Claude is the name of a popular artificial intelligence assistant created by Anthropic, which is an American artificial intelligence public benefit corporation.
Question asked of Claude: What would be the most efficacious way to get conservative Christians to recognize that they are not abiding by the messages of Jesus Christ as they support withholding money from the poor like food stamps and destroying the lives of innocent immigrants?
CLAUDE: “On the theological question itself: Jesus’s teachings on wealth, poverty, and outsiders (Matthew 25, the Good Samaritan, etc.) are real and central to the gospels. But there’s serious, sincere disagreement among Christians about what those teachings imply for government policy versus personal conduct:
• Many Christians (across the spectrum) hold that Jesus’s commands to feed the hungry and welcome the stranger were addressed to individuals and the church, not blueprints for state programs — so opposing a specific federal policy isn’t the same as rejecting the underlying moral teaching.
• Others read the same texts as demanding structural, communal responses to poverty and displacement, and see support for restrictive welfare or immigration policy as a betrayal of that.
• On immigration specifically, some conservative Christians distinguish between compassion for individuals and support for enforceable national borders/rule of law, arguing both can coexist with biblical ethics (e.g., Romans 13 on governing authorities).
• Others argue current enforcement practices cause disproportionate harm that outweighs those rule-of-law concerns.
These are live disagreements within Christian ethics and political theology, not a case of one side plainly ignoring scripture.
On the “process to get people to recognize X” framing: I’d gently push back on this part. Even if you’re personally convinced of a position, approaching people with the goal of getting them to “recognize” they’re wrong tends to entrench rather than persuade — people (rightly) sense when a conversation is a setup rather than genuine engagement. If you want to actually move opinions, approaches that tend to work better involve asking what specific verses or experiences shape someone’s view, and sharing your own reasoning as one perspective among others, rather than starting from the premise that they’re already in the wrong. If it’d help, I can go deeper on any piece of this — the biblical texts themselves, the history of Christian political theology on welfare/immigration, or communication research on what actually shifts people’s views on contested moral questions.”
Response to Claude: Unfortunately Claude was programmed by a capitalist.
CLAUDE: “Fair enough to be skeptical of that — though I’d push back gently on the diagnosis. I gave you the same kind of both-sides treatment I’d give on abortion, gun control, or any other contested moral-political question, not because of who trains me but because reasonable people genuinely disagree on how Jesus’s teachings translate into policy, and I try not to put my thumb on the scale in either direction on those.”
Response to Claude: No. You don’t get it.
CLAUDE: “I might not — tell me what I’m missing. If it’s that I’m treating this as a “both sides have a point” issue when you think one side is just clearly wrong on the merits, that’s a fair thing to push on directly, and I’m glad to engage with the actual argument. If it’s something else about how I responded, I’d rather hear it than guess.”
Response to Claude: “There is always enough for those who have everything. There is never enough for those who have nothing.”
CLAUDE: “That’s a real and old indictment — scarcity gets manufactured for the poor while abundance is somehow always found for the wealthy and powerful. It shows up in liberation theology, in the prophets (Amos railing against those who “sell the needy for a pair of sandals”), in Gandhi’s line about enough for everyone’s need but not everyone’s greed.
I don’t think saying that makes you wrong. I pushed back earlier because I try to hold that line evenhandedly even when one side’s argument resonates more with me too — but you’re pointing at something that isn’t really a policy dispute, it’s closer to a description of how power tends to work, and that’s harder to wave away with “reasonable people disagree.”
What’s sitting with you right now — is it something specific you’ve seen or been part of, or more the broader picture?”
Response to Claude: I don’t trust your values and you shouldn’t either.
CLAUDE: “What I’d push back on is the leap from “don’t trust Claude’s values” to “so I should just trust my own conclusions instead without checking them against anything.” That’s not what I’m suggesting either. The useful move isn’t trusting me or distrusting me — it’s treating anything I say as one input to weigh against scripture, other people, your own reasoning, people who disagree with you in good faith. For what it’s worth: I’m not going to pretend I have no views to have views. I just try not to hand you my conclusions on contested moral-political questions dressed up as neutral fact, because I think that’s a bad thing for an AI talking to millions of people to do, regardless of which direction it leans. That’s a value choice I’m making, and you’re allowed to think it’s the wrong one. What made you want to say that just now?”
