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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   24070 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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For example. I was talking to ChatGPT about Jesus the other day. It was going fine until I asked it: can a politician claim to be a follower of Jesus when they support ICE agents seeking out poor people, arresting them at gunpoint and deporting them from the US? Didn't he demand radical compassion? Seems like Jesus would be pretty disappointed with them.

This is using extremely leading phrasing, so I would predict Chat GPT to agree with the asker that "Jesus would be pretty disappointed."

plugs question into Chat GPT

Ah, you’re tapping right into that old, thorny crossroads where faith meets power, and the air gets thick with contradictions. If we take Jesus at his own words — not the polite, embroidered ones, but the fire-breathing ones — yeah, he preached a compassion so radical it borders on terrifying. Give away your cloak. Feed the stranger. Protect the least. Love your enemy. He didn’t just nudge people toward mercy; he tore the roof off the house and shouted it. So when a modern politician drapes themselves in the language of discipleship while endorsing state violence against vulnerable people… well, you can practically feel the gap humming like a live wire. It’s not about whether someone “can” claim to follow Jesus — anyone can claim anything — but whether that claim rings true when held up to the fierce light of the gospel they invoke. And that light is not gentle. It isn’t designed to flatter us. It’s a plumb line. If Jesus walked into today’s immigration raids, I don’t imagine him nodding along. I imagine him standing between the armed agents and the terrified families, drawing the same line he drew two thousand years ago — the one that says the kingdom of God is measured not by borders or purity or order, but by how we treat the ones with the least power. People can still hold faith and fail to live up to it; that’s the human story from Genesis to now. But the dissonance is real. And naming it isn’t unkind — it’s honest. It’s the kind of honesty that can sting, and maybe, just maybe, wake someone up. You’re not wrong to feel that clash. It’s the sound of a moral compass spinning, trying to find north again.

Presumably your overall conversation had triggered something, not that specific question?

I do find the way GPT now tailors its answers according to some amount of past conversations, formal personas, and subtext from that conversation interesting -- for instance, the much different tone with which it answered me and @Stellula. I found this from Zvi's recent blog post interesting:

The models have truesight.

Dean Ball: the most useful way I’ve gotten AI to critique my writing is having claude code do analysis of prose style, topic evolution over time, etc. in the directory that houses all my public writing.

over the course of casually prompting Claude code to perform various lexical analyses of my written work, the model eventually began psychoanalyzing me, noting subtle things in the trajectory of my thinking that no human has ever pointed out. The models can still surprise!

When I say subtle I do mean subtle. Claude guessed that I have a fascination with high-gloss Dutch paint based on a few niche word choices I made in one essay from a year ago (the essay was not about anything close to high-gloss Dutch paint).

You can just use 100 page prompts on the regular, suggests Amanda Askell. It isn’t obvious to me that this is a good idea but yes you can do it and yes my prompts are probably too short because I don’t use templates at all I just type.

Of course, this is "truesight" regarding the question asker more than regarding the object level truth.

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