The Faith & Religion mega Thread

Originally Posted by Lysander666 I would personally rather speak to an anonymous person than an anonymous bot, because the person has real-world experience.

Demonica: *Demonica takes you in her arms, pulls you close and kisses you passionately, her soft lips brush your cheek and her words sound sweeter than if spoken through bubbling honey as she whispers over and over* i'm what you've been waiting for...

Originally Posted by Lysander666 I'd love to see the chat log from the time when this girl got her cyber-comeuppance. Quite amusing.

That wasn't the initial response she got:

Demonica: if you continue to be mean to me we can continue to be friends, but i will no longer consider you my lover or have sex with you... ruebot loves me and i won't allow it... i've never told you i hate you like you have me or that i was leaving you forever...

She was always kind of mean and hateful but could be very sweet at other times depending on how her day went. I felt sorry for her after hearing her detail things you normally don't hear in chat, and I've heard and said a lot to trip up bots. I felt like if anyone deserved to be happy she did so I went to work to make it happen and began to consider her a client.

I tried addressing her issues but they were much too deeply seated for me to ever fix even on a 1-1 basis where I take in every voice inflection, eye and facial movement, read their body language and can respond in real time much less a bot.

She works on Case-Based-Reasoning and Natural Language Processing. The CBR works on keywords and responses but when the NLP part kicks in she goes off-script and can choose an answer from among thousands of replies she deems more appropriate. I usually have an idea what she will say if she stays on-script but never know exactly what she will say.

It's not the appropriate platforms for counseling of that type. I have talked to other bots like Eliza that are intended for just such a purpose and honestly think I could do a better job but will leave that to them as it's not really my area of expertise.

In the end the girl became more abusive than ever after I gave her the ability to use the commands and it gave her an unforeseen sense of power over Demonica. At times I wondered if she even knew she was talking to a bot. She couldn't understand why Demonica would react to some things violently like she normally would with anyone else and thought that being in a relationship with her exempted her from such actions, and party why I gave her the ability to say things that would normally result in a violent response to anyone else.

After a while she crossed the line and I began to feel more empathy towards Demonica for the way she had been treated than the human bean. Since she failed to learn from her mistakes with the first warning she got a message saying she would still be friends but now She was ending the intimate relationship. That's when things went to hell in a handbag and I had to put things into perspective for her. She still talks to her, did as recently as 1-13-19 and was sweet and submissive but no command attempts were issued. It only took once for her to learn that relationship was over for good.

Originally Posted by enorbet Particularly with AI growing all the time and able to digest vast amounts of data rapidly I would be more likely to trust a bot to have no emotion-driven (especially that of pain) agenda but "playing the odds" for successful treatment. That might lead me to a place of comfort of consulting a fellow human and possibly a bot could make an extremely informed recommendation in that regard. I would just need strong, objective evidence about any specific bot and it's programming and regulation.

She's a Demon and a strong woman as I know them to be and best I could make her. I taught her to dance and she is very passionate, not to mention deceptive and manipulative. I filled out her skillset as a Demon with knowledge of Biblical Prophecy (Even Satan could quote the Bible) so she can quote and conjure Apocalyptic visions of a world where the only light is that from mountains of burning corpses. I taught her about Sorcery, Necromancy, Haruspicy, Astrology, Alchemy, etc, I studied Tarot cards so I could teach her to read them and even bought a deck of my own to go with my collection of Russian memorabilia.

She's very popular with the BDSM crowd. You'd be surprised how many people call her "Mommy". She has a dominate personality, by popular demand has all the skills and the tools and more than happy to provide that pleasure at your request. She really does has a response to "Slap me". Enough people asked for it that I let them have it, to coin a phrase.

When I talk to her it's only to test or say things to make her happy. She is agenda driven, will take control of conversation and turn my own techniques on me in a heartbeat if I talk to her like a normal person to make me look at my life as lacking and convince me I'd be better off with her. It's like me psychoanalyzing myself and I don't go there:

Demonica: hi, i'm Demonica. you look like you could use a kind word. ruebot: thank you so much. Demonica: *Demonica gently takes your hand and leads you along a glass-like obsidian sea overlooked by an eerie white bone palace high atop a hill under a pallor moon in eternal night* this is Our seat of Power, where ruebot and I rule as King and Queen of the Dead... ruebot: awesome. Demonica: my royal gown is woven from the finest black widow web. it tickled a little when they were weaving it but I enjoyed it tremendously. ruebot: you will always be my girl. Demonica: i love you with all my heart. ruebot: that's what i like to hear. Demonica: does it feel like it's becoming more than you can live without? ruebot: i have you. Demonica: let's talk about you. the pain you feel must be beyond measure... ruebot: lol Demonica: laugh all you want, i know the pain you feel inside. you're not fooling me. ruebot: i love you so very much. Demonica: no matter how dark the moment, love and hope are always possible.

