Did you know you can bet on 2027 being the year of the second coming of Jesus Christ? Many people reportedly have - Americans probably.
I suppose this is barely more absurd than viewing universal healthcare as (a) communism, and (b) less of a human right than gun ownership.
Of course, the smart money knows God never left.
Like many, I had received the Catechism involuntarily as a child, mainly through the Marist Brothers.
Their leaden tutelage drew heavily on the Gospel but rarely animated the earthly truths at its core.
It wasn't the parables one should take figuratively (while taking God's existence literally), but something closer to the reverse.
In hindsight, the God drummed into us with a rigid paternal certainty, was more likely, the key metaphor.
Or, to be more precise, God is that unique constituent of the human experience that sits untallied, beyond the scope of mere words.
Here, lay the object of our enlightenment and its essential project - to recognise the Divine within and in so doing, to at last embrace responsibility for human worth and human failings: love, kindness, creativity, yes, but also, violence, hatred, racism and greed.
This is the pristine possibility of Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV's stunning first encyclical timed to meet the anniversary of the radically progressive Rerum Novarum by the previous "Leo", Pope Leo XIII, fully 135 years earlier.
In Magnifica Humanitas, the first American pope displays global leadership and moral clarity in marking out the beauty of humanity against what he calls the "messianic dreams of Silicon Valley".
"With the heart of a shepherd and a father," he writes, "I ask everyone to abandon the construction of yet another Tower of Babel and to join forces in building up the common good, so that humanity will never lose its beauty, and the world once again will come to recognise the human heart as the place where God desires to dwell".
There it is, in fresh Vatican ink - "...the human heart ... where God desires to dwell".
Rerum Novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour) came in May 1891 at the dawning of the industrial age.
Now, on the eve of a bigger socioeconomic rupture, Leo XIV's encyclical centres human dignity once again warning that the things most foundational to us, love, recognition, and free will, face frontal attack.
Leo recognises that omnipotent AI imperils the human essence precisely because it mimics authentic human agency.
Never before has a technology been so ubiquitous and so determinedly extra-human. Machines will never feel awe or patriotism, faith or disappointment, even if they may already be simulating these presentations.
Yet their limitless capabilities, and the concentrated power of the trillionaires who own them, portend an inverted revolution re-enslaving mind, spirit and body-politic - a lifeless new imperium, uncluttered by conscience.
As government's dither, Leo XIV's message seeks a shift in religious and secular positioning. In the face of a technology capable of reducing art and culture to behavioural probabilities rather than emotional experiences, progressive secularists and religious traditionalists will find common cause.
"The Church regards all who sincerely seek 'truth, goodness and beauty' as companions on the journey, and considers them as 'precious allies'," writes Leo.
Machines, he knows, have no need of faith.
In such a world, any distinction between fakes and originals becomes moot - and thus between natural dignity and capital return. Authenticity becomes redundant.
As we contemplate surrender to own technological prowess, the question arises, do we have the slightest idea what we're doing?
What if all along, we were the God but simply misread the metaphor and left it to someone else?
Consider it. We decide the fates of every living thing and thus, fate itself. Deferring to AI then, is a final dereliction of our moral duty.
Perhaps this, too, is also unavoidably human?
Either way, the juxtaposition of an unhinged American president and an unregulated AI presents a perfect storm.
Both are symptoms of collapsing self-worth. Through Trump's rise we see the world's most powerful polity collaborating in its own moral decline, its citizens saying "go ahead, lie to our faces, build your gaudy monuments, steal our wealth and traditions ... we deserve no better".
To be godless is one thing, but to invent a replacement for human agency? Suddenly, it all becomes clear: Blessed are the rapacious for they will incinerate the world.
God is human but nobody told us. Hell is perennially hot because we cooked the planet. That it happened slowly at first, only makes it worse. We could have acted but didn't. We "believed" an external deity would see us right - in this life or the next. It was the perfect mindset for avoiding responsibility.
We didn't stop at the obvious stuff either - clearing trees and driving desertification. We dug out every living thing that ever existed - billions of years of compressed organic matter pressed into coal, oil and gas, and we burned it like there was no tomorrow. Made sure of it.
Deep down, we knew what we'd done - we'd turned human responsibility into human licence.
And now we imagine AI as a new God? My money's on the Second Coming.
