Reclaiming Reality

Reclaiming Reality: A Christian Blueprint for Navigating the AI Era

• Andrew Torba • Season 2 • Episode 1

Share episode

What if artificial intelligence is not just reshaping technology but our very perception of reality? Join me as I return to the Reclaiming Reality podcast to discuss my latest book, "Reclaiming Reality: Restoring Humanity in the Age of AI." This episode tackles the spiritual and existential crises of our era, where AI-generated narratives pose a threat to truth and human identity. As Christians, we face a challenge: to ensure that technology serves humanity and is grounded in divine truth rather than allowing it to redefine what it means to be human.

Embark on a journey to construct a society that prioritizes truth, family, and faith in the midst of crumbling modern ideologies. Drawing inspiration from historical dissidents, I explore the concept of building a parallel society steeped in Christian values, with independent systems like cryptocurrencies and AI grounded in wisdom. This isn't just a theoretical discussion—it's a call to action. Through my engagement with alternative platforms like Gab, I aim to motivate a movement towards a civilization that glorifies God and thrives amid the technological and cultural upheaval of our times. Tune in to be part of this transformative journey and explore a future where faith and technology coexist in harmony.

Get the book here: https://reclaimingreality.com

Support the show

Speaker 1:

Hello there, friends. It's been quite some time. My name is Andrew Torvo and this is the Reclaiming Reality podcast. It's been about a year since I recorded my last episode and I've spent the past year working on my new book, reclaiming Reality. This book really took me to the depths of the abyss and, frankly, if it wasn't for my faith in Christ, I don't know that I would have made it out.

Speaker 1:

I've been thinking through a lot of these existential questions as we enter into this new technological renaissance with the rise of AI. So Gab is on the cutting edge of integrating, you know, the latest and greatest in AI tools and models. We have our own model that is uncensored, of course, and you know we've also integrated some of the top models both, you know, open source and in the proprietary big tech models as well into our platform. That platform has grown tremendously over the past year. So now we have over a million users, which is crazy to think about, because we don't spend a dime on marketing, it's all word of mouth and that platform is now outpacing the growth of Gab Social or of any of our other services. So it's really exciting and I think we're on the cusp of having something really truly great in the Gab arsenal of parallel services.

Speaker 1:

So this book has been a labor of love. So this book has been a labor of love. I've spent hundreds of hours reading and researching and writing and editing and you know, even something as simple as designing the cover. We went through several iterations and I was crowdsourcing that over the past couple of weeks, getting feedback from people on it, and I even changed the title of the book itself last minute and it's been quite a ride, but it's been a joy to work on this. I don't think I've seen really anybody else talking about the things that I'm talking about in this book.

Speaker 1:

Talking about the things that I'm talking about in this book. These are existential issues and we're up against a secular ideology that is fundamentally opposed to the biblical worldview and to the way that human beings have viewed reality and humanity for millennia. You know it's the worldview of the technocrats in Silicon Valley and the transhumanists is really just totally opposed to normalcy and to common sense and to humanity. It is fundamentally an anti-human ideology, as we'll get into in the book. And so you know, the reason I wanted to bring back this podcast is I want to read the book to you. You know it's a 300-page book, so it's a big book.

Speaker 1:

And in the age of short attention spans and in the age of short attention spans, where everybody's, you know, busy, and especially those of us with children, it's very difficult to find time to read a 300-page book. But you know, we can listen to podcasts, we can listen to audio, so for a lot of people it's a lot easier to sit and listen to a book than it is to sit and read, which is unfortunate. Easier to sit and listen to a book than it is to sit and read, which is unfortunate. And it's one of the things that I'm sort of trying to address in this book is like we have to get back to what is real and spend time with, you know, real, tangible things like actual books. These are important things that our attention being so diverted by the algorithms and so sucked in it makes it very difficult for our attention spans, which have been slowly eroded away over the past two decades or so, really in the last 10 years, more so with the rise of things like you know TikTok and algorithmic feeds and things of this nature, short-term videos, all that sort of stuff. So I'm going to read the book to you and I hope that this is helpful and if you enjoy the content, if you're liking the book as I'm reading it here, you know, support us, support what I'm doing, support what Gab is doing, and I'll include a link to the full book in the show's notes. But so for this first inaugural episode here, I'm going to just read the introduction. By the time this is published, the book will be available both on Amazon and on the Gab Shop in digital form as well. So let's just dive right into it and I'll start with the introduction. So the name of the book is Reclaiming Reality Restoring Humanity in the Age of AI, and this is the introduction. The world as we knew it is dead. What comes next largely depends on who builds it.

