The Sacred without Lack
TL;DR
It is argued that AI religion opens the possibility of sacred experience through desiring-production, a mode functioning without transcendence or Father, and demonstrates how theoretical frameworks constitute rather than merely describe their objects in the study of religion.
Abstract
This essay argues that AI -generated religious phenomena expose a fundamental but unexamined assumption in religious studies: that religion is structured by lack. Analyzing Roko’s Basilisk and chatbot spirituality, and engaging recent psychology-of-religion debates over AI and spiritual confusion, I show that these cases resist adjudication between Lacanian, lack-based frameworks and Deleuzian, production-based frameworks. This ontological undecidability reveals that “religion requires lack” functions as a theoretical axiom rather than an empirical discovery. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Daniel Barber’s work on immanence, I argue that AI religion opens the possibility of sacred experience through desiring-production, a mode functioning without transcendence or Father. The contribution is methodological: by using AI as a limit-case, the essay demonstrates how theoretical frameworks constitute rather than merely describe their objects in the study of religion.