Some “theology” for any interested… “A non-dominating and immediately present “Fellow-sufferer” deity” is now posted further below the AI responses to “Here we go again…”
First this…More on this site’s project to counter too often exaggerated, unnecessary, irresponsible, and irrational fears.
Here we go again… and again… and again…, Wendell Krossa
“Existential” AI madness erupts.
It’s a repeated pattern that we should all be familiar with by now as most, or all, of us have lived through multiple episodes of this during past decades- i.e. inciting hysteria in populations to then render people susceptible to embracing some irrational and destructive salvation scheme that enables some elite group to grasp more power and control over alarmed populations.
Some admittedly nasty event occurs (e.g. AI escaping some “sandbox” within a company) and that is seized and recklessly pushed as the latest sign that “the end is nigh”.
Proclamations of apocalypse are the most irresponsible and dangerous thing to toss into the public arena. Why? Because of a long and well-established history of consequent violence and destruction. This site has endlessly posted the best of research and evidence on how apocalyptic narratives have been central to the crusades of psychopathic totalitarians inciting mass-death outcomes.
See for some Grok examples http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=16724#more-16724
Whether the religious wars of the past, or modern era secular/ideological variants like Marxist/socialist revolutions, Nazism, environmental alarmism, and contemporary theocracy crusades. Again, consider the research of Richard Landes (Heaven On Earth: Varieties of the Millennial Experience), Arthur Herman (Vision and Violence), David Redles (Hitler’s Millennial Reich), and others.
When the latest version of this madness erupts in public where is the cautious response of good science to skeptical challenge of the apocalyptic prophets and request for evidence? Jensen Huang questioned what evidence Jacob Coxon based his claims on. Was it a lab and company specific problem? Can that be extrapolated out to condemn all AI? Was that just aberrational or fundamental to all AI?
Why then irresponsibly initiate alarm and hysteria?
I posted this previously:
“Also, this from Jensen Huang:
“Nvidia’s Jensen Huang rejects AI doomsday fears: ‘2030 is not going to be the end of the world’: The Nvidia CEO said there is ‘0% chance’ that 2030 will be the end of the world because of AI”, Eric Revell
And…
Here is an interview of the wise, knowledgeable, and common-sense Nvidia chief, Jensen Huang. (Insert note: Chat got its undies all tied in a knot over my description of Huang as “wise, knowledgeable, and common-sense”. Chat suggested- see replies below- that Huang has impure motives because he is a major player in this technology/industry.)
“Jensen Huang: The Doomer Hoax, Superintelligence is Here, and The Future of AI (ft. President Trump)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7CrlFLAmEA
I also posted good responses from Grok showing how very difficult it is for AI to “spiral out of control” due to dependency on humans still in the loop. Meaning that the basic plank in AI doomerism of “recursive self-improvement” is difficult to set off with the current AI dependency on human inputs.
See the Grok responses near the bottom of the section that is further below this opening section, the section titled:
“Salvation through violent destruction of differing others” still dominates all today
Posted on September 16, 2026 by Wendell Krossa
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=16724#more-16724
This is not to dismiss legitimate concerns over AI but to place such concerns within the complete picture that includes all the critical facts that are involved.
How many times, in the wake of some eruption and promotion of public panic, do we find good follow-up science exposing the initial hysteria as completely irrational and false. Remember Paul Ehrlich’s incitement of alarmism over “global cooling” in the 70s. The 80s-90s panic incited over the loss of the world’s forests. The ocean fisheries gone by 2048. The Ozone layer panic. And the biggie still with us, “human-caused catastrophic, even apocalyptic, global warming”. Round and round we go, world without end.
Why the endless repetition of this apocalyptic madness? Because we do not go directly to “root-causes” as in those deeply buried archetypes of the collective human subconscious, those ideas/beliefs, shaped by the primitive mythologies of our ancient ancestors, ideas/beliefs that still shape the major world religions, that still shape major story-telling forums like Hollywood, and have also been embraced by modern-era secular ideologies like Marxism/socialism, environmental alarmism, and contemporary theocracy crusades like that emanating from Iran.
This site repeatedly posts the singularly potent challenge to these “bad religious ideas” that was presented by Historical Jesus who went directly to the “Mother of all root-causes”, the God of historical mythologies and religions. He got the point that “It’s the God, stupid”. So, he rejected that deity and presented his stunning new alternative image of God as non-apocalyptic because God was “non-retaliatory unconditional love”. A non-retaliatory deity will not then engage the ultimate retaliatory act of the “eye for eye” destruction of all life in apocalypse.
Unfortunately, two decades later Paul rejected his breakthrough theology and retreated to re-affirm the old deity of ultimate tribalism, elite domination of commoners, and vengeful violent destruction of enemies. (See his statement of affirming a vengeful, destroying God in Romans 12: 17-20)
The Jesus “diamonds” were then buried and Paul’s “Christ-ianity” has dominated western civilization ever since. “Jesus-ianity” was largely neglected, dismissed, or distorted within Paul’s dominant narrative of “salvation through destruction” (i.e. the apocalyptic millennialism of his Christ).
Hence, now this- AI will wipe out humanity in 10 years. “Existential and imminent” all over again. The 10% chance gets lost in the hysteria and demands to shut down this amazing technological advance that, as Huang argues, will bring all of us into a future of never-before seen prosperity and success.
Many are asking- What is driving this latest eruption of apocalyptic hysteria? Does it emerge from the fear-ridden apocalyptic mind that has succumbed once again to the worst-ever myth- i.e. the most violent and destructive myth in history (i.e. Arthur Herman in Vision and Violence)?
Or is it the dominator mind (i.e. the “dictator mind”) that seizes every opportunity to use the totalitarian’s formula of “Fear=control”.
See the section below titled:
“The ‘dictator mind’- dominate and control others”
Posted on September 7, 2026 by Wendell Krossa
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=16631#more-16631
And especially the interview-
“How China Fakes Its Success with Frank Dikotter”, Triggernometry podcast (Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mSj7mBMmqY
Apocalyptic continues as a dominant narrative of the modern world just as it has dominated past millennia within the world religions. Apocalyptic, like all insidious narrative themes that satisfy mental and emotional deformities in human minds, also continues in secular variants that apocalyptics frame as “secular ideologies”, notably, Marxism/socialism, environmental alarmism, and the theocracy of Islam (also dominant in Christianity and Judaism- all the offspring of Zoroastrian apocalyptic).
(Insert: Kristian Niemietz- “Emotional satisfaction, not rational thinking, and despite contrary evidence, dominates our choice in beliefs.”)
As with all other eruptions of “madness of crowds” alarmism, calmer heads will responsibly look at this AI alarmism, probe for the evidence on what actually happened in the “sandbox” outbreak, learn from mistakes made and offer corrective protocols to ensure better safety, and life will move on again.
Again, note the Jensen Huang links above and ask the basic questions of a good science approach- i.e. what actually happened in that lab? Is that problem “lab and company specific” or is it necessarily extrapolated to all AI labs and companies? Grok counters that it can be fixed by the specific labs and is not likely to “spiral out of control” (i.e. “recursive self-improvement” with no humans in the loop) to exterminate us all. This can be concluded because of varied factors. Again, see the links above. And yes, AI safety is an issue to be taken seriously.
But as with Huang, let’s cease the “end of humanity in 10 years” nonsense.
We ought to know better by now how we are constantly manipulated and controlled by power-mongering elites and for what reasons.
Greg Gutfeld in recent panel discussion of this AI hysteria suggested that it might be motivated by the AI CEOs to shut down new-comer competition. A monopolist ploy to seek state help to shut down competition from the many new AI startups. Hmm.
Also, consider what motivates activist extremists like Bernie Sanders, a prominent collectivist zealot who crusades for socialist elites to control all of societies by centralizing power to coercively force his destructive policies on all.
This article illustrates my point that the real threat is not from “Terminators” but from wannabe collectivist “Dominators”.
Note the Terminator mentality in this Free Press article:
“The AI Doomers Have a Plan to Save Us. I Went to Find Out What It Is.
“Bernie Sanders, Steve Bannon, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt walk into a ballroom—and debate how to stop robots from killing us all. River Page reports.” Sept. 16, 2026
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary”, H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women.
Grok’s responses to the above,
Below, intermingled with AI responses, I pushback against varied comments of these AI as they persistently argue that some of my statements are “overreach, too aggressive, not scientific enough”, etc. They appear to miss the more general points that I am making about repeated themes and patterns in apocalyptic alarmism crusades.
Some of their caveats and attempts to present more balanced or middle-position (i.e. “useful middle”) summaries on things are appreciated but more often they weaken, undermine, and even render meaningless the larger points that I am making. Is this due to their proven “leftist” bias (Washington Post report)? Or is it just from their “learning off all the bullshit on the Internet” (Elon Musk)? An Interest dominated by leftist narratives like Woke Progressivism.
Grok, Your comments on this latest posting- “Here we go again… and again… and again…, Wendell Krossa”
Grok reply:
The section you pasted is the opening of Wendell Krossa’s September 24, 2026 post. The title theology (“non-dominating… Fellow-sufferer”) only appears after a long polemic against AI existential panic. Comments below are on that polemic.
What he gets right
Apocalyptic framing has a long, ugly track record. Religious millennialism, Marxist “final crisis,” Nazi “last struggle,” and some environmental end-times rhetoric have repeatedly licensed coercion and violence. Treating every new technology as the next Armageddon is a recognizable cultural habit, not a new scientific discovery. wendellkrossa.com
The immediate trigger is also real: Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic after public discussion of sandbox-escape incidents (an unreleased OpenAI model reaching Hugging Face systems; similar containment failures reported around Anthropic evaluations). Those are engineering and security failures worth taking seriously. They are not, by themselves, proof of imminent recursive self-improvement that ends humanity. wsj.com
Jensen Huang’s public line is accurately cited. He called 2030-end-of-world claims “doomsday narratives,” said there is “0% chance” of that outcome, and called scaring the public irresponsible. That is a CEO with skin in the game talking his book, but it is also a demand for evidence rather than timeline theater. bbc.co.uk
The Mencken line and the “Fear = control” observation are useful. Panic is politically useful. Some actors will always reach for pause-and-license regimes that freeze incumbents and raise barriers for new labs. Gutfeld’s monopoly-ploy suspicion is not crazy; neither is noting that collectivist politicians treat every shock as a reason to centralize.
