BLESSINGS

BLESSINGS This month in Perspectives our theme is Blessings. I think the reason this came to mind is that, among ourselves in the speakers' team, we have come to have adopted a habit of ending every e-mail with this single word, and it seemed worth looking into why we depend on blessing one another as a suitable way of putting our messages to rest each time we end a communication. Blessings are actually an invocation of God's help, of course. Often these invocations occur in situations where we want something but have been afraid to ask in case it sounds selfish. But they also indicate that we want the person receiving our message to receive God's blessing too on the actions they decide on as a result. 'Kind regards' sounds a bit feeble for that. You can't have blessings without authorisation; and the author of all blessings is of course our heavenly Father. The Father's blessing is both an authorisation to act and the liberation from impotence which the blessing confers. Because blessings are empowerment; they are powerful, they set us free. When we bless God, we are using this power, which transforms us into instruments of God's will. God is the only author of blessings. He holds the copyright. This adds a dimension to the current debate over the rights to harvest creative material such as plays and scripts in order to train AI 'bot' systems. It takes the debate away from rights violation into the whole question of the nature of the inspiration of creative works. AI depends on copying already existing models, in order to mimic the style of different authors and create new writing as if it was original. Bots are copycats, they can't create, they don't (yet) have a soul. And probably never will, because we don't know enough about the full extent of the spiritual capacities of living creatures ( telepathy, spirit guidance and many similar taboo subjects, for instance). But you can't bless God unless you have a soul. Makers of robots, pay attention, can you really manufacture a full replacement for a human? Artificial intelligence will never be able to create a complete living person, a whole human being, without God's permission. The recognition of God's authority is an essential prerequisite of bioengineering a new individual possessing a soul. Without God, nothing is possible. Think about it: Why might God have it in his divine will to create an artificially intelligent being, simply to satisfy a craving for power? Get behind me Satan He said. In fiction, people have asked for the blessing of life on simulated human beings. Pinocchio the puppet who wanted to become a real boy, and Frankenstein the monster who turned on his creator are the classic literary models, but the full title of Mary Shelly's book was Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus - which only shows the antiquity of the desire for divine powers. Prometheus in Greek mythology was a Titan who stole fire from heaven to bring it to Earth. His name means forethought, and his other claim to fame was to have brought down Zeus's punishment in sending Pandora as wife to his brother Epimetheus (meaning hindsight). Pandora took the great lid off the jar she carried, and evils, hard work, and disease flew out to plague humanity. Hope alone remained within. Pinocchio, Frankenstein, Pandora, all three are warnings to ask for blessings which don't have a catch to them. In other words, count your blessings, and be careful what you ask for, mindful of what you may have to pay for them, as our Blessed Saviour did for all mankind. So, not in bitcoin then !