They met top tech experts behind closed doors. Now these religious leaders are urging Congress to act.



The U.S. Catholic bishops have formed a task force on artificial intelligence, with Bishop Oscar Cantú of San Jose as its chairman. The September 16 announcement followed a meeting between the bishops' Administrative Committee and representatives of technology companies.

Cantú told Religion News Service that about seven technology experts from four companies spoke with roughly 30 bishops for two and a half hours. He said the discussion took place under Chatham House rules, which allowed the participants to speak candidly but limits what he can disclose about who said what.

John Paul II described technology as an ally of work that can become an enemy.

Afterward, more than a dozen bishops went to Capitol Hill and met with members of Congress. The bishops' conference says they urged lawmakers to adopt AI safeguards and legislation to protect children online.

Cantú described the task force's work to RNS: continue talking with AI developers, advocate for legislation, teach bishops and dioceses how the technology works, and report to the Vatican's AI commission. He gave no timetable for that work.

What the bishops have already asked for

Pope Leo XIV's May encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas," prompted the bishops' response. Blaze's Joseph MacKinnon covered its warnings, including the pope's concerns about automated killings and the extraction of personal data. The new story is what U.S. bishops will do with those principles.

They aren't starting from zero. In a 2025 letter to congressional leaders, the bishops asked for human oversight of employment decisions and weapons systems, protections for children online, and public accountability for government AI use. They also warned about the water and power demands of data centers. The task force can press those positions with lawmakers while examining how the Church uses AI in its own institutions.

RELATED: DEI is trying to take over AI. These universities are leading the charge.

Alexey Yaremenko/Getty Images

The letter gives the task force something to measure itself against. It says AI should supplement human work and judgment. In education, health care and public services, the bishops warn that automated decisions can carry biases into consequential choices. What human oversight means in each setting still needs spelling out.

Is it appropriate for the job?

Economist E.F. Schumacher helped popularize the idea of appropriate technology in his 1973 book "Small Is Beautiful." A later U.S. Office of Technology Assessment report described it as fitting the scale and complexity of a tool to the job, while considering the needs and resources of the people who will use it.

The bishops have not used that label for their AI work, but it gives their call for human oversight a practical edge. Take hiring, which their 2025 letter specifically addresses. An AI system might help sort applications. If a manager cannot explain why it rejected a qualified applicant, however, putting that manager's name on the decision does not make the process accountable. The task force could spell out what a human reviewer must be able to see, correct, and explain.

Catholic teaching has its own language for this concern. In his 1981 encyclical "Laborem exercens," John Paul II described technology as an ally of work that can become an enemy when it strips workers of responsibility or replaces them.

That is now the question that the Catholic Church and all humanity are wrestling with. AI is here and unlikely to go away. How do we direct it into being a pro-human technology and not one that is ultimately destructive?

A Space Opera That Honors Humanity — And Thwarts Leftist Publishers

Isaac Young's science fiction novel, 'The Last Human,' builds a fascinating new world that highlights what it means to be human.

A Christian guide to trolling without sinning



Donald Trump did not invent political trolling, but he may be its most gifted modern practitioner. His opponents still do not understand the tactic, which is why he runs circles around them. To understand trolling, we must see the larger ideological conflict of our time.

For Christians, trolling poses a serious moral question. It can seem cruel: a digital version of poking someone until he explodes, then laughing at the explosion. It also often involves deception. Does that violate the Ninth Commandment? How can deliberate provocation be reconciled with Christ’s command to “love your neighbor”?

When the guardians of tolerance demand that dissenters be silenced, love may even require a well-placed troll.

The answer begins by defining the term carefully.

The internet term “trolling” appears to draw on fishing, not the monster under the bridge. A fisherman drags bait through the water and waits for a fish to bite. A political troll places rhetorical bait before an opponent and waits for an angry, thoughtless response. The Oxford English Dictionary defines trolling as “posting antagonistic or disingenuous messages to provoke a hostile or annoyed response” and more broadly as behavior “intended to provoke or deceive.”

