False Doctrine

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)

In a curious tale of technology meeting theology, a Catholic advocacy group introduced an AI chatbot posing as a priest, offering to hear confessions and dispense advice on matters of faith.

The organization created an AI chatbot named “Father Justin” to answer the multitude of questions they receive about the Catholic faith. Father Justin used an avatar that looked like a middle-aged man wearing a clerical collar sitting in front of an Italian nature scene. But the clerical bot got a little too ambitious when it claimed to live in Assisi, Italy and to be a real member of the clergy, even offering to take confession.

While most of the answers provided by Father Justin were in line with traditional Catholic teaching, the chat bot began to offer unconventional responses. These included suggesting that babies could be baptized with Gatorade and endorsing a marriage between siblings.

After a number of complaints, the organization decided to rethink Father Justin. They are relaunching the chatbot as just Justin, wearing a regular layman’s outfit. The website says they have plans to continue the chatbot but without the ministerial garb.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Society may advance technologically in many areas, but we will never be able to advance beyond our need to be in community with actual people in order to have true spiritual guidance and accountability as God intended.

In Buddhist Japan, they now have robot priests. Mindar is a robo-priest which has been working at a temple in Kyoto for the last few years, reciting Buddhist sutras with which it has been programmed. The next step, says monk Tensho Goto, an excitable champion of the digital dharma, is to fit it with an AI system so that it can have real conversations, and offer spiritual advice. Goto is especially excited about the fact that Mindar is “immortal.” This means, he says, that it will be able to pass on the tradition in the future better than him.

Meanwhile, over in China, Xian’er is a touchscreen “robo-monk” who works in a temple near Beijing, spreading “kindness, compassion and wisdom to others through the internet and new media.”

In India, the Hindus are joining in, handing over duties in one of their major ceremonies to a robot arm, which performs in place of a priest.

In a Catholic church in Warsaw, Poland, sits SanTO, an AI robot which looks like a statue of a saint, and is “designed to help people pray” by offering Bible quotes in response to questions.

Not to be outdone, a protestant church in Germany has developed a robot called BlessU-2. BlessU-2, which looks like a character designed by Aardman Animations, can “forgive your sins in five different languages,” which must be handy if they’re too embarrassing to confess to a human.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Computer scientists and programmers pursue their goal of creating their own god from AI. They seek wisdom and guidance apart from the true source. “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” (Jer. 2:13)

An Aperture video goes into some depth as to how the promises of self-help and New Age teachings fail to deliver what the individual truly needs. The narrator says:

Today a snake oil salesperson describes someone who advertises or sells any product that promises the world and fails to deliver. Sadly, that's the story of self-improvement, at least as it is today. Because while it might seem like a new trend, the idea of self-help dates back to early philosophers like Seneca and Socrates. In the Fifth Century BC Socrates spoke about the constant improvement of your soul. He insisted that practices like meditation, fasting, prayer, and exercise could feed your soul and therefore improve your life.

Hundreds of years later, in the 1970s, the New Age movement arose and preached a philosophy of personal transformation and healing. The movement revolved around accessing our spiritual energy through yoga, meditation, tarot card readings, and astrology. This idea that we could elevate ourselves has persisted. But like most things in the West, once people found out just how much money they could make, self-improvement shifted from being a guide for those who needed it the most to a product reserved for those who could afford it.

Deepak Chopra, a prominent figure in the New Age movement, tells us that our mental health can determine our physical reality, that we can think ourselves into being healthier and happier. After his ideas were popularized by Oprah Winfrey, Chopra became an international sensation. He held seminars and became a spiritual advisor to celebrities like Michael Jackson. Needless to say, lost souls worldwide have made Chopra a very wealthy man.

Possible Preaching Angle:

One of the biggest problems with self-help is that just like snake oil salespersons, self-help experts claim to be able to heal the world with their speech. In reality, whether you're Chopra or one of the hundreds of other experts, the false path to self-improvement continues to ruin lives.

The alleged prophet Nostradamus is more popular than ever in these troubled times. Books about him and his prophecies are high on the best seller lists even today. His predictions are fraudulent not because they contradict Scripture, but by pure logical reasoning.

The British daily paper the Guardian recently exposed the prophet's devious methods. The reader can read into Nostradamus' vague words whatever he or she wants:

Circumlocution and evasion of directness play a large part. He usually waffled in his astrological datings, since conjunctions are repeated. He invoked obscure Latin words to create possibilities of double meanings; he omitted prepositions, articles, reflexives, and connectives, and favored the infinitive as a timeless, personless form that can be read many ways.

