My apologies to the ever-irreverent Babylon Bee for copying and pasting your post regarding Facebook scanning for misinformation before forwarding our prayers to God. It is here: https://babylonbee.com/news/facebook-to-scan-prayers-for-misinformation-before-passing-them-on-to-god
and copied in full with my comments below:
MENLO PARK, CA—Facebook has introduced a new prayer request feature. Unfortunately, according to Mark Zuckerberg, many people are posting prayer requests with lots of misinformation in them. So, to fight these misleading prayers, Facebook is now scanning all prayer requests for misinformation before they will pass them on to God.
“All prayer requests will go through our fact-checking filters so we can make sure there’s no harmful information in them before they make their way to the Almighty,” said Zuckerberg during a press briefing Friday. “For instance, if you tell God your spouse is being unreasonable, but you, in fact, are the one who’s being unreasonable, we’ll still pass on the prayer request, but God will get a little pop-up saying that this information has been disputed by leading fact-checkers.”
The fact-check process will also check for heresy. Many Protestants tend to commit multiple heresies in short prayers. For example, people will begin praying to the Father and then thank Him for dying for us. These kinds of errors will be caught by the automated algorithm before God gets your message.
Prayers will also be scanned for too many uses of the word “just” so that God doesn’t get too annoyed by them.
THE BABYLON BEE
So that the good folks at Babylon Bee won’t sue me, please do subscribe to them. This Old Catholic archpresbyter is merely jealous that I did not think of it before them.
I wonder how much education, experience, examination and just-plain common sense might be the case with a Facebook fact-checking arbitrator. Recalling what my sort had to go through in times primordial to gain certification for ordination, it would be nice if the apostates at Zuckerberg’s “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” were compelled at least to do likewise.
And what I learned as the Chaplain of a maximum security, death row prison, who tended to the religious needs of 13 different religious groups meeting in the Religious Center, and another twenty or so unable or unwilling to meet, and experience of the extreme pluralism of the society at large, makes me wonder about the possibilities for an algorithm capable of scrutinizing the prayers of billions directed an an ‘Other’ of whatever sort. Utterly unimaginable…
The consummate arrogance of big-tech magnates aside, the comedic presentation of Babylon Bee gives us pause to consider the utter arrogance of government scanning our beliefs as we already know. The phenomenon of Lois Lerner redux in a current IRS official who equates the Bible with the Republican party instructs us that the government wants to ‘fact-check’ your soul. A Buttigieg gaining in popularity, who famously claimed that our owners in D.C. ought to police our religious thoughts, gives us pause still further as we recognize that this is nothing new.
When the government or the big-tech alliance become the ‘belief-police’, liberty is gone…
Father David+