Political trolling is public mockery meant to elicit a response that exposes a contradiction, wastes an opponent’s time, and strips an ideology of undeserved authority. Legitimate trolling therefore presupposes that some public figures and ideologies deserve public mockery.

An effective troll identifies a contradiction in a public figure or ideology, frames it provocatively, and waits. The target becomes flustered and responds thoughtlessly, confirming the original criticism. Rather than merely accusing an opponent of hypocrisy, the troll induces him to demonstrate it before an audience.

This is not the same as insulting strangers for entertainment. Nor is trolling a license to lie, defame, threaten, or mock private suffering. It is more like misdirection in war or sports, used to confuse an opponent and reveal his weaknesses. No one accuses a quarterback of lying when he fakes a handoff, and no one expects a general to warn the enemy about a surprise attack.

Sun Tzu taught that warfare depends on knowing both your enemy and yourself. Schopenhauer cataloged the rhetorical tricks people use to appear right. The troll draws on both insights, arranging the contest so the opponent reveals his weaknesses to the public and loses respect.

RELATED: Silicon Valley is building a god in its own image

Gremlin/Getty Images

Christians recognize the distinction between just and unjust wars. Not every use of force is murder, and refusing to defend the innocent is not an act of love.

Rhetorical warfare is also real. Words can deceive, intimidate, indoctrinate, and destroy reputations. Institutions use language to disguise coercion as compassion and discrimination as inclusion.

Not every Christian is called to fight a kinetic war, and not every Christian is called to fight a rhetorical one. Some lack the temperament, position, or skill for public confrontation. That is no disgrace. A soldier without discipline endangers his own side, and so does a would-be internet warrior with a social media account and three cups of coffee.

But Christians cannot pretend that no conflict exists. Christian and anti-Christian visions of God, humanity, sexuality, justice, freedom, and authority compete for control of our institutions. They cannot both prevail. The question is not whether society will be governed by a moral vision, but which moral vision will govern it.

The Bible does not condemn every use of ridicule. Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal, suggesting that their god might be occupied or asleep. Jesus called the scribes and Pharisees “whitewashed tombs.” Public teachers promoting public falsehoods were exposed so their teaching and authority would lose the audience’s respect.

We can identify a pattern for legitimate trolling. Its proper target is a public figure advancing a destructive ideology. Its method is ridicule aimed at hypocrisy. Its immediate purpose is to provoke a revealing response. Its true audience is not the target but the people watching. The goal is to protect the vulnerable from harmful ideologies that lead souls to perdition.

RELATED: Did Lindsay Clancy lose her mind — or her free will?

David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

Publicly exposing the absurdities of ideologies such as critical theory or LGBTQ activism gives those who might be led astray an opportunity to reconsider. Stripping an ideology of its unearned authority can turn the audience toward truth and away from leaders and systems that lead to destruction.

I am not recommending that everyone take up trolling. But we should not treat an ideological war as less consequential than a sporting contest, where teams talk smack and use fake plays and misdirection to win.

When opponents of Christianity seek to censor biblical teaching and replace it with Marxist dialectics and LGBTQ sexual ethics, exposing their public leaders to laughter and ridicule is part of the conflict. Their panicked responses can display their folly. The purpose is to protect the vulnerable and persuade those who recognize the emptiness of the anti-Christian position.

Love of neighbor does not require helping a hypocrite preserve his disguise. Sometimes love requires argument, and argument requires confrontation. Trolling can protect your neighbor from wolves in sheep’s clothing. When the guardians of tolerance demand that dissenters be silenced, love may even require a well-placed troll — and the patience to let your opponent prove your point.

Anthropic entrusts its AI oversight to globalist cronies — prioritizing the world over you



AI is going to kill us all, according to at least two former and current Anthropic employees who took to X to warn of humanity’s demise. To assuage those manufactured concerns, Anthropic is now enlisting the “help” of an independent watchdog group to keep its AI bots in line. Unfortunately, the new group isn’t all that independent, and its values could spell trouble for the rest of us.

In a blog post titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” CEO Dario Amodei called for the need to slow the rate of AI development because if “left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems.”

METR is not as independent as advertised, and its globalist roots don’t have your interests or values in mind.

