Decline of religion

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Japan is running out of monks, so they're training AI robots called "buddharoid" to replace them:

Japan is currently grappling with depopulation and a decline in religious affiliation, which has accelerated the closure of traditional places of worship; approximately 30% of Buddhist temples in Japan are projected to vanish by 2040 as younger generations move away from organized religion. This crisis is compounded by an aging population, making it increasingly difficult for rural temples to find successors or maintain a physical presence.  

The Buddharoid is designed to support the Buddhist clergy as Japan’s religious infrastructure faces a steady decline. It utilizes a system called BuddhaBot-Plus, a specialized generative AI derived from OpenAI’s ChatGPT that has been trained extensively on sacred Buddhist scriptures. This allows the robot to provide spiritual guidance on personal and social issues, like a real monk would.

https://www.tokyoweekender.com/entertain...uddharoid/

Well, that just reeks of desperation.

Boru

[Paleophyte]

Japan is running out of monks, so they're training AI robots called "buddharoid" to replace them:

Japan is currently grappling with depopulation and a decline in religious affiliation, which has accelerated the closure of traditional places of worship; approximately 30% of Buddhist temples in Japan are projected to vanish by 2040 as younger generations move away from organized religion. This crisis is compounded by an aging population, making it increasingly difficult for rural temples to find successors or maintain a physical presence.  

The Buddharoid is designed to support the Buddhist clergy as Japan’s religious infrastructure faces a steady decline. It utilizes a system called BuddhaBot-Plus, a specialized generative AI derived from OpenAI’s ChatGPT that has been trained extensively on sacred Buddhist scriptures. This allows the robot to provide spiritual guidance on personal and social issues, like a real monk would.

https://www.tokyoweekender.com/entertain...uddharoid/

If AI ever becomes fully aware, we're so very fucked on so very many levels.

[Fake Messiah]

Are We Actually Experiencing a Christian Revival? News of a Gen-Z religious resurgence doesn’t tell the full story.

Have you heard the good news? God is back, and He’s speaking to Gen Z. In Greenwich Village, 20-somethings fill the pews of St. Joseph’s Church in search of spiritual truth, or a date, or both. Christian student clubs at Ohio State University say attendance has doubled. “We’re seeing baptisms on college campuses” along with “a hunger for reverence” and “a return to Christianity,” Evie magazine gloated. Lifeway, a Christian nonprofit, credits young adults with a rise in Bible sales. Some Orthodox parishes are reporting a flood of young men, or “Orthobros.” Earlier in April, St. Isaac Jogues Catholic Parish in the Chicago suburbs said converts had risen by 124 percent since last year. The Archdiocese of Boston has welcomed almost 700 new Catholics since 2022, including many of them young people, leaders tell CBS News. On Easter, members of V1 Church, a large charismatic congregation, packed Times Square to celebrate the risen Christ. In videos, the crowd looks diverse and youthful.

If a revival is underway, as many claim, it would defy conventional understandings of religious identity and the future of Christianity. In one story, America is becoming more secular as Christian traditions lose their young. Research has shown that millennials are less religious than their forebears, and Gen Z is less religious still. Now, headlines say otherwise. Young adults are rediscovering church and the value of faith in an unsettled world. Among them are young men who want families and masculine role models.

But there is no empirical evidence for a sustained Christian revival in the United States — among members of Gen Z or anyone else. True revival would be hard to miss, says Ryan Burge, a demographer and the author of The Nones and The Vanishing Church. In 2024, about a quarter of Americans said they attended church every week. Even a 3 percent rise in that figure could constitute a “modest revival” with around “12 million new people going to church that weren’t a year ago,” Burge explains. That isn’t happening, and adults in their 20s aren’t more observant than millennials.

Instead, the American church has, for some, become a proxy for a broader political project. So far, the most triumphant tales of revival are coming from the right: Evie is funded by Peter Thiel, a far-right billionaire with an Antichrist fixation. Lifeway is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which forbids women from becoming pastors. The founder of V1 Church, Mike Signorelli, says he met with Donald Trump during Holy Week, and MAGA influencers spread videos of his Times Square service online. His “stand” in New York City, that pit of godless villainy, “shows real revival is possible,” one influencer claimed. Last September, Elon Musk, formerly an atheist, shared a message from Erika Kirk urging Americans to “go to church,” and in June, J.D. Vance will publish a memoir about his conversion to Catholicism.

The right owns the White House, but it hasn’t won the church yet. Church attendance is up in some places, earning trend pieces in the Washington Post and the New York Times. The Orthobro phenomenon is real, if small, and it is driven by right-wing politics. But not all converts are reactionaries, and a surge in one diocese or parish or congregation can occur without leading to national growth. Before the Gen-Z revival-that-isn’t, the story of the church was one of decline.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/...vival.html

[Paleophyte]

Headlines say otherwise because Christians are bad at stats and got excited by a blip in polling. The only real polls are the empty pews that Gen-Z isn't filling.

[The Grand Nudger]

Yes, yes, the white man is being replaced and young men are returning to the church for a substitute. So say the stenographers of power.

[Fake Messiah]

Talk about the decline of religion; even Sean Hannity is leaving Catholicism, but I guess we won't be seeing him on AF anytime soon. 😄

“As of today, I no longer consider myself a Catholic. I am a Christian,” Hannity, 64, said on the Thursday, April 16, episode of his primetime show Hannity. “I left the Catholic church in large part due to the institutionalized corruption, and it was at the parish level, to the bishop level, cardinals, all the way to Rome.”

Without naming specific situations, Hannity criticized the scandals and “terrible behaviors” in the Catholic church that he claimed were “frankly not only unchecked, they never fully corrected it or dealt with it.”

“Others at the Vatican have totally lost the true meaning of the Bible and its teachings,” he added.

The comments come after Pope Leo spoke out against the ongoing war America is fighting in Iran.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/cele...36414.html

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Talk about the decline of religion; even Sean Hannity is leaving Catholicism, but I guess we won't be seeing him on AF anytime soon. 😄

“As of today, I no longer consider myself a Catholic. I am a Christian,” Hannity, 64, said on the Thursday, April 16, episode of his primetime show Hannity. “I left the Catholic church in large part due to the institutionalized corruption, and it was at the parish level, to the bishop level, cardinals, all the way to Rome.”

Without naming specific situations, Hannity criticized the scandals and “terrible behaviors” in the Catholic church that he claimed were “frankly not only unchecked, they never fully corrected it or dealt with it.”

“Others at the Vatican have totally lost the true meaning of the Bible and its teachings,” he added.

The comments come after Pope Leo spoke out against the ongoing war America is fighting in Iran.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/cele...36414.html

I’m trying to care about Hannity’s religious inclinations and failing in a truly spectacular fashion.

In tangentially related news, JD Vance recently said, ‘The Pope needs to be more careful when he talks about Christian theology.’ 

Really? The fucking POPE? Love him or hate him, I’m pretty confident that Leo has a better grasp of theology than Vance. That’s like saying Neil deGrasse Tyson better watch his mouth about astrophysics.

Boru