Pope Warns of AI Risks So 'Violence and Discrimination Does Not Take Root' - Sla...

Pope Warns of AI Risks So 'Violence and Discrimination Does Not Take Root'

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• 1 hidden comment

• Re:

  Hitler was born and raised by the chruch, Stalin was also raised in the church, intended for priesthood before he became an atheist, both learnt there evil in the church. The crusades, spanish inquisition, current church discrimination and hatred.

  • Re:

    Hitler and Stalin opposed to and by the Church and Christ's teachings. The crusades were not a church lead series of wars. I will grant you the Spanish Inquisition, but that's nothing compared to the whole of history. "Current church discrimination and hatred" LOLWUT?

    • 1 hidden comment

    • Re:

      Wut? That's just false. They were called by the Pope (of Rome) who also granted indulgences (forgiveness from sin) for those that went on the crusades. Now some of the later ones were called by other people, but the first ones, the main ones, the ones that get called crusades were very much projects of the church.

    • Re:

      False for Hitler, true for Stalin.

      Stalin was atheist and said so.

      While Hitler's personal view of the church may have been negative, he never disavowed the Catholic church, nor was he excommunicated from it, and he used it as a tool. He praised the church as a good thing for Germany. "Kinder, Küche, Kirche" ("Children, kitchen, church") was the slogan for the values of the Germany Hitler was fighting for.

      • 2 hidden comments

    • Re: References?

      I didnâ(TM)t expect the exception to be the Spanish Inquisition!

  • Re:

    So it was the church that gave them vision lacking any subjectivity? Wingding goes in to the prison camp, flowers must come out..... total blind objectivity.

• Re:

  I'm not sure 5m in the 12th century and 5m in the 20th century are really comparable. The populations were much smaller back then and everything had to be done by hand. Also, there are far more religious wars in history than just the crusades. And finally there is the fact that the church holds itself up as a moral authority. Having a few megadeath worth of body count in your past tends to be looked upon more dimly when you do that.

• by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 08, 2023 @06:48PM (#63751664)

  discrimination of woman still active to this day
  coverups for child molesters
  Spanish Inquisition
  Witch trials
  crusades
  roman wars were justified through religion
  cromwell's genocide campaign
  forced conversion
  modern christian fundamentalists
  there really is no end to violence and discrimination in the church and it is not just historical.

• by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2023 @06:57PM (#63751676)

  I'm intrigued. Can you cite references for this?

  The Church launched the first crusade in 1095. Over the next two hundred years estimates range from 1 million to up to 9 million people killed in the Crusades alone [apholt.com]. Entire towns and cities were wiped out by the Catholic crusaders, even when those towns and cities surrendered. Because, you know, god would want that.

  Since that time there have been numerous conflicts and wars started by, sanctioned by, or in the name of the Church, mainly in Europe, such as the Thirty Years War, where an estimated 4.5 million to 8 million people died [wikipedia.org].

  And this doesn't take into consideration the minor skirmishes sanctioned by the Catholic church throughout Europe over the past thousand years or so. You know, where someone was blessed by the Pope or someone high up to start a small war to take some valuable piece of land or show those who weren't Catholic a lesson or two.

  • There was a Christian Nationalist party

    Got pretty famous in the 1940s. Put a sort of "In God We Trust" slogan on their belt buckles and were praised by multiple churches.
    
    There's a reason why the bible tells you it's best to pray where other's can't witness and why Christ had little use for Temples. It's way, way too easy for organized religion bigger than you 30 person congregation to get real bad, real fast. God does not protect us from false prophets.
    • 3 hidden comments

    • Re: There was a Christian Nationalist party

      "Gott mit uns", God with Us

      • Re:

        Same basic thing, mixing God and Patriotism. When it's done at scale that never seems to end well, which is sorta why we have a 1st amendment.

  • Good points

    Good point. The wars around the Reformation [wikipedia.org] are essentially Catholics fighting Protestants, the 30-years war alone resulted in 8 million direct deaths.

    I still don't know if that would stack up - you would need 10 thirty-years wars to equal Mao's genocides, and I could also include numerous smaller regimes such as Pol Pot (about 2 million), the Uyghurs in China (about 1 million), the tootsies in Rwanda (about 600,000), and so on.

    Wikipedia has a page for genocides [wikipedia.org], the list only starts at the year 1200. Sorti

    • Re:

      Sorting by estimate, the first entry is about 175 million American Indians massacred, and that wasn't a religious movement.

      Not directly, but it was. Go read God, War, and Providence. It's how the Puritans wiped out the Naragansett tribe in New England. One thing they would do is attack Native American villages and if the people didn't come out, they set the village on fire and burn people alive. Here is one example [voanews.com] of how Pequots suffered that fate, and how the militia leader said his god was pleased th

    • "the first entry is about 175 million American Indians massacred, and that wasn't a religious movement."

      Found the historical illiterate who's never heard of manifest destiny.

• Re: References?

  Disclaimer: I think it's a pointless.debate and have no interest in taking sides. However, I remember how Hitchens used to point out the religious characteristics of brutal regimes like those of the Nazis and the Soviets. Look it up, not uninteresting.
  • 1 hidden comment

  • I've seen Hitch

    I'm a big fan of Hitchens, and I've seen his lectures on this point.

    I agreed with him at first (happens whenever I see a documentary pushing a particular viewpoint), and after a couple of days I started wondering if it was true. Over time I started coming up with counterexamples, and keeping a mental tally of incidents that he neglected to mention.

    I'm now of the position that he was wrong. Hitch is no longer with us, but if he were I would love to enter into an online debate with him about it.

    I don't think

    • Re:

      I would agree with that. And as much as I admired and respected Hitch for his debating qualities and especially his immense wit, I think his view on the topic of religion was overly simplistic. The issue is that he never faced a debater that had the intellect to go somewhere that would enlighten everyone. He always wiped the floor with his opponents and that was that. Bottom line, I now believe that violence is part of human nature, and religion is especially good at bringing it out, but other "ideological

      • Madness of crowds

        As mentioned, I'm in the middle of "The Madness of Crowds", full title being: "Memoirs of Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay, first published in 1852. You can find it on Project Gutenberg.

        Humans can occasionally link together in a crowd so that the crowd acts as an independent organism. One observer noted that people within a crowd (French Revolution) would charge a cannon - for the benefit of the group and against all individual interest.

        I think this is a survival trait, p

      • Re:

        > I now believe that violence is part of human nature, and religion is especially good at bringing it out, but other "ideological endeavors" like nazism and communism have been very good at replacing it.

        I believe human nature includes the capacity to be violent and that religious violence, political violence, nationalistic violence and such seem to rely more, or primarily, on manipulation rather than on the capacity for violence itself.

    • Re:

      > I don't think religion is the majority driver of violence in our civilization...

      I agree with that.

      Religious violence, political violence, nationalistic violence, and such seem to rest on similar assumptions.

• Re:

  Pre-Columbian Americas. About 90% of a population of 50 million or more perished at the blessing of the Pope and his minions.

  • Re:

    So the Pope controls disease now? He is more powerful than I thought.