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AR 28:19 - A serious drive to reform Islamic Sharia law
In this issue:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - will AI-enabled religions "soon be able to perform religious duties even better than human priests?"
FREEDOM OF SPEECH - the Covid lockdowns as an assault on democracy and the poor, a critique from two Left-leaning academics
ISLAM - the Nahdlatul Ulama renews its campaign to reform Sharia law
Apologia Report 28:19 (1,616)
June 1, 2023
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
"DEUS EX MACHINA: AI Gods & ChatGPT religions are coming - they will be better than human priests and they could turn evil, warns experts" by Taryn Pedler (The U.S. Sun, Mar 18 2023) -- Wesley Wildman (Philosophy, Theology, Ethics, Computing and Data Sciences; Boston University), <www.bit.ly/3OQPBqp> "told The Sun that he believes AI will soon be able to perform religious duties even better than human priests. ...
"The likes of ChatGPT have already reportedly found their way into churches, writing thoughtful and authentic sermons on behalf of the priests.
"And the listeners were none the wiser.
"Wildman explained that AI will have the ability to change everything we know about relationships with spiritual advisers and religious figureheads.
"He said: 'It will be like having your own personal guru you can take with you anywhere.' ...
"One example is the Catholic Church, which has endorsed the use of apps that facilitate the act of confession....
"This is 'partly for convenience, and partly because they're trying to avoid human priests'....
"He also believes that this bizarre wave of new AI will be able to simulate deceased relatives, religious leaders and spiritual advisers. ...
"Wildman says that just as human religious leaders can manipulate vulnerable people, AI chatbots can be trained by their creators to do the same.
"He believes that as younger generations grow up with these AI chatbots as friends - some even including holographic and VR representations - they will adapt to confiding in them and seeking advice and guidance from them. ...
Rev. Christopher Benek - pastor, "global emerging tech & theology expert" and "founding Board Chair of the Christian Transhumanist Association" <www.bit.ly/3C9qvvA> - darkly warns: "I don't think we have a good example of virtuous AI at this point. I mean, almost every time you see AI, you see the evil that's in us come forth in it."
However, "Benek sees the humans that are creating these robots as 'co-creators with God, like a parent with a child,' and believes that we can instill behavioural traits and codes into AI in the same way."
Pedler briefly offers examples, including: "the Mindar robot" in the Kodaji Temple in Kyoto, Japan, which is "6 feet 4 inches tall and has been preaching at the 400-year-old temple since 2019."
In addition, "Poland also has [its] own Catholic priest named SanTo, and in China, an android monk called Xian'er recites mantas [sic] and offers guidance on matters of faith." <www.bit.ly/425OBSo>
(Special thanks to Brooks Alexander for passing this along to us.) And, if you'd like a deeper dive, check out "Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart” by Kevin Schaul, Szu Yu Chen and Nitasha Tiku (Washington Post, Apr 19 '23) <www.archive.is/FWfzZ>
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FREEDOM OF SPEECH
"Two left-leaning authors, historian Toby Green and economist Thomas Fazi, have written a new book on the global response to the Covid pandemic, The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor? A Critique from the Left. <www.bit.ly/3O1vuWh> ...
"There is no debate. The authors' answer is unambiguous, and no reader of this book will die wondering what they think. Not about how governments responded to the Covid-19 pandemic (barring a Sweden here or a Florida there). Nor about the authors' own left-wing principles, both economic and political, and how they bear on recommendations for the future. The authors bring swathes of data and evidence to bear to argue that lockdowns were a public policy disaster of gargantuan proportions. ... What happened in six or seven weeks from late 2019, you might ask, other than an authoritarian government in China welding people into their homes?
"Green and Fazi look at Sweden, which came in for huge criticism from the mainstream press, along with the doctorly caste and social media. Sweden was widely castigated for going against the lockdown zeitgeist that demanded widespread business closures, masking, mandates, isolation of many from their loved ones even when death was in the offing, and a myriad of inane rules. The whole Swedish approach was pilloried by the great and the good because it served as a control case, a counter-example, to what virtually every government on earth opted to do to its own citizens.
"As I write this review in March 2023, Sweden has the lowest cumulative excess deaths in the entire OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] from the start of the pandemic till now. ... If more people died with lockdowns than without them, they clearly didn't work. ...
"The Swedes' chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell - who says 'I only followed the pre-pandemic existing plans by the WHO and by Britain and did not panic' - should win a Nobel Prize for medicine, not to mention everyone's gratitude for bravery."
Reviewer James Allan, Professor in Law, University of Queensland, confesses: "I am something of a lockdown skeptic myself. For some time I have been a weekly op-ed contributor to the Spectator Australia (owned by the British parent brand). Our publication, alone in all of Australia, came out in March 2020 against the lockdowns and the panic, and never wavered from that position.... I am on record from March of 2020 as saying that lockdowns were a betrayal of core liberal principles and of good policy-making. ...
"They show that the biggest losers of the lockdown response to Covid-19 - to be clear, not of the virus itself but of the governmental response to it - were the young, the poor, and the non-laptop class of workers. ... The massive increase in the debt and incredible printing of money delivered big-time asset inflation which benefited (no surprises here) those with the most assets. The pandemic years were the best years ever for billionaires.
"One real question is whether there will be any actual and serious accountability for this woeful decision-making, suppressing of dissent, modelling that was off by orders of magnitude, and complete failure by the press to do its job. ...
"Green and Fazi explain how the consequences of Covid policy were most brutal for those who had begun to clamber out of grinding poverty. They quickly found themselves back in it, with few opportunities to rise again. ...
"All that said and conceded, the foundational left-wing politics and economics of this book left me wholly unconvinced. ... The book comes in two parts. The first is largely descriptive; it describes what happened. There is the lab leak versus zoonotic theories of the virus's origins and the censorship and attacks on those who thought the evidence pointed to the former. (Again, many readers will know that today - after years of vitriolic attacks on those holding this position including by one Anthony Fauci - the lab leak theory is now widely considered to be the most likely explanation....
"There is a chapter on how the search for the truth about what happened in the external, causal world came under political pressure and collapsed.... I spent seven years on the ethics committee of my former New Zealand university where 'informed consent' was, I used to argue, being taken to ridiculously extreme lengths when data could not even be linked to any individual. During the pandemic, it seemed, informed consent suddenly meant nothing at all.
"Part II of the book is more evaluative. Did lockdowns save lives? Actually, if you focus solely on Covid deaths, even that is not clear. ...
"There is a chapter on how much harder these lockdown policies were on the young and the poor. There is one on the economic effects. All these are completely devastating to the standard pro-lockdown position. ... One real question is whether there will be any actual and serious accountability for this woeful decision-making, suppressing of dissent, modeling that was off by orders of magnitude, and complete failure by the press to do its job. The London Telegraph's release of the 'Lockdown Files' - the WhatsApp messages of the then British Minister of Health to and from the other main players during the bulk of the pandemic years - make it clear that the political class was deeply compromised, along with most of the medical establishment. They won't be anxious to push for accountability. ...
"So where does it go wrong? As a quibble, I found the various snide asides directed at former President Donald Trump to be as tiresome as they were wholly predictable. ... [O]utside, leftists were by far the biggest cheerleaders for lockdowns and other Draconian state policies.
"Of all the US states that resisted the full force of lockdown mania, all had Republican governors - while California and New York were outperformed by Florida, Texas, and South Dakota.... And on vaccine mandates, something the authors rightfully abhor, the left side of politics across the Anglosphere was and is far, far worse. (The US is the last country left that still, right now under a Biden administration, will not allow unvaccinated non-citizens to enter, though there is no scientific basis for this rule.)
"As for media outlets, those leaning left were far more supportive of lockdowns than those on the right. ... Any authoritarian streak amongst capitalists is, in all likelihood, one in a Democrat or Labour supporter. ... Buy it and give it to some pro-lockdown person you know. They'll hate you for it unless they read it." Law & Liberty, Mar 30 '23, <www.bit.ly/42wqKwa>
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ISLAM
"Campaign for thorough reform of Muslim law deserves mainstream coverage - now" by Richard Ostling (Get Religion, Apr 11 '23) -- "The world's largest organization of Muslims is campaigning for thorough worldwide reform of how to understand the faith's religious law (Sharia) and applied jurisprudence (Fiqh). ...
"The organization in question is Nahdlatul Ulama (NU, meaning Revival of Islamic Scholars) <www.bit.ly/45TNicq> in Indonesia, the nation with the largest Muslim population. ... NU encompasses an estimated 90 million lay followers, tens of thousands of religious scholars, 44 universities and 18,000 lower schools.
"NU upholds Sunni orthodoxy, but with a more tolerant tone than is customary in the Mideast. Its legal reform program was prominent during the massive February celebration of its 100th anniversary, analyzed in [James M.] Dorsey's March 31 Substack column. <www.bit.ly/45GA5TY> His article is a good starting point for journalists, but its opinionated viewpoint warrants careful follow-up interviewing. Also note this 2021 NU backgrounder <www.bit.ly/3qkXAC7> by political scientist Ahmet T. Kuru. <www.bit.ly/3IRsYyo>
"Moderate Muslim thinkers have long favored some sort of move away from rigid legal traditionalism. Dorsey depicts a two-sided struggle among them, pitting allies of NU's fully democratic and tolerant outlook against religious leaders beholden to rulers in the Mideast, as in Saudi Arabia, where certain social liberation is being allowed without fundamentally rethinking Islamic law or politics. ...
"NU issued a centennial declaration <www.bit.ly/3ML3a8i> that especially targets the traditional belief that all Muslims have an obligation to create a worldwide religious empire known as the caliphate. ...
"But the NU declaration insists 'it is neither feasible nor desirable to re-establish a universal caliphate that would unite Muslims throughout the world in opposition to non-Muslims.' ...
"Instead, NU calls for a 'new vision' of Fiqh designed to curtail 'communal hatred' and promote respect for all the world's diverse peoples, in accord with the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights." <www.bit.ly/3Io4zjF>
For a look at NU in AR's past issues, visit <www.bit.ly/3pPEILd>
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