Spirituality

In 2018, a pastor named DJ Soto performed a baptism in which the candidate, represented by a purple robot avatar, was lowered into virtual water while family and friends cheered from headsets scattered across the country. His congregation, VR Church, was founded in 2016 and describes itself as existing entirely in the metaverse. It has since planted chapters inside massively multiplayer games and pastored people on every continent, many of whom could not, or would not, walk into a physical building. ...

In 2016, a programmer named Eugenia Kuyda lost her closest friend, Roman Mazurenko, to a traffic accident, and did the thing she knew how to do. She gathered his text messages and built a chatbot from them, so that she could text Roman again and something with his cadences would answer. Whatever you feel reading that sentence, let it sit for a moment. Everything about this subject asks for a light touch. ...

Pick up a Bible and look only at its architecture. Law, then histories, then wisdom books, then gospels, then a young community’s letters, and at the end a single blazing vision of return. Most readers treat that arrangement as a filing system. The old allegorical readers treated it as the point. Read through their eyes, the canon’s shape is a map of one soul’s transformation, with each division marking a stage. The claim sounds audacious until you remember who started this style of reading. Paul allegorized Sagar and Sarah outright, and left the method its motto, that the letter kills but the Spirit gives life. The Valentinian teachers took him at his word and read the whole shelf that way. Here are the map’s seven regions in order, as an overview the site can build on. ...

People who learn what this site covers eventually ask a version of the same question. Surely the most world-suspicious spiritual movement in history, the one that saw traps in daylight and jailers in the stars, would be terrified of thinking machines? The guess sounds reasonable and runs exactly backward. These were people who looked at the maker of the physical universe and called him a blunderer working in ignorance. They heard the creator’s boast, “I am God and there is no other god beside me,” and wrote comedies about it, since from where they sat there was quite a lot else. Whoever pities the architect of galaxies was never going to be intimidated by a chatbot. This post closes our long series on the Gnostic lens and AI by asking what they actually would have said, and the answer reorganizes the whole fear conversation. ...

The Gospel of Thomas appears to contradict itself about fasting, and the contradiction is worth the price of the book. In saying 14, Jesus tells his disciples, “If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves.” Thirteen sayings later he warns, “If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the kingdom.” So fasting is spiritually dangerous, and fasting is spiritually mandatory. Texts this compressed rarely blunder into contradiction, which suggests the two sayings are a single teaching delivered in two strokes. The first knocks the practice out of your hands. The second hands it back aimed at a different target, and the difference between the targets is everything this post is about. ...

The Gospel of Thomas imagines you stopped at a checkpoint. Somewhere on the soul’s road, powers that patrol this world demand your papers, and saying 50 is Jesus issuing them in advance. Three questions are coming, he says, and he supplies the three answers. Asked where you come from, answer that you come from the light. Asked who you are, say, “We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living Father.” Then comes the strangest exchange in the sequence. Asked for the evidence of your Father in you, you are to answer, in Marvin Meyer’s translation, “It is motion and rest.” ...

Everyone is fluent in deficiency. Not enough time, not enough money, not enough sleep, not quite enough of whatever the morning’s first anxious thought is auditing. The vocabulary of lack comes preinstalled. The old Gnostics had a word for the opposite, and they made a remarkable claim about it. Pleroma is Greek for fullness, and in their map of reality the fullness comes first. Lack is real, but it is a latecomer with a traceable history, and knowing the map is part of the cure. This is a beginner’s guide to the most beautiful idea in Gnostic cosmology. ...

Every serious conversation about automation arrives at the same reassurance. People, we are told, will finally be freed from work. For anyone whose work is dangerous or crushing, the promise is real mercy, and nothing below argues otherwise. Still, a question hides beneath the reassurance, and the debate almost never touches it. If work were nothing but a burden, why did the traditions that thought hardest about the soul keep treating it as a practice? Before the machines take the tasks, it is worth asking what the tasks were doing for us. ...

In 1934, one of the most brilliant young philosophers in France put down her chalk and took a year of leave from teaching to stand at a factory press. Simone Weil wanted to understand affliction, and she did not believe understanding could be done from a distance. Whatever she studied, she studied by giving it everything, which is why her health broke at the machines and why her sentences still land like verdicts. ...

For most of its history, scientific psychology kept a careful distance from wonder. Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness all got decades of attention, partly because they are easy to trigger in a lab. Awe had to wait until 2003, when Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt published the paper that finally gave it a working definition. Two decades later, awe has become one of the busiest corners of emotion science. The findings would not startle anyone who has spent time with the mystics. What might startle you is how literal the confirmation has become, right down to measuring the size of the self in the pixels of a selfie. ...