January 2025 – Man of Faith (Homo Credens)

When I was about 10 years old, we received news that a much beloved brilliant and exuberant cousin had passed on. I had already come to know that faith can move mountains even bringing the dead back to life. I mastered all the faith I could and pleaded with God, commanded him to bring my cousin back to life. Having prayed; I waited for the news with hope; My beloved cousin has risen ! Oooh man.

I had not yet understood that God being all wise and knowledgeable may not always agree with what we think is right and must happen. And that; for that reason, he may refuse to grant our request because much as we may desire, our request may not be the best for all involved. I knew little about how God works. Today, I know a little more, but I am still on a journey to knowing God and understanding how he works in the world.

In the book of exodus (Ex 32); God reprimanded the Israelites for making a Golden calf. He had already forbidden the Jews from worshiping other gods (Ex 20). But this was a situation in which they felt abandoned by Moses. It is possible some of them even reasoned Moses was probably dead. They make the Golden calf, not because they want to Worship another god. They are looking for the God who took them out of the land of Egypt. Having made the calf, they can feel secure and close to him, and they exclaim “This is your god, Israel, who brought you out of the Land of Egypt” Ex 32:4b. And Aaron even proceeds to prepare a festival for the “Lord”. With all their heart they were worshiping the God who took them out of Egypt with mighty deeds. But they had reduced him to something that he was not! A golden calf. And this was also particularly dangerous because calf was symbolic of deities in the ancient world. Aaron could have conceived this idea through his knowledge of other religions of his time.

When we reduce God to a “golden calf” like the Israelites of Exodus, we end up with a poor/bad picture of who God is and how he works and set ourselves up for big disappointments like the one I had when I prayed fervently for my cousin.

If a person says Totus Tuus(All yours) when they think God is some “golden calf”, a money or good luck machine or a capricious individual; their actions will reflect that picture. Instead of working and making effort to learn, they spend their day commanding God to give them promotions, jobs, and money. In extreme cases, people attempt to force others to convert including by threatening, injuring and killing them. This has happened to abortion clinics and gay clubs. Another extreme is a rejection of God who having been perceived is being capricious, and mean minded is rejected altogether since accepting him would seem to be capitulating to evil and “slavery”. The Spirit of Totus Tuus is behind a lot of abuse that takes place in religion today. Evangelical churches are particularly vulnerable because their Pastors often have supreme control of how to describe the person of God and how he works.

In case you do not know, “Totus Tuus” is the latin translation for “All yours”. It was the motto for St Pope John Paul II. It is similar to the statement of Mary, “May it be done to me according to your word” and to a lesser extent to the statement proclaiming Jesus as “personal Lord and Saviour”. It is also similar to the Islamic saying “Insha Allah”. It expresses a total surrender to the will of God, trustful that his will is always directed to our good in the end.

Totus Tuus has two sides to it. The first is what happens outside of us beyond our control. What we see or hear happening around us and on the news. Is there fighting in Congo? Did Trump depot a gang member? Was a very good politician in your neighborhood assassinated? Did someone relieve you of your wallet this evening downtown. Did a Priest do or say something today that was terrible. Did the Pope issue an edict that was nauseating and unbecoming of his role. Totus Tuus teaches us to hold that everything that has happened was allowed by God to take place. It teaches us that if he did not permit, the Pope would not even have the energy to lift his hands up and sign that declaration, however much he wanted to.

The second part of Totus Tuus is in our response. Totus Tuus asks us to always respond to everything in the way that God desires. Everything we see and witness is God’s invitation for us to respond as his servants who work to bring the good of his Kingdom. It is in this response that we become and are affirmed as children of God. If we do not respond correctly, we can receive condemnation like the rich man in the parable of Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31). Totus Tuus asks of us to be loyal and faithful servants of God even if it means giving up our life.

It is this part of Totus Tuus that is fraught with challenges. At one extreme are those who believe in doing nothing, because they cannot oppose the almighty power of God. According to them it is good to abort because God knew it would happen and allowed it. This group also includes us when we rationalize, normalize, and sanitize evil. On the other extreme are the people who go to great lengths to ensure that the will of God is done. Those who bomb gay clubs, attack abortion clinics, cut off people’s ears (Lk 22:50), call down fire on entire villages (Lk 9:54). That also includes us when we celebrate the attack on abortion clinics, the bombing of gay clubs or the demise and suffering of an evil dictator. There is nothing good in the death of a sinner or in attacking and wounding those who promote evil.

