AI as a Religion
AI as a Religion
Mark Wain August 3, 2025
https://www.facebook.com/andrew.colesville
https://x.com/mwsansculotte
As the temperatures upsurge everywhere beyond control, AI activities have equally, if not more, blistered. The seven corporate giants accelerate their bets on AI gambling across the world. Their requirements, demands and upsurges of electrical and cooling resources are about equal to or higher than folks’ need in New York City, as the number of H100 equivalent GPU’s to be installed at each data center will exceed the one-million level, the goal is 100 million, sooner than they had predicted, because the inference demand is humongous. More than 500 billion dollars investments in AI or AI capex have been in place, its investment preferences will soon show power by reaching annual capex of one trillion dollar level by the end of this decade. Why doesn’t the AIistic, namely the doctrine of an Ai-afflicted redemption force, seem to care about the bottom lines? Doesn’t it know AI-reduced living labor creates less surplus value for capital? It seems to be so confident that its long-term gain will be both enormous and unstoppable.
AI has been worshipped as an almighty technical being, or simply put, a Godless God or a pre-god. Nothing in the world can be operational without begging for its superior, unique and pivotal holiness position as well as power.
The position and power of AIism cannot be overlooked because it is the first and, probably, the very last revolution of technology challenging humanity. Both the Industrial Revolution and the Internet Revolution are the other way around, i.e., humanity took over technology for relief benefits of either their physical or mental labor.
Today's AI movement is different; it resembles an emerging quasi-religion, AIistianity. Its emergency, of course, is no accidence; in fact, before it, there were plenty of similar religious movements emerging in the non-technical arenas such as social, political and cultural, in a similar way as the agnostic and polytheistic pagan religions of ancient Rome, or more appropriately, of modern-day U.S., each of which tended to justify to the struggling masses that class harmony, individual liberty, and the ruling-class democracy ruled over them were all necessary and sufficient to face the calamities – unemployment, economic downturns, wars, and climate changes. It is not surprising that Mary Harrington’s article “Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good” said and quoted: “The governing class to adapt pragmatically to the electorate’s collective decline in rational capacity, for example, by retaining the rituals associated with mass democracy, while quietly shifting key policy areas beyond the reach of a capricious and easily manipulated citizenry… International polls show waning support for democracy among Gen Z.”
Just like the Christianity more than two thousand years ago, the modern-day AIism emerging in 2020 has quickly caught up with and overtaken the battered paganism.
Based on the “shock and awe” intimidation – the internal emotion-based foundation, both religions and their apostles who add up to about twenty or so for each, at the beginning, had and have mastered “the religious dread” as the key to success, respectively.
Christianity’s shock, on one hand, was based on many kinds of feelings of the believers such as the absolute overpowering of death, salvation, self-denial, and so on. The shock of AIism, on the other hand, is based on leading capitalists being persistently aghast of reduced and delayed technology renewals. To them, AI is their Nirvana. It has been promoted from a self-contradictory compute rapture to a simulated and compressed humanity that AIistianity apostles couldn’t care less.
All religions are contradictory. They are active in pursuing human aspirations of their progenitors in the distant past resulting in acquiring mysteries, tremendousness, stupor, or irrationality and at the same time their assertions are rational and reason-oriented in general.
Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) had explained the contradictions existing in religions by emphasizing the term “numinous,” from the Latin numen, or supernatural divine power. Numinous feeling is just this unique apprehension of a Something; Numinous and Numen, bearing no moral importance, stand for the specific non-rational religious apprehension and its object. The translators who translated the English edition of his masterpiece “The Idea of the Holy” into the Chinese pointed out: “The author insists: religion is not only a natural thing, but also a paradoxical thing. Religion is the true knowledge of a certain being, and it is also a kind of communication with the true personality of this being, and the nature of this being is beyond knowledge and personality.
https://ia902901.us.archive.org/8/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.22259/2015.22259.The-Idea-Of-The-Holy.pdf
In terms of the contradiction, AI enters the stage of religious struggle or competition.
The LLM model universally adopted inference, algorithm, and optimization based on neural network simulation to human’s brain for training the AI of billions, or even nonillions (one nonillion = ten-thousand billions) of tokens can be taken to be the numen or the irrational aspects of AIistianity of which the Almighty capital is the Lord. AIistianity consists of the Capital-LLM entity. Without Capital, the approachable, rational, universal and the heavenly Fatherhood-like pre-god that has been numinously (a word referring to some supernatural and mysterious object; also, to a subjective mentality of this kind) described as the Master of the Universe, AIism can never be born.
In Chapter XIV THE HOLY AS AN A PRIORI CATEGORY Part I and its sequel, Dr. Otto wrote: “It follows from what has been said that the ‘Holy’ in the fullest sense of the word is a combined, complex category, the combining elements being its rational and non-rational components. But in both — and the assertion must be strictly maintained against all sensationalism and naturalism — it is purely a priori category.
