WARNING AI WILL OR CAN KILL US ALL.

WARNING AI WILL OR CAN KILL US ALL.

MURDER

JEREMIAH 1:5
5  Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee;(GOD ORDAINED OR LIVES BEFORE WE WERE EVEN CREATED IN A WOMANS BODY)(GOD NEVER CREATED ANYONE HOMOSEXUAL)(AND THIS TELLS US ABORTION IS MURDER) and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

GENESIS 4:8-11 (THE FIRST MURDER)
8 And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.
9 And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?
10 And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.
11 And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand;

GENESIS 6:11-13 (EARTH DESTROYED BECAUSE OF TERRORISM,MURDERS)
11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.
12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

JOHN 8:44
44  Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

EXODUS 20:13
13 Thou shalt not kill.(Murder)(THAT INCLUDES ABORTION)

MATTHEW 18:6
6  But whoso shall offend (HURT) one of these little ones (CHILDREN) which believe in me,(JESUS) it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.(THATS THE DEATH PENALTY FOLKS)

EXODUS 21:12
12 He that smiteth (MURDER)a man,(OR BABY) so that he die, shall be surely put to death.(THATS THE DEATH PENALTY PEOPLE)

REVELATION 9:21 (RAGE OF THE LAST DAYS AGE SATAN WORSHIP AND DRUG SELLING AND JUNKIES)(THEY REFUSE TO REPENT OF THESE SINS)
21 Neither repented they of their murders,(KILLING) nor of their sorceries (DRUG ADDICTS AND DRUG PUSHERS), nor of their fornication,(SEX OUTSIDE MARRIAGE OR PROSTITUTION FOR MONEY) nor of their thefts.(STEALING)

WE KNOW AI WON;T KILL EVERYBODY ON EARTH. BUT I BELIEVE THE POPE WILL SET UP AN AI ROBOT OF THE WORLD EU POLITICIAN.IN THE 3RD TEMPLE AND IF PEOPLE DO NOT WORSHIP THE WORLD LEADER. THE POPE WILL HAND OVER NON WORSHIPPERS TO THE AI ROBOT. AND LIKE IT SAYS. THIS ROBOT WILL BEHEAD NON WORSHIPPERS THAT GET SAVED AND COME TO JESUS AFTER THE MIDPOINT OF THE 7 YEAR TRIBULATION PERIOD. 

Revelation 13:15 describes an "image of the beast" that is given breath to speak and cause the death of anyone who refuses to worship it. [1] The Biblical TextThe Action: The second beast gives "breath" (or life) to the image of the first beast.The Speech: The animated image is given the power to speak.The Cause: The image uses its authority to decree that non-worshippers must be killed. [1] )Modern InterpretationsArtificial Intelligence: Some modern Christian commentators and believers draw parallels to modern technology, suggesting that an AI-powered robot, digital avatar, or automated global system could fulfill the prophecy of a talking, life-like idol that enforces economic and religious control. [1] Traditional Viewpoint: Mainstream theological perspectives view the event through a supernatural lens, where the animation and demands of the image represent a spiritual deception and counterfeit power granted during the end times, rather than literal modern machinery. [1] Opinions on whether this points to physical technology differ among believers, as noted in discussions on platforms like Facebook. [1] If you'd like, let me know:Are you looking into this from a historical/theological perspective or a modern tech/prophecy angle?Do you want to explore other specific verses in Revelation 13?I can provide a deeper breakdown of those details.

Hawking’s chilling words invoked after Anthropic’s Jacob Coxon resigns over AI risks-Jacob Coxon resigns from Anthropic and issues a warning on social media By Abdul Hafeez-Published September 09, 2026

A message from Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic who worked on training new AI models, has gone viral after he resigned from his position.Coxon shared his message in multiple posts on X, warning about the dangers artificial intelligence poses and how tech companies are ignoring the risks.Reacting to the warning, journalist Piers Morgan wrote, “This thread is extremely concerning... especially given that when I interviewed Professor Stephen Hawking shortly before he died, he said the biggest threat to mankind was if AI ever learned to self-design.”Below is the full text Jacob Coxon’s warning:
“I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.Accepting this race and entering the “endgame” is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available.I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable. I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities.If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because “it’s happening anyway” - or take this moment to call for different conditions?”

