Musk announced his new artificial intelligence company xAI on Wednesday, stating that its aim was to “understand the true nature of the universe.” It’s hard to pick apart the reasoning on that goal, which sounds like it came out of a magic mushroom journey. Why does Musk want to understand the universe? The name of his latest venture plays into all sorts of Elon tropes, from using the letter X to announcing it on a date that adds up to 42, the number that “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” author Douglas Adams cryptically offered as the single answer to the meaning of life. But set aside the usual Musk eccentricities and it looks like he could make life difficult for Google in the battle to develop cutting-edge AI. Musk’s description of the AI challenge might sound familiar to the team at DeepMind, the artificial intelligence lab that Google bought in 2015. DeepMind’s founder Demis Hassabis was the first AI entrepreneur to openly state that he wanted to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) back when he co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010, and he has consistently described his motives in abstract, even philosophical terms.  His Twitter bio today still reads, “Working on AGI. Trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality…

Christians in America have gotten used to being on the defensive. Not only are many of the moral principles that we hold sacred openly trampled in the media, the public square, or even the White House lawn, but Christians sometimes find themselves blamed for quite nearly all the evil in the world. Some of the charges lobbed our way are familiar ones, dating back centuries: Christians are killjoys and bigots, responsible for oppressing religious minorities and persecuting anyone who didn’t fit their mold—Exhibit A being the Salem witch trials. Others are of newer vintage: Christians, we are told, have taken the lead in purveying racism and xenophobia, and the pages of American history are littered with the destruction they have visited upon Native Americans, African Americans, and immigrants. Some Christians have responded by endorsing these accusations with unseemly gusto, calling on their co-religionists to join them in self-lacerating “lament,” and hoping that profuse apologies to progressive advocates will avert these avenging angels from their own doorsteps. Others have responded by meeting resentment with resentment: if progressive elites are going to tell white Christians all the ways they have victimized others, then white Christians are going to stake their own claim to victimhood status. Thankfully there is a third, more promising route: meet bad history with good history, and demonstrate that many of the moral triumphs that progressives take for granted are in fact the legacy of Christianity alone…

In “The Spiritist Fallacy,” a penetrating analysis of Luciferian Theosophy, Spiritism, and by extension, the New Age Spirituality overtaking and replacing Christianity throughout Western civilization, the respected French traditionalist metaphysician Rene Guenon explained how the theories of William James (1842-1910), the father of American psychology, are examples of unconscious Satanism. Guenon gives two reasons. First, James’ theory of “religious experience” as a manifestation of the subconscious by which man communicates with the Divine “within” is only one step away from “condoning the practices of spiritism” (contact with spirits) with the further consequence of conferring on evil spirits an “eminently religious character. Second, the notion that the subconscious puts man in contact with the Divine Substance “within” puts God, “…in the inferior states of being, in feris in the literal sense of this expression. This then is a properly ‘infernal’ doctrine, a reversal of universal order, which is precisely what we call ‘Satanism.’” (pp. 258-262) Building off James satanically oriented theories, the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961), a heavily demonized man, taught that the psyche (soul) consists of two main systems: a personal unconscious and a deeper more significant layer which he called the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious Jung identified as archetypes. Archetypes were innate, unconscious, and universal, said Jung. Jung’s system incorporates Darwin’s materialist theory of evolution together with spiritual conceptions of evolution, reincarnation, Gnostic conceptions of the Divine One Substance, ancient Egyptian Hermetic magic, and various other…

If you think witchcraft is a good idea, you might also think this is a good reason to divorce: “Sometimes you grow together; sometimes you grow apart.” That was the excuse from supermodel Gisele Bündchen to a Vanity Fair reporter explaining why she ended 13 years of marriage to Tom Brady, the greatest NFL quarterback of all time. The couple had married Feb. 26, 2009, in a Catholic ceremony in Santa Monica, California, and have two children together. When a beautiful power couple live out their love story before an adoring public for more than a decade, they become Pied Pipers of romance. But among Catholics, a 13-year marriage with two children awash in privilege but ending due to different growth patterns should sadden us. Wealth and fame easily overshadow God and religion without intentional effort to overcome the world’s pull into selfishness. Sacrifice, prayer and openness to the marital graces is the way to get through hard times to keep the unbreakable bond of a sacramental marriage strong. Despite the fairytale romance image, back in 2019, I had an ominous feeling about the couple’s future. Brady admitted glibly to CBS that he credited his 2019 Superbowl win with the Patriots beating the Rams 13-3 to witchcraft. His wife had been directing his participation in it. Having interviewed many exorcists…