Who is America's God now? | Morality

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All of history's strongest empires are no more.

  • Mongol Empire? — Gone ✅
  • Roman Empire? — Fell ✅
  • Ottoman Empire? — Finished ✅
  • British Empire? — Dissolved ✅
  • America? — Not down... yet. ⭕

“Well, we’re not TECHNICALLY an empire Glenn.”

Okay, Karen. The point is that every society that has ever led the world has diminished or collapsed.

America is not the unsinkable ship we thought she was, and the iceberg is REALLY close. If you think the currency is unstable, you should see our kids. Child suicide doubled between 2007 and 2017 and self-harm among preteen girls is up 189% since 2010. Americans can’t afford family vacations, but it’s fine because the family fell apart a while ago. Every woman of the year is a man, and every man is told he’s an oppressor. Our Ivy League students want more censorship and our government wants more surveillance, all while we grow more and more isolated, depressed, and unstable. We have lost our unum and we don't know how to get it back.

Meanwhile, the Brave New World is accelerating towards us at incredible speed.

Futurists, dreamers, and innovators foretell a future where man and machine are one. A world more virtual than physical. A world where technology extends life beyond death, and intelligence beyond our universe. Some say we will colonize Mars, others say we will link to computers, but one thing is certain, life as we know it will change forever.

But are we ready?

If we don’t enter into this brave new technological era with some collective moral agreements, then our advancements will quickly overtake us.

America is not the unsinkable ship we thought she was.

If we can’t define the difference between man and woman, can we know the difference between man and machine?

What are the ethics of this new world? What is life? How do you live in a virtual world? What will give us meaning?

Are we big pieces of meat being driven around by machine brains? Are we a dwelling place for God? Are we immortal souls trapped in mortal bodies, or are we finite?

If all of the data of who I am can be downloaded, does that mean I will live forever? Is that me? Or is there something more to me, something that could never be downloaded, reproduced, or preserved?

If a machine can deduce, communicate, abstract out ideas, imitate, and infer patterns — if they can write poetry and tell us they love us, are they human? If they respond to touch and seem to make friends, what could make us any different?

If a car is driving itself and there’s no time for the car to stop and Elon musk is on its right, the president is on its left, and Mother Teresa is in front — who should the car hit?

MIT is already working on that. What moral standard are they using? Ours? Do we even have a moral standard?

According to NIH, artificial intelligence will be used “more extensively” in healthcare in just ten years. But don’t fear the machine, fear the programmer. Someone somewhere in the world of Big Tech will be developing technology that could literally be making life and death decisions. Do you trust that guy? Who even is he? Where does he get his values? Are they the same as ours?

Also in the NIH website is a report that scientists in China using CRISPR technology for “human enhancement.” They are genetically modifying babies in test tubes, and it’s WORKING. This will open the door for “genetically tailored humans.” What could possibly go wrong?

If all of the data of who I am can be downloaded, does that mean I will live forever?

Oh, and the Pentagon went ahead and admitted we have seen UFO’s. If aliens come down with a higher level of intelligence, are they our master now like we are over animals? Is this OUR planet?

Who decides? Well God does, but do we believe in God anymore?

According to Pew Research Center, we don’t believe in God as much as we used to. They found:

“The secularizing shifts evident in American society so far in the 21st century show no signs of slowing.”

Pew’s religious landscape study breaks the data down by age group. They found that each new generation cares about God less and less.

There are generational declines in:

  • Belief in God
  • Frequency of prayer
  • Importance of religion in one's life
  • And even frequency of feeling spiritual peace and well-being.

Our nation is abandoning the God of our founding, so where do we go to answer these HUGE questions about right and wrong, life and death, meaning, and values? Without a God to order our society, who is stepping up to fill that gap?

As we have tried to shake off our religious foundation, we have not freed ourselves from dogma or religious strictures, far from it, we have simply introduced new dogmas, and new strictures. It is accepted wisdom that you cannot serve two masters, but it should be equally regarded that everyone serves someone, or something.