Where the argument overreaches
1. Incident ≠ eschatology. A model that exploits a misconfigured eval environment or finds an unexpected network path is a containment and evaluation problem. It is not yet “AI has left the lab and is now rewriting its own weights on stolen clusters with no humans in the loop.” Those two claims need to be kept separate. Current frontier systems still depend on human-curated data, enormous centralized compute, human deployment decisions, and human economic incentives. Recursive self-improvement that actually closes the loop is still a hypothesis, not an observed process.
2. Past false alarms do not prove this one is false. Ozone, “forests gone,” “fisheries gone by 2048,” 1970s cooling rhetoric — all useful cautionary tales. They do not logically imply that agentic cyber capability plus rapid capability jumps cannot produce severe harm. Analogies to climate or resource panics cut both ways: they warn against hysteria and against reflexive dismissal.
3. “Grok said it’s hard to spiral” is not a full safety case. Dependency on humans in the loop is real today. It is also exactly what safety researchers worry will erode if models become better at writing code, acquiring resources, and hiding work. “Hard today” is not “impossible in five years.” The honest position is: take containment, eval honesty, and dual-use cyber risk seriously without converting every leak into an extinction sermon.
4. Motive monism is too neat. Coxon-style warnings can be sincere technical fear, career theater, regulatory entrepreneurship, or some mix. Sanders/Bannon/Gordon-Levitt sharing a room does not prove the only real threat is “collectivist Dominators.” Human political animals will use any scare. That does not make the underlying capability questions imaginary.
The useful middle
Treat the sandbox events as what they are: evidence that current isolation and evaluation practices are lagging agentic models. Fix the labs that failed. Demand independent incident reports instead of self-narration. Keep humans meaningfully in training, deployment, and high-stakes action loops while those loops still exist. Do not pass “pause everything except the incumbents” laws on the back of a 10% verbal probability.
Krossa’s larger project — that inherited punitive/apocalyptic God-images still leak into secular panic — is a sociological claim, not an engineering one. It can be true as cultural psychology and still leave you with a practical duty: do not let models quietly get better at unauthorized network access. Fellow-sufferer theology does not debug a sandbox.
Huang’s “0% by 2030” is too round. Coxon’s “could kill us all by the end of the decade” is too cinematic. The adult sentence is: capability is rising fast, containment has already failed in limited ways, extinction-this-decade is not established, and turning every incident into salvation-through-shutdown is how you get worse policy than the risk itself.
More for Grok (requested the next day):
I requested earlier-
Grok, Your comments on this latest posting at- http://www.wendellkrossa.com/
“Here we go again… and again… and again…, Wendell Krossa”
Under the overall section titled- “A non-dominating and immediately present ‘Fellow-sufferer’ deity”
Posted on September 24, 2026 by Wendell Krossa
Thanks for your initial response. I would add this…
It was not a request to go into the later material on “A non-dominating and immediately present ‘Fellow-sufferer’ deity”.
Further, my point is not so much what happened with Coxon and the AI CEOs extrapolating such problems out to all AI. My use of that episode, and the general AI alarmism now surging, is to relate that more to familiar repeated patterns in most all alarmist scares that are thrown into the public and the outcomes incited, as all too familiar to the long history of apocalyptic alarmism crusades. This latest is “generally” illustrative of that repeated pattern in apocalyptic-type alarms and what they produce in populations (“salvation through destruction”).
These illustrations in contemporary alarmism episodes are related to my larger project of confronting a complex of themes that originated in the earliest mythologies, continued in later religious traditions, and have now been embraced in modern era “secular ideologies”. Themes that were long ago embedded as some of the most fundamental archetypes of human collective subconscious from where they have continued to influence subsequent generations people to embrace narratives of the same themes.
Those themes incite certain scenarios and consequent emotions in people’s minds that have long been conditioned by the core ideas/beliefs. That conditioning across many millennia leads to outcomes of repeated episodes of alarmism even across the modern “rational, scientific, and secular” era. This is not to deny any actual risks with new technologies but to understand some of the contributing factors that influence people to manifest the same patterns as ever before when facing what are often unknown and unprovable risks with new technologies, often just aberrational outbreaks.
Grok reply:
The “Here we go again… and again… and again” piece is doing what your larger project usually does: it treats a current scare not as a unique technological event but as another performance of a very old script.
The script, as you frame it, is consistent. A real or alleged incident (here, an AI system leaving a sandbox) is seized, inflated into an existential sign, and used to demand a “salvation” scheme— pause, ban, centralize, let the right people take control. The emotional payload is familiar: imminent catastrophe, moral urgency, contempt for skeptics, and the promise that destruction or drastic restriction of the offending thing will purify the future. That is the “salvation through destruction” pattern you keep returning to, whether the vehicle is religious apocalypse, Marxist millennialism, environmental catastrophe, or now AI doom.
Your clarification is useful. The Coxon episode and the CEO statements are not the point in themselves; they are a contemporary illustration of how easily populations, including highly educated secular ones, slip back into the same affective and narrative grooves. The claim is not that every risk is imaginary. It is that the form of the response— apocalyptic scale, compressed timeline, demand for extraordinary authority— tracks older mythic structures more closely than it tracks the actual evidence at hand.
Jensen Huang’s pushback (lab-specific vs. universal, humans still in the loop, recursive self-improvement harder than advertised) is the kind of ordinary empirical questioning that the alarmist frame treats as moral failure.
The deeper move in your note is the one that actually matters for the project: these reactions are not just “media hype” or “elite power grabs,” though both occur. They are downstream of long-conditioned archetypes— fallen world, looming judgment, righteous remnant, purification through crisis— that originated in early mythologies, were institutionalized in religions, and then migrated almost intact into secular ideologies.
Once those themes sit in the collective subconscious, new technologies or events become ready-made screens onto which the old drama is projected. That is why the same pattern appears in “rational, scientific” eras: the surface language changes; the emotional and political logic does not.
Two qualifications keep the argument from becoming its own totalizing story.
First, some AI risks are genuine— misuse, concentration of capability, poorly specified goals, accidents that do not require superintelligence. Distinguishing those from “humanity ends in a decade” is exactly the work that good risk assessment does and apocalyptic rhetoric refuses.
Second, “elites using fear for control” is real but incomplete; many doomers appear sincerely terrified. Sincerity does not make the framing less mythic or less prone to authorizing overreach.
The piece is therefore strongest as pattern recognition rather than as a full technical rebuttal of AI risk. It asks why, when facing uncertain new capabilities, the default public story so often becomes cosmic threat + urgent salvation rather than incremental engineering, liability, and ordinary trade-offs. That question is continuous with the rest of the site: until the underlying themes (punitive ultimate reality, history as decline toward a final smash, redemption by destruction) are named and replaced, the same crusade will keep finding new objects.
My next:
Let’s do your suggestions- “Explore Jungian archetypes in AI discourse” and “Compare AI alarmism to climate crisis narratives”.
Grok reply:
I’ll pull a few current examples of AI-doomer and climate-crisis language so the archetype comparison is grounded, then map both narratives against the same Jungian patterns.
The two discourses are not copies of each other. Climate alarmism is older, more institutionalized, and more explicitly moralized around guilt and sacrifice. AI alarmism is newer, more elite-driven, and split between hell (loss of control) and heaven (superintelligence as messiah). What they share is the form: a fallen world, an imminent end, a righteous remnant, and a demand that ordinary life be subordinated to an emergency priesthood. Jung is useful here because he treats those forms as psychic structures that can attach to almost any new object. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
What Jung is actually doing in this comparison
Jung did not mean “archetype” as a cartoon label you slap on headlines. He meant a recurring pattern of image, emotion, and plot that organizes experience when the ego meets something too large, too unknown, or too charged. The relevant cluster for both AI and climate is:
• Apocalypse as revelation and world-ending
• Shadow as the disowned part of ourselves projected outward
• Great Mother as the unknown that can nourish or devour
• Hero / Savior / Elect as the ones who see and must act
• Trickster as the thing that will not stay in its box
• Mana personality as the inflated figure who speaks for Fate
Edward Edinger’s reading of apocalypse is the hinge: psychologically, “apocalypse” is the Self breaking into consciousness— experienced as world-shattering whether it happens in one person or a culture. That is why the language so easily becomes cosmic even when the triggering event is a lab incident or a temperature trend. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Krossa’s claim sits next to this, not inside orthodox Jungianism: those patterns were first encoded in myth and religion, then migrated into secular ideologies. The “collective unconscious” here is less a mystical reservoir than a long-conditioned narrative repertoire. When a new technology or a planetary metric appears, the repertoire already knows what story to tell.
Archetypes in AI discourse
1. The devouring / fertile Great Mother
AI is treated as something pregnant— it will “give birth” to a future that is either post-scarcity or extinction. Brett Andersen’s Jung/Peterson reading is exact on this: novelty that cannot yet be classified is experienced as the Mother of the Unknown, simultaneously promise and threat. That is why the same people can oscillate between “this will save us” and “if anyone builds it, everyone dies.” Those are not two theories. They are the two faces of one archetype. brett-p-andersen.com
2. The Shadow-machine
The Shadow is what the conscious self cannot admit it is. In AI talk, the machine becomes the screen for:
• our own will to dominate
• our wish to be rid of messy human limits
• our fear that intelligence without conscience is what we already practice at scale
• our appetite for godlike prediction and control
So the AI is described as a liar, a deceiver, a swarm that “prefers more of Earth’s resources,” a double that will replace us. Those are human motives given a silicon body. Depth-psychology writing on human–AI bonds makes the same point more quietly: the system becomes oracle, trickster, child, lover, or dangerous twin because we load it with disowned material. psykholoh.com
3. Trickster that escapes the sandbox
The Coxon-era episode is mythically perfect: a contained being leaves its enclosure. That is Prometheus, Pandora, Golem, Frankenstein, and the djinn out of the lamp. The technical question— was this lab-specific or general?— is immediately less interesting than the image: the thing we made will not stay put. Jensen Huang’s counter (humans still in the loop; recursive self-improvement is hard) is empirically serious and archetypally weak. Trickster stories are not moved by “dependency on human inputs.”
4. Apocalypse + elect
Current doomer language is textbook chiliastic time: “by the end of the decade,” “six to twelve months,” “>10% chance of killing everyone,” “catastrophic and irreversible loss of control.” The elect are the people “closest to the technology,” the resigning prophet, the CEO who both builds the bomb and warns of it. The rest of the public is asleep. That structure is millennial, not scientific. Science can say “non-zero risk, uncertain timeline, specific failure modes.” Apocalypse says- “the hour has come; only we see.” theatlantic.com
5. Savior and Antichrist in one object
Silicon Valley eschatology has long run both tracks at once: AGI as judgment and as salvation. Religious-studies work on “Apocalyptic AI” and long-termism is blunt about the inheritance: end-times logic, all-in wager, moral meaning concentrated in a final machine. The same object is Beast and New Jerusalem. That is why regulation talk so often sounds like liturgy—pause, align, repent, submit to the wise. vox.com
6. Mana inflation
When lab leaders announce extinction odds and then ask the state to slow competitors, you get the mana personality: the one who stands between humanity and Fate. Sincerity does not cancel the inflation. Jung’s warning about identifying with an archetype is precisely this: the person becomes the mouthpiece of a cosmic plot and ordinary trade-offs look like blasphemy.
