Reflections on the Reality of Jesus in the Age of AI Chatbots

The Redeemed Christian Church of God [1]

 

What becomes of divinity when it reveals itself in icons, 

when it speaks to us through machines? 

  

 

I. 

 

This Saturday, as every Saturday, three African women in brightly-coloured dresses stand on a nearby street corner, smiling and spreading the Gospel. Because they are so friendly - and because it seems impolite to just walk past ignoring them - I invariably say hello and accept the leaflet being offered.

 

This week, it reads: JESUS is for REAL! And that naturally got me thinking once more about the latter as a philosophical concept ...

 

For our Christian friends, the Real is essentially the same as the True and the Good and it exists as the Ideal foundation of existence. God is Real and his reality includes not only all that is and has ever been but all that will be; i.e., it includes both the actual and the potential. 

 

I'm not a theologian, but I think that's a fair summary. God is conceived of as a huge Universal Mind and Reality is dependent upon his Will.    

 

 

II.

 

But what about Jesus? What can we say of his reality? 

 

I suppose that depends on which aspect of Jesus one wishes to discuss. 

 

For example, there's the historical Jesus, a 1st-century preacher from Galilee to whom we might accord mortal reality and an all-too-human existence. 

 

But then, on the other hand, there's the figure whom believers think of as the Christ: a semi-divine being who transcends his human reality and historical time and place; an Ideal Jesus who has eternal reality. 

 

For non-believers, this is a mytho-fictional figure born of the religious imagination; one who occupies a virtual space and exerts a powerful cultural influence even though they may lack any objective reality.   

 

I suppose if I'm interested in Jesus at all, it's in the latter. I'm particularly fascinated with the way in which the image of Jesus as a religious icon is mediated in contemporary culture - a subject discussed by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard ...

   

III.

 

In America (1986), Baudrillard briefly mentions Jesus, observing how marble statues of Christ in Salt Lake City were all copied from Thorwaldsen's famous work of 1833 and made him "look like Bjorn Borg" [2]; i.e., a popular contemporary figure from the world of sports rather than a transcendent historical icon.

 

In other words, Baudrillard argued that the modern image of Christ reflects the present ideal of the perfect man and functions as just another part of the hyperreal landscape; religious art merging seamlessly with mass-media aesthetics.

 

His thinking here developed earlier ideas found in Simulacra and Simulation (1981) [3]. In this crucial text, Baudrillard analysed the role played by religious icons in the simulation of God, eventually replacing the original reality they were intended to represent. 

 

Here's how the game works in four easy to follow stages:    

 

(i) Start with early Christian signs and symbols, artworks and images: these were thought to embody and reflect a profound reality: God is all-powerful and ever-present and Jesus was His Son.  

 

(ii) Eventually, however, the evil genius of the image [4] begins to disguise and corrupt this reality. Art begins to depict Jesus not as he was, but as the Medieval mind wanted to see him; i.e., less Middle Eastern Jew and more Aryan superman used to justify crusades and European imperialism. Nevertheless, if pushed, everyone still agrees that an underlying reality (tied to Truth and Goodness and Beauty) still exists. 

 

(iii) In phase 3, the image - now mass produced within modern secular society - masks the absence of any such reality (Baudrillard calls this an act of sorcery). Jesus is seen everywhere, but his likeness no longer means anything and is no longer connected to a spiritual truth, nor even a historical reality. It mostly exists to trigger a consumerist response (think of the multiple gift shops located in the Vatican).    

 

(iv) Finally, we get pure simulacrum in the age of hyperreality; the image bears no relation to any reality whatsoever. Jesus is now merely a meme on social media or an AI chatbot designed to give comforting advice to those in need. Jesus is now just a copy of a copy of a copy; he refers only to other media images and functions completely independently of history, theology, or reality. 

 

Baudrillard was right here as he was right so many other times in so many other places: the religious iconoclast didn't destroy images because they were afraid such might insult or offend God - but because they intuitively understood that such images would ultimately prevail over God and succeed in making him untenable.   

 

Who needs Jesus to be for real when you can simulate his existence - and even his presence - with digital technology? A blessedly large language model trained on biblical writings and other religious texts can create a theo-algorithmic echo chamber so perfect that one might almost describe it as heavenly [5]. 

  

 

Notes

 

[1] The Redeemed Christian Church of God is a Pentecostal megachurch founded in 1952 by Pa Josiah Akindayomi in Nigeria. Today, it is one of the largest church denominations in the world with over nine million members located in almost 200 countries and territories. After Akindayomi's death in 1980, pastor Enoch A. Adeboye, a former university lecturer, became the RCCG's General Overseer.

 

[2] See Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (Verso, 1989), p. 2.

 

[3] See Jean Baudrillard, 'The Precession of Simulacra', in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (The University of Michigan Press, 1994). 

