Category: Religion

Reims and Amiens

by  Tyler Cowen in

Both cities have significant war histories, but they are very different to visit, even though they are only two hours apart by car.

Reims was largely destroyed in World War I, and so the central core was rebuilt in the 1920s, with a partial Art Deco look.  The downtown is attractive and prosperous, the people look sharp and happy, and it is a university town.  You arrive and feel the place is a wonderful success.  If you had to live in a mid-sized French city, you might choose this one.

The main cathedral is one of the best in France, and arguably in the world.  The lesser-known basilica also is top tier.  There are scattered Roman ruins.  French kings were coronated in Reims from early on, all the way up through 1825.

Amiens is on the Somme, and the 1916 Battle of the Somme, followed by a later 1918 offensive, was a turning point in WWI history.  The town is a melange of architectural styles, with many half-timbered homes but also scattered works from different centuries.  The town also has France’s “first skyscraper,” renowned in its time but now a rather short and out of place embarrassment.  The main Amiens cathedral, however, is perhaps the best in all of France.

The town itself feels like visiting a banlieu, with large numbers of African and Muslim immigrants.  It is lively, and it feels as if a revitalization is underway, though I do understand opinions on these matters differ.  Real estate prices are at about 3x their 1990s levels.  That to me is strong evidence that things are going well.

Restaurant Momos Tibetian has excellent Chinese and Tibetan food.  The Picardy museum has some very good works by Boucher, Balthus, Picabia, El Greco, and Chavannes.

Both cities are radically undervisisted.  They do attract some tourists, but for the most part you feel you have them to yourself.

Avila, Spain

by  Tyler Cowen in

The town has amazing, quite intact walls from the 11th-14th centuries, and also three (!) of the most beautiful churches in Spain.  It is only about ninety minutes from Madrid, yet I have not seen North American tourists here.

This morning it struck me to see a large number of Avila children reenacting the “lucha entre los christianos y los moros” [fight between the Christians and Moors] with toy swords and costumes, some of them dressed up like Saudis in their full garb.  This made an impression on me because the Mexican village I used to visit, San Agustin Oapan, has a very similar fiesta, and here is the history of how the fiesta was transmitted, dating back to the 16th century.  Even the dances and toy swords felt familiar to me.  How many of them in Oapan even know what “the moros” are?  I recall during my second visit to Oapan I was shocked to learn they did not know what China was, or that there was a Pope, even though they were Catholic.  That all changed rapidly with the later arrival of satellite television of course.

In any case, Avila, along with the nearby Roman aquaducts of Segovia, is a much underrated visit, underrated at least in North America.

China divination of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

The AI-Spiritual-Commerce loop went viral. “DeepSeek Occult Commands” became an online hit. On WeChat, a flood of mini-programs appeared—“AI Face Reading,” “AI Bazi Calculator”—reaching the daily user numbers of medium e-commerce apps. A 9.9-yuan facial reading could be resold again and again through referral links, with some users earning over 30,000 yuan a month. DeepSeek hit 20 million daily active users in just 20 days. At one point, its servers crashed from too many people requesting horoscopes.

On social media, commands like “Full Bazi Chart Breakdown” and “Zi Wei Dou Shu Love Match” turned into memes. One user running a fortune-telling template got over 1,000 private messages in ten days. The AI could write entire reports on personality, karma, and even create fake palm readings about “past life experiences.” People lined up online at 1:00 a.m. to “get their fate explained.”

Meanwhile, a competing AI company, Kimi, released a tarot bot—immediately the platform’s most used tool. Others followed: Quin, Vedic, Lumi, Tarotmaster, SigniFi—each more strange than the last. The result? A tech-driven blow to the market for real human tarot readers.

In this strange mix, AI—the symbol of modern thinking—has been used to automate some of the least logical parts of human behavior. Users don’t care how the systems work. They just want a clean, digital prophecy. The same technology that should help us face reality is now mass-producing fantasy—on a huge scale.

Here is the full story.  Via the always excellent The Browser.

Has Buddhism been statist for a long time?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Again, as was also the case in so many Buddhist countries, the success of Buddhism relied heavily on its connections to the court.  In Korea, the tradition of “state protection Buddhism” was inherited from China.  Here, monarchs would build and support monasteries and temples, where monks would perform rituals and chant sutras intended to both secure the well-being of the royal family, in this life and the next, and protect the kingdom from danger, especially foreign invasion.

…As in China, the Korean sangha remained under the control of the state; offerings to monasteries could only be made with the approval of the throne; men could only become monks on “ordination platforms” approved by the throne; and an examination system was established that placed monks in the state bureaucracy.  As in other Buddhist lands, monks were not those who had renounced the world but were vassals of the king, with monks sometimes dispatched to China by royal decree.  With strong royal patronage, Buddhism continued to thrive through the Koryo period (935-1392), with monasteries being granted their own lands and serfs, accumulating great wealth in the process.

