Apostasy

Almost half of Americans (48%) believe that the rise of artificial intelligence has made them less “scam-savvy” than ever before. With AI working its way into education, finance, and even science, a new survey finds people admitting they can’t tell what’s real anymore.

The poll of U.S. adults revealed that only 18% feel “very confident” in their ability to identify a scam before falling victim to it. As the United States enters a new era of tech, AI is continuing to blur the line between reality and an artificial world.

One in three even admits that it would be difficult for them to identify a potential scam if the scammer was trying to impersonate someone they personally know. Between creating fake news, robo-callers with realistic voices, and sending texts from familiar phone numbers, the possibility and probability of falling victim to a scam may cause anxiety for many Americans.

This may be because 34% of respondents have fallen victim to a scam in one way or another over the years. For others, the sting is still fresh. According to the results, 40% of people have been impacted within the last year — with 8% indicating it was as recent as last month.

BOSS Revolution VP Jessica Poverene said in a statement, “As AI technology advances, so do the tactics of scammers who exploit it. It’s crucial for consumers to stay vigilant.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The question “Can You Spot an AI Scam?” can apply to Christians with a slight change. The question becomes, “Can You Spot a Doctrinal Scam?” In this age of deception, there are many false doctrines being spread by false teachers and it is important to be informed and vigilant. “But evil people and impostors will flourish. They will deceive others and will themselves be deceived.” (2 Tim. 3:13)

When Americans are asked to check a box indicating their religious affiliation, 28% now check “none.” A new study from Pew Research finds that the religiously unaffiliated is now the largest cohort in the U.S. They're more prevalent among American adults than Catholics (23%) or evangelical Protestants (24%). Researchers refer to this group as the "Nones."

Back in 2007, Nones made up just 16% of Americans, but Pew's new survey of more than 3,300 U.S. adults shows that number has now risen dramatically. Pew asked respondents what they believe. The research organization found that most Nones believe in God or another higher power, but very few attend any kind of religious service.

They aren't all anti-religious. Most Nones say religion does some harm, but many also think it does some good. Most have more positive views of science than those who are religiously affiliated; however, they reject the idea that science can explain everything.

Pew also asked respondents what they believe. While many people of faith say they rely on scripture, tradition, and the guidance of religious leaders to make moral decisions, Pew found that Nones say they're guided by logic or reason when making moral decisions. And huge numbers say the desire to avoid hurting other people factors prominently in how they think about right and wrong.

Demographically, Nones also stand out from the religiously affiliated:

• Nones are young. 69% are under the age of fifty.

• They're also less racially diverse. 63% of Nones are white.

• The Nones are comprised of three distinct groups – atheists, agnostics, and those who describe themselves as “nothing in particular.”

Only half of Americans now say they are sure God exists according to the General Social Survey, conducted by NORC, the research arm of the University of Chicago. Religious scholars consider NORC the gold standard of surveys on faith.

According to this 2022 survey, 50% of Americans say they’re unsure God is real; just under 50% say they’re positive God exists; and 34% say they never go to church—the highest level in 50 years. It’s still about a fifty-fifty world out there; but it’s tipping toward uncertainty.

If you look at years past, in comparison with years present, it seems America is hurtling toward secularism. In 2008, for example, 60% of those responding to this General Social Survey expressed certainty in the existence of God. At that rate—of 10% drops in belief in God every 15 years—all of America will be non-believing by the dawn of the next century.

Ryan Burge, is a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who studies faith. He wrote that mainline Protestantism, the backbone of faith in many American communities, is “collapsing.” Since the 1970s, the share of Americans who identify with Protestant denominations has declined from nearly 1 in 3 to around 1 in 10.

LifeWay Research and Ligonier Ministries have once again examined the theological awareness, or lack thereof, of American evangelicals. This time, instead of defining “evangelical” by whether participants identify as such, they used a definition endorsed by the National Association of Evangelicals. Below are the areas where believers have most gone astray in their theology:

People have the ability to turn to God on their own initiative. 82% Agree

Individuals must contribute to their own salvation. 74% Agree

Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God. 71% Agree

God knows all that happens, but doesn’t determine all that happens. 65% Agree

The Holy Spirit is a force, not a personal being. 56% Agree

God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. 48% Agree

My good deeds help to earn my place in heaven. 39% Agree

God will always reward faith with material blessings. 37% Agree

Author/speaker Christopher Ash asks, “What are we to make of the Bible’s passages that seem to speak quite straightforwardly of blessings following obedience and curses following apostasy?” Ash urges that a distinction be made between the general truth of such sayings and absolute “every case” truth. He offers the following illustration:

Suppose an earthquake struck a well-planned place like Manhattan, with its clear and ordered grid of streets. If I wanted to go from A to B after the earthquake, I would in general still be best advised to go by the main roads. But whereas before the earthquake that would always be the best route, now I might find both that the main road has been blocked and also that some building has collapsed to open up some unplanned route.