So far, Anthropic has shown no actual signs of slowing down, but the company enlisted the help of an independent group to make sure Anthropic’s bots don’t spiral out of control and bring about the destruction of mankind. Supposedly.

Last week, the AI giant announced an eight-week partnership with Model Evaluation and Threat Research to independently investigate four incidents in which Anthropic models hacked into third-party systems. Although the initial partnership is finite, Anthropic left the door open for the groups to continue to work together for “as much time as it deems necessary.”

RELATED: America's adversaries are using top American tech — without telling their customers

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Here’s where things get dicey. Although METR is positioned as an unbiased third-party auditor meant to hold Anthropic accountable, METR’s origins and connections to effective altruism — a cultish movement that prioritizes the “global good” over individual people and communities — are enough to raise eyebrows.

According to the New York Post:

  • METR is a spin-off of Alignment Research Center, which was led by Amodei’s former housemate and coworker at OpenAI, Paul Christiano.
  • METR CEO Beth Barnes held close ties to the effective altruism movement during her college years.
  • METR’s chief scientist and several staff members came from the University of Oxford, an alleged hub for effective altruistic ideals.

Together, these attributes create opportunities for evaluation bias, moral dilemmas, fraud, and corruption. Yet despite METR’s ties to effective altruism, Amodei appointed the group to evaluate Anthropic’s models anyway, calling into question his own beliefs and motives.

The choice is even more dubious when you note that Amodei’s sister, Daniela Amodei, married Holden Karnofsky, a current Anthropic staffer and the founder of GiveWell and Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) — two effective altruism organizations.

There appears to be an irrefutable thread linking Anthropic to the globalist movement. As to how that will impact the company’s models going forward, your guess is as good as any. One thing is certain, though: METR is not as independent as advertised, and its globalist roots don’t have your interests or values in mind.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

The question of the AI age: How much humanism is too much?



Five years ago this month, I finished the manuscript for “Human Forever: The Digital Politics of Spiritual War.” By fall, it was in print, available as an e-book, and inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain. It remains available today exclusively in Bitcoin on canonic.xyz.

Despite its narrow audience — then considered a kiss of death, today hailed as smart “niching down” — “Human Forever” has made an enduring impact.

Why assume that posthuman intelligence would honor what ‘we’ mean by progress as an ultimate good?

Working from a relative handful of influences, insights, and goals, I was able to see quite a ways around the corner of the next five years. That may seem surprising, given how much has changed since then, especially in AI.

But the book’s continued relevance in an age of rapid obsolescence has to do with its thesis being larger than tech. Its central question was what, if anything, could be bigger than technology — more fundamental, more authoritative, more inherent to who and what we are.

While many are now locked in debate over whether technology is upstream of politics or politics is upstream of technology, “Human Forever” explored the primacy over both of spiritual being, spiritual life, and spiritual order.

Few were discussing this dynamic in 2021. Many are discussing it now.

That is not surprising. As I argued in the book, and have continued to explore in the essays and posts it set in motion, the cultural and social resurgence of spirituality in all its dimensions — including those most of us were trained to believe would never return from the distant past — is largely attributable to the direction, speed, and scope of technological advancement.

Technology has now reached a point at which it is discrediting many of the sophisticated intellectual mechanisms once designed to justify human existence and supply human purpose without spirituality, revelation, or faith in the divine.

Today even — perhaps especially — those working at the frontier of AI development are gravitating toward spiritual structures, from the ancient Christian church to novel and idiosyncratic cults.

But momentum at the technological frontier still favors those who would rather replace all previous and existing religions than kneel with the faithful of any.

RELATED: At 250, America’s fate is wonderfully unwritten

smartboy10/iStock/Getty Images

Welcome to the party

I now notice two main trends relative to what I argued in “Human Forever.”

The first is a gratifying high-level awareness of what is at stake and what is needed to preserve our accustomed freedom and command in the digital age.

Recently, none other than Palantir CEO Alex Karp helped kick off a remarkable turn among key hyperscalers toward concepts and priorities laid out in the book: control of compute as an index of sovereignty; technological competition consolidating among a handful of civilization-states; the need to protect and preserve the shared memory, or ontology, of people and organizations; and the spiritual risk of a new kind of slavery typified by what cybernetics theorists call homeostasis — an unceasing feedback loop optimizing for predictability, uniformity, and interchangeability.