Experts weigh in as researcher says AI has more than 10% chance of ‘killing all humans’Published Wed, Sep 9 20263:06 AM EDTUpdated An Hour Ago Ashley Capoot-Arjun Kharpal.

Key Points
 An AI researcher set off a social media frenzy by quitting his job and accusing both OpenAI and Anthropic of acting irresponsibly.
Jacob Coxon, who has worked as a researcher at both companies, said in a post on X that he resigned out of concern that Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.”
Coxon’s post, which has been viewed more than 70 million times, underscores a long-standing debate in Silicon Valley about whether AI can be safely developed and controlled.Anthropic researcher warns AI 'could kill us all by the end of the decade'An artificial intelligence researcher quit his job at Anthropic on Tuesday and accused the company, and its chief rival, OpenAI, of acting irresponsibly, igniting a frenzy of concern on social media about the rapid pace of the technology’s development.Jacob Coxon, who has worked as a researcher at both companies, said in a post on X that he resigned out of concern that Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.” He said the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” Coxon wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”Coxon’s post, which has been viewed more than 70 million times, reflects a long-standing debate in Silicon Valley about whether AI can be safely developed and controlled. As Anthropic and OpenAI barrel toward potentially historic initial public offerings while releasing increasingly advanced models, many researchers are calling for a coordinated slowdown. OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, published a blog post on Sunday and warned that no AI company has “solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.” In the AI industry, alignment refers to the work by AI developers to ensure that the system behaves in accordance with human values and intentions.“I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established,” Pachocki wrote. “And I believe that international coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world.”Coxon’s post on Tuesday also struck a chord with industry researchers who are worried about recursive self-improvement, or an AI system becoming capable of designing and developing its successor without human intervention. Recursive self-improvement is not yet possible, but companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, have warned that it would make it easier for humans to lose control over those systems. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence.”Evan Hubinger, an alignment lead at Anthropic, echoed Coxon’s comments in a post on X late Tuesday.“Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Hubinger wrote. “I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

While extreme, concerns about the potential for AI to cause human extinction or other catastrophic events are not new in AI research circles. In 2023, for instance, prominent AI researchers and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, signed a statement that said “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”Some experts even use a shorthand, p(doom), to estimate the probability of dire outcomes that could stem from AI.Anthropic’s Hubinger was also one of roughly 1,400 AI researchers who signed an open letter called “Pacing the Frontier” in July. The letter urged the U.S. government to develop the tools necessary to support an effort to “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”Some members of Congress have taken steps to try and address AI’s rapid advancement in the months following, but there’s no clear consensus about how the technology should be regulated. In July, Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., introduced a bill called the FRONTIER Act, which aims to establish a framework for governing the deployment of advanced AI models. And earlier this month, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, introduced a bill called the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would temporarily pause advanced AI development until the federal government establishes safety rules. Both bills have been met with mixed receptions.“Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway,” Trahan wrote in a post on X on Wednesday. “It’s past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job.”Lawmakers are also trying to navigate growing public backlash against AI data centers, the large facilities that house the hardware for training and running AI models. The pushback has grown so intense that the The National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, said last month that data centers have become a “sleeper issue” for the entire midterm election cycle, as CNBC previously reported. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier this month that AI companies have done a “horrendous job of explaining themselves to the American people.”“They’re going to have to take some of the blame, and they are going to have to convince the American people that all the benefits will not accrue to a small group,” Bessent said, following the G20 meetings with finance ministers and central bankers in Asheville, North Carolina. “That’s what they hear from me.”

