Can a Jesus chatbot replace the real thing? The Easter story suggests not

I find the fleshliness of the story a reality check, one that gets me out of my head.

The more we do life online, the more we are in a hall of mirrors where algorithms reflect people’s desires back at them, and nothing is ultimately real beyond the blizzard of electrical signals swirling around their brain.

A sex therapist recently told The New York Times that it didn’t matter if human-AI (or human-God, for that matter) relationships were real.

Reality isn’t just what you make of it in your head. Which is why, by the way, talk of resurrection is such a bold move. The early Christians claimed Jesus rose bodily, not spiritually, from the dead. If true, it’s the ultimate guarantee that the real world shifted on its axis that first Easter . The body, both now and forevermore, is the really real. Something solid to grip on to in a virtual age when it seems surplus to requirements. - Justine Toh is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity .