Concerning 'good' faith and the Christian/pagan priest who believes Google AI is sentient

Let’s start with some basics as we look at a recent New York Post story that ran with this headline: “Google engineer says Christianity helped him understand AI is ‘sentient’.”

For decades, I have been arguing with people, mostly cultural conservatives, who say things like: “Journalists hate religion.”

This is simplistic. In my experience — first, while working in newsrooms, and second, while reading and writing about media-bias issues — many journalists don’t care enough about religion to work up a good batch of hate. They tend to be indifferent or apathetic, unless certain types of religious folks start interfering in politics, which is the true religion of many or most news professionals.

No, it’s crucial to understand that many reporters love certain types of religion and oppose others. Always remember the following passage in that Jay Rosen PressThink essay, "Journalism Is Itself a Religion.” Yes, this involves interaction with one of my “On Religion” columns, but I can’t help that, nor can I help that this is quite long. So, what is the religion of the press?

A particularly telling example began with this passage from a 1999 New York Times Magazine article about anti-abortion extremism: “It is a shared if unspoken premise of the world that most of us inhabit that absolutes do not exist and that people who claim to have found them are crazy,” wrote David Samuels.
This struck some people as dogma very close to religious dogma, and they spoke up about it. One was Terry Mattingly, a syndicated columnist of religion: “This remarkable credo was more than a statement of one journalist’s convictions, said William Proctor, a Harvard Law School graduate and former legal affairs reporter for the New York Daily News. Surely, the ‘world that most of us inhabit’ cited by Samuels is, in fact, the culture of the New York Times and the faithful who draw inspiration from its sacred pages.”
Yet here is the part that intrigued me: “But critics are wrong if they claim that the New York Times is a bastion of secularism, he stressed. In its own way, the newspaper is crusading to reform society and even to convert wayward ‘fundamentalists.’ Thus, when listing the ‘deadly sins’ that are opposed by the Times, he deliberately did not claim that it rejects religious faith. Instead, he said the world’s most influential newspaper condemns ‘the sin of religious certainty.’ “

College football is celebrating its 150th season this fall. As a result, there have been many retrospectives looking back at some of NCAA’s best teams and players. You can’t look back at the last century and a half without mentioning Notre Dame.

That takes me to a recent issue of America, a weekly Jesuit magazine, and the great job they did at looking back at Notre Dame football in the context of what the success of a Catholic school meant in a primarily Protestant America. Under the headline, A Fighting Spirit: The place of Notre Dame football in American Catholicism, the result is a wonderful reflection of how important religion, football and immigration are to the American experiment. It also manages to be nostalgic and at the same time wrap in the current realities of the clerical sex-abuse crisis and other issues plaguing the church.

The piece starts off with how the Notre Dame mystique got its start in the 1940s and what that meant to Catholics around the country. This is how writer Rachel Lu, a contributing writer for America, summed up that feeling:

U.S. Catholics embraced the Fighting Irish with enthusiasm. When the leaves started turning each September, people who had never set foot in the state of Indiana would be decked out like frat boys, raising the gold and blue for Our Lady’s loyal sons. In parochial schools across the nation, nuns led Catholic schoolchildren in prayers for Irish victory. Notre Dame was the first school in the U.S. to have a nationwide following of “subway alums,” devoted fans for whom a radio dial represented their only connection to the university. It was said in those days that every priest in the U.S. was a de facto recruiter for Notre Dame.
In the minds of their fans, Notre Dame’s stars were much more than football players. They were warriors, fighting for the honor of Catholics across the nation.

Despite living a more secular world, Notre Dame’s Catholic roots and traditions are very much a story. I made a similar point about a year ago when Notre Dame was vying for a national title. A year later, Notre Dame isn’t anywhere close to a national championship — No. 1-ranked LSU is the favorite for now — but that doesn’t mean sports writers can’t be reminded how important religion is to the school and football in general.