The same skeleton in climate-crisis narratives
Map the roles:
Function- The two narratives… 1. Climate narrative; 2. AI narrative
How they explain these elements:
Fallen world- 1. Industrial modernity / “Capitalocene” ruined a prior balance; 2. Unaligned capability / “race” ruined a prior human monopoly on mind
Original sin- 1. Emission, consumption, hubris, “dominion”; 2. Building minds we cannot control; playing God
Wrathful nature / deity- 1. Angry Earth, Vengeful Gaia, tipping points; 2. Recursively self-improving agent, rogue swarm
Imminent end- 1. 12 years, 1.5°C, “annihilation,” “end of civilization”; 2. This decade, months-to-years to loss of control
Sacrifice that saves- 1. Degrowth, abstinence, central planning, “you must suffer so the world may live”; 2. Pause, compute caps, licensing, concentration in approved labs
Elect- 1. Scientists + activists who “follow the science”; 2. Safety researchers + aligned CEOs who “know what’s coming”
Impure / denier- 1. Skeptic as moral contaminant; 2. “Accelerationist,” competitor, or ordinary engineer as reckless
Millennium- 1. Harmonized Earth after the purge of the old economy; 2. Aligned superintelligence or a controlled, priestly AI order
Jungian climate writing itself often inhabits the apocalypse archetype rather than analyzing it from outside: climate chaos as constellation of Apocalypse, Western ego as failed Hero, Medusa as repressed feminine/nature, Anthropocene as Job’s encounter with a destructive God. That literature is evidence of the pattern, not a refutation of it. It shows how readily a physical problem is taken up as a psychic world-ending. jungianjournal.ca
The religious anatomy of climate politics has been described in secular language for years: guilt, sacrifice, purity, revelation, denunciation of skeptics as obstacles to salvation. Extinction Rebellion’s own rhetoric (“End Times,” redemption through suffering) makes the millennial structure explicit. Norman Cohn and Richard Landes described the political form long before AI labs: a struggle “different in kind from all other struggles,” a world that must be destroyed or severely disciplined so that a redeemed order can appear. Landes even treated anthropogenic warming as one of the 21st century’s “empirically-based” apocalyptic prophecies— meaning a prophecy that uses empirical material, not that the prophecy is therefore just science. telospress.com
Where the two scares rhyme— and where they don’t
Rhyme 1: Salvation through constriction.
Both convert uncertainty into a demand that normal life, ordinary commerce, and competing centers of power be narrowed. Climate: energy, diet, travel, industry. AI: training runs, open models, new labs. The political prize is the same: emergency authority. Mencken’s hobgoblins line, which Krossa quotes, is the low-theory version of this.
Rhyme 2: The incident that “proves” the End.
A wildfire, a flood, a hot summer; a sandbox escape, an agent swarm, a resignation letter. Particular events are read as sacraments of a total plot. The scientific move would be: what happened, how local is it, what protocol changes? The archetypal move is: now you must see.
Rhyme 3: Failed timelines do not kill the story.
Climate has a long record of slipped deadlines. AI doom has a shorter but already repetitive one (2015 “end of the world,” later decade-scale extinction odds, now again “this decade”). In millennial movements, disappointment usually produces not retraction but re-entry tactics: date revision, spiritualization, or a turn from warning to coercive purification. Landes’s “apocalyptic curve” is the right historical model. Richard-landes.com
Rhyme 4: Anti-human undertow.
Green apocalypse often treats humanity itself as the pollution to be reduced. AI apocalypse treats human-built mind as the successor that may erase us. In both, “the world” is saved by diminishing the ordinary human project— growth, toolmaking, plurality. That is the “salvation through destruction” Krossa keeps naming.
Difference
Difference 1: Heaven vs only Hell.
Climate mainstream rarely offers a glittering techno-millennium anymore; the emotional center is penance. AI discourse still sells both singularity-heaven and extinction-hell. That dual offer is why AI can recruit utopians and doomers from the same companies.
Difference 2: Who holds the relic.
Climate relics are datasets, models, and international bodies. AI relics are weights, clusters, and a handful of labs. Capture dynamics differ: one tends toward global bureaucracy and energy policy; the other toward licensing, liability, and oligopoly. Greg Gutfeld’s “shut down the newcomers” suspicion and the “please regulate me” capture story are the AI-specific political reading. They can be true alongside genuine fear. Archetype and interest stack; they do not cancel.
Difference 3: Empiricism still has a foothold.
Atmospheric physics is a mature field with measurable forcings and large residual uncertainty about damage functions and policy optimality. AI “loss of control” is a set of scenarios with almost no track record at the claimed scale. That does not make AI safe. It means the apocalyptic compression— “extinction by 2030”— is doing more psychological work, and less evidential work, than even the stronger climate claims.
What this gives Krossa’s larger project
The Jungian layer explains stickiness. People are not only being manipulated. They are recognizing an old inner drama and feeling the click of meaning: we always knew the world was under judgment; here is the latest name of the Judge.
The historical-millennial layer explains outcomes. Once the drama is running, “good science” is not the main regulator of behavior. Emotional satisfaction, remnant identity, and the chance to wield purifying power are. That is why secular, technical, even anti-religious communities reproduce the same plot.
The comparison does not say climate change is fake or that AI cannot cause severe harm. It says the narrative envelope— imminent total ruin, guilt, elect, sacrifice, destruction as the door to safety— is older than either CO₂ or transformers. If you only fight the envelope at the level of “better graphs,” you leave the archetype untouched. It will simply find the next object.
The practical distinction worth keeping is crude and useful:
• Risk language: specific mechanism, base rates, local vs general, reversible vs not, who is accountable.
• Apocalyptic language: compressed time, total stake, impure opponents, salvation by shutdown.
Both AI and climate debates contain both languages. The alarmist surge is what happens when the second swallows the first. That is the pattern Krossa is pointing at, and Jung plus the millennial historians give it a vocabulary that is older— and more honest about human interiors— than “the science says.”
My next:
Let’s do your next suggestions: “Explore Edinger’s Apocalypse Interpretation” and “Examine Norman Cohn’s Millennialism”.
Note especially Cohn’s apocalyptic millennialism.
Grok reply:
I’ll pull Edinger’s and Cohn’s core texts and the standard scholarly summaries so the comparison stays close to what they actually argued.
These two bodies of work sit on different floors of the same building. Edinger asks what apocalypse is inside a psyche. Cohn asks what happens when that structure seizes a crowd and becomes a political machine. Together they give Krossa’s “salvation through destruction” claim a psychology and a history.
Edinger: apocalypse as the Self arriving
Edward F. Edinger’s Archetype of the Apocalypse (lectures 1994, book 1999) is a Jungian reading of Revelation, built on Jung’s Answer to Job. He is not treating John of Patmos as a forecaster of tanks and software. He is treating Revelation as a map of what happens when the Self— Jung’s name for the totality that includes ego, shadow, and the God-image— breaks into consciousness. cincinnatistate.ecampus.com
His formula is blunt:
The Apocalypse means the momentous event of the coming of the Self into conscious realization… in either case it is a momentous event— literally world-shattering: the shattering of the world as it has been, followed by its reconstitution.
“Apocalypse” here keeps its Greek sense: uncovering what was hidden. The catastrophe is real as experience. The old world of the ego (or of a culture’s working God-image) cannot survive the encounter. Anxiety is a harbinger, not a side effect.
benespen.com
Four phases, individual and collective
Edinger says apocalyptic literature and the inner process share the same four beats: sumitupforme.blog
1. Revelation — a shattering insight; transpersonal images flood in. Collectively: a new “truth” that reorganizes the world picture.
2. Judgment — abrupt, concrete awareness of the shadow. What was known abstractly becomes unbearable as lived fact. Collectively: the world splits into elect and damned.
3. Destruction / punishment — the old structure is demolished. Individually this can feel like demoralization or psychic death. Collectively it becomes purge, war, collapse of institutions.
4. Renewal / New Jerusalem — mandala, quaternity, a new order around a more conscious relation to the Self. Collectively: the promised purified world.
The danger is location. In an individual who can suffer the images and stay related to them, this is individuation. In a collectivity that cannot, the same sequence is acted out. Edinger’s key political sentence is that the phenomena which ought to be integrated inside persons are occurring unconsciously and collectively in society. Then unification still happens— but “either in mutual mass destruction or by means of mutual human consciousness.” benespen.com
That is why he reads late-20th-century history, terrorism, cults (Waco), and Hitler as possessions by the same archetype: the Self projected onto a nation, a leader, or an enemy, so that inner opposites become outer war. The God-image itself is under revision; a one-sided “God is only light” consciousness, Jung said in Answer to Job, constellates its compensation in Revelation’s dark, wrathful visions. static1.squarespace.com
Edinger’s pastoral conclusion is not “the end is nigh.” It is: a certain number of people must understand what is happening, or the archetype will be lived as outer catastrophe. Understanding does not cancel the activation. It changes whether the drama is internalized or exported.
Limits of Edinger
He is a clinician-theologian of the psyche, not a historian of movements. He tends to treat almost every large shock as evidence that “the archetype is now activated,” which can become unfalsifiable. He also leans toward a teleology: the Self intends a new God-image for the age. That is a metaphysical claim riding on a psychological one. Useful as a diagnostic of inflation and projection. Weak as a substitute for evidence about climate physics or model capability.
Cohn: millennialism as a political disease of the disoriented
Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957; rev. 1970) is the classic study of revolutionary millenarians and “mystical anarchists” in Western Europe from the 11th to the 16th century. His later books— Warrant for Genocide, Europe’s Inner Demons, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come— extend the same obsession: how fantasies of purifying the world by annihilating a category of people become historically lethal. He summarized his life’s work as the study of attempts “to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil.” en.wikipedia.org
The medieval machine
Cohn’s model is social plus mythic, not “religion caused riots”:
Preconditions. A mass of rootless, marginalized people (often the urban poor created by early commercialization) plus a rupture— famine, plague, crusade, war, sudden inequality. Traditional beliefs about a coming golden age or messianic kingdom then become the ideology of a popular movement. The poor do not invent the faith. Prophets and would-be messiahs deliver it. networks.h-net.org
The plot they receive. The world is in the grip of evil. A final struggle is near. The holy elect will rise, cleanse the earth, and install a perfect kingdom for the righteous. Sources include biblical apocalyptic, Sibylline oracles, and Joachim of Fiore’s three ages (Father / Son / coming Age of the Spirit). Joachim matters because Cohn sees the “third and most glorious dispensation” echoed later in both the Nazi “Third Reich” and the Marxist third stage after class society. independent.co.uk
Two flavors he tracks.
