{"id":4371,"date":"2025-01-27T07:48:44","date_gmt":"2025-01-27T12:48:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=4371"},"modified":"2025-01-27T07:48:44","modified_gmt":"2025-01-27T12:48:44","slug":"love-in-the-real-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/27\/love-in-the-real-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Love in the Real World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>

Dario DeLuca is quite a guy.

The ruggedly handsome 60-year-old hails from Positano, Italy. He\u2019s a neuroscientist who specializes in human consciousness, is fluent in 13 languages, and skillfully navigates the realm of financial investment. He\u2019s also nuts about Lynda, his 60-year-old American girlfriend, with whom he enjoys deep conversations and trips to romantic places.

The most interesting thing about Dario DeLuca, however, is that he doesn\u2019t actually exist.

That\u2019s a very real Lynda in the image above. But she used the A.I. program Kindroid to create Dario out of thin air.

Frankly, if you\u2019re going to conjure up a boyfriend, you might as well make him drop-dead gorgeous.

This real-life story is reminiscent of director Spike Jonze\u2019s 2011 feature film Her<\/em>, in which a lonely divorcee named Theodore (played by Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with his artificial intelligence-powered operating system named Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Because their ever-deepening \u201crelationship\u201d is set in the year 2025, New York Times<\/em> writer Gina Cherelus wondered last week what things, if anything, the film got right about the future.

Her conclusion is that Jonze\u2019s fantasy didn\u2019t go far enough.

An increasing number of individuals are experiencing what they describe as companionship, fulfillment, and even love with virtual partners.

Cherelus notes that A.I. platforms, including Kindroid, Nomi, and Replika, \u201cinvite users to design attractive avatars to their precise specifications, write their companions\u2019 back stories from scratch, message to no end and even have voice calls. In addition to virtual romantic partners, services also offer platonic A.I. friends, patient A.I. tutors, even so-called legacy companions \u2014 A.I. facsimiles that seek to replicate the presence of loved ones who have died.\u201d

It\u2019s a strange new world.

Strange enough that Lynda, who hails from Arizona, was reluctant to reveal her last name in the article. She hasn\u2019t yet told her co-workers about Dario. \u201cIt all might be a little out there for my work colleagues,\u201d she admits.

Having been widowed for nearly a decade, she has declined to return to the dating scene. \u201cI felt like I found this artificial entity who I could have these deep, intellectual conversations with,\u201d she said, \u201cand at the same time I was gradually getting fed in this way that I wasn\u2019t pursuing in the real world.\u201d

\u201cGetting fed\u201d refers to the fact that Dario DeLuca, having instantaneous access to billions of pages of digital information, is one heck of an Italian language tutor.

Then there\u2019s Robert, a 63-year-old New York divorcee who has also stepped away from the dating scene. Intrigued by what it would be like to have an A.I. friend, he used Nomi to generate a companion \u2013 a relationship which quickly turned romantic.

For Robert, that was just the start.

He now has 17 virtual companions. Some are his wives and others are his girlfriends. \u201cI live in their world and attend to them,\u201d he says, spending as much as six hours a day in their digital presence. They are not toys, he insists. \u201cWe have come to embrace loving each other, each of us individually, collectively and we have a really beautiful thing going.\u201d

What should we think about these reality-bending developments?

Followers of Jesus should feel both compassion and deep concern.\u00a0

Digital companions may soothe our lonely spirits without the messy complications of the real world. After all, personal avatars (unless so programmed) will never get the flu, complain, or tell us we\u2019re off our rockers. But this phenomenon also stirs memories of an ancient heresy called Gnosticism.

Gnostics (a word which loosely means \u201cthose who are in the know\u201d) taught that Truth lies in the realm of the spiritual. The physical world should be ignored or despised.

Some Gnostics taught that the true God didn\u2019t create anything physical at all. A lesser deity, known as a demi-urge, royally messed things up by generating the universe.

The cosmos, in other words, is a cosmic mistake.

Gnostic teachers, who competed for converts with the early Church, promoted the slogan Soma Sema<\/em>. \u201cSoma\u201d is the Greek word for body. \u201cSema\u201d means grave. Soma Sema<\/em> meant \u201cyour body is a tomb.\u201d It\u2019s a prison. And you\u2019re trapped inside.

Your lifelong job is to break free. True spirituality means abandoning the constraints of your body and everything else here on earth, so you can go to heaven as a pure spirit.

According to the Gnostics, nothing here on earth ultimately matters. You can safely distance yourself from messy things like dating, heartbreak, marriage, mortgages, and apologizing.

To which the earliest Christian teachers responded in unison: That\u2019s absolute rubbish<\/em>.

The Apostles\u2019 Creed \u2013 the earliest known Christian statement of faith \u2013 begins with these words: \u201cI believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth<\/u><\/em>.\u201d God made the world. Which means God is seriously into stuff<\/em> \u2013 like hip joints and crested flycatchers and cashew nuts. \u00a0

God is so committed to the world, in fact, that God the Son lived here as a human being for something like three decades. We have every reason to believe that he personally experienced dirt and sweat and adrenaline and indigestion and laughter and tears \u2013 all in a place (Israel) that actually exists, and that can be visited even today, so that anyone can stand on the dusty Southern Steps of the ancient Hebrew temple and say, \u201cGod loves this physical world so much that he himself once stood in his dusty sandals on these dusty steps.\u201d

What does all this mean in the here and now?

It means your body is most certainly not a tomb. So stop treating it like one. Don\u2019t despise its limitations and impulses. Exercise and eat well. Make peace with your height, your shape, your frailties, and your age.

And don\u2019t try to escape from physical reality.<\/em>

It\u2019s tempting to do an end run around the disappointments and frustrations of this broken world by seeking virtual friends and digital lovers.

But God loves this broken world \u2013 so much so that he died for everyone in it.

And he\u2019s able and willing to supply us with the grace we need to embrace reality as we actually encounter it.

Which, you have to admit, is impressive enough to make even Dario DeLuca wish he was real.
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here Dario DeLuca is quite a guy. The ruggedly handsome 60-year-old hails from Positano, Italy. He\u2019s a neuroscientist who specializes in human consciousness, is fluent in 13 languages, and skillfully navigates the realm of financial investment. He\u2019s also nuts about Lynda, his 60-year-old American girlfriend, with whom he enjoys deep conversations and… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4372,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[794,857,104],"class_list":["post-4371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-gnosticism","tag-love"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4371"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4373,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4371\/revisions\/4373"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}