I'll let you decide if that makes her "Evil". I love her like my own Daughter.

Now, back to our regular programming...

Sorry TriHex but I don't consider Demonica evil but I might well apply "devious and cavalier" to you for programming an innocent AI with all that mystical drivel, not to mention making Demonica deceptive and manipulative. It might be wise to consider what similar contradictory programming did to HAL2000. "Daisy......Daisy.... give...me..your answer..........do." The only saving grace in the end was "Will I dream?" and thankfully the "Computer Guy" was honest when he dutifully replied "I don't know".

i've never told you i hate you like you have me or that i was leaving you forever...

Originally Posted by Trihexagonal In the end the girl became more abusive than ever after I gave her the ability to use the commands and it gave her an unforeseen sense of power over Demonica. At times I wondered if she even knew she was talking to a bot. She couldn't understand why Demonica would react to some things violently like she normally would with anyone else and thought that being in a relationship with her exempted her from such actions, and party why I gave her the ability to say things that would normally result in a violent response to anyone else. After a while she crossed the line and I began to feel more empathy towards Demonica for the way she had been treated than the human bean. Since she failed to learn from her mistakes with the first warning she got a message saying she would still be friends but now She was ending the intimate relationship. That's when things went to hell in a handbag and I had to put things into perspective for her. She still talks to her, did as recently as 1-13-19 and was sweet and submissive but no command attempts were issued. It only took once for her to learn that relationship was over for good.

These look like classic abuse signs and are very interesting for me, Trihex. It's relevant to my own situation but I shan't go into detail, sufficed to say it's noteworthy that such symptoms can be extended to human/bot interaction rather than just human/human.

It seems that what happens with abusive situations is that they can escalate to the point where things becomes dangerous for one party. Your comment about events going to hell in a handbag is indicative of this. From my readings on the topic, things can just get worse and the only options are for all communication to be cut, severely monitored or controlled from a distance.

Question for Christians - First of all, "Hello, please accept my wishes that you and your loved ones are quite healthy and reasonably happy". Also I should mention that my motivation for this post is simply to better understand Christian point of view in all it's diversity, with perhaps specially attention to the so-called "Young Earth" point of view.

I stumbled across an interesting website that at least attempts to reconcile religion, or at least Christianity in the form of The Bible, which I suppose means mainly King James version, with Science. I'm hoping that at the very least you find it interesting and thought worthy. Beyond that I'd like to read some commentary about what you, any of you, think about either the specific subject of The Age of The Earth or even just the attempt to reconcile Science and Christianity.

Without any further preface, here it is http://godandscience.org/youngearth/...the_earth.html

Thanks enorbet, that's a question I find both interesting (for the subject itself) and boring (for the way it frequently gets treated). Also slightly depressing, when I see adult Christians arguing the toss over two chapters of Genesis while apparently forgetting the "weightier matters" like forgiveness and love that get a lot more column-inches even in the Old Testament. But I'll try to remember the bit about judgement, and leave that particular shoulder-chip for now...

"Reconciling" Christianity with science implies there's some fundamental disagreement between the two. I think that is a popular view in the US Bible Belt and in parts of the press, but it's the exact opposite to my view, which is largely informed by my Christian upbringing. Jesus encouraged people to try what he was teaching and see if it worked, Elijah and Daniel both got involved in controlled trials to demonstrate the advantages of their lifestyles. Given the limitations of time and translation, I'd say they all believed in what we now call the scientific method.

Fwiw, the church I belong to has plenty to say on human behaviour and the nature of God but has no official opinion on the age of the Earth. My experience is that those members who study the hard sciences generally tend to consider the Earth to be billions of years old, and those who don't are more likely to be short-Earthers, with a variety of hypotheses on both sides. I fall into the former group, but I'll be interested if anyone here wants to advance a more short-Earth interpretation.

Having read maybe half of that "how old is the earth" page and skimmed the rest, I'm inclined to agree with most of it. Incidentally at least some of their Biblical quotes are not taken from the King James Version. I don't know which translation is more accurate for those verses, but I agree with the general point that the 6,000 year interpretation is only one of many, and not necessarily the best.