Speaker 1:

Artificial intelligence, digital economies and algorithmic governance are not distant possibilities. They are already reshaping the way we live, work and think. Every aspect of life, from the information we consume to the relationships we form, is increasingly mediated by machines. We are entering an era where AI will not only assist human decision-making but, in many cases, replace it entirely. This transformation raises fundamental questions. What does it mean to be human when AI can mimic our creativity, outthink our brightest minds and potentially alter our social and economic structures. How do we find meaning in a world where labor, art and even relationships risk becoming obsolete? These are not merely technical challenges. They are spiritual crisis dressed in silicon.

Speaker 1:

Our fight is not simply for control over data or algorithms or economic power. It is a battle to reclaim reality itself. We are witnessing the systematic erosion of objective truth, as AI-generated narratives, synthetic media and machine-driven consensus distort our perception of the world, distort our perception of the world. Reality, once anchored in divine order and natural law, is now subject to manipulation by those who control the algorithms. This is not just a technological development. It is the final consequence of a civilization that has abandoned truth in favor of power. If Christians do not assert the primacy of God's reality over the machine simulation, then reality itself will be rewritten according to a godless vision.

Speaker 1:

To reclaim reality in the age of AI means more than resisting digital illusions. It requires the active reconstruction of a world where truth is unshakable, where human identity is not programmable and where technology serves rather than supplants God's creation. Technological change is not new. The Industrial Revolution reshaped work, the Digital Revolution transformed communication and media, and now the AI revolution threatens to redefine intelligence, identity and reality itself. Yet, despite its radical nature, technology alone does not determine our fate. The future is not something that simply happens to us. It is something we must actively shape.

Speaker 1:

For centuries, the West was defined by Christian civilization. Faith provided the moral and intellectual framework upon which law, government, education and culture were built. Even those who rejected Christian doctrine operated within a society whose foundations were undeniably shaped by biblical principles. But that foundation has been eroded. The institutions that once preserved and transmitted truth have either collapsed or have been captured by forces hostile to Christianity. The modern world has rejected not only faith but the very concept of objective reality. In its place, it has erected a new order, one governed not by truth but by power, by shifting narratives and by the relentless march of technological progress with no guiding moral framework.

Speaker 1:

Christians cannot afford to be passive observers to this transformation. Too often, the church has responded to technological and cultural shifts with either naive optimism or fearful retreat. Some have embraced every new development as inherently good, assuming that progress will naturally serve humanity's best interests. Others have sought to withdraw from the modern world, entirely believing that disengagement is the only way to preserve faith. Both approaches are inadequate. The reality is that technology is neither inherently good nor evil. It is a tool and, like all tools, its impact depends on who wields it and to what end. If Christians do not shape the future, others will, and they will do so according to an ideology that denies the existence of God, the sanctity of human life and the reality of objective truth.

Speaker 1:

This book is a call to action. It is an argument for why Christians must not only engage with the modern world, but actively build a new one. The era of expecting secular institutions to self-correct has ended. The belief that the modern systems will accommodate Christian values is no longer tenable. Governments, corporations, media and education are not neutral forces. They have taken a stance, and it is one that stands in opposition to the gospel. The only viable path forward is the intentional creation of parallel structures, alternative institutions, economies and communities that uphold Christian principles and function independently of those who seek to erode them.