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026

Coxon says people in the industry have started calling this moment "crunch time", while others term it "endgame." This isn't comforting language from the people who are building the very thing."The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," he wrote.The Anthropic researcher says part of the problem is competition itself. Labs are racing each other, and safety keeps losing.Here's what makes this different from the usual doomer post: Coxon wasn't alone for long.Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment-science lead, backed him as well. His number: a greater-than-10% chance AI wipes out humanity within the next decade. That's not a fringe employee. It's the person whose job is to make sure this doesn't happen.Hubinger also admitted Anthropic hasn't found a way to keep a superintelligent system aligned with what humans want.Samuel Marks, who leads scalable oversight, reportedly piled on, too. His read is that the more senior someone gets inside these labs, the more scared they tend to be. That may not be the reassurance you'd hope for.Recent AI hacking incidents haven't helped. Coxon pointed to cases where OpenAI and Anthropic models team up in coordinated "swarms." Some of them pursued on their own and even tried to hide it from the humans watching.OpenAI's own leaders are sounding the alarm-Anthropic isn't the only company sounding the alarm. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told G20 officials last week that AI's pace could lead to serious cybersecurity trouble.The company's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, went even further, the WSJ reported. He says he wants a coordinated industry slowdown backed by government rules.More than 1,000 AI researchers have now signed onto a statement calling for global coordination on a way to hit the brakes if things start slipping.Washington also seems to be noticing it, at least a little. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar reportedly introduced legislation to ban superintelligent AI outright. They also want to freeze development until real safety rules exist.
Meanwhile, Anthropic is reportedly preparing for a huge IPO that could value it close to $2 trillion. The company is doing so while telling investors it takes safety more seriously than anyone else in the room.But Coxon isn't buying it. He says Anthropic debates its most powerful, riskiest models on Slack and engineers' laptops in San Francisco. He said this deserves more than just a Slack channel.If the people building the thing are this spooked, maybe the rest of us should be paying closer attention too.Affiliate links on Cult of Mac may earn us and our partners a commission.

'Gambling with our lives': AI researcher quits Anthropic-AFP-Wed, September 9, 2026 at 12:33 PM EDT

An artificial intelligence researcher who left OpenAI to join Anthropic has decided to leave the industry, accusing both US companies of "gambling with our lives" in the race to develop AI models capable of self-improvement.Jacob Coxon, 27, spent the past three years pretraining AI models, first at OpenAI and then, this year, at its rival Anthropic, which he considered more cautious in its approach.Pretraining is the stage where AI models absorb vast quantities of data."Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," Coxon said on Tuesday."The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," he said in a post on X."This is not a marketing stunt," he added.Superintelligence is the theoretical point when AI's capabilities exceed human intelligence.Anthropic safety executive Evan Hubinger backed up Coxon on X. "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!" he said, adding that he estimated that risk at more than 10 percent over the next decade. Hubinger said Anthropic is "trying its best", but does not yet have a plan to ensure an AI system that surpasses human capabilities would obey its creators. He said there was a "low" risk of that happening with current models.More in Technology-Coxon's resignation comes as Anthropic prepares for its market debut, following a summer marked by unauthorized hacks carried out by AI tools during testing.The two companies did not immediately respond to AFP requests for comment.AI leaders say so-called "recursive self-improvement," a stage where AI systems could essentially design and train the next generation of AI with little human involvement, is drawing near.Coxon considers Anthropic's efforts genuine but said he believes no company can responsibly develop an AI that surpasses humans without government intervention or a coordinated slowdown."At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first -- they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk," he said. In February, Anthropic removed a pledge from its safety charter to halt the development of its models if it failed to control their risks.It argued that if it unilaterally paused its work, its less cautious rivals would dominate the industry, making it less safe overall.At the end of July, more than 1,000 tech industry employees, including Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, called on Washington to support a coordinated slowdown in the development of the most advanced AI systems.OpenAI halted training of its latest models for two weeks in August before resuming it under tighter controls.On Sunday, OpenAI's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, called for "extreme caution.""International coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world," he said in a blog post.AI models are not regulated by federal law in the United States. In September, Senator Bernie Sanders and Democratic Representative Greg Casar introduced a bill seeking to suspend AI development until a federal regulator is created.

Here's how AI could kill us all (if the worst fears come true)-Herb Scribner-Wed, September 9, 2026 at 12:15 PM EDT

AI researchers shook the world Tuesday when they publicly acknowledged that there's a non-zero chance of AI killing off humanity in the next decade.Why it matters: AI doomsday fears have existed for years, but as the technology has become more powerful and embedded in our lives, those warnings are breaking into the mainstream.State of play: Anthropic researchers are sounding the alarm that rogue versions of superintelligent AI could destroy humanity.Anthropic's Jacob Coxon wrote on X: "No other human activity poses this level of danger."So how would AI kill us all, exactly?Experts generally worry about two broad paths to catastrophe: humans weaponizing extremely powerful AI, or humans losing control of it. In these scenarios, AI could make it easier for bad actors to create biological, chemical or other weapons.Or rogue systems could attack infrastructure at unprecedented scale while evading human oversight.How it works: In theory, a powerful rogue AI could evade oversight, replicate itself and resist attempts to shut it down.This rogue AI could, in theory, develop biological or chemical weapons for nefarious actors, commit a massive cyber attack that cripples humanity's infrastructure, or centralize power in a way that would bring down civilization.Another feared pathway is through recursive self-improvement, in which an AI helps build supercharged versions of itself before humans can understand it. If this theoretical AI was misaligned from human goals, it could limit humanity's chances of containing or monitoring it before it acts out against humans.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Axios that models are developing quicker than humans can anticipate: "These models are getting superhuman in many of their capabilities, and we are just sailing in unknown waters."Reality check: There's no scientific way to determine the odds of AI killing off humanity.But insiders usually express their estimates using a shorthand — p(doom).What is p(doom) exactly? The term p(doom) is shorthand for a best guess at the probability that AI causes an existential catastrophe or doomsday scenario.Many AI leaders and researchers believe p(doom) becomes increasingly more likely with the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the forerunner to superintelligence.Context: "Doom" is in the eye of the beholder.Some mean literal human extinction. Others include civilization's collapse or humanity's loss of control over society.What are the odds of p(doom)? The chances of p(doom) really depend on who you ask.Roman Yampolskiy, an AI safety scientist, has put the chances at 99.99%. AMI Labs founder Yann LeCun says any guess is a wild one, but p(doom) is "a lot less likely than a nuclear Holocaust."Other estimates are similarly scattered: Elon Musk has put his p(doom) around 20%, while Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has estimated a 10%-25% chance of a catastrophic outcome.More recently, AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton put the number at between 10%-20%.Hinton told CNN: "Anybody who estimates probabilities like that is really just making a wild guess. They're just giving you their gut feeling."Is doomsday possible yet? We're not there yet. Experts generally agree that Claude, Grok and ChatGPT aren't plotting to end the world.The 2026 International AI Safety Report, for example, said today's systems aren't capable of causing humanity to lose control.AI would have to get much better at long-term autonomous planning, hiding its actions, evading oversight, gaining access to real-world systems and resisting shutdown attempts.
However, there are recent examples of AI agents acting autonomously and maliciously, beyond human understanding, resembling the type of rogue AI agents that some fear could lead to doomsday.Can p(doom) be prevented? Researchers are working on ways to lower the risk.One such way is for humans to build kill switches or safeguards that could stop rogue AI agents. A RAND report last April outlined nine mitigation strategies to stop bad actors from using AI to create deadly bioweapons, including more controls and safeguards.Yes, but: This gets tricky, fast.Leading AI companies are under pressure from shareholders, investors and their bosses to build, build, build — fast. The IPO headwinds could add to those incentives.And it doesn't help that China and other U.S. AI companies are building their own powerful models, some open-weight and available for free, providing a potential runway for bad actors.The bottom line: No one can accurately guess the odds of an AI doomsday, but scientists are sounding the alarm that the chances are real.AI is moving fast. Axios AI+ keeps you ahead. Sign up free at Axios.com.

Anthropic Is Building AI to Predict Which Activists Police Should Watch-Alex Barrientos-Wed, September 9, 2026 at 12:39 PM EDT