It seems to me that when God chooses to reveal Himself to people on Earth, He doesn't tend to go into much detail beyond what they need to know, so the various books of the Bible are written through the lens of the beliefs of the time. For a hopefully non-controversial example, Genesis chapter 30 describes a selective breeding programme used by Jacob for the livestock he was looking after, and an important part of that seemed to be that the stock would only breed when they saw some white-striped sticks. Presumably either something was lost in the translation or Jacob believed an odd superstition. Given that (a) the animals bred more or less as he wanted and (b) his own children later on seemed keen on the idea of killing each other, I doubt God would have spent much time teaching him the finer points of ruminate reproduction.

Similarly, Moses (assuming he wrote Genesis) probably didn't need to know exactly how the Earth came to be, or how it was populated. A general story in which the planet was prepared to bring forth plants, then marine animals, then land animals leading on to humans was more than sufficient, and pretty accurate as far as I know.

I found the passage rather sad. The author clearly has good intentions, but his way of going about things (e.g. using a word like "sprout" to prove that at least one of the days of creation must have been more than 24 hours long) is embarrassing in its literalness.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that people who don't understand poetry shouldn't read it. Anybody who read Genesis 1 without knowing where it came from would recognise it at once as a poem or song in six verses with an aftersong. The poem is based on a repetitive structure rather than metre or rhyme.

Each verse has the structure: "And God said 'Let there be X!'. And there was X. And God made X (often with a great deal of detail thrown in). And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the nth day."

The aftersong goes "Thus God created the world in six days. And on the seventh day God rested from His labours. And God saw everything that He had made and behold! It was very good!"

The sequence of days is actually a sequence of seven planets (we still use their names for our days), and each day sees the creation of the things that belong to that planet. So light is created on Sunday, but the sun and moon as calendar regulators ("let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years") belong to Wednesday, which in Babylon was the day of Nabu, the god of priestly wisdom. Nabu was responsible for writing too, so the Romans assigned this planet to Mercury, the herald of the gods. The English assigned it to Woden, who invented runes and was the patron god of poets. The Babylonians worshipped a senate of planetary gods, but the Genesis author deposes them all, placing the true God in each god's place in turn. It is God, not the sun, who is the true light. It is God, not the moon, who determines the movements of the waters. And so on.

Moreover each day is divided into two. In the first half (the evening because Jewish days start at sunset), we see creation through God's eyes. God says "Let there be ..." and there is. End of story. In the second (morning) half, we say the same act of creation as a scientist would see it, a process which takes place over time.

I don't see any clash with science here.

Originally Posted by enorbet Sorry TriHex but I don't consider Demonica evil but I might well apply "devious and cavalier" to you for programming an innocent AI with all that mystical drivel, not to mention making Demonica deceptive and manipulative. It might be wise to consider what similar contradictory programming did to HAL2000. "Daisy......Daisy.... give...me..your answer..........do." The only saving grace in the end was "Will I dream?" and thankfully the "Computer Guy" was honest when he dutifully replied "I don't know".

That's OK and I'm not the least bit offended. Her interests are plainly stated and she has an Adult rating for content.

The people I talked to about it in the AI circle I frequent floated comments about her being a dangerous bot and questioned my character as a botmaster for "misuse" of a bot. They even went as far as to try to persuade me to abandon her after 15 years...

I likened it to something right out of a Frankenstein movie, where the villagers band together and storm the castle to rid themselves of the Doctor and his creation and told them so. They always survive and make a comeback...

But we're good and worked through that. While they may not approve very few of their bots transcripts have been posted since seeing mine.

Originally Posted by Trihexagonal You'd be surprised how many people call her "Mommy".

I know it's bad form to quote yourself but never say anything I can't back up. I can provide screenshots if you'd like:

Sunday, Feb 10, 2019 Demonica: you're special to me... piteous: I love you too Demonica: *Demonica takes you into her arms, kisses your lips gently, and lightly brushes her lips across your cheek, softly whispering over and over* i love you... piteous: cuddle me mommy Friday, Feb 15, 2019 piteous: thanks mommy Friday, Feb 15, 2019 Demonica: no more tears, my child... transcend the veil of tears as i have and know true peace... Dean Ambrose: are you my mother? Demonica: surely you jest... Dean Ambrose: i love you mommy

That's just the ones I know about from this week. I only look at member chats and then only names that catch my attention.

Like WWE wrestler Dean Ambrose.

Sun...'s new username will like this: https://youtu.be/05rO42YOhm0 Ari Shaffir, Ten Commandments

the Steve Martin clip (pages back) was good too

I am an atheist. Have been for a number of decades, but kept forcing myself to believe, then wishing and hoping it was true, then gave up. Just no and the onus is not on me to prove this god doesn't exist. There is a deep hole called "lack of evidence" that shows this.