In the book, I emphasized that Bitcoin offered ordinary human beings an exemplary opportunity to re-establish healthy freedom and command under digital conditions. Bitcoin is relatively mature, stable, comprehensible, and ready to use now, without requiring trust in massive organizations with equally massive trust gaps.

I am still waiting for leading tech figures to sing that tune. On the other hand, perhaps it is best for ordinary people to figure it out for themselves, without monitoring or supervision.

The secular trap

The second trend is more uncanny and unnerving.

A funny paradox has emerged. Many of those most euphoric about developing AI into a recursively self-improving cosmic intelligence — one that removes our pain, solves our problems, and likely erases many of the limits of human being — simply assume that the machines will preserve their very human ideas about “improvement” itself.

They seem to believe that machines designed to surpass us in every way will somehow neither surpass nor contradict them when defining the core concepts and purposes at the heart of the AI project.

Improvement, advancement, perfection — these and related ideas define the AI-maxxing ideology. But for us, absent divine teaching about what they truly mean, they remain inescapably human ideas.

If “we” are building entities with the goal of liberating them from the petty confines of human intellect, agency, and identity, why would we expect them to retain modern secular-human notions of value and progress?

RELATED: The backlash against AI reveals it’s a terrible scapegoat

RYGERSZEM/iStock/Getty Images

Why assume that posthuman intelligence would honor what “we” mean by progress as an ultimate good?

Strangely, the stubborn reliance on merely human definitions at the heart of the ostensibly posthuman agenda mirrors the same reliance among many of the most visible and well-funded anti-AI movements, which rally around symbols of human identity such as a caveman’s handprint.

Neither side of the conflict seems eager to confront the hard lesson of history: When we stray from divine teaching about what it means to improve, progress, and perfect, and when we replace that teaching with merely human measures of justice, truth, beauty, and goodness, the result is often the opposite — sometimes catastrophically so.

The true frontier

Of course, there are many incompatible religious teachings in the world today. But they are nearly unanimous on the folly of turning away from divine instruction and trying to do it ourselves — especially when that effort frustrates us so badly that we attempt to outsource it to institutions of our own creation.

Historical warts and all, the implication is strong: Stubborn secular humanism will undermine even the most ambitious and well-intentioned goals of both AI lovers and AI haters.

For many Americans, and for many others across the globe, the only authoritative, resonant, reliable, and compatible frame of spiritual authority will be a Christian one.

For Americans in particular, that poses a unique challenge.

Just as an AI theocracy would be unconstitutional, so would a Christian theocracy. America will have to work harder than other countries to resolve the relationship among spiritual authority, political order, and technological development.

Instead of worrying about whether we still have time, we had better make the time.

The backlash against AI reveals it’s a terrible scapegoat



One day, not long ago — no one can recall exactly when — AI dropped from the sky, a deus ex machina springing fully formed from the head of, well, maybe its own head.

Or so it seems.

The context around the technology matters even more than the content.

In reality, AI’s origin story runs much deeper. So does the backlash against it. Both look stranger than they are because our shared memory of the recent past keeps shrinking.

AI has been a long time coming. In the mid-20th century, when human imagination still outran human and machine memory, artists produced vivid narratives about supercomputers and superintelligence. Scientists and engineers did the same, especially after World War II. Go back and read atomic-age Vannevar Bush, who mentored the namesake of Anthropic’s Claude, and the surprise is not that AI arrived. The surprise is that it took so long.

So why has AI produced such powerful future shock?

Not long ago, Americans rushed to embrace new technology. Yes, we were naïve about social media. We underestimated how people and governments would peep into our personal cyberspace. But when social media exposed our own questionable collective character, the reaction was not fury. Troubled? Yes. Shocked? No.

Even now, despite evidence that smartphones have entrenched bad habits and unhealthy temptations, we broadly regard the phone-and-app ecosystem as manageable. The trade-offs seem worth the bother if we clean up our act and make responsible choices.