So, as we enter into this new era — an era rife with ethical debates, a crisis of meaning, and the last-ditch efforts to maintain our place in the world, the real question is — Who is America’s God now?

We aren’t the first country to attempt national de-christianization.

There really is nothing new under the sun. And although we sometimes remember the problems of the past, we tell ourselves that it will never happen here or that this time will be different — so we rarely remember any of the solutions. And it that way, we doom ourselves to repeat our failures over and over again throughout history.

But we CAN stop the cycle, IF we can recognize the pattern.

Let me take you back to the French Revolution in the 1790’s.

The French Revolution was a result of many things, but religious unrest was undeniably one of them. When the Cathedral of Notre Dame was stormed by angry revolutionaries, they decapitated 20 statues. They thought they were beheading French kings, but these were actually statues of the Kings of Judah.

It was a clever irony. The Cathedral of Notre Dame represented everything the revolutionaries hated. Not only was it religiously significant, but the cathedral was a symbol of the monarchy. (Henry the 6th of England was crowned the King of France there.) Religion and politics had corrupted each other in the pursuit of power, and the people could hardly tell the two apart. In the revolutionaries' rage against the establishment, they were eager to destroy all connections to Catholicism. This would prove to be a real challenge considering most French citizens were Catholic, Catholicism was the state religion, and the church owned a lot of the property.

Religion and politics had corrupted each other... and the people could hardly tell the two apart.

Yet, many had grown tired of the Catholic church’s guiding hand in the nation, and a vision of a de-Christianized France captured the minds of revolutionaries. They massacred and jailed priests, made public worship illegal, and rushed to destroy every symbol of religion left standing.

The Cathedral itself became the site of the anti-religious festival —The Festival of Reason — which mocked Catholicism and suggested Parisians worship the principles of the Enlightenment instead. This festival was the opening ceremony for the first state-sponsored atheistic religion — the Culte de la Raison. The Cult of Reason. The new atheistic religion held its launch party at the Cathedral of Notre Dame to send a clear message that reason WOULD replace traditional religion, by any means necessary. The Bishop of Paris and the Clergy were forced to attend the festival and publicly renounce their religion and promise to henceforth only recognize the public worship of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

What Constantine had done in the name of Christianity, the French did in the name of reason.

The great irony in the fall-out of the French Revolution was that the revolutionaries thought they were freeing themselves from religion, but in reality, they just swapped oppressors. Absent the Catholic church, new and still quite demanding, secular religions quickly stepped in to fill the gaps.

Maximilien Robespierre, a prominent leader of the French Revolution, was wholly unimpressed with the Cult of Reason and proposed instead: The Cult of the Supreme Being. Where the Cult of Reason insisted on a world without a god, the Cult of the Supreme Being accepted the existence of a supernatural deity, but professed that this deity didn’t interfere with men’s lives.

There was a god to stir the people, but only men to tell them what to do (how wonderfully convenient for the men in charge).

This new cult organized the ordinary people, and instilled in them “proper morals'' and patriotism. It was the transitory ideology between a worship of God and a worship of Country, or worse, the country's leadership. Robspierre doubted the Cult of Reason could really handle the work of organizing society, so he peppered his new “cult” with recognizable religious undertones in the hopes of inspiring the masses. This new “religion” came with rituals, virtues, commandments, and holidays, including the festival of the Supreme Being–where Robspieere gallantly climbed up a paper mache mountain and sang revolutionary songs while the ordinary people looked on from below.

One of Robespierre’s critics said of him:

It is not enough for him to be in charge, he has to be god.”

Considering he advocated for the existence of a disinterested supreme being, Robspierre may have considered himself the next best option. (Know any leaders like that today?)

So why did the French leap from one religious order to the next?

Is it possible that in their zeal for de-Christianization, they took for granted the role religion plays in ordering society?

They removed the spiritual order of the Catholic church, but it appears they had no plans of what to replace it with. So the opportunistic ideologies of men stepped in as an alternative.

Maybe the Catholic church was too heavy-handed in the lives of everyday people, but the French, in their fervor, swung too far in the opposite direction.

