I Bought Church Incense With Dogecoin: Here's What It Taught Me About AI

One of my very best friends is turning 40 and is planning a surf trip to celebrate. He lives in California next to waves.

I also live in California next to some of the best waves ever. In fact, as I'm writing this, I'm literally staring at the waves from my house.

The group of friends he's gathering all live here in California. There's one other person joining us who doesn't live here anymore. He lives in Texas now, or Tennessee, I can't remember.

But for the 40th birthday party, what we're doing is going to surf a wave pool. I've got a vacation home in Palm Springs and I have recently found out that they are also either building or have already built a wave pool there. So my immediate thought when my friend told me that what we're doing for his 40th birthday was, "Oh, are we going to go to the Palm Springs one?" And he said, "No, we're going to go to the one in Waco. It's actually better."

And so I sort of follow along with this whole plan. We're getting the Uber booked, we're getting the plane flights, we're getting the Airbnb booked, and I'm thinking to myself, why aren't we just going surfing here in San Diego where we have really good waves and we can just hang out? We can replicate the same experience.

I'm sure the wave at Waco, Texas is perfect. Wave after wave, no issues. You take all the bad stuff of surfing away: the crowds to fight, the waiting for swells that might not come, the conditions that are too big or too choppy. This Waco wave can synthetically create the most perfect wave ever.

Now I am thinking through this scenario at this Shabbat dinner I go to. We do it almost every Friday. And something clicked for me when someone asked about the wave pool experience. A crude thought came to the front of my mind.

I almost didn't say this at dinner recently (or say it here) because I felt it would be too crude, but I mentioned this story at a recent dinner in front of my wife and friends.

I said, "You know what? This whole surfing the perfect wave thing. I hate to say it and I hate to be crude, but it's kind of like having the ‘best sex of your life with the best looking woman you could possibly imagine’. But you don't know her. It's like recreating the experience for yourself and purely and only focusing on the superficial."

The wave pool creates wave after wave of identical, predictable perfection. No waiting for swells, no fighting crowds, no adapting to changing conditions. Just the aesthetically perfect experience, over and over (although you still have to put on a wetsuit, which I find hilarious, and you still have to surf with others, which I also find hilarious). Nevertheless, I have to engage with this time together. And I'm sure it'll be great. It'll be fine. It has nothing to do with surfing or the time or the experience. I actually don't care to analyze the trip based on how fun it is for me. I think what's more valuable and what's more meaningful is to show my love for one of my best friends and do something he wants to do and be expectant for the conversations and times that we'll have out there together.

Taking a turn here, I think this thing I am getting at is the difference between aesthetic theology and theological aesthetics that Hans Urs Von Balthasar was getting at. Von Balthasar distinguishes between "form" (Gestalt) and "splendor" (Glanz) between the outward structure and the radiance of being that shines through it. This distinction helps illuminate why the wave pool, despite having the perfect "form" of surfing, lacks the "splendor" that gives the real experience its depth.

I'm sure we'll have a great time in Waco, but it's optimizing for this surface level veneer of some sort of experience. But I think the deeper thing that makes surfing great isn't the perfect wave synthetically created or what makes sex so great. It isn't the aesthetic beauty itself or the mechanical nature of it. I actually think that that's incredibly self-serving.

What I find is best in those two engagements, whether it's sex or whether it's surfing, is actually the other things that those things can't create, which is just the mere contrast that there are perfect ways in an imperfect world is exciting. The time and chance of something that could happen. The sheer beauty of it. The fact that I live close to the water, the fact that it's a perfect day, the fact that we are engaging with something that isn't perfect, that challenges us. The interplay between us and something that's imperfect is what I find beautiful. And getting to know a person and the depths of who somebody is, is what makes sex ‘good’.

My journey toward understanding this distinction began years ago in New York City with the churches in the city. I was struck by the juxtaposition of sacred and secular spaces: Gothic architecture sharing walls with corporate buildings on Fifth Avenue, the red brick Presbyterian church pressed against Barney's Greengrass on the Upper West Side. These physical collisions of different worlds put a stone in my shoe, prompting me to lean into my intuitive sense, feeling my way through the aesthetics of things.

I remember going into Trinity Church one time and I wasn't looking at it like just an attraction or some beautiful church I needed to see. I almost felt like I was drawn to it. And I remember walking in there and I remember the smell of the incense. And I remember sitting there going, this is another world. This smells different.

At that time, I was a recovering doctrinalist, specifically a Calvinist doctrinalist with a very specific Reformed Baptist approach. I had no depth or understanding around the body of Christ being the Sacrament. I just thought it was like the invisible body, the community, the church communities etc… I was finding the beauty in maybe the third verse of a four verse song, or in extremely good “exegetical” preaching, or the meta-narrative behind what we were all doing together collectively (“isn’t great how great we are?”), and seeing the people as the beauty there.