That is an excerpt from Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Buddhism: A Journey through History, an excellent book.  Maybe the best book on the history of Buddhism I have read?  And one of the very best books of this year.

Xenophon’s consultation of the Pythia

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Statement of prayer-question – Xenophon begins by verbally addressing Apollo, asking “to which of the gods should I sacrifice and pray in order best and most successfully to perform the journey I have in mind and return home in safety?” Only once this plea is uttered does Apollo’s priesthood record the god’s reply.

2. Ritual hymn & payment – Like all individual consultants, he had to buy a pelanos (sacrificial cake) and burn it on the altar while reciting the short Delphic paean in Apollo’s honour; the spoken hymn and the offering together signalled respect and opened the way for prophecy.

3. Sacrificial plea – A goat was sprinkled with water; if it shuddered, Apollo was deemed willing to speak. The consultants (or an attendant priest) then voiced a brief prayer “Hear me, Lord Apollo…” over the animal before it was sacrificed. Only after this spoken plea did the Pythia mount the tripod and deliver the oracle.

That is an o3 answer in response to one of my queries, namely whether you had to make incantations to oracles before they would respond.  You did!  If you scroll down, you will see that original answer is amended somewhat and improved in accuracy.  For instance “…drop the idea that each visitor had to intone a fixed hymn. At most, priests might intone a brief paean while the cake was burned…”

In any case, you could not do “one shot” with the oracle — you had to put a bit of effort into it.  If you simply approached them and asked for a prophecy of the future (and did nothing else) you would get no meaningful response.  In contemporary terminology, you needed a bit of prompting.

To return more explicitly to the current day, many people complain about the hallucinations of top LLMs, and indeed those hallucinations are still present.  (o3 is much quicker than o1 pro, but probably has a higher hallucination rate.)  If you ask them only once, you are more likely to get hallucinations.  If you ask a follow-up, and request a correction of errors, the answer usually is better.

Almost everyone evaluates the LLMs and their hallucinations on a one-shot basis.  But historically we evaluated oracles on a multi-shot basis.  It would be easy for us to do that again with LLMS, and of course many users do.  For the faster models the follow-up query really does not take so long.

Or just start off on the right foot.  Marius recommends this prompt:

Ultra-deep thinking mode. Greater rigor, attention to detail, and multi-angle verification. Start by outlining the task and breaking down the problem into subtasks. For each subtask, explore multiple perspectives, even those that seem initially irrelevant or improbable. Purposefully attempt to disprove or challenge your own assumptions at every step. Triple-verify everything. Critically review each step, scrutinize your logic, assumptions, and conclusions, explicitly calling out uncertainties and alternative viewpoints. Independently verify your reasoning using alternative methodologies or tools, cross-checking every fact, inference, and conclusion against external data, calculation, or authoritative sources. Deliberately seek out and employ at least twice as many verification tools or methods as you typically would. Use mathematical validations, web searches, logic evaluation frameworks, and additional resources explicitly and liberally to cross-verify your claims. Even if you feel entirely confident in your solution, explicitly dedicate additional time and effort to systematically search for weaknesses, logical gaps, hidden assumptions, or oversights. Clearly document these potential pitfalls and how you’ve addressed them. Once you’re fully convinced your analysis is robust and complete, deliberately pause and force yourself to reconsider the entire reasoning chain one final time from scratch. Explicitly detail this last reflective step.

I haven’t tried it yet, but it doesn’t cost more than a simple “Control C.”  Perhaps some of you can do better yet, depending of course on what your purpose is.

There is no reason why you cannot ask for better, and get it.  Beware those who dump on hallucinations without trying to do better — they are the Negative Nellies of LLM land.

And oh — o3 pro is coming soon.

England and Wales fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

A recent survey, commissioned by the Bible Society and conducted by YouGov, showed 16 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 in England and Wales said they attended church at least monthly, significantly up from 4 per cent in 2018.

Here is more from the FT.  Addendum: The above quotation from the FT is slightly misleading.  Both numbers are the percentages for those who self-report as Christians.

I never knew Joseph Smith ran for President

by  Tyler Cowen in

Eventually, Smith declared himself a candidate for the White House.  His proposed platform was an awkward conglomeration of popular, though incongruent, principles including restoring the national bank, cutting Congress members’ salaries, annexing Texas, and instituting the gradual abolition of slavery.  Hundreds of Mormon men, including Brigham Young, swarmed the nation campaigning for their prophet to become president.