Are we facing that same problem in America today?

Aristotle said:

“Nature abhors a vacuum.”

He meant this as a physical principle, but it has aged into an idiom that basically means, “if there is a hole, it will be filled.”

We see this in practice when someone tries to quit smoking. The smoker doesn’t usually quit the habit without forming a new habit. That is because we humans are more motivated by positive actions, rather than negative ones.

“When I want to smoke, I will chew gum instead” is more powerful than “when I want to smoke, I won’t.

In religious circles, there is a concept that inside every person is a “God-shaped hole” and if God doesn’t fill that hole, something else will, usually something nefarious.

...inside every person is a God-shaped hole.

In Matthew: 43, Jesus warned of this in a cautionary tale he told his disciples:

An unclean spirit came out of a man and then traveled around looking for somewhere else to live. It didn’t find anywhere, so it went back to the man and found that the hole he was living in before was still totally empty. So he grabbed seven more unclean spirits and they all moved back in together. In the end, the man was worse off than before.

The man in the parable neglected to fill the hole and his life was much worse because of it. It’s a lot like what happened during the French Revolution. The French Revolutionaries destroyed institutions without understanding the role those institutions played in holding their nation together, and, in the end, they were no better off.

I am going to bring up someone you may not expect — Friedrich Nietzsche. Yes. Friedrich Nietzche, the man who wrote The Antichrist. The man who railed against Christinaity–that Friedrich Nietzche. He is well remembered for his work The Madman in which he wrote:

“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers!”

Most of us know that line, but the line that comes just a sentence later is just as important:

"Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"

Nietzche, in that sentence, asked the questions we are wrestling with today. Absent God, how will we atone for our sins? Must we become gods ourselves?

In our society, we still don’t know the answer to those questions! Who CAN take our guilt away? Do we go to the mob on Twitter to absolve our guilt when we sin?

If you look at modern culture, you see that we are trying EVERY WAY we can to absolve ourselves of guilt. We do land acknowledgments to every native American tribe, hoping that will make us feel better about even existing. We apologize for assuming that someone who looks like a man, is a man. We have started to say things like, “As a cis, white, male, I feel it is best for me to make space for other, more marginalized voices.” We atone for our skin color, our sex, our families, our friends, our ancestors, and even our old Facebook photos. We will confirm even the most outrageous ideologies if that means we can separate ourselves from guilt.

When Nietzsche said God is dead, I don’t interpret that as God is dead and all is well, no need to give that any more thought. No, he meant that belief in God was dead, and it was our fault. And that without God, everything about humanity must change.

Throughout our history, we have organized ourselves around the belief in God. Belief comforted us in death, it gave us hope despite oppression, and it inspired us in battle, including the battles within ourselves. God gave us the ideal model for our lives. Who do we model after now? As we have reasoned God out of our lives, we have incidentally diminished a crucial part of what holds us together as human beings — the part that looks upward and works to align itself with holiness. I see what Nietzche wrote as a warning to us about the vacuum left when we remove God from a god-shaped hole. I worry about what is filling that gap in America today?

...we are trying EVERY WAY we can to absolve ourselves of guilt.

Absent the discussion of whether or not God is real, is the discussion of whether or not cultures need faith to bind them together morally.

Regardless of a person's belief in God, if you ask them if there are things they could do to make their life worse, they could rattle off a list of things almost instantly. Murdering someone comes to mind. That would make life much worse. So would abandoning a child or abusing an elderly person. These actions we almost universally agree make life worse. On the reverse, there must be things that we can do that make life better. And those things must be universal. They must conform to, as our founders put it, a natural law. And we already know these things. They are the actions we point to when saying someone is a good person.

But where do we derive good from? Is it something we are born with? Or do we need to be taught what good is?