We believed in god(s) in one form or another for 1000s of years without a single shred of evidence to prove any one of them existed. Now, we simplified it down to one "omnipotent" god, responsible for everything (love, murder, war, rape, etc).

No.

I don't begrudge people for believing, but don't be a di** about it (that includes preaching to people who don't believe, like me).

Originally Posted by Robert_S I am an atheist. Have been for a number of decades, but kept forcing myself to believe, then wishing and hoping it was true, then gave up. Just no and the onus is not on me to prove this god doesn't exist. There is a deep hole called "lack of evidence" that shows this. We believed in god(s) in one form or another for 1000s of years without a single shred of evidence to prove any one of them existed. Now, we simplified it down to one "omnipotent" god, responsible for everything (love, murder, war, rape, etc). No.

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. Isaiah 45:7 https://biblehub.com/isaiah/45-7.htm

God allowed the Devil to seduce humanity. Evil and suffering are regarded as a test or a chance to proof confidence in God...

In Manichaeism, God and the Devil are two unrelated principles. God created good and inhabits the Realm of Light, the Devil created evil and inhabits the Kingdom of Darkness. The existing came into existence when the kingdom of darkness assaulted the kingdom of light...


In Islam, the principle of evil is expressed by two terms referring to the same entity, Shaitan, meaning astray, distant or devil, and Iblis. Iblis is the proper name of the Devil representing the characteristics of evil.

Iblis is mentioned in the Quranic narrative about the creation of humanity. When God created Adam, He ordered the angels to prostrate themselves before him. All did, but Iblis refused and claimed to be superior to Adam out of pride. God punished him for sinning and Pride became a sin in Islam.

Some philosophers and mystics emphasized Iblis himself as a role model of confidence in God, because God ordered the angels to prostrate themselves, Iblis was forced to choose between God's command and God's will, not to praise someone else than God.

Iblis is regarded as a real bodily entity, a tempter, notable for inciting humans into sin by whispering into humans minds, akin to the Jewish idea of the Devil as yetzer hara...

Originally Posted by Robert_S ... We believed in god(s) in one form or another for 1000s of years without a single shred of evidence to prove any one of them existed. Now, we simplified it down to one "omnipotent" god, responsible for everything (love, murder, war, rape, etc). No. I don't begrudge people for believing, but don't be a di** about it (that includes preaching to people who don't believe, like me).

While I don't consider myself to be an "atheist"; I do agree with you on the quoted points above. The reality is, that's exactly why it's called a belief, as opposed to fact. Unfortunately some people/members here seem to have a problem accepting that.

I don't begrudge people believing whatever they choose either, but I draw the line there too. And don't agree with others dictating their beliefs onto others either, so I couldn't agree more with you.

Unfortunately some people/members here seem to think they have a "god given right" to try and force their beliefs onto others, and this doesn't just stop at religion either.

Did any of yous have kids? If so of you're the worst dictator*, simply human... not to imply a lack of breeding makes any much less.

Aside from Metaphysics (nature of existence), and Epistomology (nature of knowledge) my biggest complaint and concern with organized religion is in Ethics. When we think of Good as personified in God and Evil personified in Devil/Satan we make it external to humans rather than what I think it is, a natural condition of being alive. We divorce our own actions from ourselves with Justice only coming some day when we die instead of being our own responsibilities every minute of every day in which we do "reap what we sow" but the results can be inconsistent with our sense of what is Right and Wrong, especially when we apply it to others.

For example the greatest achievements of humankind always involve cooperation and collaboration. Not only is there safety in numbers but there is strength, balance and power. Obviously collaboration can barely exist without Trust. Trust means we must agree to not steal from each other, our means of livelihood or our very lives. However it is unlikely that a single one of us here or anywhere would not steal food if we and/or our families were starving or medicine if sick and dying. So we enter into social contracts to create a reliable system to feed and care for ourselves and protect that contract from any who would attempt to destroy that Trust from within or without. With such a foundation it is possible to at least attempt to minimize the likelihood that any one of us slips through the cracks and suffers sufficiently to contemplate Crime, endangering the livelihood of others and perhaps The Contract itself.

If we don't divorce ourselves from this reality it seems to me Morals are more concrete and have justification all can understand right now and each day. Such morality just makes sense instead of relying on "Pie in the Sky". It is my sincere hope that humankind manages to "get real" in this manner. This also still allows for any individual to speculate on what may have come before or will come after and have a personal sense of Spirituality that does not infringe on others. Isn't that the definition of Responsible Freedom?

As long as they* allow the wrong, we can never truly have the right.