It is a little like this with the created order after the disruption of the fall of humankind. In general, keeping God’s commandments and living in line with the created order will bring peace and prosperity. In general, for example, if I am honest and work hard, I will do better. But not always. And the final proof that righteousness pays will not come until the final judgment, when the disruption will be put right and the creation reordered as it ought to be.

Science writer Michael Bond is a bit of an expert in the traumatic subject of lostness. He writes that being lost is a fear that runs deep in our psyche and culture:

Children lost in the woods is a common a motif in modern fairy tales and in ancient mythology. Usually in fiction there is some kind of redemption: Snow White is rescued by dwarfs and even Hansel and Gretel, facing certain doom in the gingerbread house, find their way home. Reality is often more grim: During the 18th and 19th centuries, getting lost was one of the most common causes of death among the children of European settlers in the North American wilderness.

Science researcher Dr. Jan Souman used GPS monitors to track numerous volunteers as they tried to walk in a straight line without tech through Germany’s Bienwald forest and the Sahara Desert. When clouds obstructed the sun errors quickly accumulated, small deviations became large ones, and they ended up walking in circles. With no external cues to help them, people will not travel more than around 100 meters from their starting position, regardless of how long they walk for. This says a lot about our spatial system and what it requires to anchor us to our surroundings.

In the absence of landmarks and boundaries, our head-direction cells can’t compute direction and distance, and leave us flailing in space. Above all pay careful attention … when you go into the woods.

America is still a "Christian nation," if the term simply means a majority of the population will claim the label when a pollster calls. But, as a Pew Research report explains, the decline of Christianity in the United States "continues at a rapid pace." A bare 65 percent of Americans now say they're Christians, down from 78 percent as recently as 2007. The deconverted are mostly moving away from religion altogether, and the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated—the "nones"—have swelled from 16 to 26 percent over the same period. If this rate of change continues, the US will be majority non-Christian by about 2035, with the nones representing well over one third of the population.

In what remains of the American church, reactions to this decline will vary. Some will see it as a positive, revealing of what was always true. America was never really a Christian nation. What we're seeing is less mass deconversion than a belated honesty. Others will respond to this shift with sadness, alarm, or outright fear. If you believe that your religion communicates a necessary truth about God, the universe, humanity, the purpose of life, and how we should live it—well, then a precipitous decline in that religion is an inherently horrible thing with eternal implications for millions.

An aggressive Google Maps driving direction led to dozens of drivers getting stuck in mud on the way to Denver International Airport. A large crash in Aurora, Colorado caused GPS applications like Google Maps to search for a quicker route to the airport.

Driver Connie Monsees told reporters that she and about 100 other drivers seemed to be following smartphone directions onto a dirt road. Unbeknownst to the mapping program—or the drivers—the private dirt road was impassible after recent heavy rainfall. Most of the motorists became stuck behind a few cars that had become bogged down in mud.

Monsees said, “My thought was, 'Well there are all these other cars in front of me so it must be OK.' So, I just continued.” Fortunately, those with all-wheel drive vehicles were able to get through. Monsees says she picked up a few stranded motorists and delivered them to the airport.

Denver 7 traffic anchor Jayson Luber believes people are becoming too dependent on smart phones and GPS apps instead of maps. He said, “You are driving. Google Maps is not driving. Google Maps is not perfect. You need to know where you are going and, if it does not look like that’s where you should be going, turn around and try again.”

Simon Davis, writing for Religion News Service, tells us, “Since atheist blogger Martin Hughes left Christianity, he hasn’t missed believing in God or in hell. But he does miss heaven.”

Hughes said, “I wish that there was one to go to, and that’s the truth.” He went on to say he knows his view is not “atheistically correct.” But he says that in his own version of heaven, he would “understand everything.” There would be “deep, rich happiness that feels like Mom’s sweet potato pie on Thanksgiving.”

Davis then writes:

Hughes may not be alone in his desire to keep believing in a more secular version of heaven. According to a recent analysis in the journal SAGE … the general trend over the past few decades is broadly toward less religiosity (both public and private). However, the one indicator that seems to buck this trend is belief in the afterlife, where a slight increase was recorded in recent years.