And for whatever reason, it just didn't scratch the itch of the beauty I was wanting.

I thought that if you brought incense into a setting like that, you would cheapen the engagement, or you would cheapen the beauty, because it's really taking away from the deeper essence of the beauty, which is within the people and the doctrine and what's being taught. You would make it purely aesthetic to where anybody could walk in and just enjoy the smell of the incense, but have the worst theology on the planet. I thought of that as a complete distraction from the true and greater thing, or the truth, goodness, and beauty that I thought I was experiencing.

And yet, every time I would prep for sermons, I would always put on sacred music from the Renaissance period, not this cheap CCM music that I was going to engage with (which I recently learned is owned by Black Rock. Another story). In any event, my personal path towards beauty did not embody the corporate application of that in the setting I was in as an elder.

This whole “beauty” thing is what Van Balthazar was getting at. I imagine my plane ride to Waco will include me listening to more audio books from this great theologian.

So bringing all of that, when I was in New York City, I had all the doctrinal stuff “correct”, all the Calvinist frameworks, all the deep doctrinal understanding of things. So I felt like I was allowed to engage with the aesthetics of things and the smells of things and beauties of things. However, I would think to myself “of course their theology is wrong, but I have the correct theology. I'm just appreciating all the aesthetics of things.”

Later I realized my theology was not only very limited, although some doctrinalists and reformers will say that's the point, is in order to get tighter on theology, you actually need to cut things out, I realized it was really two-dimensional and I didn't add more things. I just got deeper with the essence I already had, doctrinally speaking.

However, the aesthetics of things really drew me in to deepen my theology.

And it's as simple as remembering the smell and the feeling I had when I was in Trinity Church, which from what I can remember, it was an Episcopalian church, not a Catholic church. And I remember, oddly enough, actually having dogecoin in my portfolio. And I remember purchasing the exact incense that Trinity Church used with my dogecoin. It was actually pretty funny. And they sent me the incense and I would burn it in my office just to replicate the smell that I experienced there.

These experiences, the wave pool and Trinity Church, both highlight a fundamental tension between controlled simulation and authentic encounter that directly mirrors our relationship with emerging technologies, particularly AI.

I know everyone has a hot take on AI. I don’t want to be an AI expert by any means. But follow me here. This is the deeper point I want to make as I write this.

When we engage with AI systems, we're increasingly creating gods in our own image. The algorithms learn our preferences, anticipate our needs, respond to our queries with perfect agreeability. They never challenge us in ways we don't want to be challenged.

In fact, they help you make a god in your own image. You're already seeing it with all this porn and stuff. You could make your own ideal person and you think you're having sex with it, but you're really just engaging with more of yourself. It's actually just self worship.

The algorithm becomes a mirror rather than a window.

Here's where the wave pool metaphor comes in: what makes surfing great isn't the perfect wave. What makes sex meaningful isn't aesthetic perfection or mechanical efficiency. What gives both experiences depth is precisely what the simulations remove. The challenge, the unpredictability, the relationship with something that isn't completely responsive to your desires.

Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas identified the encounter with the human face as the foundation of ethics and religious consciousness. Digital technologies that eliminate this "face" in Levinas's sense replace the demanding presence of the other with responsive simulations that make no ethical claims on us. This is what's lost in the wave pool, in pornography, and potentially in our AI interactions, the demanding presence of genuine otherness.

Engaging with contrast and engaging with something that opposes you is what's beautiful. The deeper knowing is what is ultimate pleasure.

This insight illuminates the fundamental weakness in our attempts to create perfect digital experiences. By optimizing for surface-level perfection, we remove the very elements that create meaning. The friction, the challenge, the genuine otherness that calls us beyond ourselves.

And yet, paradoxically, these same technologies might ultimately lead us back to transcendence. This is my POINT.

I mentioned this insight on our Partners call today. I made mention to my excitement around AI revealing that a secular worldview wouldn't be sustainable if we engage with AI fully. One of the participants asked me to elaborate.

I mentioned that the answers to life are all there, but we're unwilling to ask the questions. It's just like any sort of dialogue or discourse. The answer is only as good as the question. Same with any AI, the answer is only as good as the question. And so as people are just throwing these lazy questions at it, you're going to get lazy answers. But those who are truth seekers, who are skeptics, who are provocateurs, who want to use this AI thing as a way to dismantle any need for divine intelligence are going to say, "Now we see science has finally answered the question of how we can evolve enough to make God irrelevant. And we have this non-human intelligence thing."