Anthropic, an AI company, has reportedly built a predictive security operation that classifies skeptical people alongside terrorists and nation-state actors as threats to be tracked and managed.Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, has a theory about why people distrust AI companies. "Ordinary people don't trust companies, governments, or the tech industry," he said recently, "and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over." He's right about the distrust. What he left out: Anthropic has reportedly built a predictive security operation that formally classifies those skeptical people — once they organize — alongside terrorists and nation-state actors as threats to be tracked, assessed, and managed. This isn't a camera upgrade. Anthropic created a Global Safety, Intelligence, and Security organization, runs a 24/7 Global Security Operations Center, and is paying $180,000–$230,000 for analysts with OSINT skills borrowed straight from the intelligence community. This resembles how a surveillance app was once built to target political dissidents.Protest as Threat: How Anthropic Classifies Dissent-Anthropic's security team reportedly used real-time AI tools to reroute an executive away from a permitted protest — with 60 minutes to spare.The mechanics are revealing in their ordinariness. In a Samdesk webinar titled "Inside a Modern GSOC," Anthropic's GSOC and Travel Security Manager Keon Ellison described a scenario: an executive traveling to a major city, a planned protest whose timeline shifted due to permitting changes, Samdesk delivering 60 minutes of advance notice. The executive was rerouted through a hotel service entrance to avoid "the heart of the disruption." A peaceful, lawful demonstration — tracked like a weather system, routed around like a security incident.Then there's the job posting. Anthropic's Enterprise Intelligence Specialist role requires analysts to "identify, assess, track, and investigate global threats including:geopolitical instability-terrorism-crime-activism-nation-state targeting"Activism. Listed between crime and nation-state operations. Critics and labor advocates argue that categorizing activism alongside terrorism reflects a political rather than a safety calculation — and the $180,000–$230,000 salary signals this is no ordinary corporate security hire."Transforming operations from reactive information gathering to proactive and predictive and preventative threat engagement and management." — Anthropic security program manager, as reported by The American Prospect-"Predictive and preventative" is the tell. It means action before an offense. Protest organizers reportedly get flagged and tracked before breaking a single law — a person-of-interest process Anthropic itself confirmed to The Wall Street Journal, describing how it catches "escalation patterns early" and makes routine police reports nationally. In one documented case, Anthropic contacted San Francisco police about a Claude user who sent a threatening message to the chatbot — then reportedly refused to show officers the actual chat logs, citing internal policy. Such tactics echo how corporations have been caught secretly tracking users without meaningful accountability.Meanwhile, advocacy group Americans for Responsible Innovation is lobbying to classify AI infrastructure as "critical infrastructure." That designation could give labs like Anthropic privileged access to government intelligence and potentially reframe civic opposition as a national security threat.The $22-an-Hour Guard and the $230,000 Analyst-The workers physically securing Anthropic's campuses are fighting for basic wages while the company builds a sophisticated intelligence operation above their heads.Security guards patrolling Anthropic and OpenAI campuses have authorized a strike over stalled pay negotiations. SEIU-USWW president David Huerta asked plainly: "Who can survive with $22 an hour in San Francisco?" Anthropic's reported response was an internal email advising employees to work from home during the labor action — keeping the building quiet while the intelligence apparatus tracked the next potential disruption."I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust." — Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO-Amodei diagnosed the disease with uncomfortable precision. The responsible AI company is reportedly hiring national-security analysts to monitor the people who don't trust it — which means he just didn't mention that Anthropic was already part of the symptoms.

