What, if anything, is a video based on an AI Bible?
In this case maybe AI stands for Actual Ignorance
Different religions have different views about what scripture is. In fact, often there are debates within a single religion about that, as all the Christian arguments about the nature of the Bible and how to read it testify.
But whether we're talking about the Tanakh (the Jewish Bible), the Christian New Testament, Islam's Qur'an or some other religion's sacred writing, the core reality is that we're dealing with words on a page (or, well, tablet or rock). And the truth is that the human brain processes words on a page differently from the way it processes images -- photos, drawings -- and especially moving images in movies, videos or cartoons.
Which raises the question of whether it's feasible or even possible to take a story from, say, the Bible and tell it authoritatively and accurately in one of those latter visual media. I would argue the same thing I argue about any translation of the Christian Bible from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, which is that every translation is an interpretation. So every effort to present the words of scripture in a video form, say, necessarily involves interpretative acts.
Which is why I am cautious about getting excited over videos posted to the AI Bible's Youtube channel. I first am suspicious about whether artificial intelligence can do anything close to an acceptable translation of the Christian Bible's original languages. But then I'm also profoundly skeptical that an AI Bible can be used to create videos that can be considered anything close to sacred scripture.
In much the same way, I think that if you have a great baseball play-by-play radio announcer, such as my friend Denny Matthews of the Kansas City Royals, the pictures are much better on radio than the best TV coverage, given that the words require listeners to form the images in their own heads.
This National Public Radio story about the AI Bible and the videos drawn from it says that the "AI Bible is run by Pray.com, a for-profit company that claims to have 'the world's #1 app for faith and prayer.' The new AI videos are being warmly received online, according to Ryan Beck, Pray's Chief Technology Officer. The viewers are mostly under 30 and skew male, though not too heavily."
I could be wrong, but I tend to agree with someone quoted in that story, Brad East, a professor of theology at Abilene Christian University in Texas, who said, "It's depressing that anyone would think that approach to biblical material was in any way spiritually edifying."
Look. I'm not a Luddite and I think there can be new methods of distributing old works of various sort. For instance, I've got a Bible app on my phone and find it useful. But it's still reading words. By reading on my phone instead of from a book, I haven't really moved much from one medium to another.
Translating and interpreting scripture are profoundly complicated and technical undertakings that require deep historical knowledge as well as theological underpinnings. To take a story from, say, the weird and complicated New Testament book of Revelation and turn it into a video opens up an astonishing variety of possibly mistaken interpretations. We've seen that very issue in any number of films over the years that have tried to tell biblical stories.
And yet I suspect such video efforts will continue as long as the producers continue to find a market for them. I intend to reduce the potential size of that audience by one. Feel free to join me.
(The image here today was used with the NPR story to which I've linked you and was credited to the Pray.com website.)
Can Democrats Use Religion to Attract Voters?
And now for something completely different, almost: This article from The Week suggests that Democrats across the country, having been electorally beaten in various ways in recent years, now have decided to appeal to potential voters in the upcoming midterm elections on the basis of religion — a tactic that has worked for Republicans for quite a long time.
As Justin Klawans writes in the piece, “Democrats are hoping an appeal to religion will help make the contest a referendum against the conservative movement.”
There are lots of reasons to be cautious about using this approach. For instance, it will take someone with credible faith credentials to point out the ways in which Christian Nationalism, for instance, which frequently is supported by MAGA-backed candidates, is a radical violation of core Christian beliefs. That, of course, requires a careful, accurate and subtle message, but political campaigns are a difficult arena in which to advance such complicated arguments.
And yet to cede the field to Christian Nationalists without explaining why it’s a destructive approach is to give up the fight before it’s fought. So let’s see if the Democrats can field some candidates who can use a pitch based on religion effectively. If they can, that approach will almost certainly spread quickly.
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The Book Corner
Give Me a Word: The Promise of an Ancient Practice to Guide Your Year, by Christine Valters Paintner.
The author of this spiritual guidance book is the online abbess at Abbey of the Arts.
She walks readers through 30 different spiritual practices to help them connect not just with the divine but with their interior selves.
“Ask the wise presences in your life for your own life-giving word,” she writes. “You will be invited to listen in the stillness to sacred texts, to your life, to dreams, to nature, to your body, to soul friends, to the ancestors.”
We live in fraught, distracted, disruptive times. This small book may help guide you to some needed stillness and contemplation, a place in which you may be able to make better sense of the chaos around you. And how could that not help?
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IMPORTANT P.S.: The Typepad blog hosting site on which my blog has lived for almost 21 years is dying at the end of September. So beginning Oct. 1 you will find my blog full time here on Substack at this link:
I hope you will join me there -- either for free or for a nominal fee. Please let others know about this move. It's a pain to move, but I have no choice. And surely you don't want to miss my writings, right? Cheers, Bill.