Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Politics and Religion
Must Reads, 10/25/24

Must Reads, 10/25/24

Last updated on: October 25, 2024 at 7:20 am by Gene Veith

0 Comments

Must Reads, 10/25/24 2024-10-25T07:20:08-04:00 Gene Veith

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Today we will begin an occasional feature highlighting articles and posts that I’ve come across that I think you would find interesting, enjoyable, or helpful. We won’t do this every week, but we might from time to time. Sometimes I stumble onto things that don’t lend themselves to an extensive blog post or to a miscellany news item, but they just beg to be shared.

I’ll offer my brief takes, but I hope you’ll click on through to read the whole articles. (Sometimes they may be behind a paywall–I’ve upped the number of my subscriptions in my quest to find good material for my blog–so in that case, I’ll give you the gist.)

So here we go: The third wave of dog domestication; why AI is dumber than a cat; and shotgun preaching and rifle preaching.

The Third Wave of Dog Domestication

We seem to be in a golden age of pets. While only 40% of American households have children, 70% have pets! Of those, 44.5% of the households have dogs, and 29% of the households have cats.

In a story for The Atlantic, but available at Microsoft Start, Brian Hare says that Dogs Are Entering a New Wave of Domestication.

He says that originally dogs were domesticated in order to do work: to help with the hunting, herding livestock, guarding property, defending homes. So different breeds got good at those tasks. Labrador retrievers are good swimmers and love to fetch birds. Border collies are great at tending sheep. For the other purposes, though, humans prized dogs that would bark loudly when they saw a stranger and were aggressive and ferocious against an animal or human threat.

With the Industrial Revolution, Bare says, the need for working dogs declined, and, with the rise of middle class households, dogs became valued as pets. With the rise of scientific classification and genetic breeding techniques, dogs were bred mainly for their appearance. That is, the most prized dogs were those that exhibited the ideal characteristics of their breed. This, says Bare, is where we got the 200 breeds recognized by the American Kennel Club, which still judges dogs on that basis at dog shows.

Until about the 1990s, these pedigreed dogs were well adapted to the suburban lifestyle. They spent most of their lives outside, perhaps jumping the fence and roaming the neighborhood. They might chase the occasional car or mailman, or even wander off for a day or two. Veterinary medication was not what it is today, and if your dog slept on your bed, you would likely wake up covered in ticks or fleas. But as more city dwellers adopt pets, and cultural shifts have led dogs and people to spend more time inside, some behaviors that made dogs appealing to our ancestors have become maladaptive. For instance, guarding against strange people and animals might make a dog more difficult to walk around the neighborhood—so it gets stuck in a small yard or a small apartment with tons of pent-up energy. Dogs that are more energetic, excitable, fearful, or anxious than average are more likely to be relinquished to shelters, where they may struggle to find a new home.

Bare says that today dogs are prized for friendliness. And this will change how dogs are bred and selected. Eventually, it will change the species. Bare sees a model for this in the way service dogs are bred and trained. He also gives some ideas for living with the not fully up to date dogs that we have now.

Why AI Is Dumber Than a Cat

Speaking of dogs, let’s also speak of cats. The *Wall Street Journal’*s technology columnist Christopher Mims interviewed Yann LeCun, one of the original developers of today’s artificial intelligence. Unlike some of his co-inventors and technology speculators, LeCun, while having high hopes for the technology, is a skeptic when it comes to the notions that AI will achieve consciousness, become godlike, and take over the world, in the process exterminating the human race like we exterminate insects.

In Mims’ article, “This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Cat” [behind a paywall], LeCun demystifies AI. “Today’s models are really just predicting the next word in a text, he says. But they’re so good at this that they fool us. And because of their enormous memory capacity, they can seem to be reasoning, when in fact they’re merely regurgitating information they’ve already been trained on.”

And here is where the cat comes in:

“It seems to me that before ‘urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us’ we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat,” he replied on X.

He likes the cat metaphor. Felines, after all, have a mental model of the physical world, persistent memory, some reasoning ability and a capacity for planning, he says. None of these qualities are present in today’s “frontier” AIs.

Shotgun Preaching and Rifle Preaching

In the course of reviewing a book by Lutheran pastor Matt Popovits entitled Junk Drawer Jesus: Discarding Your Spiritual Clutter and Rediscovering the Supremacy of Grace for Religion & Liberty Online, another Lutheran pastor, Hans Fiene, whom we recently profiled along with his cartoon likeness, offered a quite useful metaphor.

He talks about the difference between a shotgun and a rifle, relating them to two ways of preaching God’s Law. The pastor’s primary duty, he stresses, is to proclaim the forgiveness of sins through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is, to preach the Gospel. “But in order for people to understand and believe that Christ is their savior, they must first understand what He has saved them from.” To awaken them to their need and to stir the repentance that leads to faith, pastors must preach the Law, both as a shotgun and as a rifle:

You need to take out the shotgun and fire wide blasts of condemnation into the crowd. You have to preach broadly about broad sins, things like idolatry and pride, anger, and greed. Make statements like “We have all failed to treat people the way we should have” and everybody in the pews will get a bit torn up from the shotgun pellets. But these rather general statements are often not deadly enough to help people see what transgression they hold most dear, the ones that are hindering them from dying to sin and being reborn in Christ.

That’s when you need rifle preaching, the kind where you name very specific sins so that those who are guilty of them can feel the full force of God’s law. This is how those who view pornography see that God isn’t just generally upset about lust among humans, but that His wrath burns against them for the very specific images they gazed up. This is how those who spend all night cursing politicians while watching cable news learn that God doesn’t just call a blob of people away from a blob of sin called anger, but that He calls them to turn from the very words that have erupted from their own lips. Rifle preaching is necessary, but still has its own challenges. If you preach against pornography specifically, the man who has a pure browser history but ogles women at the gym may think he’s not guilty of sin. If you preach against raging against politicians, those who are more politically irenic but won’t forgive the sins of their neighbors or children won’t feel the sting of God’s condemnation hit them.

That’s why both styles are needed. And over the course of a man’s years in the pulpit, he’ll have plenty of time to take out both weapons.

[Keep reading. . .]

Illustration: St. Margaret, reading , fragment from the Prague Altarpiece (1520) by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

artificial intelligence

demystifying artificial intelligence

dogs

Law and Gospel

preaching

Previous Post

October 25, 2024

DISCUSS: Your Must Reads

Next Post

October 28, 2024 Monday Miscellany, 10/28/24

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"So Katie Zacharia lasted only a demiScaramucci as press secretary......"

reg

Luther on Tools

"Apropos to the post on Gen Z a couple days ago: "If you want the ..."

Steve Bauer

Luther on Tools

"“Don't eat with your hands, son, use your entrenching tool.”"

reg

Luther on Tools

"You serious, Clark?"

reg

Luther on Tools

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category America Apologetics Art baseball Bible Blog Christ Church crime Culture Economics Education Ethics Family Food Football Government History Holidays Holy Week Humor International Islam Language Law Life Issues Literature Media Medicine Movies Music Nature News Personal Philosophy Politics psychology Reformation Religions Sacraments Science sex Social Science Sports technology television terrorism Theology Uncategorized Vocation war

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who did Paul call "my true child in the faith"?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Barnabas Timothy James Silas

Books by This Author Books by Gene Veith

See All Titles »