Civilization & Human Nature
Faith is not an answer; it is a posture of continuous questioning. From theological reasoning, to the situation of faith in contemporary society, to the cross-disciplinary dialogue between faith and language in the AI era—this collection gathers 22 articles on faith and philosophy.
Theological Reasoning
The test of faith is not in good times but in how you face what cannot be explained.
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The God Beyond Definition: Why Theology Needs the Courage to Negate
We are accustomed to using language to define God, but true theological wisdom lies in acknowledging the limits of language. Apophatic theology reminds us: saying what God 'is not' brings us closer to the truth than claiming what God 'is.' In an age awash with certainty, this courage to negate is, paradoxically, a deeper form of faith.
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The Fundamentalist Trap: When Faith Transforms from Inquiry to Judgment
The core problem of fundamentalism is not doctrinal content, but its obsession with certainty. When a person believes they possess the complete truth, they lose the ability to listen and dialogue. Faith transforms from a journey of constant inquiry and humility into a frozen system that tolerates no challenge. This article explores the cost of certainty, the power of humility, and how faith can maintain its capacity to breathe while preserving core beliefs.
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The Collapse and Rebuilding of Faith: On the Nature of Religion Through the 1995 Leap-Eighth-Month Prophecy
The 1995 leap-eighth-month prophecy fiasco was the most painful lesson in the history of Taiwan's church. When fear replaced thought and prophecy replaced theology, believers sold their houses and emigrated, the church amplified the panic, and in the end no one apologized. Looking back thirty years later, this was not merely a collective blunder—it exposed a fundamental problem: a faith community lacking the capacity for theological reflection has no immunity when confronted by fear. Faith does not collapse because God does not exist, but because we build it on sand.
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The Real Context of the Reformation: When Faith Met the Printing Press and Politics
The Reformation was not merely a story of spiritual awakening; it was the product of technological diffusion and a power struggle in the political arena. Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, without the printing press's viral reshares and the political shelter of local nobility, might well have remained nothing more than a forgotten academic debate. Understanding the Reformation's real context is the beginning of being responsible toward both history and faith.
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A Rotting Crutch Still Bears Weight: Approaching the Faith of the Elderly with Humility
Faced with the good-deed economics and religious merit theories our elders embrace, younger generations often try to deconstruct them with reason. Yet for the elderly who have lost their life's anchor, these beliefs are genuine spiritual support. True humility means acknowledging the limits of reason and embracing the forces that walk our elders forward.
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Faith Offers No Immunity: When Religious Rationality Collides with the Physics of Viruses
In February 2020, the cluster infection at the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in South Korea showed the world a stark collision between religious rationality and social rationality. When faith communities believed that 'God will protect us' and ignored disease prevention protocols, they didn't just endanger themselves—they endangered society as a whole. This is not an anti-religion argument, but a believer's deep reflection on their own community.
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Moral Man, Immoral Society: Why Good People Do Bad Things When They Come Together
In 1932, Niebuhr made an observation that remains sharp today: individuals can be moral, but groups—corporations, nations, political parties—behave almost inevitably selfishly. This isn't because there are too many bad people, but because institutional logic is more powerful than individual conscience. Understanding this gap is the first step in facing social reality and the starting point for driving meaningful change.
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The Arrogance of the Elite, the Way Forward for the Young
Sandel argues that meritocracy leads the successful to believe they did everything themselves, forgetting the support of luck and institutions. This creates social fractures and burdens young people with unfair pressure. The way forward isn't climbing harder, but rebuilding a society that respects every contribution.
Faith and Contemporary Issues
When faith meets the boundary conflicts of modern society, the answers are never simple.
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AI Cannot Replace Faith: A Lesson from the Pope for the 'Efficiency-First' Generation
Pope Leo XIV's call for priests to resist the temptation of using AI to write homilies is not merely pastoral guidance for the Church, but reveals a fundamental question: when efficiency logic penetrates humanity's deepest expressions of faith, what exactly do we lose?
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Theological Reflection on Same-Sex Marriage: Between Love and Law, Can Faith Breathe?
When same-sex marriage becomes a flashpoint of conflict between church and society, most Christians find themselves anxious about 'choosing sides.' But genuine theological reflection is not about giving the right answer—it's about learning to think within tension. The conflict between love and law is not a problem to be solved, but a burden faith must learn to carry.
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When Nudity Becomes Language: Bodily Grammar and Algorithmic Symbiosis in the Digital Age
In an age dominated by the attention economy, nudity is no longer merely erotic or provocative; it has become a linguistic technology and self-preservation strategy selected and amplified by algorithms. The body is reduced to a node within a system of traffic insurance and data. Confronted with a standardized bodily grammar, we must reclaim the right to write and to view the body.