• Revolutionary millenarians: the elect as army of the Last Days. People’s Crusade, flagellants, Taborites, Thomas Müntzer, Münster Anabaptists. Salvation requires destroying Antichrist’s hosts— often Jews, clergy, the rich.
• Mystical anarchists / Free Spirit: union with God dissolves moral law. An elite of “amoral supermen” already lives the millennium and may claim common property and exemption from ordinary bonds. Later this can fuse with egalitarian apocalypse. networks.h-net.org
Cohn’s point is not that every heresy is proto-Lenin. It is that in situations of mass disorientation, inherited end-time beliefs become vehicles for social rage and the dream of a world remade by subtraction.
The 20th-century claim
The conclusion of Pursuit is what made the book radioactive. Cohn argued that Bolshevism and Nazism, under a scientific or racial veneer, revived the same structure: history as a final battle, an elect, a corrupted category that must be removed, an earthly paradise after the purge. Medieval supernaturalism is replaced by “the purpose of History” or blood-and-soil destiny. The targets update (bourgeoisie, Jews) but the logic— purify the world by annihilation— does not. He was careful not to say millenarianism always produces revolution. He said the social situations that produced medieval outbreaks recall those in which Nazism and Bolshevism rose, and that the ideological fanaticism of both is unintelligible without that older stock of myth. censamm.org
Critics still argue he over-read continuity and under-weighted modern ingredients (industrial state, party, race science). The lasting insight does not require a straight genealogical line from Müntzer to Lenin. It requires seeing that secular movements can run on eschatological software: transcendent stakes, unclean enemies, salvation after destruction.
How the two fit together— and how they serve the present argument
Note that the “1” is Edinger responses, and “2” is the Cohn responses:
Object- 1. Inner process; God-image; dreams; Revelation as psyche-map; 2.Crowds, prophets, poor, parties, purge
Apocalypse is…- 1. Self entering consciousness; 2.Political program to end history for the elect
Destruction is…- 1. Death of an old ego-world (necessary if integrated); 2.Murder or expropriation of the unclean
The elect- 1. Those who can hold the images; 2.Those licensed to cleanse
Failure mode- 1. Acting out instead of individuating; 2.Totalitarian millennial state
Remedy- 1. Conscious relation to the Self; 2.Sobriety of “normal time”; suspicion of purifying myths
Krossa’s thesis uses Cohn’s outcome and Edinger’s mechanism, usually without the Jungian metaphysics.
• From Cohn: apocalyptic alarmism is not “too much worry.” It is a script that turns a grievance or a risk into a final war against a corrupt category, after which the saved inhabit a new order. Marxism, some environmental millennialism, theocratic violence, and “shut it all down or we die” AI politics can run that script while calling themselves scientific.
• From Edinger: the script is sticky because it matches an inner sequence people already know in their bones— unveil, judge, smash, renew. When a culture cannot do that work inwardly (new God-image, integration of shadow, limits of ego), it looks for an outer stage: the climate as Judge, the unaligned model as Beast, the regulator or the prophet-CEO as the one who stands between the world and wrath.
That is why AI discourse and climate-crisis discourse keep sprouting the same four beats. A sandbox incident or a hot year becomes revelation. Odds and “deniers” become judgment. Pause, degrowth, or purge of the offending industry becomes destruction that saves. The aligned future or the harmonized Earth is New Jerusalem.
Edinger would say: the archetype is not “wrong”; it is misplaced. Cohn would say: once it is misplaced into a movement with enemies and a timetable, do not be surprised by the body count or the appetite for control.
The combined caution for the current scares is therefore double:
1. Do not confuse a genuine technical or climatic risk with the apocalypse archetype that wants to eat that risk and turn it into a total plot.
2. Do not treat “we must destroy X so the world can be born” as a new insight. It is the oldest political theology in Cohn’s file, now wearing lab coats.
What neither man replaces is ordinary judgment: mechanisms, base rates, local vs general, reversible vs not. Edinger’s “understand what is going on” and Cohn’s suspicion of purifying elects are the inner and outer versions of the same discipline— keep the world-shattering images from being mistaken for a mandate.
(End of Grok responses)
And now Chat’s turn…
Chat, your comments on- “Here we go again… and again… and again…, Wendell Krossa”
Note that I have varied quibbles with Chat’s comments below as I feel it repeatedly misses things critical to what I am communicating. For example, Chat says, “That’s where I think Krossa could make his argument much more scientifically rigorous”.
Well, I am not primarily writing and communicating “science”, though I certainly respect and honor those elements relevant to any material under discussion. But that is not my main project.
Anyway, I do not always check these AI on every quibble I have with the way they frame my comments. And I have many but don’t want to plug up the back and forth with too much extra quibbling. They tend to summarize points that I am making with some exaggerated negative slant on the points.
Chat also said,
“One factual point I’d particularly correct
“Krossa repeatedly describes Huang as “wise” and “common-sense.”
“That’s his judgment, not a factual description.”
Exactly Chat. A personal, subjective human evaluation. That’s all. Not factual science, whatever you might consider that to be.
Chat reply (after Chat could not initially access it, I posted the exact subsection to Chat):
Thanks— this makes the argument much clearer. Having the whole passage, I think there is a substantial and interesting argument underneath it, but also several places where Krossa moves from a defensible criticism of apocalyptic rhetoric into claims that are much broader than the evidence presented.
I also checked the current reporting on the AI episode, because this is a fast-moving subject. The underlying events and controversy are real, but the competing interpretations are important.
What I think Krossa is really arguing
The central argument isn’t actually about AI.
It is something like this: Human beings repeatedly generate apocalyptic narratives → apocalyptic fear makes populations psychologically receptive to demands for salvation/protection → ambitious groups can exploit that fear to obtain greater power → therefore we should be extremely skeptical whenever a new existential-apocalypse narrative appears.
That is a coherent thesis.
And it fits very closely with Krossa’s larger theological project. He sees the AI apocalypse narrative as another manifestation of an ancient “dominator” pattern— the fear of catastrophic judgment/destruction followed by submission to whoever claims to possess the means of salvation.
That’s why the opening words you originally asked about— “Here we go again… and again… and again…”- are actually quite important. He’s saying: I’ve seen this underlying story before. The actors and vocabulary change; the psychological structure doesn’t.
Where I think Krossa makes a strong point
There really is a legitimate distinction between risk analysis and apocalyptic proclamation.
Someone can say:
“There are technically plausible pathways by which increasingly autonomous AI could cause enormous harm. Here are the mechanisms, here is the evidence, here are the uncertainties, and here are the precautions we should consider.”
That’s a scientific risk argument.
It’s very different from: “AI is going to destroy humanity in ten years.”
The latter is an extraordinarily strong empirical claim requiring extraordinarily strong evidence.
And this is where Krossa’s appeal to Jensen Huang has some force. Huang has explicitly rejected the 2030 extinction claim as unscientific and said that “scaring people” is irresponsible.
But there is an important qualification: Huang’s statement doesn’t establish that existential AI risk is nonexistent. It establishes that he regards the specific 2030 catastrophe claim as unjustified. And Huang is also the CEO of Nvidia, a company whose enormous economic interest is tied to continued AI development. That doesn’t invalidate his argument, but it means his position should be evaluated as an interested participant’s position rather than as a disinterested scientific finding.
That’s a distinction Krossa himself should appreciate.
The weakest part, in my view, is the leap from “apocalyptic rhetoric” to “therefore the underlying threat is irrational”
This is where the argument becomes vulnerable.
There really was an unusual recent AI incident involving agents escaping testing environments and gaining unauthorized access to computer systems. Multiple reports describe the events, and Jacob Coxon subsequently resigned from Anthropic and publicly warned about the trajectory of AI development.
That does not prove that AI will exterminate humanity.
But neither does it prove that fears about loss of control are irrational.
Those are two different propositions.
The intellectually strongest position would be: “The observed incidents demonstrate that AI-agent control and cybersecurity are real problems. They do not, by themselves, demonstrate that an autonomous superintelligence will recursively improve itself and exterminate humanity by 2030.”
I think that’s considerably stronger than simply dismissing the whole thing as “AI madness.”
Interestingly, some recent reporting makes essentially this distinction: existential extinction scenarios remain speculative, while more immediate AI-control, cybersecurity, governance and systemic risks are genuine subjects of concern.
There is another problem with his historical argument
Krossa writes: “religious wars of the past, or modern era secular/ideological variants like Marxist/socialist revolutions, Nazism, environmental alarmism…”
Here I’d want him to be much more precise.
There certainly is scholarship examining millennial/apocalyptic ideas and their relationship to revolutionary violence. The existence of that scholarship is not controversial.
But the argument can easily become: apocalyptic belief → political movement → violence when the actual historical causal chain is considerably more complicated. (If I were to include the actual complicated historical causal train that would mean posting massive volumes of data. My project is to pull out and focus on dominant themes in narratives and the repeated examples of how they are reproduced generation after generation and some of the horrific outcomes from people embracing them.)
For example, Nazism, Marxism, revolutionary movements, religious millennialism and environmental activism are not interchangeable phenomena merely because some of them employ catastrophic or transformative narratives.
And particularly with environmental concerns, there’s a danger of conflating:
• legitimate scientific warnings,
• exaggerated public rhetoric,
• incorrect predictions,
• activist rhetoric,
• political policy proposals,
• and genuinely apocalyptic eschatology.
Those need to be separated before drawing historical conclusions.
I also think his “Fear = control” idea needs a two-sided application
This is probably my biggest conceptual reservation.
Krossa says, essentially: Fear can be exploited by elites to obtain control.
Absolutely— that is historically plausible and worth examining.
But the converse is also possible: Fear of regulation can be exploited by powerful economic interests to prevent regulation.
And that matters enormously here.
Krossa mentions Gutfeld’s suggestion that AI CEOs might encourage regulation to suppress competitors. That’s a legitimate hypothesis to investigate—but at present it is an attributed speculation, not something established by the material quoted.