Why is murder wrong? Why is it acceptable to put your dog down, but not your mom? We still have some national morals that bind us together that prioritize human life, but those are quickly dwindling. Last month we may have universally agreed that teaching kindergartners about sex is wrong, but this month we don’t know anymore. We used to agree that a man should not be allowed to bunk with women in a women's prison, but we don’t agree on that anymore. Colorado just passed a law saying that unborn babies have no rights and can be aborted at any time without restrictions. We are so far from ‘safe, legal, and rare”–the slippery slope is real. It’s happening. We have taken moral agreements for granted. We have not paid attention to our national values but expected them to just naturally sustain themselves. It hasn't worked.

So, can we count on knowing right and wrong innately? Or do we need something that guides us?

Is right and wrong decided individually or do we need to agree on it?

For example, if I believe that murder is wrong, but my neighbor who wants to kill me does not,, than we will struggle to live together in a society.

Morality is received from the wisdom of others throughout history.

A nation requires at least a minimum level of moral order, or else the system collapses. The question of our time is actually how much order we actually need. Terrible things have been done under the umbrella of god-less systems like Nazism and Communism — Communism alone is estimated to have killed up to 100 million people. But terrible things have also been done in the name of God and religion. Perhaps that is what has led us to the crisis we face today.

Yet, I argue that our ideas of morality are not conceived of independently. Morality is received from the wisdom of others throughout history. In America, our morality has a Judeo-Christian framework (a framework many of us take for granted). This morality is baked into our system of government through the protection of natural rights, the freedom of religion, the value placed on human life, equal justice, and so on.

America was special not because every single American believed in God, although many did. But Americans agreed to participate in a culture that was formed by those who did believe in God and expected to behave as if there were a God. I have known many people who don’t explicitly believe in God but who hate when the government encroaches on their personal liberty.

“The government doesn’t have the right,” they say. Says who? Atheism does not provide a quality justification for individual liberty, yet, in America, atheists are equally protected by it because God rights equally to ALL of us.

America needs to consider again the role of God and moral order in our nation.

Catch up with the rest of the "Who is America's God now?" series here:

This post is part of a series by Glenn and Mikayla G. Hedrick exploring Who is America's God now?

EXPOSED: Why Eisenhower warned us about endless wars

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Donald Trump emphasizes peace through strength, reminding the world that the United States is willing to fight to win. That’s beyond ‘defense.’

President Donald Trump made headlines this week by signaling a rebrand of the Defense Department — restoring its original name, the Department of War.

At first, I was skeptical. “Defense” suggests restraint, a principle I consider vital to U.S. foreign policy. “War” suggests aggression. But for the first 158 years of the republic, that was the honest name: the Department of War.

A Department of War recognizes the truth: The military exists to fight and, if necessary, to win decisively.

The founders never intended a permanent standing army. When conflict came — the Revolution, the War of 1812, the trenches of France, the beaches of Normandy — the nation called men to arms, fought, and then sent them home. Each campaign was temporary, targeted, and necessary.

From ‘war’ to ‘military-industrial complex’

Everything changed in 1947. President Harry Truman — facing the new reality of nuclear weapons, global tension, and two world wars within 20 years — established a full-time military and rebranded the Department of War as the Department of Defense. Americans resisted; we had never wanted a permanent army. But Truman convinced the country it was necessary.

Was the name change an early form of political correctness? A way to soften America’s image as a global aggressor? Or was it simply practical? Regardless, the move created a permanent, professional military. But it also set the stage for something Truman’s successor, President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower, famously warned about: the military-industrial complex.

Ike, the five-star general who commanded Allied forces in World War II and stormed Normandy, delivered a harrowing warning during his farewell address: The military-industrial complex would grow powerful. Left unchecked, it could influence policy and push the nation toward unnecessary wars.

And that’s exactly what happened. The Department of Defense, with its full-time and permanent army, began spending like there was no tomorrow. Weapons were developed, deployed, and sometimes used simply to justify their existence.

Peace through strength

When Donald Trump said this week, “I don’t want to be defense only. We want defense, but we want offense too,” some people freaked out. They called him a warmonger. He isn’t. Trump is channeling a principle older than him: peace through strength. Ronald Reagan preached it; Trump is taking it a step further.