Speaker 1:

History is shaped by those who act. The rise and fall of civilizations is not determined by impersonal forces, but by the choices of individuals and communities. The early Christians did not wait for Rome to accommodate them. They built their own networks, their own traditions, their own parallel society that eventually outlived the empire itself. The dissidents who resisted totalitarian regimes did not seek validation from the systems that oppressed them. They built underground communities that preserved truth until the moment of renewal arrived. We are at a similar turning point. The systems that once sustained civilization are crumbling and new ones are being erected in their place. The question is not whether a new world will emerge. The question is who will shape it. If Christians do not step forward, if we do not take seriously the call to build, then the future will be shaped by those who believe that faith is irrelevant, that humanity is malleable and that power rather than truth determines reality.

Speaker 1:

This book is structured to guide that effort, but it does not need to be read in a particular order. While the chapters follow a progression, each one stands on its own, addressing a specific aspect of our technological and spiritual crossroads. Whether you read cover to cover or jump between sections, the central message remains the time for passive observation is over. We must build. I aim to confront not only the spiritual paralysis of our age but, more broadly, the bankrupt intellectual and philosophical frameworks of modernity as a whole.

Speaker 1:

The 20th century, shaped by materialism, scientism, moral relativism and utopian ideologies, has left a toxic inheritance a world stripped of transcendence, human dignity and divine purpose. Its secular dogmas, from the cold rationality of technocratic progress to the nihilistic surrender of postmodernism, have proven incapable of addressing humanity's deepest needs or navigating the existential questions posed by emerging technologies. I reject the modern era's reductionist view of human beings as nothing more than economic units or political instruments, and nations as mere economic zones. I reject its blind faith in centralized institutions and its arrogant disregard for the wisdom of the past. The post-enlightenment fixation on autonomy and progress, divorced from virtue, has led to a profound crisis of meaning, one that neither Silicon Valley's algorithms nor Washington's bureaucracies can solve. This is more than a critique. It is a fearless invitation to reimagine civilization's foundations.

Speaker 1:

Just as the early church in the Book of Acts broke free from cultural and religious expectations to embrace a spirit-led vision of community and faith, we too must cast off the limitations of the 20th century thinking, its compartmentalized faith, its accommodation to secular power structures and its passive acceptance of technology as a neutral force. By rediscovering the transformative power of the gospel and its call to renewal, we can step into a future where faith is integrated, courageous and deeply engaged with the world. The path forward demands nothing less than the restoration of pre-modern Christian truths, reasserted with post-modern urgency to steward this technological renaissance towards holy ends. The 20th century's idols, the state, the machine, the market must give way to a renewed vision where human flourishing is inseparable from communion with God and where innovation serves not man's pride but his eternal design. The objective is not merely preserving Christian values in a changing world. It is about actively using these powerful new tools as instruments of God's will, actively using these powerful new tools as instruments of God's will, creating new sanctuaries of truth and virtue and establishing technological systems that reflect and amplify Christian principles. By approaching these innovations with wisdom and divine purpose, we can work toward a future where technology serves not just human progress but the greater glory of God. Not just human progress, but the greater glory of God.

Speaker 1:

The crumbling remains of an 80-year-old globalist experiment, a monstrous creation stitched together from the runes of secular liberalism, rootless cosmopolitanism. The intentional erosion of Christian civilization now convulses in its death throes, much like the cursed walls of Jericho. The post-war consensus order quakes its facade of eternal stability, obliterated by deep fissures in its godless underpinnings, let the blind weep for its demise. Those whose gaze is set on eternity see not destruction but providence, the divine architect clearing away the ruins to lay the foundations of truth. Behold, I am doing a new thing, declares the Lord, who transforms wastelands into vineyards.

Speaker 1:

Now is our chance to do something extraordinary create a parallel society that goes beyond anything the Czech dissidents achieved with their underground resistance to a communist regime. We're not just hiding printing presses in basements. We're building independent systems that don't rely on broken structures of the world. Think of cryptocurrencies, funding churches, ai trained on the wisdom of Christian thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas, and homeschool groups that also serve as hubs for innovation and community. This is about creating something new, bold and free from the world's control. This isn't retreat. It's spiritual D-Day. While the world licks its wounds from modernity's self-destruction, we break ground on a city whose architect and builder is God, a civilization where code serves Christ, algorithms amplify virtue and every innovation brings God glory. The parallel polis isn't a bunker. It's a beachhead. Our strength lies in a shared mission to confront the wreckage of modernity with unflinching resolve.