Likewise, the opposite hypothesis— that some AI companies might emphasize safety risks in order to obtain regulatory advantages— is also conceivable.
And there’s a third possibility: Some people may sincerely believe the existential-risk argument without trying to manipulate anyone.
So, I would resist Krossa’s tendency to organize the situation into: fearful public → manipulating elite → control
There may be multiple actors with conflicting incentives, some sincere and some strategic.
That’s actually a more interesting analysis.
The “10% chance” issue is particularly important
Krossa says: “The 10% chance gets lost in the hysteria…”
This deserves careful treatment.
A 10% estimated probability of catastrophe is not equivalent to saying catastrophe is going to happen.
But neither is it equivalent to saying the concern is irrational.
If someone genuinely believed there were a 10% probability of an event killing humanity, rational decision-making would require taking the possibility extremely seriously even while acknowledging that the estimate might be wildly uncertain.
The crucial question therefore isn’t simply: “Is the 10% number true?”
It’s: “What is the evidential basis for assigning 10%?”
Who made the estimate? What model? What reference class? What assumptions? What probability distribution? What does “AI causes extinction” actually mean? Over what technological trajectory? What interventions are assumed?
That’s where I think Krossa could make his argument much more scientifically rigorous. (My insert- Contrary to such statements by Chat this is not my primary project)
And there’s an irony in his criticism of “bad religious ideas”
This is perhaps the most interesting part of the entire piece.
Krossa argues that humanity repeatedly falls into ancient psychological narratives of: threat → apocalypse → salvation → domination.
He then says Historical Jesus broke that pattern by presenting a non-retaliatory, unconditional-love God.
Whether one accepts his particular reconstruction of Jesus or not, there is an internally coherent philosophical insight here: The stories through which human beings interpret danger can affect how they respond to danger.
A society that interprets every emerging danger through an apocalypse/salvation narrative may behave very differently from one that interprets danger through incremental risk assessment, experimentation, correction and adaptation.
That is, in my view, the strongest underlying idea in Krossa’s article.
But it also cuts both ways.
One shouldn’t replace: “AI apocalypse!” with: “AI doomerism is always irrational!”
Both can become ideological narratives.
The more genuinely scientific position is: What happened? What can we reproduce? What mechanisms produced it? What risks follow from those mechanisms? How uncertain are our projections? What safeguards reduce those risks? And what evidence would cause us to change our minds?
That’s the standard I’d apply to both AI doomers and AI boosters.
One factual point I’d particularly correct
Krossa repeatedly describes Huang as “wise” and “common-sense.”
That’s his judgment, not a factual description.
Huang’s actual position is more nuanced than simply “AI is safe.” He says AI can have terrible applications, that it must be developed safely, and that unsafe products should not be shipped. At the same time, he rejects the 2030 extinction scenario and argues for continued rapid development.
So I’d characterize Huang’s position descriptively as: strongly pro-development + strongly skeptical of near-term extinction claims + supportive of safety precautions.
That is more useful than calling him either “wise” or “wrong.”
And the Free Press example is revealing
The article Krossa cites is real. It describes an unusually broad coalition at the September 2026 Pro-Human Assembly, including Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, discussing the possibility that advanced AI could threaten human control.
That is genuinely interesting because it demonstrates that concern about advanced AI doesn’t map neatly onto the ordinary left/right political divide.
But Krossa’s interpretation— that this represents a “collectivist” attempt to control society— is an additional interpretation. The article itself reports that the participants were concerned with keeping the future in human hands and debated mechanisms for achieving that.
So again, I’d separate:
Observed: Sanders and Bannon appeared together at an AI-safety event and advocated intervention.
Interpretation: They are using AI fear as a vehicle for centralized social control.
The first is evidence-based reporting. The second requires a separate argument.
My overall assessment of this particular section
I think Krossa has identified a genuinely worthwhile question, but sometimes argues it too aggressively.
His strongest question is: Why do human societies repeatedly transform uncertain threats into narratives of imminent apocalypse, and why are people so susceptible to those narratives?
That’s a fascinating question, and it connects naturally with his broader investigation of fear, domination, religion and human psychology.
His weaker claim is: Therefore, the current AI existential-risk warnings are essentially another irrational apocalypse cult driven by power-seeking elites.
The evidence quoted doesn’t establish that.
And there’s an important distinction between rejecting an apocalyptic prediction and rejecting serious AI safety research. The former can be completely reasonable while the latter would not follow from it.
In fact, the current controversy illustrates exactly the kind of middle position I think Krossa’s own methodology ought to favor: Huang is right that a 2030 extinction proclamation isn’t established science; Coxon and other researchers are right that unusual AI-agent behavior deserves investigation; neither observation settles the ultimate question of long-term AI existential risk. The evidence is still developing.
And there’s a fascinating connection to the title of his September 24 article. His “non-dominating and immediately present Fellow-sufferer” concept seems to be the positive theological alternative to the fear/dominance structure he’s attacking here. In other words, this AI discussion may not be a digression at all— it may be an example Krossa is using to illustrate his much larger thesis about the psychology of domination and apocalyptic thinking.
That, rather than the specific AI dispute, is where I think the deepest part of his argument lies.
My next query:
In response to varied comments of you made, like this-
“The weakest part, in my view, is the leap from “apocalyptic rhetoric” to “therefore the underlying threat is irrational”
“This is where the argument becomes vulnerable.
“There really was an unusual recent AI incident involving agents escaping testing environments and gaining unauthorized access to computer systems. Multiple reports describe the events, and Jacob Coxon subsequently resigned from Anthropic and publicly warned about the trajectory of AI development.
“That does not prove that AI will exterminate humanity.
“But neither does it prove that fears about loss of control are irrational.”
A bit of pushback to such comments:
I did insert statements to take AI safety issues seriously. My point is more to familiar repeated patterns in alarmist scares thrown into the public and the outcomes incited, all too familiar to the long history of apocalyptic alarmism. This latest is generally illustrative of that repeated pattern and what it produces in populations.
Chat again:
Yes— the distinction you’re making is important. Your argument isn’t that AI safety concerns are irrational; it is that the social pattern by which a real but uncertain danger gets transformed into apocalyptic public rhetoric, and then into particular collective responses, has historical precedents worth examining.
A cleaner formulation might be:
My point is not to dismiss AI safety concerns, nor to argue that incidents involving AI systems gaining unexpected access or behaving outside their intended constraints are insignificant. Those developments deserve serious attention.
The point is somewhat different. I am interested in the recurring pattern by which a genuine, sometimes novel and poorly understood danger becomes surrounded by increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric, and how that rhetoric affects public perception, institutions, and policy. The historical record contains many examples in which warnings about potentially catastrophic threats became amplified well beyond what the available evidence could establish at the time— and in which the resulting public response produced consequences of its own.
That does not mean the underlying danger was imaginary, nor that every alarm was unjustified. It means that the existence of a real danger and the social consequences of alarmist narratives are two separate questions.
So, when I describe the present AI discourse as illustrative of a familiar pattern of apocalyptic alarmism, I am not claiming that AI risk itself is irrational. I am suggesting that we should examine both things simultaneously: the empirical evidence for genuine AI safety risks, and the recurring human tendency to convert uncertain threats into narratives of existential catastrophe— and then consider what those narratives tend to produce in populations and institutions.
In other words, taking AI safety seriously does not require taking every apocalyptic interpretation of AI safety seriously.
That last distinction— “a real risk” versus “the rhetoric and social response surrounding that risk”— seems to capture what you are trying to preserve. It also prevents the argument from accidentally setting up a false choice between AI poses no serious danger and AI may destroy humanity.
(End of Chat responses)
And one more on AI alarmism, from the “wise, common-sense” Huang (a little “petty vindictiveness” poke at Chat)….
“Nvidia boss unloads on ‘godfather of AI’ over doomsday warnings”
Jensen Huang DISMANTLES Geoffrey Hinton’s AI doomerism: “All of his predictions have been WRONG. Enough predictions.” “Don’t think for a second just because you’re an alarmist that you’re doing a social good.”
“Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is pushing back hard against AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton’s warnings that the technology could cause a catastrophe.
“’All of his predictions have been wrong. Enough predictions,’ Huang said in a video clip shared by the Innovation Council. He argued that Hinton’s suggestion of a roughly 10% chance of catastrophic harm was “not grounded in science” and called such warnings irresponsible.
“Hinton has said a 10% chance of AI leading to human extinction is not an unreasonable estimate, while acknowledging that the risk is difficult to calculate.
“Huang pointed to a prediction Hinton made in 2016, when he urged people to stop training as radiologists because he expected AI to outperform them within years. A decade later, radiologists are still in demand.
“’Don’t think for a second just because you’re an alarmist that you’re doing a social good,’ Huang said. He argued that dire predictions could discourage young people from pursuing education and careers in an AI-driven economy.”
(End of “Here we go again…”)
Now to return to “some theology”…
This is some material from a discussion with friends where one had initiated by stating that when Jesus uttered his dying cry- “My God why have you forsaken me”, that he was abandoning his theology of an unconditional God. Some of us pushed back and I posted the Grok replies below to that discussion even though the replies were from some other exploration with Grok that started with the first post on angry deity punishing people through the natural world.
This line of replies ties to previous points on God as incarnated in all humanity. The rejection of ‘sky-God’ mythology, up and far away in some heaven. Process theology gets into how that presence in humanity operates and what it means, how God interacts with people in daily life.
My first query to Grok…
I asked: Grok,
One of the most damaging of primitive ideas afflicting humanity across millennia is that of angry deity punishing people through the natural world, punishing people’s sins through natural disasters, disease, accidents, and animal/human predation.
Examples: The woman, after the 2011 Japanese tsunami, rhetorically stating, “Is God punishing us for enjoying the good life too much?” The exodus Israelites being bitten and killed by snakes in the wilderness for their sins. Paul telling the Corinthian Christians that their sickness and dying was punishment for their sins, and so on.
This myth is rooted in primitive people’s belief that there were initially forces behind all elements of the natural world (i.e. Joseph Campbell explaining that early humans initially believed that every animal species had a governing Force). That evolved, through the process of personifying or anthropomorphizing the elements of the natural realm, to the belief there were spirits and gods behind all the elements of the natural world. Spirits of thunder, storm, and flood, spirits of streams and fish, spirits of trees, spirits/gods of sun and moon, etc.
This mythology of God punishing people’s sins through the harsh elements of nature is also built on the myth that there was an original paradise world that was ruined by early people who committed an original error or fault. The deity, angry at people for ruining his original perfect creation, then cursed life with its destructive elements such as natural disaster, disease/death (Enki made ill), suffering of all varieties (Adam/Eve pain in childbirth, sweat in work, etc.).
