• Deacon@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    3 days ago

    Specifically evangelical Christians. It’s a very tricky thing to navigate because on the one hand we are taught absolute biblical inerrancy, but it’s crucial to redefine a lot of Christ’s message that gets leveraged by people with actual humanity, because a lot of it can be made to sound, well, awfully socialist.

    So I think there is a deliberate, if not coordinated and conspiratorial, effort to thread that needle. AI is also a really potent vector for this. Evangelical Christians are simultaneously 3 things:

    1. Completely devoted to scripture as the perfect and inerrant word of god
    2. largely unfamiliar with scripture itself - the bible is perfect but it’s more of a cookbook than a manual, much less a library.
    3. Weirdly open to God speaking and working in all kinds of ineffable ways, even if the resulting doctrines contradict the scripture they aren’t familiar with anyway - such as God “clarifying misinterpretation“ through AI, or through the ramblings of someone with a traumatic brain injury.

    Here is the trick - I remember understanding the rhetorical genius of it when I first heard it, even before I deconstructed:

    God’s word is inerrant - our understanding of it is not.

    It might sound tinfoil hatted, but I think this is a lever actively being pulled by the Epstein class.