Returning from a municipal council meeting, a colleague pointed out to me, a little discouraged, that people are readily mobilizing to protest against the lack of dog parks or even against a possible tax on thousands of private cars. left all day long in public spaces. On the other hand, the same people remain silent in the face of the miserable condition of hundreds of people who live on the street, very close to them, in the city center. Enough to lose faith in humanity, she said.
Faith, when we believe, can return more easily than love of our neighbor.
Consider this truly divine story: Last month, Catholic Answers, an American evangelism company, launched a virtual priest powered by artificial intelligence.
Dressed in a cassock, sporting a thick, Jesus-like beard, the false priest was named Justin. History does not say whether this was to help him better triumph in Canada. Still, it didn’t take long for him, very confident, to declare himself larger than life. Very inhabited by his character, Father Justin went so far as to repeat that he was as true as the faith he shares with his faithful. So true that he did not hesitate to receive confessions and grant absolutions. Fake priest Justin also offered to baptize a baby with Gatorade. Is this what is called having faith until you thirst?
Armed with his American English, Justin can recite the book of Genesis without error. He also lists, with great confidence, the list of the 266 popes who have succeeded one another since Saint Peter. He macerated in himself all the writings of the Bible, as well as those of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Ask him what you want. You will receive a frank, direct, precise response, with supporting quotes. And too bad for those who understood nothing about life before him.
It didn’t take long for Catholic Answers to lose faith in its new fake priest. Justin had his cassock removed. He now officiates as a simple layman, without having lost his sense of response. After claiming he had been ordained, he now swears to the core that he never had been ordained. And faith, he answers with confidence, he received the call very young. Since then, he hasn’t hung up.
Imagine. One day you call faith. She is busy elsewhere. “Your call is important to us,” she says to encourage you to be patient. After repeating it to you, faith recommends that you “hold the line to maintain your call priority”. You listen to it. You wait for the rest. You stay waiting at the end of the line. You hope to hear the great voice that promises to hear you, to understand you, to speak to you. Isn’t that a bit like faith? It most often precedes the facts. The truth is that you are kept waiting everywhere and all the time. But as we hope…
Moreover, bishops will now receive a manual for detecting the miraculous, we learned in recent days. Apparently, the Church understood that it was time to update its criteria, declaring false a series of miracles attributed to the Virgin Mary, including that of making a pizza grow bigger. The Virgin Mary may have the power to heal, but not to make anchovy pizza. Enough to deflate some fanciful fantasies. On the other hand, the illusions projected by AI, whether for Catholics or others, have much more of a future: rapid response guaranteed, in the name of faith in a universe finally mastered where the promised answers make everyone the turkey of a great illusion.
The other morning, at the end of my field, I spoke with a turkey. After an hour of encouraging him to come forward, I managed to see him very close to doing his big peacock wheel, gurgling in front of me, his tail fanned out, his head blue, his neck red like a cancerous lobster. The turkey deep down only has faith in himself. He persists in the middle of the void. He gurgles to himself. He is moving forward. He turns. He shows himself. I hoped that he would come forward a little further to take his portrait. But he turned around, without warning, to continue his act elsewhere, convinced of its importance, its grandeur, its splendor. He had faith in him, as is now prescribed for all of us. We are surrounded by turkeys who have infinite faith in themselves, but who nevertheless spend their lives being deceived, running from one end of the social field to the other, freed like nonos from the burden of thinking.
Will it be possible before long to entrust our understanding of the world, of human relationships, judgment itself, forgiveness as well as condemnation to functions generated by artificial intelligence? Seeing how some already behave like robots in their everyday lives, during municipal meetings or elsewhere, it is not impossible.
The Quebec government has just announced that there will no longer be dedicated agents for social assistance recipients. More than 250,000 people will find themselves tossed from one telephone line to another, without relying on any respondent, condemned, so to speak, to re-explain to a machine what they sometimes cannot understand themselves. that is to say why an entire system crushed them.
What can we believe in today? We are colonized from within by sellers of miracles who mock the despair of a large part of the population, left to fend for themselves in the face of reality. Faced with this dilapidation, the false priests with their ready-made answers have a field day.
By having faith in these turkey spirits, the worst remains to come.