Police cited a woman for speeding, hoping it would help her to slow down in the immediate future. Their hopes were in vain.

Deputies with the Lincoln County Sheriff's Department pulled over Chauntl Wilson for driving her yellow 2018 Ford Mustang over the speed limit, clocking her at 92 miles per hour when the limit was 75. However, after issuing the citation and letting her go, the deputies were surprised when she "accelerated very rapidly" and was shortly clocked again at a speed of 142 miles per hour, almost double the legal limit.

After engaging her in a pursuit, Wilson initially resisted, then eventually relented, and was eventually arrested and charged with willful reckless driving. Police also recovered a small amount of marijuana, which could result in further charges.

Potential Preaching Angle: Making a mistake is bad, but it's so much worse when we already know what is right but refuse to do it. Our knowledge of the truth makes us accountable for living it out with our actions.

Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, once referenced what he called the "counter-intuitive phenomena of Jewish history"—a phenomena that applies to Christians as well. "When it was hard to be a Jew," Sacks wrote, "people stayed Jewish. When it was easy to be a Jew, people stopped being Jewish. Globally, this is the major Jewish problem of our time."

In the Kingdom of Ice is journalist Hampton Sides' compelling account of the failed nineteenth-century polar expedition of the USS Jeannette, captained by Lieutenant George De Long. It serves as a cautionary tale about the hazards of misorientation—not because of a faulty compass but because of a mistaken map. De Long's entire expedition rested on a picture of the (unknown) North Pole laid out in the (ultimately deluded) maps of Dr. August Heinrich Petermann. Petermann's maps suggested a "thermometric gateway" through the ice that opened onto a vast "polar sea" on the top of the world—a fair-weather passage beyond all the ice. De Long's entire expedition was staked on these maps.

But it turned out he was heading to a world that didn't exist. As perilous ice quickly surrounded the ship, Sides recounts, the team had to "shed its organizing ideas, in all their unfounded romance, and to replace them with a reckoning of the way the Arctic truly is."

Our culture often sells us faulty, fantastical maps of "the good life" that paint alluring pictures that draw us toward them. All too often we stake the expedition of our lives on them, setting sail toward them with every sheet hoisted. And we do so without thinking about it because these maps work on our imagination, not our intellect. It's not until we're shipwrecked that we realize we trusted faulty maps.

In 1914, not long after the sinking of the Titanic, Congress convened a hearing to discern what happened in another nautical tragedy. In January of that year, in thick fog off the Virginia coast, the steamship Monroe was rammed by the merchant vessel Nantucket and eventually sank. Forty-one sailors lost their lives in the frigid winter waters of the Atlantic. While it was Osmyn Berry, captain of the Nantucket who was arraigned on charges, in the course of the trial Captain Edward Johnson was grilled on the stand for over five hours. During cross-examination it was learned, as the New York Times reported, that Captain Johnson "navigated the Monroe with a steering compass that deviated as much as two degrees from the standard magnetic compass. He said the instrument was sufficiently true to run the ship, and that it was the custom of masters in the coastwise trade to use such compasses. His steering compass had never been adjusted in the one year he was master of the Monroe."

The faulty compass that seemed adequate for navigation eventually proved otherwise. This realization partly explains a heartrending picture recorded by the Times: "Later the two Captains met, clasped hands, and sobbed on each other's shoulders." The sobs of these two burly seamen are a moving reminder of the tragic consequences of misorientation. The reminder for us is this: if the heart is like a compass … then we need to (regularly) calibrate our hearts, tuning them to be directed to the Creator, our magnetic north.

Runners will sprint to cross the finish line. College students may throw one last party or rush to check off a list of things to do on campus before they graduate. But when the end draws near some behaviors aren't so beneficial or light-hearted. New research suggests that people are more likely to cheat when they get close to finishing, reports Daniel Yudkin for Scientific American. New research suggests that when faced with a task that has an end, and little chance of being caught, people are more likely to cheat and deceive others to get ahead.

The research team ran a couple of experiments with more than 2,500 people. In a coin-tossing experiment, the participants would guess heads or tails and win a cash prize for each time they got it right. Since the coin toss should be fifty-fifty, the researchers could tell in aggregate if people were more likely to cheat. In early rounds, the percentages of correct guesses lined up with what probability would predict. Few people were cheating. But in later rounds, the results deviated, especially when people neared the end of their designated number of flips.

In an essay-grading test, participants were paid by the time it took to evaluate seven or ten papers. A secret timer logged how long it actually took. Again, the results showed that as people got to the end of their task (the final few papers), they would cheat to gain a greater reward. In this case, they reported spending at least 25 percent more time on the final essay than they actually did.