That is from the new and excellent Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism.  An excellent book, good enough to make the year’s best non-fiction list.

I also learned recently (from Utah, not from this book) that early Mormons would drink alcohol and “Brigham Young even operated a commercial distillery east of Salt Lake City, and his southern‐Utah “Dixie Wine Mission” (1860s‑80s) was organized to supply sacramental, medicinal, and commercial wine for the territory.”  By the time Prohibition rolled around, however, Mormons were close to completely “dry.”

Ross Douthat, telephone!

by  Tyler Cowen in

Despite arrests and legal aggression from the Greek Orthodox Church, the First Hellenic Polytheist Temple in 1700 Years is now open. Located near the village of Kalliani in the Peloponnese, in the wild mountains of Arcadia, Pan is once again being honored in his native lands.

The Wild Hunt reported in Pagan Community Notes on February 27, 2025, the government and faith community have not been so supportive of Hellenic religion. A Greek court has prohibited the inauguration of the Temple of Zeus and Pan, currently under construction near the village of Kalliani in Arcadia, and has ordered a halt to all ongoing construction work.

On March 8, 2025, a new temple to Pan and Zeus was unveiled, blessed, and sanctified in Greece for the first time in 1700 years; but not without a major fight with the Greek Orthodox Church and the Greek government.

Here is the full story.

USA fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

After years of decline, the Christian population in the United States has been stable for several years, a shift fueled in part by young adults, according to a major new survey from the Pew Research Center. And the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, which had grown steadily for years, has also leveled off.

Here is more from the NYT.  The youngest cohort does not seem to be declining in religiosity (unlike earlier generational shifts), and for that youngest cohort the gender gap in religiousity basically has disappeared.

My excellent Conversation with Ross Douthat on God and religion

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  I am very glad Ross flew down from Connecticut to do it, we ended up cutting about 2x the normal length.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Ross joined Tyler to discuss what getting routed by Christopher Hitchens taught him about religious debate, why the simulation hypothesis resembles ancient Gnostic religion, what Mexican folk Catholicism reveals about spiritual intermediaries, his evolving views on papal authority in the Francis era, what UFO sightings might tell us about supernatural reality, why he’s less apocalyptic than Peter Thiel about the Antichrist, and why he’s publishing a fantasy novel on Substack before AI potentially transforms creative writing.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: In general, you weigh personal testimony higher than I do. Let me see if you can talk me into it a bit. Something is recorded in data sensors and confirmed across multiple sensors. Maybe I don’t know what it is, but I’ll believe there’s something there. But if people say X, Y, and Z — there’re all sorts of religions neither you nor I would sign onto, and plenty of humans who will assert, insist that there’s direct evidence for that particular religion.

The story of Joseph Smith, the plates from LDS would be one example, but there’re plenty of religions that don’t even exist anymore, where there’re very particular stories that people have attested to. We really do dismiss them in the numbers of the tens of millions or maybe even billions. So, if we’re willing to dismiss all those stories, isn’t David Hume right? We should not dismiss the stories, but they’re not going to budge us out of a more commonsensical worldview.

DOUTHAT: Yes. I don’t dismiss all of those stories. I guess that’s part of my strong departure from Humean assumptions. I think that certainly there are fakes and frauds and charlatans in religion, and there are people who are just sincerely mistaken, who think that they had a religious experience when really, they have a diagnosis or they should get a diagnosis of some form of mental illness or insanity.

At the same time, I think that the wide range of attested spiritual, just frankly bizarre experiences that human beings have — of which, UFO encounters are a subset — that, again, has familiar antecedents going back millennia — I think we should take those seriously and have a theory of what they are that is more complex than fraud meets insanity meets delusion.

Part of this is just knowing people who’ve had those kinds of experiences, reading a lot about those kinds of experiences — not just in my own tradition, but in other religious traditions. I think that they correspond to something real, even if the interpretation that people give to them is wrong or deluded or misguided. I don’t think that Joseph Smith was in fact chosen by God to restore the lost truths about Jesus Christ, polygamy, and the ancient civilizations of the New World. I don’t think that’s true.

Do I think that Joseph Smith didn’t have some weird supernatural encounter? I’m less confident about saying that. The same would go . . . I don’t think that Muhammad is the Seal of the Prophets. Do I think that Muhammad either hallucinated or made it all up? Again, I’m certainly much less confident than you would be in saying that. I do not —

COWEN: It’s almost an Islamic doctrine you’re holding. There are these various tiers of prophets, and they’re imperfectly right, but they’re getting at the divine.

DOUTHAT: Yes. I think any coherent theory of supernatural experience — given what you can encounter just by reading William James — has to say either there’re infinite realms of deception out there . . . This is something that some religious believers would say. There’s one subset of totally authentic, trustworthy religious experiences, and then there’s a vast realm where it’s all demonic deception.