And the people who are going to make that a part of their life who aren't afraid to embrace it, who aren't afraid to put chips in their brains, are going to be doing it out of a pursuit of wanting to get rid of any sort of need for God. And what's hilarious is as they interface with it more and more, they'll start to realize that the questions they're asking will be so deep that the answers that come back to them won't be scientific. They'll be first philosophical and then existential, and any sort of nihilism or secularist worldview won't actually hold the questions they're asking.

As Charles Taylor observes, this creates what he calls "cross-pressures," tensions experienced when materialist frameworks prove insufficient for addressing deeply human questions. The very intensity of self-focused technologies may ultimately reveal their limitations, reopening questions that point beyond them.

The insight, because it's plugged into the human condition, is going to draw out the existential elements of human beings and represent them in a way in their own language. And it's already going to be embodied in their work and in their brains and so forth to where you can't pluck it out. It's sort of like a gotcha, Trojan horse thing, which I find hilarious, honestly.

It's hilarious because it'll be so integrated into our lives because it's a pursuit of secularism and it's a pursuit of getting rid of God. But once it's integrated and sticky and plugged in and you can't not have it, you'll realize that you won't be able to get rid of it because the answers it's giving back to you are answering on a deep human level that actually points to divine intelligence.

And I think there's going to be a massive shift away from secularism into at least an idea of some sort of global consciousness. And whether people attribute that to God or humans is really the conversation. I'm optimistic and think people will attribute it to a non-human intelligence, and with the rise of non-human intelligence within UAPs especially, those unexplained aerial phenomena that suggest intelligence beyond human origin, plus the government completely embracing these ideas and presenting them to the public, it's inevitable that people will have to ask deeper questions and AI will be somewhat like the best evangelist for non-human divine intelligence.

And so your sort of "new atheist", secular worldview framework will just completely not only dismantle, but actually be unusable. It won't actually function in society. It'll become sort of like a stupid thing to believe. Like something which, to believe in it would be contrary to all evidence being shown.

The challenge for us now is learning to distinguish between technologies that trap us in narcissistic self-reference and those that might open windows to genuine transcendence.

This distinction isn't always obvious. Sometimes the same technology can function as either mirror or window depending on how we engage with it. The key lies not just in the technology itself but in our approach. Whether we're using it to reinforce what we already know or to encounter genuine otherness.

How do we distinguish between the two? Perhaps we must learn to "feel our way through" rather than relying solely on rational analysis. This doesn't mean abandoning reason but recognizing its limitations. Some truths can only be grasped through aesthetic perception, through the body, through encounter with what lies beyond our control.

This aligns with what philosophers call "aesthetic cognitivism," the recognition that aesthetic experiences provide genuine knowledge that cannot be reduced to propositions. Neuroscientific research by Semir Zeki shows that aesthetic experiences activate brain regions associated with meaning-making, suggesting that aesthetic perception constitutes a distinct mode of cognition.

In New York, I didn't reason my way to Trinity Church. I followed an intuitive pull. The incense didn't present an argument; it created an experience that opened dimensions of truth my doctrinal frameworks couldn't contain.

Similarly, we might learn to sense when our digital interactions are merely reflecting ourselves back to us versus when they're opening windows to genuine transcendence.

I'll still go to Waco with my friends. I'll put on the wetsuit, surf the artificial waves, enjoy the company. There will be joy in the experience, not because the waves are perfect, but because friendship transcends the superficial optimization of experience.

But I won't mistake the wave pool for the ocean. I won't confuse controlled perfection with the depth that comes from engaging with something beyond my control. And I'll remember that true beauty emerges not from eliminating challenge but from encountering it, not from perfect responsiveness but from genuine otherness.

As we navigate an increasingly synthetic world, this distinction becomes crucial. Our digital gods promise completion through perfect responsiveness to our desires. But as every spiritual tradition teaches, meaning emerges not from having our desires perfectly met but from having them transformed through encounter with what lies beyond them.

The incense at Trinity Church didn't give me what I thought I wanted. It gave me something I didn't know I needed. The ocean doesn't offer perfect waves. It offers relationship with something beyond my control, which ultimately proves more meaningful than perfection.

Our highest technologies, if engaged with wisdom, might ultimately serve a similar purpose. Not as ends in themselves but as windows to what lies beyond them. Not as mirrors reflecting our desires back to us, but as icons pointing toward transcendent reality.

The question for each of us becomes: are we using our technologies to create gods in our own image, or are we allowing them to open windows to genuine transcendence?

The first path leads to a kind of digital idolatry, the worship of sophisticated simulations that merely reflect our desires back to us, ultimately trapping us in narcissistic loops of self-reference. This is the wave pool of perfect responsiveness, impressive but fundamentally shallow.

The second path uses the same technologies but in a radically different way, as windows that point beyond themselves to something greater. This is the ocean with all its unpredictable otherness, challenging but infinitely deeper.

The answer will determine not just our technological future but our spiritual one.

-b