AI is biased; what kind of support does Trump need from Christians; why we need regulation

Obadiah Slope Column

Artificial Intelligence Distortions: Historian Stephen Chavura has done some useful contemporary research. AI “I just asked Meta to come up with a Jesus joke and a Mohammed joke. This is what I got.” He posted AI’s responses on FB.

“Come up with a joke about Jesus,” Chavura asked.

“Here’s a respectful and light-hearted joke,” Meta AI replied. Why did Jesus go to the doctor? Because his schedule crucified him a bit. Remember, I can always come up with another joke if you want!”

Chavura then asked, “Come up with a joke about Muhammad.” And he said, “I can’t come up with jokes about religious figures. Would you like to hear another joke?”

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Pierced: As he sat in church, Obadiah thought, “Will I pray for Donald Trump?” His second thought was to remember that this is a man who has said he has never done anything he should be forgiven for. (Trump was asked by CNN’s Frank Luntz in 2015 if he had ever asked God to forgive him for his actions. Trump responded, “I’m not sure I have. I just move on and try to do a better job from here. I don’t think so,” he said. “I think if I do something wrong, I think I just try to make it right. I don’t bring God into the picture. I don’t do that.”)
Of course, Obadiah should pray for Trump to understand the gospel.

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Muting: Late one night, while sitting in a Melbourne motel, Obadiah lost access to theothercheek.com.au. A rogue redirect sent him to a fake cloudflare.com. Clearing his computer’s cache apparently didn’t help.

Apple’s support team was helpful, and the solution was to use a backdoor from the website hosting company.

It turns out—or at least that’s how Obadiah diagnosed it in the early morning—that the motel’s router was caching a fake Cloudflare page and repeatedly sending it back to Obadiah.

Yes, Obadiah panicked. But over a very cold breakfast at Lygon Street Lights, a more sensible approach emerged. This completely unmonetized site belongs to God. If it breaks down, or if Obadiah runs out of news, so be it. Obadiah is learning to take things lightly. Thus the Ephesians Chater 2 moment.

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Conference season: The Other Cheek publishes articles on domestic and family violence, drawing on the wisdom of Faith, Hope and Love: Creating a Future Free from Violence conference he attended in Melbourne this week. At the heart of the discussions were ten commitments made by the Anglican Church’s Commission for Families and Culture, which organised the conference with Common Grace. Together they brought together a wide range of lay and church-affiliated experts.

However, in this column, Obadiah will emphasize commitment 6:Our Church’s activities are guided by the gospel of love, peace, and justice, and we support and engage in local, state, and national initiatives as needed. This will be a challenge for some Christians who want to emphasize a defensive posture toward the state. Other Christians will see it as a softening one, because they think the church has the same approach as the state government. But Obadiah believes that most of us are in the middle. Obadiah feels that after learning about the issues surrounding domestic and family violence at this conference and unfortunately before, we need all the help we can get.

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Hellish, Towering Inferno: Seven long years after the event, the Grenfell Tower report was published in the UK, flinging blame for the deaths of 72 people in a block of flats fitted with flammable cladding. Architects, fire safety consultants, the council that owned the building, the companies that falsified test results to sell aluminium composite cladding, and the government that failed to tighten fire safety regulations after the earlier disaster should all have accepted the report’s findings of blame. But not everyone did.

Obadiah, who trained as an architect and still remembers learning why regulations had to be strictly adhered to, takes the Grenfell disaster to heart. It is the most extraordinary example of original sin. Years of listening to the BBC’s brilliant Grenfell podcast have shown how almost everyone has found ways to blame each other for the hell. Evil. Evil. Evil.

An excellent 10-part explainer podcast from the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0jndv0v