Lavender AI, Lived Experience & Non-Literal Truth
Here’s your weekly roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, April 21–27, 2024.
‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza by Yuval Abraham in +972 Magazine:
According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, [AI] has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war.
In the current war, officers were not required to independently review the AI system’s assessments, in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances.
Can We Ever Trust Ourselves? by Lillian Fishman in The Point:
The only love that is culturally condoned right now is this self-interested love. And the reason is ... that ... we don’t know what we want, and, in the absence of many of the practical desires that structured partnership for the better part of history, the best approximation we can make about what we should want or what it would be good to want is someone who treats us well and devotes themselves to making us feel good all the time. We are being taught—I should say, especially, that young American women are being taught—to look for people who can be instrumental to us. We are not encouraged to “apprehend another human being as a separate reality, akin to one’s own.” Is this apprehension even possible? Are we being discouraged from it because it’s impossible, or because, when we achieve it, it’s not nearly as comfortable as being self-interested?
What Is ‘Lived Experience’? by Patrick J Casey in Aeon:
Lived experience isn’t a pure foundation that escapes the intrusion of language, theory and culture, and therefore can’t be used as the basis of authority or authenticity to which others should reflexively defer.
Adult Children by Alan Jacobs in The Homebound Symphony:
We need more anarchic childhoods today to have a more mature and constructive politics tomorrow.
Dropping Out Of Everything by Ryan Burge in Graphs About Religion:
[The “nothing in particulars” (when it comes to religion)] don’t seek out education, they don’t feel like they fit into traditional political categories, and they seem apathetic to the political process.
What Is Default Friend All About? by Katherine Dee in Default Wisdom:
This ... is wider spread than just people who fib online or in more extreme circumstances, catfishers. [Not literally but symbolically true] is what it means to be “post-truth.” There may not literally be a cabal of Satanists running the world (okay, bad example, but it’s the one I have on hand), but there’s a sense in which it’s “emotionally” true.
Who Guards the Guardians? Who Speaks for the Church? by John Behr in Public Orthodoxy:
When real human beings are being sent to give their lives in killing others, all in the name of a “holy war,” the distortion of truth—calling black white—is, quite literally, devastating, both for the lives that are at stake and for that which we call, and which is, holy, a true abomination of desolation set up in the temple.
The Accidental Speaker by Elaina Plott Calabro in The Atlantic:
Friends still get a kick out of a story about how Johnson once told Trump that he was praying for him, to which the then-president responded: “Thank you, Mike. Tell God I said hi.”
Peel back the jokes, though, and all these years later, Johnson still seems quietly in search of affirmation that, behind the bluster, Donald Trump subscribes to the same basic truths about the world as he does. During our conversation, after Johnson referred to the “moral guidance” that “you would hope that everybody in power would have,” I asked if he believed that Trump has it. “I do,” he said. “You know, he talks about”—a half beat passed—”faith. He and I’ve talked about”—a full beat this time—”faith.”
In what context?
“Well,” he said, “we had an experience …” He looked over at his communications director, a wordless request for permission.
It was last fall, the week of Thanksgiving. Johnson had gone down to Palm Beach for a fundraiser; his sons, on break from school, had gone with him. Trump, upon learning he was in town, called and invited the new speaker to Mar-a-Lago for dinner. Could the boys come? Johnson asked. No problem, Trump said. So they headed over, and what was supposed to be a 45-minute get-together stretched on for two and a half hours. A great start to the trip, Johnson recalled.
The next day, Johnson was meeting with donors at a beachside hotel, not far from Mar-a-Lago, when his security detail burst into the conference room. “Mr. Speaker, we need you right now,” they said. His sons had been swept out by a rip current.
In Johnson’s telling, Will, who was 13, was drowning; 18-year-old Jack, prepared to give up his own life, tried to push his brother back to the surface. A parasailer happened to spot Will’s head from above. He hurried back to shore and alerted the lifeguards, who went out on jet skis to bring the boys in. Johnson arrived at the beach to find medical personnel hovering over his sons, pumping their chests. They would spend four hours in the emergency room before being cleared to go home.
