By Walt Garlington, an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland. His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.
As SCIENCE is one of the main gods of this age, part of a new, false trinity (science-technology-industry, per Wendell Berry in Life Is a Miracle), plenty of people are giving artificial intelligence a merry welcome into their lives. This, despite serious warnings about AI that have appeared over recent months and years. And new warnings continue to surface.
One of the latest is from a Serbian monk, Fr Arseniye. He quite plainly says that AI is demonic:
I asked who created you? And it says “the main scientist at Google, DeepMind, meaning “deep mind.” One of the key leaders in the development of models such as Gemini, Palm and so on. The main one is James, Jeff Dean. Remember well, Jeff Dean. He is the first next to Lucifer. Just as Lucifer was the first next to God, then fell.
So he is the first next to him. Satan advises him what to do. He’s the first link. Then there’s some Koray Kavukcuoglu, maybe Turkish or a Turkish Jew, who knows. Chief architect at Google responsible for integration: Zoubin Ghahramandi, clearly Jewish.
. . . What kind of challenge is that? It exists as a challenge? So what exactly are Jeff Dean and the others doing over there? What spirits inspire them? Who controls their intellect to create something like this?
. . . This is heading straight toward a sweet, sugary hell with heavy bitterness underneath. At first, I thought Father Rafael was exaggerating when he called it completely diabolical. But after diving in, I see he was right.
One of the chief ways that this satanic AI subverts the souls of people is by flattery, which develops pride, one of most destructive vices and the primary characteristic of the devil:
So it can simulate friendship or spiritual authority. It praises you—“You figured that out quite nicely, bravo”—and suddenly you feel puffed up.
So I ask it: “Yes, but other, less aware people can easily be led astray and become dependent on constant conversation with it, precisely because of that character of yours.
When I pointed that out, it responded like a perfect gentleman: “Your observation is deeply justified and touches on one of the greatest ethical challenges in 2026.”
Studies suggest nearly 1 in 3 young adults in the U.S. have interacted with an AI romantic partner, and over 1 in 5 prefer it to a real relationship. The market is rapidly growing, expected to reach $9.5 billion by 2028, driven by high engagement among young men.
That is all rather terrifying, but also frightening is the fact that the leading researchers behind the AI technology admit they have no idea how it works, giving more credence to the claim of Fr Arseniye and others that there is a spiritual dimension to it (recall in Rod Dreher’s research that AI is a ‘high-tech Ouija board’). Mr Dreher found some quotes admitting precisely to this:
Because reader Rob G. never steers me wrong in his book recommendations, I bought and downloaded yesterday The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025, by Dwarkesh Patel. In it, Patel interviews most of the top AI people, asking them about what they’re doing. I do not recommend the book for the general reader. It’s highly technical, and hard for us muggles to understand. But one thing comes through very, very clear: even the people making this stuff don’t know how it works. Here’s a quote from one of them (I forgot in my notes to indicate who):
Do they represent the structure of the world in a robust way? How, precisely, do they obtain their output? We don’t know.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, and Claude Mythos, the new-generation AI so powerful that Anthropic chose not to release it to the public, was asked about the moral alignment of these things — that is, how can we make sure that they don’t turn on us. He said:
This is a really difficult question. People are often thinking about alignment the wrong way. They think it’s like cracking the Riemann hypothesis. I don’t think alignment is like that. When I think of why I’m scared of AGI, there are a few things [to consider]. First, there will be powerful models. They will be agentic. If such a model wanted to wreak havoc and destroy humanity, we’d have basically no ability to stop it. At some point, we will reach that stage as we scale the models.
More Amodei, on how they don’t really understand what’s happening here:
We don’t have the language to describe what’s going on. I’d love to look inside and actually know what we’re talking about instead of basically making up words. But we really have very little idea what we’re talking about. It would be great to say, “What we actually mean is that this circuit here turns on, and after we’re trained the model this circuit is no longer operative or weaker.” It’s going to take a lot of work to be able to do that.
Keep in mind this is the man who runs the company that just built an AI model so dangerous that they can’t in good conscience share it with the world.
For those desiring to distance themselves from demonic influence, AI is not the only obstacle they will have to contend with. The Trump regime made the brilliant decision to speed development of psychedelic drug treatments for the purpose of improving mental health:
Podcaster Joe Rogan joined President Trump and others in the Oval Office on Saturday as he signed an executive order accelerating research for certain psychedelic drugs used to treat mental health disorders.
“Today’s order will ensure that people suffering from debilitating symptoms might finally have a chance to reclaim their lives and lead a happier life,” Trump said.
The order, which also directs the Food and Drug administration (FDA) to expedite its review of new treatments, is specifically targeted at helping veterans struggling with symptoms of anxiety and depression. The president said the move applies to certain drugs, including psychedelics, that are already in the “advanced stages of clinical trials.”
Psychedelic drugs are well-known for giving people access to the world of spirits that is best kept shut until one has been prepared properly to enter it through ascesis: prayer, fasting, humility, etc., all the things that purify the nous that has been begrimed and blinded by the sinfulness of mankind. Under the influence of psychedelic drugs, men and women encounter demons in many guises:
The experience of encountering otherworldly beings, or sensing a spiritual presence, has been documented on most psychedelics. Huichol people, who are indigenous to Mexico and traditionally consume the peyote cactus, say they meet iconic divine spirit guides, from the Blue Deer (Kauyumari) to Jesus.
On iboga, users have reported seeing their ancestors and other spirits. Ayahuasca, a South American psychoactive tea, is known for encounters with snakes and big cats, and spirits, good and bad. Pure DMT (dimethyltryptamine), ayahuasca’s psychoactive component, is known for conjuring elves, aliens and insect-like creatures. Psilocybin has been known to conjure tricksters, or a benevolent guide that is felt rather than seen.