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162 Files Declassified, Zero Aliens: An Order Test for the Age of 'Truth Pending'
On May 8, 2026, the Pentagon released 162 declassified UAP files at war.gov/UFO — 14 images, 28 videos, 120 documents — while officially stating there is no evidence of extraterrestrials. What this disclosure actually reveals isn't anything in the sky; it's three structural failures in how we handle the unknown.
Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue (AI × Faith × Language)
When AI can generate theological texts, where do the boundaries of "truth" lie?
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On Language, Truth, and Contradiction: My Dialogue with ChatGPT 5
The fundamental opacity of language is not a defect, but the basic state of real existence. AI cannot lie, but that doesn't make it reliable. A philosophical dialogue with ChatGPT 5, exploring how the boundaries of language are the boundaries of the world. This article is designed for parallel reading with the Gemini version.
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On Language, Truth, and Contradiction: My Dialogue with Gemini Pro 2.5
The nature of language is full of ambiguity, and AI's training data is precisely this human language. AI hasn't overcome ambiguity—it has swallowed vast quantities of it to make predictions. AI's 'imprecision' is a structural inevitability of probabilistic models. Faced with this structural dishonesty, humans must retain the capacity for skepticism and verification.
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The Necessity of Incarnation: A Philosophical Argument for the Embodied Development of Artificial Intelligence
AI's core flaw is not technical but ontological. Starting from the Christian theological framework of 'incarnation,' this essay argues that embodiment is not an optional feature in AI development, but a necessary condition for true intelligence.
Other
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The Church Is Not Too Slow. It Has Forgotten What Should Stay Slow.
"The church can't keep up with AI" is not the whole truth: the Vatican signed the Rome Call 33 months before ChatGPT, and 24% of U.S. pastors use AI to write or revise sermons. The real problem is a mismatch between trust and use: 48% of U.S. adults are willing to trust AI for spiritual growth while only 12% of pastors are, and the model's default is silent on faith. The crisis for the church in the age of AI is losing sovereignty over rhythm.
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You Can Copy the Method, But Not the Feel
Online you often see posts like "I built an entire system in a few days, almost all I had to do was press a button." This piece uses Zhuangzi's old craftsman, Polanyi's tacit knowledge, and Aristotle's learning-by-doing to take apart one thing: the explicit stuff (methods, rules, checklists) is something anyone can copy, but the feel and judgment that actually make it work can only grow inside you. At the end is a four-stage method for gauging AI collaboration, plus a "pre-reading probe" tool.
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Ink Earth: Building an Ink-Wash Map with Claude Fable 5
Using Claude Cowork's Fable 5 model, starting from a single sentence to build a WebGL ink-wash interactive map for paulkuo.tw's homepage: washi texture, fluid simulation, mouse interaction, and Taiwan emerging. What once took engineers weeks to implement took just hours of conversation to prototype.
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Those Who Cannot Hear the Music Think the Dancers Are Insane
On June 12, 2026, the US government required Anthropic to suspend Fable 5 and Mythos 5 citing export controls and national security. The so-called 'jailbreak' was simply asking the model to read code and find vulnerabilities—something security engineers do every day. What happens when regulators can't hear the industry's music?
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1665 to 2026: A Theological Dialogue from the Royal Society to Anthropic
In 1665, Henry Oldenburg self-funded the printing of the world's first scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions, and in the process invented a mechanism that separated creation from judgment. 361 years later, Anthropic built that same boundary into AI, while churches in Taiwan debate whether to let AI write sermons. This piece takes the long view: the dialogue between science and faith has never stopped, and AI is only its latest round.
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"Technology Is Never Neutral": The Pope's AI Encyclical
In May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, devoted entirely to AI. It is not about "AI is evil." It rests on one sentence: technology is never neutral. This piece lays out the five heaviest arguments in the encyclical, and explains why, from the height of Church teaching, it confirms judgments like technology's non-neutrality and the idea that human worth does not rest on efficiency.
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When the Reward Becomes a Voluntary Cage
At one in the morning I ordered a Meituan delivery and glimpsed a miniature of 'Delivery Riders, Trapped in the System.' This essay uses the Skinner box, Marx's alienated labor, Heidegger's enframing, and Camus's Sisyphus to dissect how the most sophisticated form of control makes people keep running of their own accord: from the more than two hundred million online gig workers to me, smugly watching my 30% Token usage, we are all in the same box.