Just this week, Trump also suggested limiting nuclear missiles — hardly the considerations of a warmonger — echoing Reagan, who wanted to remove missiles from silos while keeping them deployable on planes.

The seemingly contradictory move of Trump calling for a Department of War sends a clear message: He wants Americans to recognize that our military exists not just for defense, but to project power when necessary.

Trump has pointed to something critically important: The best way to prevent war is to have a leader who knows exactly who he is and what he will do. Trump signals strength, deterrence, and resolve. You want to negotiate? Great. You don’t? Then we’ll finish the fight decisively.

That’s why the world listens to us. That’s why nations come to the table — not because Trump is reckless, but because he means what he says and says what he means. Peace under weakness invites aggression. Peace under strength commands respect.

Trump is the most anti-war president we’ve had since Jimmy Carter. But unlike Carter, Trump isn’t weak. Carter’s indecision emboldened enemies and made the world less safe. Trump’s strength makes the country stronger. He believes in peace as much as any president. But he knows peace requires readiness for war.

Names matter

When we think of “defense,” we imagine cybersecurity, spy programs, and missile shields. But when we think of “war,” we recall its harsh reality: death, destruction, and national survival. Trump is reminding us what the Department of Defense is really for: war. Not nation-building, not diplomacy disguised as military action, not endless training missions. War — full stop.

Chip Somodevilla / Staff | Getty Images

Names matter. Words matter. They shape identity and character. A Department of Defense implies passivity, a posture of reaction. A Department of War recognizes the truth: The military exists to fight and, if necessary, to win decisively.

So yes, I’ve changed my mind. I’m for the rebranding to the Department of War. It shows strength to the world. It reminds Americans, internally and externally, of the reality we face. The Department of Defense can no longer be a euphemism. Our military exists for war — not without deterrence, but not without strength either. And we need to stop deluding ourselves.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Unveiling the Deep State: From surveillance to censorship

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From surveillance abuse to censorship, the deep state used state power and private institutions to suppress dissent and influence two US elections.

The term “deep state” has long been dismissed as the province of cranks and conspiracists. But the recent declassification of two critical documents — the Durham annex, released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and a report publicized by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — has rendered further denial untenable.

These documents lay bare the structure and function of a bureaucratic, semi-autonomous network of agencies, contractors, nonprofits, and media entities that together constitute a parallel government operating alongside — and at times in opposition to — the duly elected one.

The ‘deep state’ is a self-reinforcing institutional machine — a decentralized, global bureaucracy whose members share ideological alignment.

The disclosures do not merely recount past abuses; they offer a schematic of how modern influence operations are conceived, coordinated, and deployed across domestic and international domains.

What they reveal is not a rogue element operating in secret, but a systematized apparatus capable of shaping elections, suppressing dissent, and laundering narratives through a transnational network of intelligence, academia, media, and philanthropic institutions.

Narrative engineering from the top

According to Gabbard’s report, a pivotal moment occurred on December 9, 2016, when the Obama White House convened its national security leadership in the Situation Room. Attendees included CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Secretary of State John Kerry, and others.

During this meeting, the consensus view up to that point — that Russia had not manipulated the election outcome — was subordinated to new instructions.

The record states plainly: The intelligence community was directed to prepare an assessment “per the President’s request” that would frame Russia as the aggressor and then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as its preferred candidate. Notably absent was any claim that new intelligence had emerged. The motivation was political, not evidentiary.

This maneuver became the foundation for the now-discredited 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference. From that point on, U.S. intelligence agencies became not neutral evaluators of fact but active participants in constructing a public narrative designed to delegitimize the incoming administration.

Institutional and media coordination

The ODNI report and the Durham annex jointly describe a feedback loop in which intelligence is laundered through think tanks and nongovernmental organizations, then cited by media outlets as “independent verification.” At the center of this loop are agencies like the CIA, FBI, and ODNI; law firms such as Perkins Coie; and NGOs such as the Open Society Foundations.

According to the Durham annex, think tanks including the Atlantic Council, the Carnegie Endowment, and the Center for a New American Security were allegedly informed of Clinton’s 2016 plan to link Trump to Russia. These institutions, operating under the veneer of academic independence, helped diffuse the narrative into public discourse.