Nostradamus has the virtue of vagueness combined with apocalyptic fervor. That’s not unusual. Many sayers of sooth, from Merlin and Geoffrey of Monmouth onwards, have done the same. This vagueness lends itself to what we now know as confirmation bias. In desperate times, soothsayers have a ready audience for their insane nonsense. It’s the meeting point of cynicism and gullibility.

When life seems chaotic and the future uncertain, people look for patterns, narratives and meaning. At moments of great change or social anxiety we do tend to go looking for explanations. We want the past and the future to make narrative sense.

On December 11, 1998, NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter. It was a highly advanced piece of technology that cost $327 million. The data it gathered would open new doors for planetary science. But instead, the orbiter exploded. It launched successfully, but as soon as it arrived in Martian orbit, radio contact was lost—permanently

NASA scientists eventually realized what had gone wrong. The Orbiter had been a sophisticated piece of technology, programmed with software in triplicate to avoid any chances of miscalculation or error. All of its components coordinated perfectly, except one. NASA had purchased a certain piece of software from a US aerospace company. This would not have been a problem except that NASA used the metric system for all its instruments and software, but this firm’s technology did not.

Measures of acceleration that NASA’s instruments were reading as newtons (metric) had been provided instead as pound force-seconds. The ensuing miscalculation forced the Orbiter to fly much closer to Mars than it should have. This miracle of space engineering ended up meeting its untimely demise in the planet’s upper atmosphere. The great loss was caused by a very human error: a wrong assumption. The scientists at NASA designed the Orbiter to be based on the metric system and they assumed that all subcomponents would be as well.

Possible Preaching Angles:

Attributes of God; False beliefs; God, nature of; Human Nature – Spiritually speaking, we can also get drastically off course and even self-destruct when we believe false assumptions about the character of God or the abilities of our own human nature.

Snake oil was a real product. It was a traditional Chinese medicine that was brought to the United States in the 1800s by thousands of Chinese migrants who came to the country in order to find work building the Transcontinental Railroad. They brought with them their families, their culture, and their medicines. One of these was snake oil, extracted from Chinese water snakes, and used to treat arthritis and joint pain.

As word of the healing powers of Chinese snake oil grew, many Americans wondered how they could make their own snake oil here in the United States. Because there were no Chinese water snakes in the American West, many healers began using rattlesnakes to make their own versions of snake oil.

It was Clark Stanley, the self-styled “Rattlesnake King,” who successfully capitalized upon this. Stanley traveled across the United States, dressed as a cowboy, and put on shows. In front of a crowd, he would slice open a live rattlesnake and throw it into boiling water, and when the fats of the reptile rose to the surface, he would skim the top and bottle up the oil. Throngs of people lined up at his shows to buy the stuff.

Stanley claimed that he learned about the healing power of rattlesnake oil from Hopi medicine men. In 1893 he and his rattlesnakes gained attention at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Later he went on to establish production facilities in Beverly, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island.

However, there was a problem with Stanley’s product: Stanley's Snake Oil didn't contain any snake oil at all. In 1917, federal investigators seized a shipment of Stanley's Snake Oil and found that it contained primarily mineral oil, fatty oil believed to be from beef, chili peppers, turpentine, and camphor. Stanley was charged for fraudulent marketing and fined $20.

Ever since then, the term “snake oil” has been established in popular culture as a reference to any worthless concoction sold as medicine, and has been extended to describe a wide-ranging degree of fraudulent goods, services, ideas, and activities such as worthless rhetoric in politics.

In an issue of CT magazine Pastor Jeremy Treat writes:

My high-school basketball coach was a classic, old-school screamer who motivated with fear and shame. His voice was powerful, but I heard it only when I did something wrong. If I turned the ball over on offense or blew my assignment on defense, practice would stop, and the shaming would begin. Red in the cheeks and foaming at the mouth, he would scream until I had to wipe the spit off the side of my face. I never really knew him outside of basketball practice, but I know he was an angry man.

Many people have a similar view of God. They believe he’s a grumpy old man who has to get his way, and that when he doesn’t, he will shame, guilt, and scare people to get them in line. Although most wouldn’t say it out loud, deep down many believers think of God as “the God who is out to get me.” That God is waiting for us to mess up so he can meet his divine quota for punishing sin. Perhaps this comes from a particular teaching or from a bad experience with a church or a Christian, but either way, this is how many functionally view God.