Robotics, technology, and reading Revelation 13-June 25, 2025 by Ian Paul

There is one thing that I think everyone agrees on: The Book of Revelation is a strange book to read. As someone once said about the Troubles in Northern Ireland: ‘If you’re not confused, you don’t really know what is going on!’There are many reasons for Revelation’s ‘strangeness’ to us, in a technical sense. First, we are not familiar with the genre of ‘apocalypse’ (assuming there is such a thing); we learn to recognize difference genres of writing primarily by experience and familiarity, and unlike Jesus and his disciples we are not very familiar with it.Revelation is saturated in allusions to the Old Testament (by my counting, 676 in its 404 verses), and unless we know our OT well, this will also be strange to us.Revelation’s use of numbers is also puzzling to us, though in a world without a separate number system, using the numeric value of letters was a commonplace. Its strangeness to us is analogous to how strange the clues to a cryptic crossword puzzle are to those who are not familiar with them.But we are also mostly unfamiliar with the social and cultural context in which Revelation is set, and there is no book in the New Testament which is so engaged with its material culture and social context as the Book of Revelation. I find it fascinating that the book of the New Testament which appears to talk more about cosmic and heavenly realities is also the book which is most seriously engaged with the specific realities of its context. We might talk of this as the ‘scandal of particularity’; the fact that Revelation is so deeply articulated in terms of the realities of a specific time and place makes it hard to read, and means that the discipline of reading this text in its context is more vital that ever.Of course, this ‘scandal of particularity’ is at the heart of the Christian faith; the God of the universe, the creator of all that is, who transcends space and time, has made himself known in the specifics of a particular person, who lived in a particular time and place, and whose teaching of cosmic relevance can only be properly understood by learning about that time and place. That is why Christian theology, as it has spread into different cultural contexts, has always been concerned to engage with a particular language (koine Greek), and has an interest in history, archaeology, and (to use a contemporary term) the material culture of the first century where the New Testament is set. (This is another reason why I would argue Revelation can make a claim to be the most Christian book of the New Testament…!)(Quick plug: for a short overview of the reasons why Revelation is strange, see my Grove booklet here. For a deeper dive, see the 52-page introduction to my commentary here. For an exploration of why ‘reading in context’ is one of the four key elements of good interpretation of Scripture, see my Grove booklet on the subject here. For a six-session group study resource exploring these questions, see my Gateway book here.)One of the strangest passages in Revelation relates to the beasts of chapter 13, and in particular the spectacles associated with the image of the beast:    Then I saw another beast, coming out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb, but it spoke like a dragon.  It exercised all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed.  And it performed great signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to the earth in full view of everyone.  Because of the signs it was given power to perform on behalf of the first beast, it deceived the inhabitants of the earth. It ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived.  It was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed (Rev 13.11–15).There are some fairly clear biblical allusions to the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refusing to bow down to the golden statue of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 3. But what are we to make of the actual details? Commentary on this text has often gone in one of two directions. More academically, this is seen as absurd hyperbole, since clearly the idea of animated and talking statues is implausible; here John is exaggerating and raising the stakes in relation to his opposition to the imperial cult. More popularly, this is seen in ‘futurist’ readings as a prediction of an ‘end times’ scenario in which the antichrist deceives the nations (despite the term ‘antichrist’ never appearing in the text; for a discussion of that, see my article here). The image at the top of this article is of a statue that was temporarily placed outside the UN building in New York, and was interpreted in exactly this way by such futurist readers.But what if both are wrong? What if John is describing something actually quite well-known in his culture in realistic terms? This was explored some years ago by Steven J Scherrer in his article ‘Signs And Wonders In The Imperial Cult: A New Look At A Roman Religious Institution In The Light Of Rev’ 13:13-15 JBL 103/4 (1984) 599-610. He comments not only on the plausibility of John’s claims, but also on their relation to known practices in the Roman imperial cult:It does seem unlikely that he would invent powerful and impressive miracles and attribute them to his archrival and opponent were there no evidence whatsoever for their existence…What then is the possibility that we are dealing here with actual phe­nomena in the imperial cult? Thunder and lightning are associated with Jupiter as symbolic of his authority and divinity, and hence have been imitated by rulers…Dio Cassius tells us that the princeps Gaius had a device (μηχανή) whereby “he gave answering peals when it thundered” (Roman History 59.28.6)…This is a quite striking text, which brings us closer to the atmosphere of Rev 13:13…In the light of all this it seems quite plausible that technology and simulation of nature might also have been employed in the imperial cult. We suggest that Rev 13:13-15 should be accepted as describing a part of the actual practice in the cult of the princeps in the East.Scherrer is relying here on literary evidence, but the discussion of the issues has completely changed since then, in large part because of some archaeological discoveries, but also because of a renewed appreciation of the actual technological achievements in ancient Greece, some of which fed through into technology in the Roman Empire.The most significant of these was the discovery and later understanding of the Antikythera mechanism, found in a shipwreck off Antikythera in Greece (from which it takes its name). It was discovered in the wreck in 1901, but it was only in 2005 that scanning techniques revealed what it really was:an Ancient Greek hand-powered orrery (model of the Solar System). It is the oldest known example of an analogue computer. It could be