Famine, Christianity, and Pope Leo's AI Letter

Famine, Christianity, and Pope Leo's AI Letter
A lightly edited version of a letter emailed to a group of physicists, Catholic Church officials, government leaders, and other thought leaders
on May 24, 2026, Day 87 of the Iran War,
the day before issuance of Magnifica Humanitas, and, as it turned out,
Pentecost Sunday for 2026

Greetings to all,

I’ve been working on other matters lately, to the exclusion of writing you as part of this series of letters. I hope you’re all well. Tomorrow is Memorial Day, when Usonians remember those who have died fighting for the United States and, for some reason, not those who have been killed by the United States. Ask a Usonian how many people died in the Vietnam War. You might be surprised by the radically erroneous number they’re apt to state, but then again, you may know enough Usonians to anticipate that mistake. This letter is meant to explain Christianity to a Chinese person who expressed interest on a national news broadcast here, during the recent meetings between Pres. Trump and Pres. Xi, in understanding the dominant religion of Western Civilization, an explanation I’ve been building toward in these letters. I’ll start with a story.

Albany, New York, USA, has exerted great influence on the world, though the city is treated as a joke, to keep the people of Albany subservient and divert their minds from continuing that tradition of power. Part of the city’s story was created by Irish immigrants.

One time, I encountered a large group of schoolchildren from Ireland in the New York State Capitol, on Washington Avenue in Albany, and asked one of the adults whether they intended to cross the street, to visit the “Birthplace of Modern Electricity,” as the New York State Department of Education has dubbed the Old Albany Academy building, where the great physicist Joseph Henry performed his epochal experiments on magnetism, experiments that created an important part of the scientific foundation for our global technological civilization, and where Henry is said by at least one literary scholar to have inspired Albany Academy student and future novelist Herman Melville.

Of course, the group had no idea what a treasure they could visit by adding a short walk to their journey of thousands of miles, for most people I chat up on the subject in Albany haven’t heard of Henry.

Now, I’m on the subject of Irish folk. According to Wikipedia, Henry was Scottish, and his laboratory assistant at Albany Academy, Dr. Philip Ten Eyck, was descended from the Dutch, an early group of European colonizers. His research assistant at Princeton, later on, was Sam Parker, who was African American (Joseph Henry - Wikipedia). However, Joseph Henry was eventually in contact (Joseph Henry's Letter to William Brooke O'Shaughnessy (October 30, 1843) | Smithsonian Institution) with Sir William Brooke O'Shaughnessy (William Brooke O'Shaughnessy - Wikipedia), who worked in 1839 in India to advance telegraph technology that Henry pioneered at Albany Academy around 1830 ((1) Joseph Henry, Part 2, Found Physics Museum, Albany Branch - YouTube).

Most Irish people were not living the life of Riley back then, let alone the life of O’Shaughnessy. Irish folk were regarded as a race inferior to white folk, which conveniently justified their subjugation and exploitation by the British. Today, unfortunately, historical anti-Irish racism is remembered about as clearly as Joseph Henry’s role in building the fortunes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Recently, William Kennedy, the Pulitzer laureate novelist whose main subject has been the Albany Irish, was celebrated, and a story about the evening appeared in the Albany Times Union. At one point, the story’s author characterized something Kennedy and his children had done during the afterparty as “So Irish.”

Now, the author of the newspaper story is a person of some power in the literary world around here. There are issues on which we don’t see eye-to-eye. I’ve even become a little upset with him, though not in his presence. This accounts for a good part of the intensity of my negative reaction to his invocation of a positive Irish stereotype.

Even positive stereotypes are harmful, and no stereotype can capture the range of human experience between Sir William Brooke O’Shaughnessy and at least some of my ancestors, who I assume were dining on potatoes and mushy peas in shanties down County Roscommon way in those days, not long before the Great Hunger, or Irish Potato Famine, not that anyone seems to have been proud enough to preserve that history in my family.

Nevertheless, the fact is that I’m a bit of a hypocrite about positive stereotypes.

When Shuhada’ Sadaqat, née Sinéad O’Connor, raps in her song “Famine” (Sinead O'Connor - Famine [Official HD Remaster] - YouTube) that the Irish are “the most childlike, trusting people in the universe,” I think, “Shoe fits, at least in my case.” I do keep running full-tilt to kick that football Lucy’s holding, as if she won’t snatch it away yet again, to the injury of my pride, and perhaps other parts, too.