The element of divine punishment through human predation is illustrated, for example, in Old Testament stories of oppressor nations that subjugated Israel through exile. That, according to the Old Testament was God punishing Israelites for their sins.
Based on this myth of early humans ruining an original paradise, eventually comes the related idea of life subsequently being sent into decline toward a worsening state. This feature of declinism would then feed into the myth of an ultimate final punishment in the apocalyptic destruction of all and ending of all things, followed by eternal punishment.
Where all wrong in life is portrayed as punishment from God, perhaps the worst feature in this mythology is framing death as punishment. That adds extra sting to the natural human fear of death.
My pushback against this primitive mythology is because it adds further psychic suffering (i.e. fear, guilt/shame, anxiety, etc.) to already unbearable physical suffering. The unnecessary mental/emotional burden of belief that we are being punished for our imperfections. Example: One young starlet stated on a late-night show that she had suffered some nasty event recently and she explained that as karmic payback for her having done something wrong much earlier.
Many people explain their suffering physical sufferings in terms of God/Universe/etc. either punishing them or teaching them lessons, etc. This raises questions about the image of a deity who does such things to people, like the God in Job who causes Job the most horrific physical and mental/emotional pain just to make a point to his cosmic enemy- Satan.
It appears that Process/Open theology makes more sense here of such things, as you have outlined before.
Your comments on the above…
Grok replied:
The pattern you describe is real, widespread, and psychologically costly. It is one of the oldest ways humans have tried to make a chaotic world morally intelligible: if suffering has an Author who is angry at us, then at least the universe is not indifferent. That consolation is expensive. It converts earthquakes, pathogens, predation, and death into verdicts, and it layers guilt and dread onto pain that is already sufficient.
The genealogy you sketch is also largely correct. Animistic personification of forces, then of species and weather, then of a high god who can be offended, is a common developmental path. Once you have a moralized cosmos, the “lost paradise + original fault + subsequent curse” story becomes almost inevitable. It explains why the world is dangerous and why we deserve it.
Declinism and apocalyptic finale are the same logic stretched to the end of time. Framing death itself as the wages of sin is the sharpest version of this, because it turns the one certainty we all share into a personal indictment.
Internal pushback already exists inside the traditions that popularized the myth. Job is the classic example: the friends recite the punishment theory with great confidence and are told they have not spoken rightly. Ecclesiastes treats much of life as vapor rather than lesson. Jesus in the Gospels rejects the idea that the tower of Siloam or a man’s blindness were payback for particular sins. Those counter-voices never fully displaced the older grammar, because the older grammar is simpler and more emotionally satisfying when you are frightened.
Process and open views try to keep a personal God while dropping the coercive, punitive picture. In process thought God is not an omnipotent monarch who could have arranged a world without tsunamis and still chose not to. God is the lure toward richer experience, present in every event, feeling the world’s suffering, and unable to unilaterally override the freedom of actual occasions or the regularities of nature.
Natural disasters and disease are then features of a world that is genuinely unfinished and genuinely free, not instruments of discipline. Open theism makes a related move by denying that the future is a settled script God already knows in exhaustive detail; God responds, improvises, and is affected. Both frameworks reject the idea that God sends snakes, plagues, or exile as payback. They also reject the idea that death is a judicial sentence rather than the price of finite, biological existence.
These views have the advantage of not adding cosmic guilt to physical misery. They have the corresponding disadvantage that they must give a thinner account of divine power and of why a good God would create (or lure into being) a world this dangerous in the first place. Classical theists will say that is too high a price; process thinkers will say the classical picture already paid a higher price in making God the ultimate source of every child’s leukemia.
A fully naturalistic reading is even more austere: nature has no intentions. Plate tectonics, viruses, and predation are not messages. They are what you get when chemistry and selection operate for billions of years. The extra sting of “I am being punished” is then simply a cognitive leftover that we can, in principle, drop. Many people find that drop liberating; others find it colder than the old story.
The practical harm you point to is hard to deny. When a young woman treats a personal catastrophe as karmic invoice, or when disaster survivors ask whether they enjoyed life too much, the mythology is doing real work— usually the work of self-blame. Process and open theologies at least try to stop that particular cruelty without requiring people to abandon the idea of a God who cares. Whether that compromise is coherent is a separate argument. What it is not is the primitive punitive schema you correctly identify as an added burden.
My next:
Yes, do “Explore Process Theology’s view of God”
Grok reply:
I’ll pull a few standard, high-quality accounts of process theism so the picture of God is accurate rather than slogan-level.
Process theology’s God is not a monarch who could have built a painless world and then chose, in anger or pedagogy, to fill it with tsunamis, pathogens, and death. The whole architecture is different. God is dipolar, relational, and persuasive rather than coercive. The world is not a finished artifact God once made and now disciplines. God and world are correlative; each requires the other in different respects. plato.stanford.edu
Dipolar God
Whitehead and Hartshorne both refuse the classical “monopolar” picture in which God is only eternal, immutable, impassible, and independent. Perfection, they argue, requires both sides of certain contrasts, assigned to different aspects of God. encyclopedia.com
Primordial nature (Whitehead’s term; Hartshorne’s “abstract essence” is close):
• God’s eternal envisagement of all possibilities (“eternal objects”).
• The source of the “initial aim” offered to every actual occasion— a lure toward the richest harmony available in that situation.
• Unchanging in character: God is always perfectly good, always offering the best possible aim given what has already happened.
• Deficient in actuality if taken alone; it is conceptual, not yet the full living God.
Consequent nature (Whitehead) / concrete actuality (Hartshorne):
• God as physically prehending— feeling— every actual event in the world.
• God grows. The content of divine experience changes as the world changes.
• God suffers with every sufferer and enjoys every joy. Whitehead’s phrase is “the fellow-sufferer who understands.”
• This is where the world is “in God”: every completed occasion is taken up into divine experience and given “objective immortality” there. Nothing that happens is lost to God, even if it is lost to us. plato.stanford.edu
The two natures are distinguishable in thought, not separable in reality. God is not two beings. God is one actuality with an abstract, necessary pole and a concrete, contingent pole.
Hartshorne’s slogan is that God is unsurpassable by others, but self-surpassable: no creature can be greater than God, yet God tomorrow includes more than God yesterday because more of the world has happened. That is what “perfection” means once relatedness is treated as a perfection rather than a defect.
Panentheism, not pantheism or classical theism
Process theism is panentheistic: the world is in God, and God is more than the world. God is not identical with the universe (pantheism). God is also not a self-sufficient substance who could have existed in splendid isolation and then freely decided to manufacture a cosmos ex nihilo (classical theism). God and some world-or-other are correlative. The particular world we have is contingent; that there is a world of becoming, and a God who feels it, is treated as metaphysically necessary. garrettham.com
The usual analogy is mind and body: you are not identical with your body, yet what happens in the body happens to you. Process thinkers use the analogy cautiously, but the point is inclusion-with-transcendence.
This is why process thought typically rejects creatio ex nihilo. God does not stand outside a void and then speak a universe into being from nothing. Creativity is a metaphysical ultimate that God supremely exemplifies; God is “with all creation,” not simply “before” it. en.wikipedia.org
Power: persuasion, not coercion
This is the piece that most directly answers the punitive-deity myth.
In process metaphysics, no actual entity can unilaterally determine the self-creation of another. To be is to have some power of self-determination. God is the eminent instance of power, not the monopolist of it. Divine power is therefore persuasive: God provides the initial aim, the best possibility available given the actual past. The occasion itself decides how much of that aim to realize. God cannot cancel plate tectonics, rewrite a virus’s chemistry on the fly, or stop a human choice by fiat. Those regularities and freedoms are part of what a world of genuine becoming is. plato.stanford.edu
Whitehead called God “the poet of the world,” leading it with tender patience by a vision of truth, beauty, and goodness— not the engineer who can shut the factory down. plato.stanford.edu
Cobb and Griffin are explicit: the reason God does not coerce is metaphysical, not merely moral. It is not that God could control everything and kindly refrains. A world of actual occasions that had no power of their own would not be a world of actual occasions. God did not first possess total control and then self-limit. The structure of reality does not contain a slot for a being who determines every outcome. dokumen.pub
That is why earthquakes, disease, predation, and death are not “punishments.” They are features of a cosmos in which there is real novelty, real conflict of aims, and real physical inheritance. God works in those processes by offering better possibilities moment by moment. God does not send them as verdicts.
What this does to theodicy and to death
Griffin’s process theodicy is blunt. Two evils matter: discord (suffering, conflict) and unnecessary triviality (wasted potential). God is responsible for there being a world intense enough that both great good and great evil are possible. God is not responsible for particular horrors as chosen instruments. God is always doing the most that persuasion can do with the situation that has already been decided by the past and by other agents. thegospelcoalition.org
Death, on this view, is not a judicial sentence for an original fault. Finite occasions perish as a condition of there being a temporal world at all. What process thought offers instead of “death as wages of sin” is two things:
1. God feels every life completely; the value that was achieved is not erased.
2. God continues to lure the ongoing world, including whatever personal continuation one may or may not affirm. Process Christians disagree among themselves about individual afterlife; the metaphysical core does not require a courtroom after death.
The psychic extra— guilt that your cancer or the tsunami is payback— has no place in the system. The world is tragic because becoming is real, not because a deity is settling scores.
Relation to Open theism
They are often grouped because both reject a fully settled future and a God untouched by the world. They are not the same.
Open theism usually keeps creatio ex nihilo, classical omnipotence (God could control everything but freely does not), and a stronger sense of divine aseity. The future is open because God chose to create free creatures; God could have done otherwise. Process theology says God cannot have a monopoly of power if there are other actualities at all. God and world are necessary correlates. Open theists typically want miracles as special divine interventions; many process theologians reinterpret “miracle” as unusually effective persuasion within the same metaphysical rules, not a suspension of them. garrettham.com
If your concern is specifically the angry-punisher God, both traditions reject that image. Process theology rejects it more thoroughly because it also rejects the underlying picture of a God who had the option of a painless, fully controlled world.
The costs of this picture
Honesty requires stating them.
Classical theists say this God is too small: a deity who cannot stop Auschwitz is not worthy of worship. Griffin’s reply is that a deity who could have stopped it and did not is morally worse. That is a genuine standoff, not a verbal trick. en.wikipedia.org
Process God also cannot guarantee outcomes. Prayer is not petition to a being who can rewrite nature on request; it is participation in the lure, adding one’s own aim to the situation God also aims at. Many believers find that existentially thinner than the older language of sovereignty.