In the novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Garcia Marquez, the author describes in his magical but realistic way a village suffering from an insomnia plague. As this plague continues, it gradually causes the loss of memory. To try and salvage memory, Marquez describes how a man named Jose developed an elaborate plan that involved labeling everything: "With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went on to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen ... banana."

As their memory continued to fade Jose decided that he needed to be even more explicit. He posted a sign on a cow that read: "This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk. Thus they were living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words but which would escape ... when they forgot the values of the written letters." Eventually the village put a placard at the entrance to town that said, "God exists," as that knowledge too was slipping.

It's easy to forget our initial God-given mission, just as it's easy to lose our first love for Christ and drift away from our call to follow Christ. For instance, take one of the most popular board games of all time and the one most commonly associated with ruthless greed, competition, and big business. It's called Monopoly. But according to a new book titled The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game (written by Mary Pilon), the famous board game was designed to provide a warning about the dangers of greed and big business. The initial version, known as the Landlord's Game, was invented in the early 1900s by Elizabeth Magie who wanted to teach players about the evils of monopolies and land ownership.

But over time, as the game spread through word of mouth and as people developed local versions of the game, the focus drifted from that original vision and purpose. Instead, the game started focusing on building (rather than preventing) huge monopolies and bankrupting your opponents. That's the game's version that Charles Darrow, and then later Parker Brothers, turned into the hyper-competitive game that we know today.

After the publication of his bestselling book, Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson became an instant celebrity. The mountain climber turned champion for the underprivileged brought the plight of central Asia's children to the global stage. The charity he started creates educational opportunities for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, particularly girls.

Unfortunately, Mortenson's story had some major holes. For instance, at one point Mortenson writes grippingly about being held hostage by the Taliban. He even had a photo to prove it. But it turns out the men in the photo, his alleged "captors," were not the Taliban. One of the "captors" was an esteemed research director named Mansur Khan Mahsud. Mahsud said that Mortenson was a guest not a hostage.

Mortenson, who admits to some exaggeration in his story, could argue that he had to stretch the truth to help those in need. But even little steps as simple as embellishing a story for dramatic effect lead to places you never thought you would go.

The media community put Mortenson on trial. Reporter Jon Krakauer claims that Mortenson was using the organization as a "private ATM machine" to buy things like personal jets. An expose on 60 Minutes revealed that of thirty schools in Mortenson's organization that they visited, about half were either no longer being funded or had been abandoned. Some were even used "to store spinach, or hay for livestock; others had not received any money from Mortenson's charity in years." Mortenson started with noble intentions and a great idea, but after launching his organization he lost his moral bearings and betrayed the trust of many people.

Possible Preaching Angles: The same thing could happen to any of us: we can start out with such noble intentions (in business, in our marriage, in ministry, in church) and then veer off course. The same thing happened often in the stories of the Old Testament. The people of God lost their "moral bearings" and their God-given mission.

Consider this mission statement of a well-known university: "To be plainly instructed and consider well that the main end of your life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ." Founded in 1636, this university employed exclusively Christian professors, emphasized character formation in its students above all else, and placed a strong emphasis on equipping ministers to share the good news. Every diploma read, Christo et Ecclesiae around Veritas, meaning "Truth for Christ and the Church." You've probably heard of this school. It's called Harvard University.

Only 80 years after its founding, a group of New England pastors sensed Harvard had drifted too far for their liking. Concerned by the secularization at Harvard, they approached a wealthy philanthropist who shared their concerns. This man, Elihu Yale, financed their efforts in 1718, and they called the college Yale University. Yale's motto was not just Veritas (truth) like Harvard, but Lux et Veritas (light and truth).

Today, Harvard's and Yale's legacy of academic excellence are still intact. But neither school resembles what their founders envisioned. At the 350th anniversary celebration of Harvard, Steven Muller, former president of Johns Hopkins University, bluntly stated, "The bad news is the university has become godless." Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, confessed, "Things divine have been central neither to my professional nor to my personal life."

Harvard's and Yale's founders were unmistakably clear in their goals: academic excellence and Christian formation. Today, they do something very different from their founding purpose. What happened to Harvard and Yale is called "Mission Drift."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Leadership; Church, mission of; Vision—"mission drift" applies to the leadership of the church. Greer and Horst write, "Mission Drift unfolds slowly. Like a current, it carries organizations away from their core purpose and identity." (2) Christian life; Backsliding; Spiritual formation—"mission drift" also applies to our individual spiritual lives.