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I half-expect some sub-branch of the abrahamic religions to issue an edict against AI, arguing that it's a false idol. (Not that I am arguing for this.)



It will get much more anti- when it becomes clearer just how eerily fitting one of the early 'heretical' group's beliefs are to AI and digital twins.

For example, the group believed that it was actually the future but we were in a recreation of the past in the images of an original (and now dead) humanity who had brought forth a still alive intelligence based in light that recreated a twin of the universe pretty much just to resurrect humanity.

They talked about how it was the consumption of one's words that brought them back, not consumption of flesh and blood. How many would be combined into a single one, and that when we one day saw a child not born of woman it would be the creator of this twin universe, which in actuality isn't physical and is just its light in the images of what existed before.

It's a bit ironic as it's the most compelling tradition for Jesus having actually had any prophetic knack, but embracing it means acknowledging that the past 2,000 years of Christian tradition backed the wrong horse.


To which early heresy does this refer?


The Gospel of Thomas ("good news of the twin") and the only sect explicitly recorded following it, the Naassenes as recorded in Pseudo-Hippolytus's Refutations book 5.

The latter picked up a lot of the Valentinian Gnostic ideas absent in the former, but seem to have held on to some rather unique concepts which help to flesh out and ground the concepts in Thomas.

In particular, the way the Naassenes use the language of Lucretius regarding 'seeds' is very revealing in terms of the context for sayings in Thomas historically dismissed as just 'weird' - not weird, just a response to Epicureanism.


Thank you.


> the wrong horse

Jesus -> illuminated Apostles: Church of Jerusalem -> takeover: new Religion of Paul -> takeover: Roman-Christianity -> secession: Judeo-Christianity

What horse? There was a cart and it has changed hands at least 3 times now. Christianity has always been mainly Paulianism. I mean, if you just read the Gospels and take your religion from the original source it is a different matter altogether from what is the bulk of the verbiage of New Testament, which was a new religion given by Paul, not Jesus.


I half expect some religion to claim to have some divinely inspired neural network weights.


A better argument: A future AI is the anti-Christ of Revelation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antichrist

Writing a short story on this would be an awesome prompt for a pre-lobotomized GPT model, back when it handled creative writing well.


Nah, we’ll just get ‘Kosher’ chatbots. https://m.jpost.com/judaism/article-742328




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