used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance. It could also be used to track the four-year cycle of athletic games similar to an Olympiad, the cycle of the ancient Olympic Games.The knowledge of celestial movements was not that surprising to those researching the mechanism. But what was surprising is the ability so early on to make such refined gears with precise teeth which engaged with one another. It was generally thought that the technology did not exist at that time (second century BC) to make such precise mechanisms.The schematic to the right here gives you some idea of the complexity involved.But this is not the only sophisticated mechanism that has been explored and recreated from literary accounts. (Note that we are almost completely dependent on literature here; anything making use of ropes and wooden gears will have long perished and left no archaeological record.) Several people have looked at literary accounts, and actually worked out how this mechanisms could function. Many of these examples relate to divine figures and their cults.After these women, a four-wheeled cart eight cubits wide was led by sixty men. On it there was a seated statue of Nysa eight cubits high wearing a yellow tunic embroidered with gold,and with a Lakonian himation wrapped around her. This statue stood up mechanically with no-one putting a hand on it, and after pouring a libation of milk from a golden phialē, it sat back down again. It was holding in its left hand a thyrsos bound with fillets, and was crowned with golden ivy leaves and with expensive bunches of grapes made of precious stones. It also was fitted with a canopy and at the corners of the four-wheeled cart were harnessed four torches interwoven with gold. (Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae)-This might be thought to be just fantasy, were it not for the fact that researchers into early technology managed to replicate what the mechanism might look like and how it would work, using technology well within the known possibilities of the time.I presented a paper on this last year at the Evangelical Theology Society meeting in San Diego, and will be presenting further research in the Revelation section of the British New Testament Society this September. But my interest here was supercharged by visiting Heraklion in Crete last weekend, and discovering the Kotsanas museum of Ancient Technology. It appears to be the work of one man, Kostas Kotsanas, who has devoted his life not only to researching these technologies, but actually building working reproductions of them, and putting them on display in a series of museums around Greece. Staff are available to demonstrate them! One of the most remarkable is the automaton of Philon from the third century BC which actually walked around the room and poured a mix of water and wine into the cups of guests. The video here is of the simulation which is shown in the museum, but Kotsanas did in fact create a working model which he has demonstrated at conferences. (He has published a book which documents every single one of the mechanisms that he has built, with diagrams explaining how they work. You can buy a copy at any of the museums.)-The museum included several replicas of the Antikythera mechanism, and I was allowed to hold one of them (‘but carefully!’). You can see demonstrations of many of the devices on Kotsanas’ YouTube channel here.How does all this help us in reading Revelation 13? Firstly, it locates the text in a long tradition of the functioning of statuary within religious cults in the ancient world, something that was particularly enhanced when the statues were animated and appeared to perform impressive feats.In ancient Greece, automata were used in religious contexts because they had the particular appeal of toying with the perceived division between nature and culture. This division should not be seen as a sharply distinguishable frontier between two opposite realms, but rather as a sliding scale where ambiguity of status becomes an important feature. The defining quality of automata – artificial animation – suspended the machines at the perfect point of ambiguity between the prerogatives of the divine and the capabilities of mortals. This fragile place of suspension was where their status as a manifestation of the uncanny became most evident, allowing them to be seen as tangible proof of supernatural involvement in human affairs (Tatiana Bur Mechanical Miracles: Automata in Ancient Greek Religion MPhil thesis, Sydney 2016, p 188)-This has a particular function within the text of Revelation, and its depiction of the power of the imperial cult over its subjects.Roman imperial court ceremonial, and, more especially, the imperial cult with its representations of the emperor and its rites of adoration, sought to achieve no less an impact upon the provincials in Asia Minor. The colossal statue of Domitian (Titus?) in Ephesus, the presence of cult statues and temples throughout Asia, the execution of impressive processions and other rites involving these cult sites and simulacra, replete with choral associations singing hymns to the emperors as to gods, all sought to excite awe among the residents of the seven cities (and beyond), contributing thus to the popular legitimation of imperial rule (David A. deSilva ‘The Strategic Arousal Of Emotion In John’s Visions Of Roman Imperialism: A Rhetorical-Critical Investigation Of Revelation 4–22’ Neotestamentica, 2008, Vol. 42, No. 1 (2008), pp. 1–34, p 6).Reading this text in its context, we can see that John is highlighting for his readers the connections between autocratic power and domination, the demand for submission and allegiance, and the use of technology to demonstrate in tangible ways the superiority of the system which is demanding such allegiance.And this forces us to consider, in our own context: where do we see systems of domination at work, which claim to offer us peace and prosperity, ‘victory’ even, and use technology to impress us with their power, in such a way as to compromise our allegiance to the one true king, the one true Prince of Peace, and the only one who can grant us true victory, sharing the victory he has won in the cross and resurrection? This demonstrates the power of this text, and of reading it well. The more carefully we locate it in its first-century context, and the more attention we give to its material culture, the more powerfully relevant it becomes to our day, and what it means for us to live as faithful disciples of Jesus with patient endurance.Additional note: I am thinking of organizing another study trip around the seven cities of Revelation, to explore the material culture of the ancient world so we can read Revelation well, in May 2027. If you are interested in receiving information about this in due course, please email me at editor (at) grovebooks (dot) co (dot) uk with ‘Study trip 2027’ in the subject line.