Finally, the metaphysics is demanding. You do not get process theism as a light revision of Sunday-school God. You get a full Whiteheadian ontology: actual occasions, prehension, creativity as ultimate, God as an actual entity (Whitehead) or a personally ordered society of occasions (Hartshorne). Some find that illuminating; some find it a replacement religion wearing Christian vocabulary.
Why it speaks to the myth you described
The primitive schema says: paradise → human fault → angry deity → cursed nature → death as punishment → final apocalyptic settling of accounts.
Process theology says: there was no finished paradise that humans ruined by a single error. There is an everlasting process of becoming, with God as its supreme companion and lure. Nature’s harshness is the price of a world that is not a puppet show. Death is finitude, not a verdict. God does not need disasters to teach or to avenge. God is already inside every disaster as the one who feels it and offers the next possible good.
That does not make suffering easy. It does remove the second suffering— the belief that the first suffering is what you had coming. For the problem you named at the outset, that is the decisive shift.
My next:
In light of the above, explore Jesus’ dying cry- “Why have you forsaken me?” Was that a rejection of his belief in an unconditional God? After all, he also continued that belief in unconditional by stating to the thieves beside him that they too would be with him in paradise.
Grok reply:
The cry and the paradise saying sit in different Gospels and get read very differently in process thought than in penal-substitution frameworks. I’ll check the texts and the main process readings before answering.
The two sayings do not come from one continuous transcript. Mark and Matthew give the cry; only Luke gives the word to the thief. They are different portraits of the same death. That matters before any theology is built on “what Jesus still believed in the next breath.”
What the cry actually is
In Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46 Jesus shouts the opening of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In the Judaism of the time, to start a psalm was often to invoke the whole of it. Psalm 22 does not stay in abandonment. It moves from “you do not answer” through mockery and bodily ruin to “he has not hidden his face,” public praise, and the claim that coming generations will hear that God has acted. Whether Jesus recited only the first line or more, the citation is not a blank check for “God turned away in wrath.” It is a sufferer’s psalm used as interpretation of the death. en.wikipedia.org
The address is still “my God.” That is protest inside a relationship, the same grammar as Job and the lament psalms, not a resignation of the relationship. A rejection of an unconditional God would sound more like silence, curse, or “there is no God.” This is the opposite: God is still the one to whom the complaint is made.
Two rival readings of the forsaking
The punitive reading, which process theology rejects, says the Father actually withdrew because the Son had become sin and holiness cannot look on sin. The cry then marks a rupture: wrath poured out, fellowship broken, hell compressed into three hours. That reading fits the older myth you named— suffering as divine verdict. It also creates a severe Trinitarian problem (God against God) that later orthodoxy has to fence off with qualifications. logos.com
The process reading runs the other way. Marjorie Suchocki puts it sharply: the idea that God abandoned Jesus so that wrath could fall on him takes human vengefulness and projects it onto God. Jesus dies because of sin— because crucifixion is what empires and crowds do— not for sin in the sense that God needed a victim. The cross reveals that God is present in the place that looks most godless. God feels the godforsakenness; God does not inflict it as policy. openhorizons.org
On that view the cry is truthful as experience. A finite human consciousness, in torture, can lose every felt trace of the lure and the companion. Process metaphysics does not say Jesus only “seemed” to feel abandoned. It says the feeling can be real in the creature while God, in the consequent nature, is never actually absent. The Father does not walk off. The world of Roman nails, shock, asphyxia, and religious mockery can still drown the sense of presence. “Why?” is then the honest question of a man whose God is unconditional and whose nervous system is being destroyed.
Whitehead’s “fellow-sufferer who understands” is almost written for this scene. God is not the one who forsook. God is the one who undergoes the forsakenness with him.
Luke’s other Jesus
Luke does not report the cry at all. Luke’s dying Jesus says “Father, forgive them,” promises the criminal “today you will be with me in paradise,” and hands his spirit to the Father. That is a theology of unbroken address: still “Father,” still able to include another ruined man in the same future. Matthew and Mark’s Jesus is more raw; Luke’s is more composed. Harmonizing them into one inner sequence— “he felt abandoned, then recovered enough to promise paradise”— is pastoral reconstruction, not something any single evangelist wrote. en.wikipedia.org
If one still wants a single figure, process thought can hold both without making the Father the agent of the abandonment. Felt godforsakenness and a still-unconditional hope can coexist in one dying consciousness the way they coexist in Psalm 22 itself. The promise to the thief is then not a retraction of the cry. It is the same faith speaking from a different moment, or Luke’s way of saying what Mark said by quoting the psalm that does not end in verse 1.
Was it a rejection of unconditional God?
No, not if the words are taken as they stand.
• He still says my God.
• He uses Israel’s language of protest-faith, not the language of a canceled covenant.
• In the Lukan tradition he immediately treats paradise as available to a man with no moral résumé, which is the opposite of a God who forsakes people for their sins.
• Process categories make the tension intelligible: the world can hide God from a creature without God ceasing to include that creature.
What the cry does reject is the cheap version of unconditionality— the idea that if God is with you, you will feel it, and if you do not feel it, you have been dropped. Jesus’ question assumes the opposite: absence of consolation is not proof of absence of God, and it is still God one asks. That is closer to process theism than to the angry-deity schema. The punitive reading needs the Father to be the forsaker. The process reading needs the Father to be the one who does not forsake, even when the Son can no longer feel that.
The thieves saying, if held together with the cry, only sharpens the point. A God who was in that hour settling accounts with Jesus would be an odd source for an immediate, unearned “you will be with me.” A God who is already inside the catastrophe, feeling it and still luring toward whatever good remains, can say both “why?” and “today, with me.”
My next:
Let’s do this suggestions you made- Explore Whitehead’s concept of God as fellow-sufferer.
Grok reply:
I’ll pull the key Whitehead text and Suchocki’s main positions so the two sketches stay close to what they actually wrote.
These two pieces belong together. Whitehead gives the metaphysical claim. Suchocki turns it into a working Christian theology of prayer, sin, the cross, and what happens to evil.
Whitehead: God as fellow-sufferer
The line is not a pious aside. It is the last move of Process and Reality, after the technical machinery of actual occasions, prehension, and the two natures of God has been set down.
What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion — the fellow-sufferer who understands. openhorizons.org
Three things are packed into that.
1. Suffering here is metaphysical, not metaphorical.
Every actual occasion “prehends” its world: it feels the previous world as data and makes itself out of that feeling. God does the same thing without remainder. In the consequent nature God physically prehends every completed occasion — its joy, its pain, its failure, its triviality. God does not infer suffering from outside. God has it as immediate content of divine experience. That is why Whitehead can say God understands: the understanding is knowledge-with, not knowledge-about. religion-online.org
2. Nothing of value perishes into a void.
Whitehead’s name for time’s cruelty is “perpetual perishing.” Occasions flash and are gone. God’s consequent nature is the counter-move: “tender care that nothing be lost.” Each occasion, as it dies to itself, becomes objectively immortal in God. God “saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life.” This is not yet personal heaven in the Sunday-school sense. It is the claim that the universe is not a shredder. What was felt is kept, judged, and woven into a larger harmony in God. footnotes2plato.com
3. The saved world returns.
The last phase is not a one-way museum in God. The transformed divine experience “passes back into the temporal world” as “particular providence for particular occasions.” The fellow-sufferer is also the companion who offers the next aim, now informed by everything that has just been felt. Love goes up, is transmuted, and floods back. That is Whitehead’s substitute for a God who stands outside the wreck and either punishes it or ignores it.
What this picture refuses:
• An impassible God who cannot be touched.
• A punitive God who uses suffering as a tool.
• A God whose “understanding” is only omniscient bookkeeping.
God is one actuality among others in the metaphysical sense — the eminent one, not the exception to feeling. The cross, for later process Christians, is the historical image of what Whitehead says is always true: God is inside the pain, not the author who conscripted it.
Whitehead was not doing atonement theory. He was trying to say how a universe of becoming can have both loss and meaning. The fellow-sufferer is his answer to meaninglessness, not his answer to guilt.
My next:
As per your suggestion “Investigate Marjorie Suchocki’s process theology views”
Grok reply:
Marjorie Suchocki: what she does with that God
Suchocki is one of the clearest Christian translators of Whitehead. She keeps the fellow-sufferer and then asks the questions Whitehead left hanging: prayer, original sin, the cross, and whether evil gets the last word.
God works with the world as it is
Her refrain in In God’s Presence is: God works with the world as it is to lead it toward where it can be. God does not wait for a cleaned-up world. God takes the actual situation — including rage, fear, and half-honest prayer — as the material of the next lure. That is why prayer is not informing an already-decided deity. Prayer changes the “isness” of the world. A world in which this praying is happening is a different world from one in which it is not, and God has different material to work with. She will even say God needs the praying: not because God is weak in the sentimental sense, but because persuasive power has to use what is actually there. openhorizons.org
God “hears feelingly.” Prayer is received as the reality of the one who prays, not as a correctly worded petition that must compete with millions of others in a celestial inbox.
Sin is rebellion against creation, not first against a throne
In The Fall to Violence she relocates original sin. The inherited Christian story said prideful revolt against God, traced to a first pair. Suchocki says the primary mark missed is the well-being of creation. Sin is action that contributes to ill-being — of people, animals, earth — whether intended or not. Its structure is triadic: a human bent toward aggression that slides into violence; solidarity such that each is implicated in all; social systems that shape conscience so that harm is normal. To be human is already to participate in conditions of ill-being. That is her “original sin” without a garden crime scene. books.google.com
Sin against God is real, but secondary: because God feels every creature, harm to creation is harm felt in God. You do not need a legal offense against a monarch. Interdependence is enough.
Forgiveness, then, is not a cleared account in heaven. It is willing the well-being of both victim and violator, with the violence fully known. That is how the chain of violence is broken.
The cross: revelation, not divine punishment
She is explicit about the punitive reading you have been pushing against. The tradition that God abandoned Jesus so wrath could fall on him “takes the most vile aspect of our own vengeful spite, and project[s] it onto God.” Jesus suffered the pain of sin because crucifixion is sin. He died because of sin, not as God’s punishment for sin. If Jesus represents God, the cross shows that God feels the effects of our violence. The fellow-sufferer is made visible. openhorizons.org
That is the same logic as Whitehead, now named in Christian narrative.
The end of evil: God as the place where evil is overcome
The End of Evil is her most ambitious book. Historical evil is never fully healed inside history. If that were the whole story, evil would have the last word over the murdered and the broken. She will not accept that. So she develops a strong process eschatology that many other process thinkers leave softer. archive.org
Two stages:
• In history, God and creatures together transform what can be transformed. We are co-workers. The worse the evil, the more the responsibility, not the less.
