The Worst Idea In The History Of Bad Ideas

Sunday, November 16, 2025

I wish I knew how Christians could think this was a good idea (HT: Instapundit), “The Text With Jesus app allows users to “embark on a spiritual journey and engage in enlightening conversations with Jesus Christ,” according to the app’s website,” but alas I cannot.  That is the most blasphemous version of the AI silliness, there is more.

For example, “Catholic apps One Day Confess and Confession – Catholic help users with confession and spiritual reflection, providing AI-guided responses based on biblical texts.”  And my personal favorite, “San Jose, California-based megachurch pastor Ron Carpenter has even created an AI app promising “1-on-1 personalized interactions” with a bot version of him for $49 per month.”  And that is when this Biblical account comes to my mind:

Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”

Various Christian expressions have vastly variant theology about how much the church is empowered to speak with God’s voice.  Catholics believe that the church actually dispenses God’s grace.  Pentecostals believe that God speaks directly to and through them as individuals on occasions generally highlighted by the miraculous of some sort – often tongues.  Mainline Protestants are a bit more circumspect.  But until now – all of it involved a human, personal intermediary of some sort.

But no more – now, thru the miracle of AI, you can chat with God!  (Why do I hear an “snake oil” infomercial when I write that?)  I am being sarcastic here because I just cannot get my head around this; it is so, so wrong.

To be serious, it is difficult to know how to approach it without boring you to tears with an extended and esoteric discussion of theology.  It is as if this defied the laws of physics in some fashion, but you had to understand quantum physics to understand that…I’ll try this.

Last Thursday I wrote how we had failed several generations in educating them and in building character in them.  I focused on two character traits – aspiration and a sense of gratitude that implied obligations.  But character consists of many traits, not just those two.  How do you build them in people?

Proverbs says:

As iron sharpens iron,
    so one person sharpens another.

It takes personal interaction.  We have, to no small extent, depersonalized education and churchgoing.  We have certainly bureaucratized education, which drives out the personal entirely.  No personal interaction – no iron against which we can be sharpened.  And hence our failure to build character, the kind of character that God incarnated, died and was resurrected to enable us to have.

People have been doing stupid things in the name of “Christian progress” pretty much since Jesus took HIs leave of the earthly realm.  In one sense this is just another one.  The church has outlasted all those and it will outlast this.  But I grieve for every soul that falls victim to this utter nonsense.  And so I shall pray for them at church this morning.