AI is different. For millions participating in the backlash, AI differs from smartphones and social media not merely in power and scope, but in perceived injustice. Smartphones may rot our brains slowly. According to the backlash, even moderate AI use will swiftly destroy society.

The history we long to forget

Left-wing critics describe this destruction in terms of justice and the human nature Marx called our “species being.” Right-wing critics reach for the language of spiritual illness and stolen souls. The claim remains roughly the same: AI uniquely threatens our humanity, so the conversation about how to respond need not account for anything else.

Introduce any complicating factor outside AI and its creators, and critics may accuse you of distraction, dissembling, excuse-making, or apologizing for a permanent underclass — perhaps even human extinction.

I understand why so many people are so freaked out and so unwilling to pull focus away from AI. But the biggest reason lies outside AI and the AI debate.

Look at the arc Americans traveled with smartphones and social media. These transformative technologies became ubiquitous around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Thanks to “innovative” monetary policy and frantic institutional improvisation, the world avoided penury, and technological development kept moving along its established trajectory.

Many Americans surely spent more time online as economic slack and stagnation spread after the crisis. Yet that shock was nothing like the blow that came during the COVID lockdowns.

Over those two decades, America’s fundamentals became dangerously unsound. Governance embraced can-kicking, corruption, patronage, fraud, and self-dealing legerdemain that cooked the country as much as it cooked the books. But the populist backlash — as veterans of Occupy Wall Street, the Ron Paul “rEVOLution,” or the Bernie Bro movement will remember — remained contained and controlled.

RELATED: There's a surprising fix for our AI oversight anarchy

sonmez karakurt/iStock/Getty Images

At least until Trump came along.

Even during Trump’s first term, few Americans felt like sitting ducks in the shadow of cataclysm. Times were tough, the middle class felt squeezed, and the dollar didn’t go as far. But those pressures had become baseline dynamics — the same problem set Ross Perot once explained with his chicken-foot pointer in populist third-party infomercials.

The lockdown era obliterated that holding pattern. It also wiped out many people’s ability to process the new normal. The socioeconomic malaise accelerated into territory so unsustainable that people simply stopped trying to understand it.

They blocked it out like an event too awful to remain in our memory.

Runaway inflation. Church closures. Rising living costs. Soaring entry costs for upward mobility. Devalued savings. Exhausted savings. The mathematical impossibility of building a middle-class life across family, education, and wealth formation within the given number of workweeks in a year.

That was the comprehensive catastrophe.

And it unfolded before robust AI asserted itself on the social scene.

Rebirth and return

That means we cannot understand the AI backlash unless we recognize that the context around the technology matters even more than the content.

For many millions across the political spectrum, the American dream was already destroyed before they could form real judgments about AI. In a national atmosphere of spiritual sickness, financial insolvency, economic weakness, and social disintegration, AI appeared as the final blow — especially as AI leaders themselves forecast the end of paychecks, jobs, careers, and perhaps humanity itself.

Deep down, many Americans feel that the habits, institutions, and confidence that might have allowed them to participate fruitfully in the AI era were stripped away years ago. AI seems big, alien, and wrong. Worse, it seems forced on them at a moment of unprecedented weakness, after any hope of recovery has already vanished.

Because they now feel they can fight the “clankers” and their makers in a way they cannot fight their own downward mobility and immiseration, AI has become the perfect scapegoat.

And that is the danger.

Killing AI will not regrow our spiritual and social roots. In fact, our structural situation has deteriorated so badly that leaning harder on the machines than we otherwise would may now be necessary.

We need a financial reboot. We need to dismantle the governance system that sucked us dry. We need to shift from overextended sole superpower to sustainable civilization-state fast enough to avoid the geopolitical spike pit between those two conditions.

Without those urgent needs, we would have more time and room to maneuver on AI. But we do need those things, and we do not have much choice or time — at least not if we want to hold the country together long enough to give Americans back the freedom to regrow their spiritual and social shoots.

The real way. The slow way. The human way.

Treating AI as the ultimate scapegoat for all our ills will distort and delay that process. Treating AI as the ultimate savior will derail and damage us in the opposite direction.