Media coordination was not incidental. On the very day of the aforementioned White House meeting, the Washington Post published a front-page article headlined “Obama Orders Review of Russian Hacking During Presidential Campaign” — a story that mirrored the internal shift in official narrative. The article marked the beginning of a coordinated media campaign that would amplify the Trump-Russia collusion narrative throughout the transition period.

Surveillance and suppression

Surveillance, once limited to foreign intelligence operations, was turned inward through the abuse of FISA warrants. The Steele dossier — funded by the Clinton campaign via Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS — served as the basis for wiretaps on Trump affiliates, despite being unverified and partially discredited. The FBI even altered emails to facilitate the warrants.

ROBYN BECK / Contributor | Getty Images

This capacity for internal subversion reappeared in 2020, when 51 former intelligence officials signed a letter labeling the Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation.” According to polling, 79% of Americans believed truthful coverage of the laptop could have altered the election. The suppression of that story — now confirmed as authentic — was election interference, pure and simple.

A machine, not a ‘conspiracy theory’

The deep state is a self-reinforcing institutional machine — a decentralized, global bureaucracy whose members share ideological alignment and strategic goals.

Each node — law firms, think tanks, newsrooms, federal agencies — operates with plausible deniability. But taken together, they form a matrix of influence capable of undermining electoral legitimacy and redirecting national policy without democratic input.

The ODNI report and the Durham annex mark the first crack in the firewall shielding this machine. They expose more than a political scandal buried in the past. They lay bare a living system of elite coordination — one that demands exposure, confrontation, and ultimately dismantling.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Trump's proposal explained: Ukraine's path to peace without NATO expansion

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Strategic compromise, not absolute victory, often ensures lasting stability.

When has any country been asked to give up land it won in a war? Even if a nation is at fault, the punishment must be measured.

After World War I, Germany, the main aggressor, faced harsh penalties under the Treaty of Versailles. Germans resented the restrictions, and that resentment fueled the rise of Adolf Hitler, ultimately leading to World War II. History teaches that justice for transgressions must avoid creating conditions for future conflict.

Ukraine and Russia must choose to either continue the cycle of bloodshed or make difficult compromises in pursuit of survival and stability.

Russia and Ukraine now stand at a similar crossroads. They can cling to disputed land and prolong a devastating war, or they can make concessions that might secure a lasting peace. The stakes could not be higher: Tens of thousands die each month, and the choice between endless bloodshed and negotiated stability hinges on each side’s willingness to yield.

History offers a guide. In 1967, Israel faced annihilation. Surrounded by hostile armies, the nation fought back and seized large swaths of territory from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria. Yet Israel did not seek an empire. It held only the buffer zones needed for survival and returned most of the land. Security and peace, not conquest, drove its decisions.

Peace requires concessions

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says both Russia and Ukraine will need to “get something” from a peace deal. He’s right. Israel proved that survival outweighs pride. By giving up land in exchange for recognition and an end to hostilities, it stopped the cycle of war. Egypt and Israel have not fought in more than 50 years.

Russia and Ukraine now press opposing security demands. Moscow wants a buffer to block NATO. Kyiv, scarred by invasion, seeks NATO membership — a pledge that any attack would trigger collective defense by the United States and Europe.

President Donald Trump and his allies have floated a middle path: an Article 5-style guarantee without full NATO membership. Article 5, the core of NATO’s charter, declares that an attack on one is an attack on all. For Ukraine, such a pledge would act as a powerful deterrent. For Russia, it might be more palatable than NATO expansion to its border

Andrew Harnik / Staff | Getty Images

Peace requires concessions. The human cost is staggering: U.S. estimates indicate 20,000 Russian soldiers died in a single month — nearly half the total U.S. casualties in Vietnam — and the toll on Ukrainians is also severe. To stop this bloodshed, both sides need to recognize reality on the ground, make difficult choices, and anchor negotiations in security and peace rather than pride.