Or you have to say that there’s just a range of ways in which people encounter God and the supernatural that do get filtered through cultural assumptions and through — I don’t want to say imperfect prophets — let’s just say imperfect human beings. And that helps yield the diversity of religions in the world today.

But you can also see patterns in those things like near-death experiences. The range — there is cross-cultural variation in near-death experiences. If you have a near-death experience as a Tibetan Buddhist, you are more likely to see the Buddha. If you have a near-death experience as a Catholic, you’re more likely to maybe see an archangel or a Catholic saint or something. But at the same time, there are some pretty clear commonalities to suggest that people in Tibet and people in Indiana are having the same kind of experience when they die and are resuscitated and report the lights, the tunnel, all the strange things associated with those experiences.

Yes, there’s a challenge here, obviously, for any kind of dogmatic religion. You do have to figure out, “Okay, why is there this consistency but also this variation?” But there’s also a challenge for the Humeans to say, “Well, we’re just writing off this fairly consistent cross-cultural realm of human experience because it’s all supposed to be myth and hallucination?” The people who have these experiences are not generally the kinds of people who you would describe as prone to hallucination and insanity. There are of course cases, but that’s not the norm.

On the Humean point — if you go back and read Hume, he doesn’t exactly say this, but you really have the strong impression that Hume thinks that once you get rid of established religious authorities and the universal teachings of antique stories from the Bible, that a big swath of supernatural stuff will just go away. Now, he says humans still —

Interesting throughout, definitely recommended.  And again, I am happy to recommend Ross’s new book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious.

Corin Wagen defends Leviticus (from my email)

by  Tyler Cowen in

In your recent conversation with Misha Saul, you and Misha discussed your joint dislike for Leviticus. I can’t say that I find Leviticus a page-turner, but the book that’s done the most to help me understand why it’s important and what role it plays in the movement of the narrative is L Michael Morales’s book Who Shall Ascend The Mountain Of The Lord? (Amazon). A number of folks I’ve talked to have found this book very helpful. (Disclaimer: Morales is a Protestant, as is D. A. Carson (the editor), so the biases are apparent.)

Briefly, his argument is that Leviticus serves to resolve the narrative tension introduced by the ending of Exodus. Exodus 40:34–35: “Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.” The tension introduced by Genesis 3 is that God and man can no longer co-exist because of sin. Moses is able to ascend Sinai, speak with God, and bring the people his laws, but even after building the tabernacle and the ark, even Moses is unable to reside in the presence of God—let alone the people who cannot even touch Sinai!

The rules of Leviticus presents the conditions to resolve this tension and allow the people access to God—protected by the rules that God gives them. In particular the book has a chiastic structure centered around Leviticus 16 (Yom Kippur) where the high priest himself is able to enter the Holy of Holies. There’s other points about how the structure of the tabernacle and later the temple mirrors Eden, etc. “Interesting throughout,” as they say.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (Netflix) is one of the best and best-crafted documentaries that I have ever seen. It tells the story of Mats Steen, a Norwegian boy living with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. As the disease relentlessly robs him of mobility, Mats turns to the online world, spending much of his time immersed in World of Warcraft. (No spoilers.)

To Mats’ parents, his growing screen time is a source of worry and a reminder of the physical limitations imposed by his condition: a life confined to a wheelchair, seemingly isolated and devoid of traditional social connections. By his early twenties, Mats is capable of moving only a few fingers—just enough to click a mouse. But what else, his parents wonder, is there for him?

The documentary follows Mats’ until his death at the age of 25. On the surface, it’s a tragic yet predictable narrative of a young life overshadowed by illness. What happens next transforms the story. After Mats’ passing, his parents post a notice of his death on his blog. To their astonishment, messages pour in from all over the world. Strangers write heartfelt tributes, sharing stories of how Mats profoundly impacted their lives. In the online realm, Mats was known as Ibelin, a vibrant personality who had cultivated deep friendships, inspired others, and even experienced romantic relationships.

The documentary then retells Mats’ story but this time as Ibelin and it does so in such a way that we feel the exhilaration and freedom that Mats must have felt when he discovered that he could have a flourishing life in a new realm. It’s brilliant conceived and aided by the fact that Mat’s entire online life–which in many ways is his life–has been recorded. Everything he said and did, 42,000 pages of text, is preserved online. (As Tyler has said, if you want to be remembered, write for the AIs.)

The film raises profound questions: If heaven is incorporeal, is an online existence closer to a heavenly life than the physical one? What defines an ideal romance? What constitutes true friendship? Highly recommended.