In the middle of these extremes lies most of us for whom Totus Tuus presents itself in a painful and difficult way. Seeming to ask of us to give up the small joys and pleasures of life. Or give up control of our lives and become reserved to a miserable existence in which what we feel does not matter. The God we know about today seems to ask of us that which is unreasonable. And yet our Christian journey continuously calls us towards saying Totus Tuus, walking in the path of the great Saints who we desire to emulate deeply. The unhealthy tensions cause some of us to reserve Totus Tuus for tomorrow.

Should you say Totus Tuus ? Eventually, yes, you should say Totus Tuus. Because in the end, when all is said and done, we will come to realize that God permitted the most painful things for our good. God works in a counter intuitive way. The Babylonian exile of the Jews for example literally meant that God was weaker than the Babylonian gods. But looked at in retrospect, we can see that the Babylonian exile cemented God as the controller of all the universe. Of all peoples and nations. In Babylon he showed his mighty power and will by subduing Nebuchadnezzar making him eat grass like an animal (Daniel 5:20-22). He commanded King Cyrus to order the return of the exiles and build a temple in Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 36:22-23). It was in Babylon that the Jews came to fully appreciate God as God of all the Earth, not a territorial God of Jerusalem. In Babylon they learnt that God was with them even in foreign lands, working mighty miracles and protecting them. It was in Babylon that the synagogues were born which were to become important tools of religious education. This religious education was important in preparing the Jews for the coming of the Messiah. But at the time of the fall of Jerusalem, it looked like the end, For Yawheh it was just the beginning of another chapter.

Should you say Totus Tuus?, maybe not yet. If you think that God is limiting your enjoyment with arcane rules. If the idea of surrendering to God makes you feel sad or feel like you have to give up certain things you like, absolutely not yet. If saying yes, means wishing others the wrath of God, wishing them death because you think they are depraved sinners, not yet. If you are not ready to endure the suffering of good people without wishing those who cause that suffering evil like Mary did with Jesus on the cross and those who executed him. You are not yet ready. Totus Tuus requires us to see good and the potential for good even in our evil enemies; to pray and work for their good and to respect their conscience and capacity to reason. St John Paul II is credited with destroying communism in Eastern Europe. But his appointment was okayed by the communist leaders in Poland who had veto rights over Church appointments of Bishops. This fact probably happened because he chose to look at them as human beings with dignity and did not seem to them like a rabid opponent. Really effective interventions are rarely loud.

When you are ready to say Totus Tuus, you will not have to speak it. It will come in many small ways consistently. Totus Tuus is the statement of a faith that has matured. A faith which has learned to thank God for all and like Mary to ponder patiently about the meaning of things not understood because in everything there is the invisible hand of God.
But we can all say, have mercy on us sinners and show us the way. Have compassion on us in our suffering and challenges. We can say, help us to see your loving hand in all things especially those that pain us deeply, so that like St Paul we can praise you because you make all things work for the good of us who you deeply love (Romans 8:28)!. We can be trustful of the great mercy of God and of Jesus the good and gentle teacher who leads each of us gently, mindful of our fears and misconceptions. We can be confident in his mercy to help us to come to an understanding of the truth in time and to say Totus Tuus with all our heart and all our mind.

NOTES:

Direct quotations from the New American Standard Bible

When Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT were first released, I experimented with bard and then gemini for a while; I noted some limitations but was impressed by its capabilities. But that use led me to refer to the Apostle’s creed as the Nicene creed for a significant amount of time. It was something which caused me embarrassment upon discovering. LLMs are especially bad because they have subtle lies. Outright lies are easy to detect. Subtle lies just slip under. After that incident, I stopped using LLMs.

Unfortunately LLMs migrated into my regular search, giving me really impressive, confident, irresistible and ‘useful’ summaries. It came first to Google Search and Bing. Then I migrated to Brave Search only occasionally checking Google for references. After a while, Brave Search also introduced Leo, spewing out beautiful summaries of what potentially does not exist, full with references. I felt angry and helpless. I tried to ignore the summaries but that did not seem to work. Then I tried turning it off. But I don’t know what happened. The LLM summaries just kept coming my way. It’s just too tempting, like a beautiful woman begging to flirt with you.

