Religious intelligence is based on two obscure
ingredients,
one of which is spirituality, a religious feeling that does not make
any sense,
contrasting with religious moral precepts that can be justified by their
expedience,
a far more rational rationale for them than fear of punishment for their
disobedience.
I hope that God does not object to this poem’s message, taking
offense
to my comparison of divinations He allegedly facilitates in humans via AI, the
artificial intelligence
which typical believers in a holy God apply with human divinations, while they’re waiting
for contact with His religious intelligence, a concept they are with AI
conflating.
This poem was inspired by “The Religious Humbling of America; Faith can bring us back together,” Sapir, 6/9/26, in which Rabbi David Wolpe writes:
The decline of religion in America is not a private matter of belief; it is a public crisis of character. In 2025, a study revealed that the percentage of Americans who consider religion personally important fell below 50 percent for the first time. Tocqueville saw religion as the secret of American democracy. Yet this secret is being dismantled and disregarded, and religion has acquired a bad name. Opponents often level accusations of hypocrisy against the religious: “You say you are religious, but you still do this?” But the accusation is itself an affirmation of religion’s values, even if religious people don’t always live up to them. The recognition of hypocrisy confirms the original principle. Religions, in general, have certain ideas about how to treat others and live a morally upstanding life. And these ideas are deep, complex, and interesting — not simply “be nice.”
It is tragic to see religion wane in America at a moment when we desperately need it. Even as Americans insist on meaning, they are steadily abandoning the institutions that it has long flowed through. Much of what ails us in this country is an impoverishment of the ideas that religion nourishes and promotes. Understanding and recovering those central values would help lead our society back from the ill feeling and ill will that have so powerfully gripped us.
The core religious ideas to which I refer — the dignity of every human being, gratitude, purpose as necessary to a well-lived life, humility, decency, the importance of community — have their source in belief in God. But we don’t need to enter a theological argument to identify such values. Most people remain, in some deep sense, religious beings: believing in something that is greater than ourselves, intuiting a world that has a mystery at its heart, yearning for a direction to our dreams. Even if we reject traditional religion, a large majority of us still affirm that decency, goodness, humility, and justice aren’t simple whims but essential for the stability of the social order, of our nation and our world. But along the path of progress — social, technological, financial — we have lost the art of practicing, or at times even recognizing, such values.
