People who like Answer to question Grok: Can you find everywhere in the 5th Epochal Revelation Urantia Papers where it describes what Jesus looked like and then create an image of what he might have looked like based on these descriptions and the genetic lineage of his parents
"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing." —George Bernard Shaw
On Paul's Grok experiment:
Paul, your experiment is not a joke and I am not dismissing it. But I want to share what it stirred in me.
I grew up in Lutheran churches where images of Jesus were rare. My Catholic grandmother took me into cathedrals where the stained glass showed mostly his suffering. I was never moved by any of it. Or by painting of the Master. For a long time I thought that was a personal failing. As I grew older, I understand it differently.
When you have built an inner picture of someone through many years of reading, prayer, and lived encounter, an external image does not add to that picture. It subtracts from it. It replaces something irreducible with something smaller. Sometimes it is upsetting me, like when I first saw Christ Michael's Emblem with a cross on it.
The robot voice saying 'I am the way, the truth and the life' also upset me for a reason I can name precisely. Jesus in the revelation never presented himself as the destination. He consistently pointed away from himself toward the Father. That sentence, rendered by a machine in Jesus' name, is the founding text of a religion about Jesus. And we have had two thousand years of that already.
Paper 141:7.4 says Jesus left behind no books, laws, or other forms of human organization affecting the religious life of the individual. A speaking avatar affects the religious life of the individual. That is exactly what the revelation asks us not to create.
We don't stop playing because we grow old. I know Shaw. But I wonder, as we play, whether we are building a religion of Jesus or adding one more portrait to the cathedral wall.
Oliver
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