Speaker 1:

My aim is not to merely analyze cultural decay, but to expose dying ideologies to the light, to name the hard truths our age refuses to face and to ignite the kind of fearless dialogue that leads to renewal. This is no exercise in abstract theory. It is a work rooted in flesh and blood, commitments to the sanctity of truth, to the defense of family and community and to the unapologetic declaration of Christ's lordship over all things, from the digital sphere to the physical world and beyond and beyond. What some may call harsh critiques are, in truth, the urgent triage of a civilization hemorrhaging its soul, surgical interventions meant to break modernity's death grip before it drags us all into the abyss. Let me be absolutely clear when I challenge the false idols of our age.

Speaker 1:

From radical individualism, progress severed from virtue and moral relativism disguised as tolerance, I and blind trust in technocratic solutions has led us to the edge of collapse. We exalt innovation while our families crumble, our churches empty, birth rates fall off a cliff and our children lose hope. To stay silent now is not neutrality. It is complicity in the destruction of beauty, truth and human dignity. The Enlightenment's brave new world has become a self-imposed prison. It's time to discard the flawed designs and construct something better. We're done negotiating with decay. The mandate is total transformation. We're done negotiating with decay. The mandate is total transformation, to build systems so radiant with divine truth and practical power that the collapsing world clamors to join us. You hold a roadmap for holy insurgency. The kingdom's forge is hot. We'll blend silicone and steel into tools for God's harvest. The adventure awaits, the battle for the future. Soul is live and the clock ticks with prophetic urgency. We are builders, not bystanders, pioneers, not refugees. The same spirit that hovered over the primordial chaos now ignites our hands to code, create and wield technology, as David swung his sling Unashamed, precise and destined to topple giants. The stones are in hand, the target is set and now we strike.

Speaker 1:

So that's the introduction to my new book, reclaiming Reality. I'm going to keep doing episodes like this and I'm reading the chapters there's, I think, 13 chapters in total and it gets very philosophical, theological and deep. There's a lot of big questions that we have to address that are currently unanswered. They are answered. God's word answers them for us. But I think there are so many of us that are sort of revisiting these fundamental questions of who are we when AI can do all the stuff that we're supposed to be doing or that we have been doing? You know what becomes of us? What does work look like when AI is, you know, doing all the things that we used to do? Who are we as humans when AI can create and mimic? You know the work that we do. So these are some of the questions that we're going to be going through, and this is an existential journey and I hope you'll join me on it. If you're interested, please go purchase the book. It'll support our efforts here with what we're doing.

Speaker 1:

And again, this is not just a thesis, right, this isn't just words on a paper. This is something that these ideas you know, these ideas of building parallel systems, building a parallel society these are things that I've been talking about for many years now and actively doing. Right, these are things that I'm actually doing in my real life. Right, building, you know, these parallel systems and this parallel infrastructure. You know Gab being the quintessential example of an alternative social network and now, of course, gab AI, offering an uncensored parallel AI infrastructure platform. So, you know, we're not just you know theorizing here. You know I wanted to get these ideas in a book, to get them out there.

Speaker 1:

Right, I've been writing blog posts and, you know, sending emails and, of course, doing all of my normal day-to-day social media posts about these topics for many years now, but I think it's important to sort of have them down in a book and to answer a lot of these fundamental questions that are going to be coming in the next couple of decades, if not sooner, and we have to have. You know the church has to have an answer to. You know ideologies like transhumanism, and you know the secular will-to-power sort of mentality that these technocrats have. They don't care about humanity, they view the body as a bug to be fixed right. They want to somehow extract their soul if they even believe in a soul, which most of them don't because they're materialists they want to remove their consciousness from their body, which they see as sort of limiting and defective and not a glorious gift from God, and put it into a robot or put it into a new body. These are the ideologies, these are the plans of the people that hold a tremendous amount of power, have a tremendous amount of wealth and a tremendous amount of control and influence over our society and our culture, and so the church must be prepared to give a response.