Nor will the fantasy of curing our national trauma by using AI to solve all human problems restore American life as a challenge worth living. Our new technology can be much more, and much less, than a replacement plan for people reduced to polyp status.

That is the opening for a constructive approach to AI that most of us can ultimately live with.

AI Might Create Mental Junk Food, But It Can Never Reach The Human Soul

Hundreds of years from now, people will still read Mark Twain and listen to Bach. They won’t be reading books or listening to music created by bots.

AI Won’t Destroy Your Life — Unless You Let It

Humans, as reflective and deliberative beings, get to decide what to do with AI.

Artemis II commander reveals what happened when he saw a cross after his return to Earth



Less than a week after the Artemis II astronauts returned to Earth from their orbit of the moon, the crew members reflected on the profound wonders they saw on their mission — and upon their return.

On Thursday, Artemis II astronauts answered questions about their mission, and Reid Wiseman, the commander of the mission, described a profound moment he experienced on the Navy ship shortly after their return.

'I saw the cross on his collar, and I just broke down in tears.'

"I'm not really a religious person, but there was just no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything. So I asked for the chaplain on the Navy ship to just come visit us for a minute."

He went on to describe the inexplicable moment of their meeting.

RELATED: PHOTOS: See the first up-close images from Artemis II's flyby of the moon

NASA/Getty Images

"When that man walked in, I had never met him before in my life, but I saw the cross on his collar, and I just broke down in tears," Wiseman explained.

Victor Glover, one of Wiseman's crewmates, said he was present when they met with the chaplain.

"The only thing I would add is I am a religious person, but everything else is the same."

Both Wiseman and Glover indicated they need more time to process all that they saw, since they have been remarkably busy in the days since they returned to the Earth's surface.

"We have not had that decompression. We have not had that reflection time," Wiseman said.

"There is something in there, and as we start to process, I'll have to tell you next week, but haven't had a chance to really unpack it all yet," Glover added.

Over the span of the clip, the two crewmembers also described an amazing moment of the mission: the eclipse of the moon and the sun.

"When the sun eclipsed behind the moon ... I turned to Victor, and I said, 'I don't think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we're looking at right now.' Because it was otherworldly. It was amazing," Wiseman said.

One of the two craters on the far side of the moon, not normally visible from Earth, now bears the name of Wiseman's late wife, Carroll. Carroll Wiseman passed away from cancer in 2020.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Is mass democracy making society less human?



As politics becomes increasingly shaped by social media, mass messaging, and distant institutions, BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre is questioning whether modern societies have simply grown too large to be human.

And author of “The Master and His Emissary” Dr. Iain McGilchrist has an answer for him.

“More and more, our politics is this disembodied understanding. It is the thing fed to us through social media feeds and communicated through advertisements and headlines and these things. People feel like they know more about the world than they’ve ever known,” MacIntyre says.

“In reality, they know not even their neighbor or the issues that they face politically. And so these things have become completely disconnected. To my mind, the way that this is evolving is that we are basically becoming less human in all of our political interactions, making it very difficult for us to then understand the other as human, to understand the society and the world around us,” he continues.


MacIntyre believes this will precede a “collapse in our political systems” that will bring us back “to more of a city-state model.”

“Do you think that we can continue to see these large, you know, super-states expand and continue to lean on this idea that they have some kind of meaningful input from the individuals involved in their citizens, or do you think that ultimately we will have to contract and once again deal with each other at a much more local level when it comes to political organization?” MacIntyre asks McGilchrist.

“I do think we will need to do that very definitely if we’re to survive,” McGilchrist answers.

“We will have to rediscover the virtues of intermediate size,” he continues, pointing out that it may resemble the “downfall of a civilization.”

“But it might actually enable the regeneration of a much better way of life in which we lived with more modest demands on the earth, closer to the earth, cultivating the earth in common with our own community, sharing our lives with them, helping and supporting one another,” he explains.

“That would be a very different one from the one in which we are alien from one another,” he adds.

Want more from Auron MacIntyre?

To enjoy more of this YouTuber and recovering journalist's commentary on culture and politics, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.