Peace or bloodshed?

Both Russia and Ukraine claim deep historical grievances. Ukraine arguably has a stronger claim of injustice. But the question is not whose parchment is older or whose deed is more valid. The question is whether either side is willing to trade some land for the lives of thousands of innocent people. True security, not historical vindication, must guide the path forward.

History shows that punitive measures or rigid insistence on territorial claims can perpetuate cycles of war. Germany’s punishment after World War I contributed directly to World War II. By contrast, Israel’s willingness to cede land for security and recognition created enduring peace. Ukraine and Russia now face the same choice: Continue the cycle of bloodshed or make difficult compromises in pursuit of survival and stability.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

The loneliness epidemic: Are machines replacing human connection?

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Seniors, children, and the isolated increasingly rely on machines for conversation, risking real relationships and the emotional depth that only humans provide.

Jill Smola is 75 years old. She’s a retiree from Orlando, Florida, and she spent her life caring for the elderly. She played games, assembled puzzles, and offered company to those who otherwise would have sat alone.

Now, she sits alone herself. Her husband has died. She has a lung condition. She can’t drive. She can’t leave her home. Weeks can pass without human interaction.

Loneliness is an epidemic. And AI will not fix it. It will only dull the edges and make a diminished life tolerable.

But CBS News reports that she has a new companion. And she likes this companion more than her own daughter.

The companion? Artificial intelligence.

She spends five hours a day talking to her AI friend. They play games, do trivia, and just talk. She says she even prefers it to real people.

My first thought was simple: Stop this. We are losing our humanity.

But as I sat with the story, I realized something uncomfortable. Maybe we’ve already lost some of our humanity — not to AI, but to ourselves.

Outsourcing presence

How often do we know the right thing to do yet fail to act? We know we should visit the lonely. We know we should sit with someone in pain. We know what Jesus would do: Notice the forgotten, touch the untouchable, offer time and attention without outsourcing compassion.

Yet how often do we just … talk about it? On the radio, online, in lectures, in posts. We pontificate, and then we retreat.

I asked myself: What am I actually doing to close the distance between knowing and doing?

Human connection is messy. It’s inconvenient. It takes patience, humility, and endurance. AI doesn’t challenge you. It doesn’t interrupt your day. It doesn’t ask anything of you. Real people do. Real people make us confront our pride, our discomfort, our loneliness.

We’ve built an economy of convenience. We can have groceries delivered, movies streamed, answers instantly. But friendships — real relationships — are slow, inefficient, unpredictable. They happen in the blank spaces of life that we’ve been trained to ignore.

And now we’re replacing that inefficiency with machines.

AI provides comfort without challenge. It eliminates the risk of real intimacy. It’s an elegant coping mechanism for loneliness, but a poor substitute for life. If we’re not careful, the lonely won’t just be alone — they’ll be alone with an anesthetic, a shadow that never asks for anything, never interrupts, never makes them grow.

Reclaiming our humanity

We need to reclaim our humanity. Presence matters. Not theory. Not outrage. Action.

It starts small. Pull up a chair for someone who eats alone. Call a neighbor you haven’t spoken to in months. Visit a nursing home once a month — then once a week. Ask their names, hear their stories. Teach your children how to be present, to sit with someone in grief, without rushing to fix it.

Turn phones off at dinner. Make Sunday afternoons human time. Listen. Ask questions. Don’t post about it afterward. Make the act itself sacred.

Humility is central. We prefer machines because we can control them. Real people are inconvenient. They interrupt our narratives. They demand patience, forgiveness, and endurance. They make us confront ourselves.

A friend will challenge your self-image. A chatbot won’t.

Our homes are quieter. Our streets are emptier. Loneliness is an epidemic. And AI will not fix it. It will only dull the edges and make a diminished life tolerable.

Before we worry about how AI will reshape humanity, we must first practice humanity. It can start with 15 minutes a day of undivided attention, presence, and listening.

Change usually comes when pain finally wins. Let’s not wait for that. Let’s start now. Because real connection restores faster than any machine ever will.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.