“President Trump heard about it somehow—miraculously, this never made the news,” Johnson recalled. The two got on the phone. “He was just so moved by the idea that we almost lost them, and we talked about it at great length. And we talked about the faith aspect of that, because he knows that I believe that, you know—that God spared the lives of my sons. That’s how I understand those events, and we talked about that.” Johnson continued: “And he said, he repeated back to me and said, ‘God—God saved your sons' lives.’”
For Johnson, repetition was window enough. Much like a parasailer glancing down at just the right moment, a Trump victory in November would not be accidental, Johnson told him, but “providential.” A gift to be embraced soberly, for a purpose larger than oneself. “And we talked about that, and I think he has a real appreciation for that, and that’s been, you know—it’s been encouraging to me.”
“So we’ll see, we’ll see,” he said, his voice a touch quieter. “We’ll see where all that goes.”
These evangelicals never consider that the providential purposes of God could biblically include sending a wicked ruler as judgment on the nation.
Music
Bodies that grow weak and ill are all we've ever known
But I want my body back when this earth is finally home
I'm gonna ride the chariot in the mornin', Lord.
I'm gettin' ready for the judgment day,
My Lord, my Lord.
Devotional
Tri-unity
The Bible maintains that there is only one, true creator God. Speaking for God, the book of Isaiah says, “Remember the primordial. For I am divine and no one else. I am God, and there is none like me” (46:9). But if “God is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4), how can it be that the Word through whom God created all things, Jesus, is himself God (John 1:1–3, Genesis 1:1–3)?
When Jesus “began” his preaching, teaching, and healing activity, the writers of his story in the Bible noticed echoes of what happened “in the beginning” when God created the world (Luke 3:22–23, Genesis 1:1) In the Bible, God begins new things through water. The world began with the primordial sea (Genesis 1:2), and the public ministry of Jesus with him being dipped in water or baptized by his cousin, the preacher John the Baptist (John 3:23).
The Spirit of God was also present like a bird—with wings moving back and forth, hovering, at creation (Genesis 1:2) and descending like a dove at Jesus’s baptism. “After Jesus was baptized, right as he was coming up out of the water—and see, the heavens opened he saw the Holy Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And see, a voice from the heavens said, ‘This is my dearly loved son. I am delighted with him’” (Matthew 3:16–17). Here again, as with the light of creation (Genesis 1:3), God speaks something new into existence: the public authority of Jesus (compare with Matthew 17:5).
The Bible writers saw in Jesus’s baptism something like the start of a new creation. And Matthew ends his account of Jesus’s public ministry with Jesus teaching that “‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations by baptizing them into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit …” (Matthew 28:18–19). When Jesus turned his mission on earth over to us, he did it with the Father and the Spirit, and said that they all have the same “name.”
“Name” is the Bible writers’ way of indicating reputation or character—who you are. Peter said that there is “no other name” than Jesus’s name “under heaven given among humans by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). If Jesus’s name is the only name that saves us, who Jesus is must be the same as the others into whose names we are also to be baptized. In other words, the Bible presents the Father, Son, and Spirit as having the same character, reputation, and being—the one true creator God.
The Bible presents the Father, Son, and Spirit as being one God through their story. They have the same divine past; they always were and were always involved in what the others have done. They have the same divine character traits (like mercy) and divine attributes (like knowing all things) at every present moment. And they have the same goals and orientation toward the future (compare, for example, God the Father in Revelation 1:8 and 21:6 with Jesus in 1:17 and 22:13).
The writers of the Bible who knew Jesus presented him and the Father as being aware of their own self-consciousness. In other words, Jesus called himself “I” when talking about the Father and the Spirit. And they presented them as being aware of each other’s self-consciousness; they called each other, “you” and “he”. And the Bible writers recognized that each have their own feelings, desires, will, etc. (see, for example, Matthew 26:38–39). These are the abilities that, when integrated, constitute a person who can have experiences.
Jesus called himself “Son” because sons are supposed to have the characteristics of their fathers, and Jesus came here to show us what God is really like: “No one has ever seen God. The one-of-a-kind God, who cuddles with the Father, he has made that God known” (John 1:18). Part of what Jesus confirmed is that the creator God is a tri-unity: three persons who are the same eternally loving being (1 John 4:16). If that is true, it changes everything because it means that, regardless of whatever may explain our existence, we are ultimately here because a loving Creator intended the best for us.