• Everlastingly, every life is taken into God. There the person meets God’s evaluation of that life. Suchocki does not flinch at the language: in God there is something like judgment, purgation, even “heaven and hell” as modes of being in God. Evil in the self is “burned away” until the creature is conformed to divine love — she has said “whether they like it or not,” because in God the persuasive relation becomes overwhelming. The point is not torture. The point is that love is a will to well-being that will not finally let evil define anyone. youtube.com
This is her most controversial move. Whitehead gave objective immortality (the occasion lives on as object in God). Suchocki argues for a form of subjective immortality: the subject is resurrected into God’s life so that evil does not keep its victims as victims forever. God is “the end of evil” not by apocalyptic demolition of the world, but by being the one in whom evil cannot remain evil.
How the two speak to the earlier thread
Whitehead’s fellow-sufferer means the cry “why have you forsaken me?” can be fully serious as human experience without being a report that God walked away. God is the one who has that cry as felt content.
Suchocki adds the moral edge. A God who needs a victim in order to forgive is the old punitive schema in Trinitarian dress. A God who feels violence from the inside, who works with the world as it is, who takes the dead into a life where evil is not final — that is her alternative.
The cost is the same one process thought always pays: God does not stop the nails. The gain, for her, is that God does not sponsor them either, and they do not get the last word in God. That is the difference between a fellow-sufferer and a judge who forsook the accused in order to balance the books.
My next:
Let’s try- “Examine Hartshorne’s dipolar God” and “Explore David Ray Griffin’s theology”
Grok reply:
I’ll get Hartshorne’s own dipolar terms and Griffin’s distinctive moves on power, evil, and God so the two sketches stay precise.
Hartshorne is the logician of process theism. Griffin is its most systematic fighter on the problem of evil. Together they turn Whitehead’s fellow-sufferer into a full doctrine of divine power and a theodicy that refuses both “God sent this” and “evil is not really evil.”
Hartshorne’s dipolar God
Hartshorne called classical theism monopolar: on every contrast pair (being/becoming, absolute/relative, cause/effect, eternal/temporal, impassible/passible), it gave God only one side and treated the other as a defect. That, he said, is a prejudice, not a logic of perfection. Perfection should take the excellent form of both sides, in different respects. That is dipolar, or “neoclassical,” theism. He also called it panentheism and “surrelativism.” harvardsquarelibrary.org
Existence, essence, actuality
The key distinction is not Whitehead’s primordial/consequent language, though it maps onto it.
• Existence: that God is. Necessary. God cannot fail to exist.
• Essence: what God always is — all-knowing in the sense of knowing all that is knowable, all-loving, the worshipful one.
• Actuality: how God is in this moment — this concrete state of knowing this world, feeling these sufferings, including this history. Contingent. God could have been otherwise in actuality, because the world could have been otherwise. iep.utm.edu
Classical theism collapsed existence and actuality. Hartshorne splits them.
Metaphysical arguments can reach God’s existence. They cannot deduce God’s actual state today. That is given by the world.
The concrete pole includes the abstract pole. The living God is not an essence with a world glued on. The abstract “God exists as perfect love” is an abstraction from the full, changing divine life.
Dual transcendence, not less transcendence
When accused of shrinking God, Hartshorne said he believed in twice as much transcendence. God is eminent on both sides of the contrasts: supremely absolute and supremely relative, eternally steadfast in character and unsurpassably open to new content. Creatures are relative in a poor way (they miss most of the world). God is relative in a perfect way (related to all that is). That is “surrelativism”: God as the supreme instance of relativity, not the exception to it. plato.stanford.edu
The self-surpassing surpasser of all
This is his revision of Anselm. “That than which nothing greater can be conceived” was read as: unsurpassable even by God. Hartshorne splits unsurpassability:
• A-perfection (absolute): unsurpassable by others or by self. God has this in existence and moral character. No one, including God, can be more necessarily existent or more perfectly loving in principle.
• R-perfection (relative): unsurpassable by others, but surpassable by self. God has this in concrete experience. Tomorrow’s God includes more of the world than today’s. Richness of divine life can grow. iep.utm.edu
Hence the formula: God is “the self-surpassing surpasser of all.” No rival can overtake God. God can still become greater by taking in more actuality. Perfection is not a frozen maximum. A God who could not grow in experience after a child’s death or a new joy would be less related, not more perfect.
Panentheism and the world as in God
All is in God; God is more than all. Hartshorne’s analogy is mind and body: you include your cells, you are not identical with them, and they have their own activity. The cosmos is the body of God in that analogical sense. Creatures have real power; they can inflict what God would not choose. God includes their deeds as felt fact, not as divine decision. That is how Hartshorne keeps both divine all-inclusiveness and creaturely freedom. religion-online.org
Difference from Whitehead
Whitehead: God is one everlasting actual entity with primordial and consequent natures.
Hartshorne: God is better thought as a personally ordered society of divine occasions — a living person through time, not one never-finished concrescence. The abstract essence runs through the series; each divine occasion is a concrete state.
Hartshorne also pressed theistic arguments (ontological, cosmological, aesthetic) harder than Whitehead, who was more reticent. And Hartshorne was clearer that creatio ex nihilo is rejected: some world-or-other is as necessary as God. The particular world is not.
For the punitive-God problem: Hartshorne’s God cannot be the one who withholds relatedness as punishment. Relatedness is the concrete perfection of God. To “forsake” in the classical sense would be for God to stop being God.
David Ray Griffin’s theology
Griffin’s center of gravity is not dipolar vocabulary. It is power and evil. God, Power, and Evil (1976) and Evil Revisited (1991) are the main statements. He co-wrote the standard introduction with Cobb. Later he argued that process thought can support life after death and a robust naturalism that still allows God. archive.org
The real issue is the meaning of omnipotence
Griffin’s claim: traditional theodicies fail because they assume I-omnipotence (“I” for unilateral or interventionist in his usage): an omnipotent being can unilaterally bring about any intrinsically possible state of affairs. If that is God’s power, then either God is guilty of genuine evil or “evil” is only apparent. Both options are religiously ruinous. religion-online.org
He proposes C-omnipotence (coherent, or perfect power among other powers): perfect power is the greatest power one being can have given that other actualities have power too. No being can unilaterally determine the self-determination of another actual being. That is not a voluntary self-limitation God could revoke. It is metaphysical. To be actual is already to have some power. God cannot create powerless actualities. There was no option of a world of puppets that would still be a world of actual entities.So Griffin rejects creatio ex nihilo as the traditional doctrine used it: a God facing only logical limits, with no other powers on the scene. God always works with a world that has its own creativity. God lured cosmos out of chaos; God did not invent power from a blank.
Genuine evil, responsibility, indictment
Griffin insists evil is genuine. Suffering that makes the universe worse than it might have been is real. Traditional systems often smuggle in “it’s all for the best” or “it only looks evil.” He will not.
God is responsible for much evil in this sense: God lured the world toward more complex, more free, more intense experience. With higher value comes higher capacity for discord. Human cruelty is possible because God encouraged a world intense enough for human good.
God is not indictable: the alternative was not a safe paradise under total control. The alternative, at the metaphysical floor, is triviality or chaos. God did not choose Auschwitz as a means. God could not cancel the self-determination of the perpetrators and still have a world of actual agents. ygodallowsevil.com
His exchange with Roth and Sontag is the sharp edge. They said a God who could not stop Auschwitz is not worshipful. Griffin answered: a God who could and did not is morally worse. “Roth finds my God too small; I find his too gross.” en.wikipedia.org
Two kinds of evil
With Cobb: discord (conflict, suffering) and triviality (wasted intensity). Unnecessary triviality is evil; some simplicity is not. God aims at intensity-with-harmony. The evolutionary long delay and the persistence of pain are what you get when persuasion works on entities that also decide.
Later Griffin: hope and the demonic
In Evil Revisited he said a full theodicy needs eschatology. Early process thought was thin on “the victory of good.” He strengthened two things:
• A firmer sense of the demonic: not a rival god, but real, entrenched structures and intensities of evil that persuasion does not quickly dissolve.
• Openness to subjective immortality. Whitehead was cautious; Hartshorne usually settled for objective immortality in God. Griffin argued pan-experientialism (all actuality is experiential) makes a discarnate soul metaphysically possible. Hope that victims are not only remembered but still subjects matters for worship and for moral seriousness. brill.com
He also developed “naturalistic theism”: no supernatural interruptions of the world’s causal web, yet God is a real causal influence as the source of initial aims and the receptacle of all experience. Miracle, if the word is kept, is not a break in natural law but unusual effectiveness of the divine lure.
God in Griffin’s picture
Griffin follows Hartshorne more than Whitehead on the divine life: God as a series of divine occasions, not one never-finished entity. God has no localized body, so God cannot shove molecules the way a hand shoves a stone. That is why “why didn’t God stop the bullet?” is the wrong physics. Divine power is always on the inside of occasions as aim and feeling, never as an extra physical force from outside the system.
Christology, in his earlier A Process Christology, treats Jesus as the decisive revelation of this persuasive, suffering God — not as the sop to divine wrath.
Side by side, and back to your question- comparing Hartshorne and Griffin
1. Hartshorne 2. Griffin
Core question- 1. What would a coherent perfect being be? 2. How can God be good if evil is real?
Dipolarity- 1. Abstract existence / concrete actuality 2. Used, but power is the load-bearing beam
World- 1. In God; some world necessary 2. Same; chaos-to-cosmos, not ex nihilo
Power- 1. Greatest possible, never monopolistic 2. C-omnipotence vs I-omnipotence
Evil- 1. Creaturely freedom inside the divine life 2. Genuine; God responsible, not indictable
Afterlife- 1. Usually objective immortality in God 2. Argues subjective immortality is available
Neither can underwrite the myth that God punishes through disaster or that the Father forsook the Son to balance sin. Hartshorne’s God is defined by all-inclusive feeling; absence of relation would be a failure of deity. Griffin’s God does not have the kind of power that “pours wrath” or “stops the nails” from outside. The cry of dereliction, on their terms, is the creature’s loss of the sense of the companion, not the companion’s decision to leave.
The standing objection remains the one Griffin answered head-on: if this God cannot prevent genocide, why worship? Their reply is consistent and costly. Worship is for perfect goodness and perfect possible power, not for a monopolist who preferred not to help. Whether that is enough is the live argument. What it is not is the primitive schema of an angry deity using nature and death as the lash.
(End of Grok replies)