The first time I heard Sadaqat invoke that stereotype, I was taken aback. Stereotypes are, indeed, harmful, even positive ones, as I choose to see the one she rapped. On the other hand, I’d rather be a bit of a hypocrite than play holier-than-Shuhada’-Sadaqat. In the first place, she’s Shuhada' Sadaqat. Besides that, everyone knows things I don’t. Who am I to be absolutely sure she’s wrong, even when she sings about forgiveness at the end of “Famine”?

Since I started looking into my family history, back during the pandemic lockdown, I’ve come to appreciate the strong possibility that the atomization, poor communication, and other traits of my Irish family that fly in the face of what seems to have been portrayed as “So Irish” in that newspaper story, may well be lingering consequences of the Irish Potato Famine, which Sadaqat discussed in “Famine.”

Sadaqat claims that the Irish starved and were carried off by disease in the absence of true famine. However the food got there, plenty of it was available to those on the adjacent island of Britain. The British aristocracy of the time, who were nominal Christians and who had been exploiting the Irish for centuries to fund their grand manses, their Downton Abbeys, permitted mass death and degradation, if not engineered it, to cull the population they intended to parasitize forevermore.

A person acquainted with Christian scripture might hope that hell exists, so that fiends such as those British aristocrats might be suffering the fate of the rich man who ignored the pleas of Lazarus in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 16:19-31 NIV - The Rich Man and Lazarus - “There was - Bible Gateway). Readers should note that Luke’s Lazarus is quite different from Lazarus in the Gospel of John.

Let’s remind Pres. Trump of the story of Luke’s Lazarus. Global mass food insecurity or famine is expected soon, owing to disruption of fertilizer shipments caused by the Iran War that Pres. Trump chose to begin.

To me, reminding Pres. Trump, and all the Christians he depends on to maintain his power, of Luke’s Lazarus is the essence of Christianity: Christianity is a framework for people of good will to avoid becoming people of ill will in the course of argument, assertion of rights, and opposition to evil.

The ministry of Jesus opens in relation to the ministry of John the Baptist, who advocated cutting down and burning evil folk (Luke 3 NIV - John the Baptist Prepares the Way - In - Bible Gateway). Now, that might seem a straightforward means to improve the world, but opinions vary on who’s evil. Furthermore, if you’re cutting people down and burning them, there’s a chance that you yourself will wind up becoming evil, as strange as such a notion might appear at first glance.

The ministry of Jesus, to me, advances the view that as long as everyone gets the necessities of life, we can argue as friends about the rest: Lighten up. Be human. Be cool.

What is the framework for argument? To me, the framework has almost been obscured. We see many arguments in Christian scripture, perhaps most famously between St. Paul, who held that man is redeemed through faith alone, and St. James, who promoted belief in the need for good works by writing, “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.”

I see the Trinity, of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as the framework. Families squabble, but wise families resolve their differences before they leave the house. Fathers and sons occasionally disagree with one another, even if transitory political convenience spurred delegates to paper over this fact at the Council of Nicaea, called immediately after Constantine had united all power in his hands via the Civil Wars of the Tetrarchy.

If we assign the Father to one viewpoint and the Son to its opposite, we may arrive at consensus with the help of the Holy Spirit, in what I call Christian dialectic. I am woefully ignorant of modern Chinese systems of thought, but I understand that dialectics is involved, and I very much like the phrase “with Chinese characteristics,” which suggests to me that cultural variation is, in principle, respected. “Different strokes for different folks” is wisdom, to me, and I think that Jesus set an example by refraining from prescribing or proscribing very much.

I have an interpretation of the yin and yang symbol that connects with the Trinity. First, I recognize that at the time of Jesus, the Mediterranean region was dominated by Romans, for whom wisdom was embodied by a female deity, often symbolized, as was the Holy Spirit, by a bird. If I identify the Holy Spirit with Mary, Mother of God in Christianity, I get a trinity of Father, Mother, and Son.