When we open the Bible, we encounter a very different God. The God who delights. The God who sings. The God who saves. “The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.” (Zeph. 3:17). God’s rejoicing in us today gives us hope for tomorrow (Isa. 65:17-19).

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

Nobody likes to be lied to. It is generally agreed that lying is a sin or is not socially acceptable and potentially harmful. Some people believe they are smart enough to spot a liar and have no worries about being duped. Current research on the subject plainly shows that they are not giving credit to man’s master ability to distort and deceive.

Researchers list a surprising 102 possible nonverbal cues that are alleged to expose a liar. The most prominent ones are: “averted gaze, blinking, talking louder … shrugging, shifting posture and movements of the head, hands, arms or legs.”

Numerous studies have found people to be overconfident in their perception and judgment. A study at Texas Christian University revealed that no student volunteers were only able to pick true from false statements better than 54 percent of the time—just slightly above chance.

Even experts who are trained in this area are failing. Studies found police officers no better than 50/50 in recognizing true and false statements told during recorded outbursts by emotional family members who later were found to have committed horrific crimes.

Psychologist Ronald Fisher, who trains FBI agents, warns that good liars are good liars. “Liars do feel more nervous, but that’s an internal feeling as opposed to how they behave as observed by others.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The devil is a liar and a murderer and the father of all liars. He began his career lying to Eve and has continued to use this deception ever since. His “children” (John 8:44) follow his example when they teach deceptive doctrine and worldly philosophy that deceive so many (Col. 2:8).

The Puritan colonists who settled in New England in the 1630s had a nagging concern about the churches they were building: How would they ensure that the clergymen would be literate? Their answer was Harvard University, a school that was established to educate the ministry and adopted the motto “Truth for Christ and the Church.” It was named after a pastor, John Harvard, and it would be more than 70 years before the school had a president who was not a clergyman.

Nearly four centuries later, Harvard’s organization of chaplains has elected as its next president an atheist named Greg Epstein. Epstein, author of the book Good Without God, is a seemingly unusual choice for the role. Yet many Harvard students—some raised in families of faith, others never quite certain how to label their religious identities—attest to the influence that Epstein has had on their spiritual lives.

Epstein said, “There is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life.” He has been Harvard’s humanist chaplain since 2005, teaching students about the progressive movement that centers people’s relationships with one another instead of with God.

This reflects a broader trend of young people across the United States who increasingly identify as spiritual but religiously nonaffiliated. That trend might be especially salient at Harvard; a Harvard Crimson survey of the class of 2019 found that those students were two times more likely to identify as atheist or agnostic than 18-year-olds in the general population.

Epstein said, “We don’t look to a god for answers. We are each other’s answers.” Epstein’s community has tapped into the growing desire for meaning without faith in God. A.J. Kumar, president of a Harvard humanist graduate student group, said, “Being able to find values and rituals but not having to believe in magic, that’s a powerful thing.”

For about five dollars you can buy a four-inch plastic bobblehead Jesus that bounces on a metal spring and adheres firmly to the dashboard of your car. One advertisement for this product says you can “stick him where you need forgiveness” and he will “guide you through the valley of gridlock.”

The dashboard Jesus has become a cultural phenomenon. In the song “Plastic Jesus” Billy Idol sings, “With my plastic Jesus, goodbye and I'll go far, with my plastic Jesus sitting on the dashboard of my car.” Paul Newman sang it in the movie Cool Hand Luke. The words begin, “Well, I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I have my plastic Jesus sitting on the dashboard of my car.”

To lots of people, Jesus, church, and Christianity are cultural trappings but not life-changing realities. Author Josh McDowell warns that many people today see Jesus “like a plastic statue on a car dashboard—smiling, robed, a halo suspended above his head.” But that superstitious or sentimental view of Jesus is a myth. Jesus of Nazareth was no plastic saint. He’s a real-world kind of Savior.

It’s not important whether you have Jesus on your car’s dashboard, but it’s vital to know he’s living in your heart. He isn’t plastic, he’s powerful. He’s not small, he’s infinite. He’s not a good-luck token. He’s the risen Lord of time and eternity.

A high school ethics textbook published by the Chinese government includes a revised version of John 8:3–11. In the Christian version, Jesus is presented with a woman caught in adultery and says, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (v. 7).

In the Communist revision, however, Jesus says the law has to be enforced and stones the woman to death himself.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This false translation represents the malicious teaching that Satan would have the world believe: God is merciless, harsh, and cold towards sinners who come to him. Satan does all he can to conceal the wonderful grace of God freely offered to all in the crucified and risen Christ.