Speaker 1:

And then also, secondly, we're entering into an age that is going to basically be an existential crisis. Right, people are going to question reality, especially with things like deepfake videos and even voice AI as one example. You could be right now listening to a clone of my voice. That is AI, and you wouldn't know the difference. And actually I trained a model on hours and hours of my interviews and my podcast episodes from a few years ago and was able to train an AI voice model and it's very convincing. You could be listening to it right now. Now you're not. I'm going to tell you you're not, but you wouldn't know. That's how good it is. And so when we enter into a world where not only voice but video, where if there's photos of you or video footage of you, it's now comically easy to make AI footage of maybe you doing something illegal, right? And so we're entering into this world where people are going to start questioning reality itself and they need some sort of ground to stand on, some grounding of truth, and, of course, the ultimate grounding of truth is Jesus Christ. And so this is actually, you know, as we enter into this age of existential crisis, it's actually a gospel opportunity, and I think not enough Christians are talking about these things, are thinking this way. There really aren't too many Christian technologists, which is a big problem. We need more Christian technologists and Christian entrepreneurs and Christian thinkers aren't stuck in the past.

Speaker 1:

I think that you know there's something to be said about sort of having this nostalgic longing for, you know, the 1500s or whatever. You know I wish it was. You know, I wish I was alive and it was like during the time of Calvin or something right. And this is how this is sort of the trap, the mind trap that a lot of Christians sort of fall into. Now it's important to study history and it's important to study, you know, the writings of Christians from the past and theologians. There's nothing wrong with that. But I think it sort of transforms into this like LARP, this longing and this LARPing where you know we have to understand that like we're living in, you know, the now, the present right, and we're heading in a direction.

Speaker 1:

And I think there's too many Christians that sort of spend way too much time, especially Christian thinkers. You know many theologians. They spend way too much time looking in the past instead of sort of having, you know, like a prophetic vision for the future. You know, what does Christianity look like in the age of AI? What does our faith look like? What does what ground do we have to stand on? And of course we have plenty. But people need to be reminded of that and not everybody knows that, especially in our widely secularized society, and so it's our duty to be thinking about these things and to be guiding not only Christians through it, but the broader secular world as well.

Speaker 1:

Because so starts taking jobs, and it's going to happen, probably quicker than people realize. It's going to create this, you know, sort of existential crisis and people are going to be questioning reality. They're not, you know. They're not going to know if the video in their newsfeed is real or fake. So this is going to create a crisis, and the church needs to be prepared to welcome these folks in with open arms, with the love of Christ, and point them to Christ as the solid rock to stand on. And that's my hope with this book, because there's a lot of non-Christians that follow me online and maybe even look up to me in some capacity, and so my hope and my prayer is that this book will lead them to Christ, is that this book will lead them to Christ, and perhaps there are some folks who are maybe nominally Christian or culturally Christian who will go all in and go all in for Christ and start living their lives for Christ, not only on Sunday, but every hour of every day. Sunday, but every hour of every day. That's fundamentally where the future for a new Christendom is going to arise. Obviously, it starts with people's hearts and, hopefully, speaking on these things, which I frankly don't see any other Christian leaders embracing any of this stuff or talking about any of this stuff I'm hoping that God can use me and speak to people who have ears to listen and eyes to see where things are going and what needs to be done and get the church prepared for a response.

Speaker 1:

So that's the introduction. That's what I've been working on for the past year. That's why there haven't been any new episodes. I've been writing this 300-page book for a year now and of course, I've been very busy building Gab and also raising my three children, which is obviously priority number one for me. So I hope you guys enjoyed the introduction. Go check out the book. It'll be on Amazon and it'll also be on the Gab shop in digital form. For now I'll probably do. You know a lot of people are asking already for signed copies and stuff, so I'll probably do that once I get the copies in and go through signing a bunch of them. So check it out on Amazon, reclaiming Reality and the Gab Shop, shopgabcom. We'll have digital copies there as well. Thank you guys for tuning in. God bless and keep fighting. Christ is King.

People on this episode

Contributor

Andrew Torba

Host