good News, a magazine for United Methodist evangelicals. He is also known for writing about faith and popular culture.

"Someone will say something like, 'When the zombie apocalypse occurs, we need to make sure we're all at so-and-so's house so we can stick together.' It's all a wink and a nod kind of deal, but the point is that this whole zombie thing has become a part of the language of our time."

Tales of the living dead began in Western Africa and Haiti and these movies have been around as long as Hollywood has been making B-grade flicks. However, the modern zombie era began with filmmaker George A. Romero's classic "Night of the Living Dead" in 1968, which led to his "Dawn of the Dead" and "Day of the Dead." Other directors followed suit, with hits such as "28 Days Later," "Zombieland," "The Evil Dead" and "Shaun of the Dead." Next up, Brad Pitt in the $170 million-dollar epic "World War Z," due June 21, which could turn into a multi-movie franchise.

In bookstores, classic literature lovers will encounter a series of postmodern volumes clustered under the title "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies." Also, videogame fans have purchased more than 50 million copies of the Resident Evil series and these games have inspired countless others.

But anyone who is interested in the worldview -- if not the theology -- of zombie life must come to grips with the cable-television parables offered in the AMC series "The Walking Dead." This phenomenon, said Beard, has become so influential that it cannot be ignored by clergy, especially those interested in the kinds of spiritual questions that haunt people who avoid church pews.

Truth is, "The Walking Dead" is not "about zombies. It's a show about people who are trying to figure out the difference between mere survival and truly living," he stressed, in a telephone interview. "How do you decide what is right and what is wrong? How do you stay sane, in a world that has gone crazy? ...

"Where is God in all of this? That's the unspoken question."

In his classic book "Gospel of the Living Dead," religious studies scholar Kim Paffenroth of Iona College argued that Romero's zombie movies borrowed from one of the key insights found in Dante's "Inferno" -- that hell's worst torments are those humanity creates on its own, such as boredom, loneliness, materialism and, ultimately, separation from God.

As a final touch of primal spirituality, Romero -- who was raised Catholic -- added cannibalism to the zombie myth.

"Zombies partially eat the living. But they actually only eat a small amount, thereby leaving the rest of the person intact to become a zombie, get up, and attack and kill more people, who then likewise become zombies," argued Paffenroth. Thus, the "whole theme of cannibalism seems added for its symbolism, showing what humans would degenerate into in their more primitive, zombie state."

The point, he added, is that "we, humans, not just zombies, prey on each other, depend on each other for our pathetic and parasitic existence, and thrive on each others' misery."

This is why, said Beard, far too many women and men seem to be staggering through life today like listless shoppers wandering in shopping malls, their eyes locked on their smartphones instead of the faces of loved ones. Far too often their lives are packed with stuff, but empty of meaning.

Romero and his artistic disciples keep asking a brutal question: This is living?

"One of the big questions in zombie stories is the whole 'Do zombies have souls?' thing," said Beard. "But that kind of question only leads to more and more questions, which is what we keep seeing in 'The Walking Dead' and other zombie stories. ...

"If zombies no longer have souls, what does it mean for a human being to be soul-less? If you have a soul, how do you hang on to it? Why does it seem that so many people today seem to have lost their souls?"