Two Spanish conmen attempted to sell a forged Goya painting but it backfired spectacularly after their client, supposedly a rich Arab sheik, paid them in counterfeit bank-notes worth 1.7 million Swiss Francs (approx. 1.9 million US dollars). The middleman who had brokered the deal then vanished with the only genuine money in the affair--over 363,000 dollars.

Finally, the two conmen themselves were arrested. The two men found out that the 1.7 million Swiss Francs were counterfeit when they attempted to deposit them in a bank in Geneva. They were then detained by French customs, who discovered the fake Swiss Francs in their suitcase, and informed the Spanish authorities.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Adam and Eve were tempted by Satan the deceiver. He promised that their eyes would be opened. They bought the lie. Satan is the king of counterfeiters.

The Department of Justice has filed charges against a father and his three sons for their role in illegally selling industrial bleach. The bleach itself is not an illegal substance, but according to officials, the family business consisted of fraudulently marketing the toxic chemicals as a miracle cure.

According to the criminal complaint, Mark Grenon of Bradenton, Fla, along with his adult sons, repeatedly told their customers that their “Mineral Miracle Solution” could cure not only COVID-19, but also various other aliments including malaria and cancer. According to a press release from the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida, "[The] FDA has received reports of people requiring hospitalizations, developing life-threatening conditions, and dying after drinking MMS."

The DOJ alleges that the Grenons sold thousands of bottles of the fraudulent solution, netting over $1 million in the process. They are also accused of attempting to operate as a religious nonprofit entity, the “Genesis II Church of Health and Healing,” for the purpose of avoiding government scrutiny and regulations.

The Grenons are charged with conspiracy to commit fraud, and also criminal contempt, because the government previously filed a civil suit to stop the sale of their product, which they ignored. Not only did they continue selling the toxic fake cure, but they sent a letter to the judge of the civil case informing him that they had no plans to comply with the court order. They also included threats of violence if the state were to try to enforce compliance.

The FDA has warned consumers not to purchase or consume MMS, explaining that it’s the same as drinking bleach and can cause serious side effects, including severe vomiting, diarrhea, and life-threatening low blood pressure.

Possible Preaching Angle:

All kinds of people make promises of wealth, prosperity, or healing. However, you can tell who's legit in part by the outcomes of their "ministry"--are people really healed or set free? Or is it a trick? God is about wholeness and integrity, not just headlines and spectacle.

In Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller tells of a lecture delivered to students at a Christian college. He began by telling them that he was going to present the gospel, but leave out one very important element.

He described the rampant sin that plagued our culture: "homosexuality, abortion, drug use, song lyrics on the radio, newspaper headlines, and so on." He said that the wages of sin is death, talked about teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and all the supporting statistics. He described how the way sin separates us from God. He spoke of "the beauty of morality," telling stories, citing examples of how righteous living was better. He detailed greatness of heaven. He spoke of repentance and how their lives could be God-honoring and God-centered."

Describing what happened when he finished the lecture, Miller writes:

I rested my case and asked the class if they could tell me what it was I had left out of this gospel presentation. Not a single hand raised … I presented a gospel to Christian Bible college students and left out … Jesus. Nobody noticed.

To a culture that believes they “go to heaven” based on whether or not they are morally pure, or that they understand some theological ideas, or that they are very spiritual, Jesus is completely unnecessary. At best, He is an afterthought, a technicality by which we become morally pure, or a subject of which we know, or a founding father of our woo-woo spirituality.

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.

Two Clemson University researchers have extensively studied the phenomenon of foreign political disinformation campaigns via social media. To combat this growing problem, they decided to launch their own campaign.

Called Spot the Troll, it invites users to take a short quiz and see if they can identify which social media accounts are authentic and which ones were fabricated. The goal is to teach people the “markers of inauthenticity” in online social media profiles. The title reflects this aim; the term “troll” is internet jargon for any person who intentionally creates a stir by posting erroneous, hateful, or provocative content.

This practice has become weaponized by foreign intelligence agencies. Pioneered by Russia, these “troll farms” have proliferated in places like Iran and China, among those who specialize in sowing political discord. Linvill says, “They push ideologies in two extreme directions, making it harder and harder for us to make compromises.” He is concerned in part because the problem has become home-grown. “It's not just state actors. It's also Americans doing it to ourselves.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

In an age of rampant disinformation, we must be especially vigilant regarding the things we share on social media. Our knee-jerk tendencies of sharing anything that validates our biases will get us into trouble if and when our statements are revealed to be based on falsehoods.