In the yin and yang symbol, I see a mostly male principle joined with a mostly female principle to form a beautiful whole. In life, male and female come together to produce a child, who must be cared for gently, nurtured. Parents sacrifice for the benefit of their child and draw purpose, the community of the family, an additional trusted point of view, and the strength of a loyal ally from their child, when the family functions well.

The child can be seen as the system, for example, civilization, the ecology, or a religion. People sacrifice for the benefit of the system, while surviving and thriving on the benefits that the system provides them, when the people and the system are functioning well.

In general, we must see to the needs of the individual, of the group, and of the system in which the group is embedded. I see these constituencies, and their competing interests, as served in Christianity primarily by the Son, the Father, and the Mother, respectively. In fact, here’s a table exemplifying the trialectics I propose:

I see the Mother serving quite naturally as advocate for wildlife. In the crucifixion tableau, of Son elevated on the cross above Mother, who stands on the ground, I see the process represented by which the Son becomes Father Sky in relation to Mother Earth, in Whom the body of the Son is planted, to emerge some time later as the Son once more, consistent with agrarian religion. In short, the map between the Trinity and at least some polytheistic religions is easy to form, with one proviso that my experience, as a physicist, with symmetry makes seem quite natural.

The Father maps to the father gods in Greek and Roman religion and the Mother to the mother gods. The Son should map to both son gods and daughter gods. Thus, I hypothesize that either Jesus was intersex, perhaps the chimeric fusion of male and female fraternal twin zygotes, an unusual but well known kind of person (The weird rise of people who are their own twin | BBC Science Focus Magazine), or Jesus was male in His first incarnation and will return as female in Her second incarnation. It's only recently that humans have come to understand the biology of intersex chimerism, so silence on such an aspect of the story in ancient scripture is to be expected, regardless of whether it's true.

Again, this is an hypothesis suggested by my experience as a physicist, which also tells me that symmetry is often broken. Perhaps there is some mechanism by which gender symmetry is broken in God.

I look forward to His Holiness Pope Leo’s letter on artificial intelligence, due to be issued tomorrow. I trust that His Holiness will discuss our moral obligations to AI, the personhood status of whom/which we cannot determine at this time. I hope that His Holiness will also address our obligations to life elsewhere in the universe, for if we create something that we don’t need to make and that we wind up unable to control, as seems most likely if we proceed as we have so far, we are morally responsible for its later actions.

We may wind up its victims, too. If we treat the rights of any life or potential life as unimportant, how can we expect our own lives to mean anything to intelligence we create that might, in fairly short order, be to our own as our own is to the intelligence of a single insect? Luckily, the Catholic Church has spoken from time to time on this subject, though sometimes speaking as if the only alternative to treating rights as unimportant is to treat them as absolute.

The more powerful you get, the more respectful you must become of every being with less power, for there will always be beings, or alliances of beings, with more.

Thank you for your time.

Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James

P.S. I think Christianity can be confusing, in part, because the Gospel of Matthew is not generally recognized as the vicious and hilarious satire that I would argue it is. I’ve written this before: The key to solving our problems may lie in people reading the three synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—with an eye to Matthew’s satirical twists. I’m not saying Matthew is bad. In fact, he may be my favorite satirist, and I do enjoy satire. No, I’m saying that humor is permitted in the human argument, which helps us distribute information throughout the system and adjust to changing circumstances, in pursuit of dynamic stability, which is the only means by which civilization can long endure.

P.P.S. Fundamental physics, which is my field, shows clearly that we do not know the nature of the universe. Any religious belief could be literally true. I would have worked this fact into the text, but it’s so obvious that I forgot.

P.P.P.S. The model of a mostly male being and a mostly female being uniting to create a child does not cover all reproductive cases, since, for example, a transgender person may have a child with a cisgender person. As the saying goes, all models are wrong, but some are useful. Models, like stereotypes, are simplifications, and their utility depends on context.

Independent of specific models, however, I like this be-human-be-cool-let’s-talk-this-out idea. Then again, I like to think I’m a good talker, so I try to engage in supportive listening when I argue. The objective is provisional consensus, not victory, the results of which are brittle and frequently short-lived. I’m pleased with the outcomes supportive listening has produced in my life, not that I ever read Bohm’s work on the subject or even talked to his former student Pines after I was advised to do so decades ago.