The rational ideas of absoluteness, completion, necessity, and substantiality, and no less those of the good as an objective value, objectively binding and valid, are not to be 'evolved’ from any sort of sense-perception. And the notions of 'epigenesis’ (ep·i·gen·e·sis /ˌepəˈjenəsəs/noun Biology the theory, now generally held, that an embryo develops progressively from an undifferentiated egg cell. In Chinese, 渐成说), 'heterogony’(in biology, refers to the alternation of generations, specifically the alternation between parthenogenetic (asexual) and sexual reproduction, or between dioecious (separate sexes) and hermaphroditic generations. In botany, it can also refer to the condition of having flowers with different stamen and pistil lengths. In Chinese, 形变说 ) or whatever other expression we may choose to denote our compromise and perplexity, only serve to conceal the problem, the tendency to take refuge in a Greek terminology being here, as so often, nothing but an avowal of one’s own insufficiency. Rather, seeking to count on the ideas in question, we are referred away from all sense-experience back to an original and underivable capacity of the mind implanted in the 'pure reason’ independently of all perception.
“The justification of the 'evolutionist’ theory of today stands or falls with its claim to 'explain’ the phenomenon of religion. That is in truth the real task of the psychology of religion. But to explain we must have the data (Emphasis is mine.) from which an explanation may be forthcoming; out of nothing, nothing can be explained. Nature can only be explained by an investigation into the ultimate fundamental forces of nature and their laws: it is meaningless to propose going farther and explaining these laws themselves, for in terms of what are they to be explained? But in the domain of spirit the corresponding principle from which an explanation is derived is just the spirit itself, the reasonable spirit of man, with its predispositions, capacities, and its own inherent laws. This must be presupposed: it cannot be explained. None can say how mind or spirit 'is made’ — though this is in effect just what the theory of epigenesis is tried to attempt. The history of humanity begins with man, and we must presuppose man, to take him for granted as he is, in order that from him we may understand his history. That is, we must presuppose man as a being analogous to ourselves in natural propensities and capacities. It is a hopeless business to seek to lower our- selves into the mental life oi di pithecanthropus erectus and, even if it were not, we should still need to start from man as he is, since we can only interpret the psychical and emotional life of animals regressively by clumsy analogies drawn from the developed human mind. To try on the other hand, to understand and deduce the human from the sub-human or brute mind is to try to fit the lock to the key instead of vice versa; it is to seek to illuminate light by darkness. In the first appearance of conscious life on dead unconscious matter we have a simple, irreducible, inexplicable datum. But that which here appears is already a manifold of qualities, and we can only interpret it as a seed of potentiality out of which issue continually mature in powers and capacities, as the organization of the body increases in stability and complexity. And the only way we can throw any light upon the whole region of sub-human psychical life is by interpreting it once again as a sort of 'predisposition’ at a second remove, i.e. a predisposition to form the predispositions or faculties of the actual developed mind and standing in relation to this as an embryo to the full-grown organism. But we are not completely in the dark as to the meaning of this word 'pre- disposition’ (anlage)For in our own awakening and growth to mental and spiritual maturity we trace in ourselves in some sort of evolution by which the seed develops into the tree — the very opposite of 'transformation’ and 'epigenesis’ by successive addition.
“By the continual living activity of its non-rational elements a religion is guarded from passing into ‘rationalism’. By being steeped in and saturated with rational elements it is guarded from sinking into fanaticism or mere mysticality, or at least from persisting in these, and is qualified to become a religion for all civilized humanity. The degree in which both rational and non-rational elements are jointly present, united in healthy and lovely harmony, affords a criterion to measure the relative rank of religions — and one, too, that is specifically religious. Applying this criterion, we find that Christianity, in this as in other respects, stands out in complete superiority overall its sister religions. The lucid edifice of its clear and pure conceptions, feelings, and experiences are built up on a foundation that goes far deeper than the rational. Yet the non-rational is only the basis, the setting, the woof in the fabric, ever preserving for Christianity its mystical depth, giving religion thereby the deep undertones and heavy shadows of mysticism, without letting it develop into a mere rank growth of mysticality. And thus Christianity, in the healthily proportioned union of its elements, assumes a classical form and dignity, which is only the more vividly attested in consciousness as we proceed honestly and without prejudice to set it in its place in the comparative study of religions. Then we shall recognize that in Christianity an element of man’s spiritual life, which yet has its analogies in other fields, has for the first time come to maturity in a supreme and unparalleled way.”
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Natural languages from which AI has been processed by humans are the irrational part of AIistianity, because machines that AI use cannot understand natural languages. They must be taught, trained, and tricked to serve capital as its magical servant. Its ambiguity of being in terms of “personality” and non-personness is prominently demonstrated in its hallucinations. Natural languages are historical accumulation and legacy that contain inexhaustibly rich connotations. When AI works under capital’s heavy pressure, it tends to be out of its mind and does not do the right thing. There is no possibility that AI can do no wrong, as it is not a genuine machine of compute, rather it is both a man-made nomen or mysterium and a gruesome daemon.
The questions remain the same as in the early stage of Christianity: who will be the son of the Capital and how AIistians react to their religion? Will they believe in their Holy Father and His Son? Will the twenty or so saints/apostles of AIistianity show their magic powers to rescue their millions and billions of jobless, homeless and futureless believers?