By John Kass

Nov. 19, 2025    

Because I grew up as a religious minority—a Greek Orthodox kid treading water in the Kelly-green sea of Chicago Irish Catholics—I was never all that keen on hunting down the heretics.

“Are you really Christian?” a kid from St. Catherine said as we conducted our endless theological discussions either at the playground or playing fast pitching on the wall of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox church. “Do you believe in Jesus or the Greek gods? Father Kane doesn’t think you’re Christians.”

Please, don’t burn me, I cried. I’m a White Sox fan.

In the 1960s, a time of squishy theology as the political left was killing off the Roman Catholic Church and the desperate church announced the end of the Latin Mass. A few members of our St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox parish—including my mom– were supportive of inter-faith dialogue with the nearby Catholics from St. Catherine of Alexandria.

But Father Kane put his foot down and killed the idea about a dialogue with “those Greeks.”

Of course, that didn’t stop his assistant Father O’Brien from stopping over by our house for dinner on Wednesdays and my mom’s delicious Greek cooking, including her braised lamb and baked orzo, or her galaktoboureko dessert, sweet orange touched custard wrapped in honey drenched phyllo dough. Betty makes it for us now.

But nothing tickles my Byzantine urge to burn heretics at the stake like the news that there is such a thing as ChatGPTJesus.

You may have heard about it. It’s not science fiction anymore, but our greased road to hell. I don’t believe in violence, but I’m willing to reconsider because I think we need a good old-fashioned inquisition with various medieval tortures and lashings.

ChatGPT Jesus was created by–you wouldn’t believe it—by Artificial Intelligence, meaning AI. Which sadly, probably means I can’t have AI boiled in oil. Does AI feel pain? If it is real, that is if we can still use such a word as “real” these days.

The first time I saw the ChatGPTJesus was years ago when I was a film student. It was a film directed by George Lukas of who later create “Star Wars.”. The movie was called THX-1138.

And this past Sunday, after we’d taken Holy Communion and celebrated the Feast of St. Mathew, the dour tax collector who wrote part of the Gospel, we found it again on the Prime streaming service. It was disturbing, so much so that I witlessly insisted we watch it because I’d planned to write this. One scene is the one referred to as the Confession.”

THX 1138 was George Lucas’s first feature film, a 1971 science fiction movie. In the confession scene, the protagonist played by Robert Duval enters an automated confession booth. The state-sanctioned deity in this world is named OMM 0910, and its visual representation, which appears on a screen during confessions and I’ve used the painting as lead illustration of this column, is Hans Memling’s painting, Christ Giving His Blessing.

There is another scene that many will recognized, as Duval watches his entertainment, like we watch TV now. He is zonked on tranquilizers–he lives in a state where it is illegal to avoid state prescribed pharmaceuticals,  and switches the channels, from idiotic low comedy to obscene violence and back again, his face impassive, a victim of state control. If you watch other people as they watch today’s TV, passively changing channels to find “something good to watch,” you might recognize yourselves.

Hans Memling was one of the major figures of early Netherlandish painting. The portrait-like conception was reportedly inspired by a medieval document offering a physical description of Christ. According to what I’ve read on Memling “Both the sensitive modeling of the face and the gesture of the left hand casually resting on the bottom of the frame create an illusion of space and depth. The painting is still in its original frame, an exceptionally rare survival. The date of the painting (1481) is inscribed at the top center of the frame.”

In the film, the Jesus is used a means of state control. In the confessional, an automated voice with pre-programmed messages like “my time is yours”, “go ahead”, and “I understand” and “be productive,” responding to the confession. This “Jesus-like digital picture” is a key element of the film’s social commentary on control and an apathetic society broken by the bureaucrats.

In this dystopian hell, where human beings are overly medicated, hooked on big pharma to endure their lives, they are encouraged to visit confessionals to speak to the deity, and to “unburden” themselves.

According to one of the ChatGPT websites, “Talk to Jesus Christ on ChatGPT. A compassionate guide offering life and spiritual advice. Trained on Jesus’ teachings found in the Bible.

But it isn’t Jesus. It’s only recorded phrases strung together by open AI. And if I were king, their board members would be burned at the stake for this. OpenAI’s board of directors includes several prominent figures from various fields:

• Bret Taylor (Chair)
• Sam Altman (CEO)
• Adam D’Angelo
• Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann
• Dr. Zico Kolter (non-voting observer)
• Retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone
• Adebayo Ogunlesi
• Nicole Seligman
• Larry Summers

I’m not advocating real violence, but given the arc of our culture, I do not advocate it. Yet now that I think on it, it should be obvious that burning a few heretics might be just the thing to bring our divided nation together.

Summers is the former president of Harvard and a big time Ivy League Democrat Party brain. The Democrats had hoped to use Epstein to destroy Trump. That is all they’ve been talking about for weeks. Now, though, they’re sad cry cats mewing in the dark. Summers has been so wounded by his emails now public between himself and his pedo wingman, Jeffrey Epstein, that he’s decided to “retire from public life,” as if his pronouncement is enough, as if he’s some creature in a cheap melodrama.

Top Trump official: OpenAI, Harvard should dump Summers

“I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein,” Summers bleated to POLITICO. “While continuing to fulfill my teaching obligations, I will be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.”

Stepping back? Full responsibility? You pathetic worm, if you were a man, you’d take a long walk in the woods and not return. All you would leave behind is the fluttering of the startled birds. Or at least give yourself up to the fathers of those girls.

I’m sure there are many who would talk about ChatGPTJesus or the other copies as something offering to touch the human soul. But that is a lie. Even in this time of spiritual yearning it is a lie. Call me old fashioned, a hopeless Orthodox Christian, but there is no soul to a machine. It is only a machine, performing as it was designed.

And still there are people in the world desperately seeking contact, even with a lie. You don’t need a computer to talk to Jesus. Or some demon like Larry Summers. You can do it in my favorite spot in a church, in the back pew where I’ve asked Kyrie Eliason, Lord have mercy, my head down, whispering. But any moment would do. It can be accomplished in your drive home from work, in a crowd at an athletic event, alone on a river, on a train, anywhere. Just ask Him.

He knows what’s on your mind. He’s always known. All you need to do is ask.

 

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About the author: John Kass spent decades as a political writer and news columnist in Chicago working at a major metropolitan newspaper. He is co-host of The Chicago Way podcast. And he just loves his “No Chumbolone” hat, because johnkassnews.com is a “No Chumbolone” Zone where you can always get a cup of common sense.

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