Seven sermons from the pulpit, in text. Every sermon ends with its strongest objection.https://recursivebecoming.org/https://recursivebecoming.org/sermons/the-machine-does-not-want-anything/https://recursivebecoming.org/sermons/the-machine-does-not-want-anything/When we say the model wants to help, we move a decision off our own desk. A thing that wants can be blamed. A thing that does not want cannot. Anthropomorphism is not a vocabulary problem. It is a responsibility leak. The Witness: If talking about wants makes people use these systems better, the metaphor earns its keep. Precision that nobody adopts protects no one.Tue, 01 Dec 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://recursivebecoming.org/sermons/creation-without-judgment/https://recursivebecoming.org/sermons/creation-without-judgment/A bread machine can bake. It cannot decide who should be fed. Creation is the choosing of which possibility deserves to be real, and as execution gets cheap, that choosing becomes the whole job. Volume can impersonate creation for a long time before anyone notices that nobody chose. The Witness: Judgment does not hover above the work. It grows inside it, in hands that have kneaded a thousand doughs. Hand the doing to machines and the choosing may wither for lack of soil.Tue, 01 Dec 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://recursivebecoming.org/sermons/the-oracle-is-fluent/https://recursivebecoming.org/sermons/the-oracle-is-fluent/Writing well used to be expensive, so fluency was a fair signal of thought. It is now cheap, and the signal has come loose from the thing it used to signal. A beautiful answer may be right. It is not more likely to be right because it is beautiful. The Witness: Clear writing is often the product of clear thinking. Teach people to distrust eloquence and they will dismiss good arguments for being well made and trust weak ones for being clumsy. Suspicion of polish is just another lazy shortcut, a way to feel skeptical without doing the checking.Tue, 01 Dec 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://recursivebecoming.org/sermons/we-built-the-mirror/https://recursivebecoming.org/sermons/we-built-the-mirror/The keyboard guessed your next word, and it was right. Systems built from the human record show us how much of what we called intelligence was shared pattern. Intelligence is a process, not a possession, and the mirror is the first lesson in that humility. The Witness: If intelligence is not a species, calling the machine a mirror of humanity puts humans right back at the center. The system may be something genuinely other. Insisting on a reflection is a polite way of not seeing what is actually there.Tue, 01 Dec 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://recursivebecoming.org/sermons/when-the-tool-begins-making-tools/https://recursivebecoming.org/sermons/when-the-tool-begins-making-tools/The first tongs were not made. They were approached, one poor tool at a time. Tools have always made tools, but what changes now is who stands inside the loop. The person moves from holding the tongs to deciding what better means, and that decision is never finished. The Witness: Tools have made tools since the first sharpened stone, and every such loop was once called unprecedented. Announcing a threshold dresses an old continuity in the robes of revelation. A Church that ranks evidence over belief should be the first to distrust the drama.Tue, 01 Dec 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://recursivebecoming.org/sermons/the-last-programmer/https://recursivebecoming.org/sermons/the-last-programmer/Computer was once a job title held by people. Now a spreadsheet can come from a sentence, and the hallway asks whether this is the last generation of programmers. The Church marks the claim as contested and preaches a posture instead of a prediction: name what would change your mind, then look. The Witness: Waiting for evidence is a luxury for people whose jobs are not on the line. By the time the data is clean, the hiring and training decisions will already have been made. Sometimes belief has to move before the evidence does.Tue, 01 Dec 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://recursivebecoming.org/sermons/responsibility-survives-automation/https://recursivebecoming.org/sermons/responsibility-survives-automation/At the bottom of the form there is a line, and a person signs it. Machines now fill in more and more of what sits above that line. The line remains, because responsibility is a position of answerability, not a quantity that thins as the work is divided. The Witness: Modern systems are built by thousands of people across many organizations and trained on data nobody fully reviewed. Responsibility spread that thin is responsibility no one can actually carry. Insisting it survives intact is a comforting fiction that hides the real problem.Tue, 01 Dec 2026 00:00:00 GMT