In the end, I started getting complacent, peeping into the AI summaries every so far often. One day, I searched for “when did the pillar of cloud leading the Jew disappear”. Behold there was a beautiful summary, almost relieving. But then, I decided to double check the results and I became angry. The answer to this question can be inferred from the fact that the pillar of cloud and fire was the primary campus for the Jews in the desert. When they entered the promised land, they would obviously not need the pillar of cloud. And what I needed was to find a Bible verse that made this reference to the end of this pillar of cloud and dust. And I got a beautiful summary (see image), complete with Bible quotations and references.

To summarise for you the result of my double checking; the basic premise of the summary was plausible (probably correct). But the Bible quotations did not support the summary. The referenced documents spoke about the subject matter but did not speak about the particular aspect. Some of the Bible verses could perhaps be used to justify the conclusion. But then, the logic would have to be inductive and not include such “phrases” like “specifically”. I have not found a Bible verse which specifically states when the pillar of cloud disappeared. But the AI was very confident and very specific about when it did. I was almost tempted to use the Bible quotations as a justification for that conclusion. Almost!

The reality is that we are all vulnerable to information that is nicely presented and projected with confidence. We perceive such information as coming from an expert and a fact that makes us even more gullible. At the same time, when we do a web search. We do so because we do not know. Worst of all when we meet a presentation that is referencing other sources, we are primed to believe what has been stated because we have been trained to know that when a person supports an assertion with a reference. That assertion must be right because they have taken their time to do their research. The only people who check references are skeptical reviewers intent on destroying an argument they do not believe. Most people rarely check references. Only people with an in depth knowledge in a specific field will make the attempt to check a reference, and that will only be done a small fraction of the time when they find that the assertions made seem wrong.

We search the web because we do not know. Most of the things we search for are not in our field of expertise. We are therefore rarely well placed to criticise an answer especially one that is well written and presented with confidence. For this reason, over reliance on AI will inevitably lead to the incorporation of half truth and lies into our knowledge base and dataset having believed a summary which is quoted.

I have gone shopping for alternatives to the traditional search engines (google, bing, and brave). It turns out there are many search engines out there, some of which use other search engines to process queries. It turns out there are over 24 search engines one can use. For the time being, I have settled on qwant.com and swisscow.com. If these also start providing automatic AI summaries, I will look for others. If the regular search engines can remove the experimental disclaimer on their summaries, I will come back to using them.

You can find out more about the different search engines. I know about AI, I want a plain search engine, which will not throw information that looks plausible but is unsupported by references. Even if AI summaries are not a result of hallucinations but are the genuine extraction of information from sources which my intuition suggests is not. The AI summary gives credence to those sources and may realize a conclusion that is not entirely true.

When the major search engines have the confidence to remove the experimental label and warning to search the results. I will go back to use them.

Appendix

screen shot of the search

Notes

Joshua: 1:13 “Remember the command that Moses the servant of the Lord gave you after he said, ‘The Lord your God will give you rest by giving you this land.’ “

Does not tell us that the pillar of cloud disappeared or that they entered the promised land.

Joshua 5: 10-12 “On the evening of the fourteenth day of the month, while camped at Gilgal on the plains of Jericho, the Israelites celebrated the Passover. 11 The day after the Passover, that very day, they ate some of the produce of the land: unleavened bread and roasted grain. 12 The manna stopped the day after[a] they ate this food from the land; there was no longer any manna for the Israelites, but that year they ate the produce of Canaan.”

We can use this to ascertain when the jews stopped receiving manna from heaven. It does not tell us when the pillar of the cloud disappeared.

You can continue the breakdown if you wish. But take the first reference Wikipedia is a generic reference to the pillar of cloud. It does not talk about the disappearance of the cloud using either deductive or inductive logic.

I do not have the appetite to continue an in depth analysis of this nonsense. The summary is not anything close to summary.

Alternative search engines.

Month: January 2025

Who is You? Totus Tuus; Why you should ? Why you shouldn’t ?

Why I am abandoning traditional search engines.

Appendix

screen shot of the search

Notes