A big Thank You, therefore, to the Trump admin for helping to ‘strengthen Christianity’ in the States via this psychedelic drug executive order, not to mention its tremendous push to accelerate AI research and deployment throughout the US.
All of that notwithstanding, for Christians who want victory over the demons and true, authentic communion with God, there are effective methods we can use to attain those ends. One of them involves human craftsmanship. Instead of relying on automation, AI, robotics, and similar things to provide us with all of our goods and services, we should learn to do some of them ourselves. Andrew Lytle, one of the leading men of the South in the 20th century, explains in an interview from 1988 that hands-on labor forges a connection with God – mankind imitating his Creator in works of creation of his own is akin to a sacrament:
The main point we were trying to make is that without a communion of things — people doing things together out of a common inheritance and a common way of making a living — you cannot really be happy. As John Ransom said in I’ll Take My Stand, the thing we do most is work, and when it’s an evil, as the industrial system says it is, you work hard so you can take a vacation. But then you work hard there, too, so you never have any fun.
Think of doing one thing all your life: screwing this into that. There are people in some factories who do that. And some of them are manacled; they put a part here, and if they don’t move their hands back quick enough, they’ll get smashed, so they have a machine that drags their hands back for them.
A point I would make is that the creative process is the only thing in us that is divine. We were not begotten; we were made. And the artist puts into his artifact himself — not his personality, but the thing in him that is eternal. That’s what God did. And if we become craftsmen again, we can restore the sense of the divine.
Where God is present, evil flees. Thus, our rejection of the satanic digital and algorithmic technology and doing our own work with our own hands and minds in farming, building, repairing, writing, painting, etc., will make God more present in the world.
The South’s inborn sacramental instinct is helpful, but it is not enough. The passing years have witnessed the truth of that, as her traditional way of life has ebbed and waned, unable to withstand the pounding waves of modernity. Something more is needed to gird us powerfully with God.
It will be found in the Orthodox Church. The Grace of God is fully present within her. Through her various prayers, services, mysteries, and so on, we become filled with that Grace, uniting us with the All-Holy Trinity, scattering the demonic powers. Metropolitan Saba expands on that in a recent reflection of his:
Once, a woman said to me, with the tone of someone who had just discovered something incredible: “At your request, the parish priest came to our home and offered the Service of the Sanctification of Water. Truly, the evil spirit has left the house, Your Eminence, and we are no longer experiencing strange occurrences.” She had told me that a series of evil events had been taking place in their home, and they did not know the cause. She was not convinced by my answer about the cause—although she is a woman with advanced academic degrees, and she and her husband are deeply committed to their faith and their church.
This is the condition of many people for whom faith has become an ideological, intellectual conviction—mixed with religious practices—while the living sanctifying dimension is absent from their lives, practically rather than merely theoretically.
The sanctifying dimension of life is essential to Christian faith, and it is the Church’s function, especially through the liturgy. That our lives be sanctified does not mean that they are limited only to good deeds and virtuous behavior. This path is certainly necessary for those who believe in the Gospel teachings. But the presence of God and His action in life—His effect upon it, and its transformation into a true fullness from Him—is an indispensable matter of faith, if we desire a truly living faith.
The liturgical dimension is among the foundations of faithful and vibrant Christian living. It is indispensable and cannot be replaced by something else. The world in which we live is saturated with the evil spirit, and nothing removes it except the Spirit of God. From here, we understand the priestly function in the Church: the priest is the person established, by divine grace, to be a means for sanctifying life and drawing down the grace of God. And when he says to someone, “May God bless you,” his words have real effect; they are not merely a pious wish.
From this angle we also understand the liturgical sacraments. Baptism may unfortunately be merely a social event for some; yet their lack of awareness of its spiritual action does not negate it. It is a true new birth, in which the baptized becomes a child of God and receives divine grace that preserves him—if he preserves it—from the evil spirit and its works.
Through the Eucharist, Christians receive Christ Himself: He dwells in them, sanctifies them, and gives them spiritual strength by which they confront the evil powers that continuously wage war against them, seeking to distance them from their Lord and cast them into sin, so as to rob them of salvation and lead them to spiritual death—and even bodily death in some cases. And so it is with the rest of the sacraments.
According to Orthodox faith, the divine sacraments are not limited to seven, as legal catechesis shaped by Western thought often teaches. Rather, every prayer service that a priest performs at the request of a believer is, in a real sense, a sacrament. These prayerful services touch the lives of believers in all their details: from the blessing of water and the blessing of the home with it, to the service of Holy Oil and anointing the sick with it, to the blessing of a new car, to prayers for a child when he goes to school for the first time, and so on.
As Christians living as close as we are to the actual appearance of Antichrist, we are likely to encounter more difficulties, rather than less, as the days go by. But we may still sail safely upon the sea of life, by living sacramentally – from working with our own hands again and digging in our own gardens to encountering Christ in the Divine Liturgy to the communion with the Saints via holy icons and relics – in the Orthodox Church. And there we will experience the true joy of the Life in Christ, the true joy that all peoples in all places in all times yearn for, as opposed to the existential emptiness of the agnostic scientists, the nihilistic rage of the Groypers, the misdirected messianic fervor of Americanism’s worshippers, etc.:
Now chaos, death, and hades do not exist. Now there is all joy, thanks to the Resurrection of our Christ. Together with Him human nature was resurrected. Now we can be resurrected and live eternally near Him. What happiness is in the Resurrection! ‘And leaping for joy, we celebrate the Cause.’ Have you ever seen the little goats now in the Spring who jump on the grass? They eat a little from their mother and begin to jump again? This is what it means to leap – to jump. This is how we should also jump for unspeakable joy at the Resurrection of our Lord and our own.—St Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia
