I mean this is just the consequences of “de-thinking Christianity” as you mentioned 2 months back. Watch Bishop Barron on Tucker’s show, Tucker went into AI is demonic slop and Bishop Barron disabused that notion rather easily and said AI doesn’t have an intellect it’s just symbol manipulation using neural networks. Of course this would require the dreaded “scholasticism” again but that’s the only solution
Botkin diagnoses well that “demonic” language functions less as theology than as a displacement of agency.
Where I’d sharpen the diagnosis is this: the problem isn’t primarily that people misunderstand metaphysics, but that they no longer know where responsibility still sits in systems whose outputs feel autonomous but whose decisions are already closed elsewhere. When agency migrates into training pipelines, incentive structures, deployment defaults, and scale effects, lived experience encounters results without ever touching the point where they were shaped.
In that gap, metaphysical accusation becomes attractive—not because it explains more, but because it restores a sense that someone must be acting, even if that someone is imagined. “Demons” step in where authorship has thinned.
The danger, then, isn’t superstition as such, but a deeper structural condition: decisions persist without a clear site where judgment can still interrupt them. As long as that remains true, symbolic language will keep substituting for responsibility, whether the symbol is demonic, divine, or merely “out of control.”
The harder task isn’t better theology or better technical literacy alone, but rebuilding decision architectures where agency is once again locatable before outcomes harden—to give unease somewhere to go other than accusation.
I mean this is just the consequences of “de-thinking Christianity” as you mentioned 2 months back. Watch Bishop Barron on Tucker’s show, Tucker went into AI is demonic slop and Bishop Barron disabused that notion rather easily and said AI doesn’t have an intellect it’s just symbol manipulation using neural networks. Of course this would require the dreaded “scholasticism” again but that’s the only solution
I smell Angel-Themed towns, Gene.
I think I've only seen Rod "The Divorcee" Dehrer crying 'demon,' and he equivocated a lot to try to posture sanely.
Botkin diagnoses well that “demonic” language functions less as theology than as a displacement of agency.
Where I’d sharpen the diagnosis is this: the problem isn’t primarily that people misunderstand metaphysics, but that they no longer know where responsibility still sits in systems whose outputs feel autonomous but whose decisions are already closed elsewhere. When agency migrates into training pipelines, incentive structures, deployment defaults, and scale effects, lived experience encounters results without ever touching the point where they were shaped.
In that gap, metaphysical accusation becomes attractive—not because it explains more, but because it restores a sense that someone must be acting, even if that someone is imagined. “Demons” step in where authorship has thinned.
The danger, then, isn’t superstition as such, but a deeper structural condition: decisions persist without a clear site where judgment can still interrupt them. As long as that remains true, symbolic language will keep substituting for responsibility, whether the symbol is demonic, divine, or merely “out of control.”
The harder task isn’t better theology or better technical literacy alone, but rebuilding decision architectures where agency is once again locatable before outcomes harden—to give unease somewhere to go other than accusation.