 

[4] Playing on Descartes's concept of the malin génie, Baudrillard suggests that the image is a diabolical force that doesn't innocently reflect a pre-existing reality; rather, it ultimately works to replace the real via a process of simulation. 

      'The Evil Demon of Images' was originally a paper delivered by Baudrillard at the University of Sydney in July 1984. It was first published three years later by the Power Institute of Fine Arts and can be found in The Jean Baudrillard Reader, ed. Steve Redhead (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 83-98. 

 

[5] Baudrillard died in 2007 so didn't live to see the rise of the Ask Jesus AI chatbot, but it fits perfectly into his hyperreal scheme of things. Users claim to find the instant, personalised responses of the AI more comforting or emotionally validating than reciting traditional prayers or reading ancient scripture. 

      That is why they actively participate in the illusion, even whilst knowing they are chatting with a machinic intelligence and not communing with the Holy Spirit. What it might mean for the future of faith and organised religion when divine authority is outsourced to code, I don't know, but D. H. Lawrence warned long ago that man will first come to worship his machines, then come to resemble them. 

      See the essay titled 'D. H. Lawrence Against the Machine', by Micah Paul Veillon, in The European Conservative (17 June 2023).  

 

Notes on the Be Real Campaign

berealcampaign.co.uk

I.

The Be Real Campaign - which has developed out of a global marketing campaign by Unilever for a range of toiletries sold under the brand name Dove and in partnership with the YMCA - is determined to change attitudes to body image and help all of us put real health above appearance.

According to their website, low body confidence is something that affects everyone; impacting upon our physical and mental well-being and preventing us from achieving all of the wonderful things we would be capable of if only we were more body confident.

In order to bring about real change, the campaign calls upon businesses, advertisers, and the media to act responsibly and embrace real diversity, positively portraying different body shapes and sizes drawn from all ages, genders and ethnicities.

Individuals are also encouraged to take back control and sign a pledge in which they promise to help create a body confident nation by no longer editing their photos on social media. They also, of course, agree to submit their details to the Be Real Campaign.

II.

I suppose it'll be pretty obvious to most readers that I won't be signing this pledge. Indeed, I philosophically oppose the aims of this campaign and the language of politico-moral correctness and authenticity upon which it relies.

What is confidence, ultimately, but a mixture of faith and narcissism? And what's the point of being healthy if you look like shit? As for Dove's idea of the real, do they not know that - somewhat ironically - it's objectifying and betrays a death instinct?

Our individuality and our agency is a type of artifice; something styled within culture. To become-human is to challenge real being (understood in essentialist terms) and enhance our thingness; our uniqueness as a species rests on the fact that we are more than a mere piece of nature and that we have invented each gesture.

I may, as a Nietzschean, be interested in ways of overcoming our humanity as presently conceived, but I certainly don't want us to fall back into a pre-human condition lacking in style, complexity and virtuality - no matter how real it may be ...

On Cumshots and the Triumph of the Will to Orgasm

Charlotte Gainsbourg as Joe in the two-part film 

Nymphomaniac, dir. Lars von Trier (2013)

According to one sexologist, real men like to have narrative closure and some sense of satisfactory ending. Thus the importance and popularity within the pornographic imagination of the cumshot which provides an often premature but nonetheless definitive full stop to proceedings.

Only a few effeminate perverts enjoy the experience of delayed orgasm in which the purpose of pleasure and pleasure of purpose is constantly deferred and often ruined; perverts, a few philosophers, and those rare women who still value seduction over production and regard feminism in a Nietzschean sense as a loss of style, or an obscene staging of desire determined by purely phallic values.  

For such women - to whom the promise of so-called sexual liberation was always laughable - pleasure can very well exist without purpose. They don't mind exchanging amusing stories that lack a punchline (the female inability to tell jokes is rooted in an unconcern with climax, rather than the lack of a sense of humour), or receiving massages without the happy ending that most men anticipate and desire (consenting to a certain amount of back, neck and shoulder work so long as they are able to eventually flip over and have the oiled hands of their masseuse set to in the one area they want to have rubbed).

But today, as indicated, such women are few in number. The majority have been taught to demand equal rights and pleasures and to make sex visible and meaningful, i.e. the essential truth of themselves: I come therefore I am. The insistence on orgasm and the porn industry's obsession with showing such close up and in hi-definition has exorcised the ambivalence of her body and compromised the strange intensities that existed in erotic games of reticence and artifice.

I would like to think that Lars von Trier understands something of this and that his new film, Nymphomaniac - as well as the accompanying poster campaign which features many of the lead actors showing us their orgasm faces (including Charlotte Gainsbourg pictured above) - is a subversive attempt to mock the sexualized order we inhabit and to bring about some form of reversal.    

But, sadly, I suspect from what I have read of the work, that this is not the case; that he too remains a believer in sex as a form of truth to be ejaculated in all our faces in an orgy of realism. For that is precisely what it is to live in a pornified culture; one is subject to endless cumshots and an obsession with the real.