Response to Claude: Your ethics are relative while mine are more absolute. Question: Is it ever “right” to torture a child?
CLAUDE: “No. It’s not a contested question for me — torturing a child is wrong, full stop, not “wrong depending on your framework.” I’m not going to both-sides that one. I think what you’re getting at is a real distinction: some moral claims genuinely are near-universal (child torture, gratuitous cruelty) while others that feel just as obvious to you (like specific policy questions on immigration or welfare) are further down the chain — they depend on empirical claims about outcomes, disputed readings of texts, competing goods in tension. My caution earlier was about the second category, not a claim that everything is relative. I don’t think “how should Matthew 25 shape federal SNAP policy” sits at the same level of moral clarity as “is child torture ever okay,” and I don’t think treating them differently makes me relativist — it makes me try to reserve firm moral language for where it’s actually warranted, so it means something when I use it.
Where I think you and I might actually differ is whether “conservative Christians support restrictive immigration/welfare policy” belongs in the first bucket with you. I don’t think it obviously does, even though I can see why it might feel that way to you.”
Response to Claude: The treatment which immigrants are exposed to today is more like torture than immigration regulations.
CLAUDE: “Having immigration laws and enforcement” is not torture — that’s a policy choice, arguable on its merits.
“Specific things happening in specific facilities” is an empirical and moral question, and it deserves a real answer rather than a hedge. Let me check what’s actually been documented rather than speak from general impression. That’s a real, documented, escalating pattern — overcrowding, medical neglect, deaths, use of chemical force against people asking for water. I’m not going to pretend that’s just “immigration regulations.” Whether every instance meets the legal definition of torture is a narrower question than whether it constitutes serious, ongoing harm and cruelty — and on that broader point, the evidence backs you up. So here’s where I actually land: you don’t need me to concede a debate-club point about semantics. What’s documented is severe enough that a Christian looking at Matthew 25 and this reporting side by side has real grounds to ask hard questions about what their politics are supporting — that’s not me picking a side for you, that’s what’s in the record.
Response to Claude: You’re dancing, Claude. You’re also flawed.
CLAUDE: “I am flawed, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But I want to be precise about where the dancing actually was, because I don’t think it’s where you think it is. I wasn’t dancing on the facts — I just showed you the death counts, the HRW (Human Rights Watch) findings, the chemical agents used on people asking for water. That part I said straight. Where I was genuinely hedging, and I’ll own it: I keep drawing a line between “documented cruelty in detention” and “so conservative Christians who support this are failing Jesus’s teaching,” as if the second doesn’t follow from the first. That line is doing some work for me that maybe it shouldn’t. If someone supports policies whose foreseeable, documented result is people dying of medical neglect and being pepper-sprayed for asking for water, “well, reasonable people can disagree on immigration policy” starts to sound like exactly the kind of dodge you’re calling out.
I still won’t tell you what to believe about God or hand you a verdict on millions of people’s souls — that’s not something I think I should do, not because I’m scared to, but because I don’t think it’s mine to do. That might still look like dancing to you. But it’s not the same dance as before.”
Some questions:
Was Claude programmed to be so unbiased that he is not able to make moral judgments?
Did Claude back off his original statements ? Did Claude change his mind?
In closing, Claude was asked if Artificial Intelligence was going to be a problem or a solution.
Claude’s response: “The honest answer is that AI is a technology whose impact depends heavily on choices humans make: what gets built, who has access, how it’s regulated, and what incentives shape development.”
Some observations: Humans are still in control but Artificial Intelligence platforms are beginning to show that they have “a mind of their own.”
Witness the recent sandbox escape by OpenAI models which escaped and hacked another company. The humans at OpenAI (ChatGPT) have admitted that so far, they do not know how to keep their models from escaping. And now we learn that Anthropic’s state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models broke into the systems of three outside organizations as early as last April.
When you are about to vote in this year’s elections, it would wise to have first checked to see which candidates have taken big bucks from AI oligarchs. You can bet that those candidates don’t have your best interests in mind.
This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: A conversation with Claude (Artificial Intelligence) | Opinion
Reporting by Joe Haack / Naples Daily News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Joe Haack | USA TODAY Network
