Surprised by Holy Hacker News

Seeing a thoughtful, Bible-inspired post today was encouraging in a place where I never thought I would find one.

The post was written by a group I don’t read; it’s on a relevant topic and exposes people who don't normally consider Jesus to his words.

Typically, you would consider people in the startup and tech fields opposed to religious thought. Considering it outdated or incompatible with their worldview. After today, I’ll need to reconsider. 

The front page of Hacker News is the last place I expected to find a philosophical post shared by the Roman Catholic Church.

Talk about two different communities. A startup incubator and a church with roots from Ancient Rome.

For those unfamiliar with the Y Combinator page Hacker News, it’s a news feed filled with cerebral writing pieces, conversations on entrepreneurism, fancy new technology tools, updates to code bases, rants resonating with the community, and deep dive reports on computer science topics. You’ll find industry data pertinent to startups or tech. It's my kind of interesting when I can understand the topics. Similar to Reddit, upvoted posts the community deems most worthy or groundbreaking rise to the top.

Not to put too fine a point on it, you can find a lot of interesting hacker news there.

After my nine-year hiatus from checking HN regularly (edit: daily), the site design was as familiar as ever. Makes my heart glad to see you can still find the same deep diversity of topics there.

The HN post I found (but nearly missed due to the Latin title: “Antiqua et Nova”) was the Roman Catholic position on AI.

While it wasn’t the highest-voted link on the homepage, when I saw it, it was the most commented and discussed post on the front page.

With the subject being AI, it must have finally crossed the two communities' intellectual radar just enough to result in a rare HN front page appearance of the Roman Catholic and Christian worldview.

As an Evangelical Christian, I don’t agree with many unique particulars of the Catholic Church. But reading this note was a profound moment of appreciation for their thoughtful, Christian considerations on AI. I’ve not read another source outside of Evangelical spheres that would worry about AI becoming an idol (which is also one of my concerns about LLMs and more advanced technology). 

Idolatry is examined in a couple of the 117 points, in one of 6 sections. The Vatican's note covers AI environmental concerns, job markets, and impact on the poor. It’s a tremendous range of topics. They all get a few punchy sentences in well-written paragraphs. Aquinas gets quoted along with the pope and Jesus.

In fact, the quality of reflection and broad scope of the note is undoubtedly one of the reasons the piece made it outside typical Catholic channels.

Quality thoughts get considered.

In this post, it’s not my goal to try and sift out the details and my differences with the article's many positions. There would be differences. Someone more qualified than myself would have to sort that out anyway. The Vatican has some brilliant guys thinking about and debating this stuff.

It’s encouraging to see God’s words shared on a pertinent topic posted where people might be hearing scripture for the first time. I hope more people hear about Jesus and meet him through posts like this timely Vatican note.

That being said, I would definitely encourage anyone finding Jesus in a post to attend a healthy Evangelical church. While I wish I didn’t need disclaimers, I do think Roman Catholic theology and practices are distracting from Jesus at the very best and, at worst, harmful to serving him.

Jesus is still using the Catholic Church, as he uses all of us. We’re all still working towards sanctification in Jesus, but no purgatory or prayers to saints will be required.

Read Antiqua et nova with a grain of salt, but there is much to appreciate here and think about.