Stupid things religious people say

[Mr Greene]

People are using AI to talk to God

In India and around the world, worshippers are turning to purpose-built AI for religious worship and spiritual guidance. What happens when the machines become our new spiritual middlemen?

Faced with the questions and challenges of modern life, Vijay Meel, a 25-year-old student who lives in Rajasthan, India, turns to God. In the past he's consulted spiritual leaders. More recently, he asked GitaGPT.

GitaGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot trained on the Bhagavad Gita, the holy book of 700 verses of dialogue with the Hindu god Krishna. GitaGPT looks like any text conversation you'd have with a friend – except the AI tells you you're texting with a god.

"When I couldn't clear my banking exams, I was dejected," Meel says. But after stumbling on GitaGPT, he typed in details about his inner crisis and asked for the AI's advice. "Focus on your actions and let go of the worry for its fruit," GitaGPT said. This, along with other guidance, left Meel feeling inspired.

As AI touches every aspect of the human experience, India may offer of a glimpse of what it will mean to interact with the divine through our newly talkative machines.

The past few years have seen many religious experiments with AI. In 2023, an AI app called Text With Jesus allows chat with AI manifestations of Jesus and other biblical figures.

The same year, a QuranGPT app designed to answer questions and provide guidance based on the Muslim holy text got so much traffic it reportedly crashed within a day of its launch. AI has even been the basis for entire religions, such as the Way of the Future church, a group started by former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, which hopes to develop and promote the realisation of a god "based on artificial intelligence".  

For centuries, religious communities have been anchored to priests, scholars and other spiritual leaders, says the reverend Lyndon Drake, a research fellow at the University of Oxford who studies theological ethics and artificial intelligence. But "AI chatbots might indeed challenge the status of religious leaders", Drake says.

Religious chatbots might be trained on scripture and dutifully quote verses, but they share the same bizarre hallucinations and shortcomings of other AIs. In one instance, GitaGPT claimed, in the voice of Krishna, that "killing in order to protect dharma is justified".

In 2024, an evangelist group called Catholic Answers rushed to take its chatbot priest Father Justin offline after the AI reportedly told users it was a real priest that could perform sacraments and said it would be fine to baptise a child in the soft drink Gatorade.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251...alk-to-god

Well at least we know the chatbot won't abuse the kids.

[Fake Messiah]

I recently watched a 2010 documentary about the Transcendental Meditation and I had no idea what a huge money grift that is. I'm talking about billions of dollars, golden castles, golden limousines, and people wearing golden crowns shaped like those king's crowns from Disney cartoons—all from telling people their mantra word and to repeat it every day for 20 minutes.

The title of the documentary is David Wants to Fly (2010) and it starts innocently enough with David, a young graduate film school student in Germany, is out of work and out of ideas, so he wants to meet his idol David Lynch to learn how to get ideas and make movies.

He goes to America, where he meets David Lynch. If you know anything about David Lynch you know that he's all into transcendental meditation, so Lynch tells him to start meditating. So he gets into transcendental meditation ( TM), and suddenly the movie unravels the grift. For example, he goes to the German branch of transcendental meditation, where, to enter, he has to pay 2,380 euros. Yes, 2,380 euros to hear your mantra word and "learn" to repeat it every day for 20 minutes.

And the grift goes on and on. We see that the famous Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (of The Beatles fame), with whom Lynch is tied, lives in a golden palace and drives around in a golden Mercedes limousine, and what his people do is go around the world wearing golden crowns and driving in limousines to ask for money: hundreds of millions of dollars to supposedly build "invincibility universities" where groups of people will meditate and thus bring peace—for example, it needs one thousand special people to meditate together in order to make Germany invincible.

There is also a camp in the US surrounded by wired fence where yogis are praying for world peace that also funnels millions of dollars.

Then we meet people who lost their life savings to TM and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who financially drained them and then threw them away when they were broke. One guy even gave $150 million to build a TM praying center in India in which a 10 thousand "group" would meditate to finally bring world peace, but since world peace hasn't arrived I guess it didn't work.

So you start to wonder if this is TM or Scientology or the Vatican. To become one of those who wears a golden crown, you have to pay one million dollars to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi or his successor (since he died in 2008).

But Lynch tells us this is all fine because just like when you need to buy a vitamin pill there needs to be a business behind it, is same with the transcendental meditation.

Being part of the religious racket, Lynch even turns into an active villain who threatens young David with his lawyers about the movie's final cut and what he can film.


Now, that movie is 15 years old and I don't know what the state of TM is anymore. It was already cracking up after Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died, and now that Lynch is dead too, who was their face (at least in the West), I don't see who is keeping it afloat.

[Paraselene]

People are using AI to talk to God