The Gods We Made in Our Own Image

By Kavisha Pillay

I am not sure that I believe in god. At least, not in the way that I was taught to.

I grew up Hindu, which if you are unfamiliar with the tradition, means that you grow up in a world that is populated with the divine. There is a god for everything. For wealth and for wisdom, for dawn and destruction, for the obstacles in your path and the grace that clears them. There’s a god for Tuesday and a god for Thursday, and I found this, genuinely, magnificent because it suggested that the universe was always paying attention. That everything mattered enough to have a presiding deity. That the divine was not something that was distant; it was in your home, your heart, and the beings around you.

Then slowly, it began to fray.

Somewhere between the god who loved everyone and a world that very clearly did not, my grip on religion loosened. It became hard to believe in a god which is often invoked to wage wars, justify oppression, and draw borders not just on maps, but inside people too. It became harder still to reconcile that god, with any serious belief in equality and human dignity.

As I have drifted from the gods of my upbringing, a new pantheon has arrived - on demand and in our pockets.

Enter the god bots

We now live in a time where you don’t just pray to god, you can also chat with one - or rather, with a plausible imitation. There is “Text with Jesus”, “Buddhabot”, “Gita GPT”, “QuranGPT” and a steadily multiplying list of AI chatbots that promise divine wisdom on demand. They don’t ask for incense or offerings, just Wi‑Fi and your data.

Large language models trained on religious texts can now synthesize spiritual insights, delivering in seconds what took scholars, saints, and grandmothers a lifetime to pass down. One theologian has dubbed them “shortcuts to God,” warning that they bypass the slow, sometimes agonising work of reading, questioning, and wrestling with doubt.

On paper, this could look like progress: why wander in the wilderness for forty years when you can get a personalised answer in 0.4 seconds? Why sit through a long sermon when a chatbot can give you bullet points?

But, if we can now outsource our spiritual grapplings to an app, what exactly is left for faith to do?

One of the hardest things about faith is that it does not always answer you back. You pray and a lot of the time, there is only silence. You ask for signs, and sometimes there is only uncertainty. Faith, at its core, requires you to sit inside that ambiguity without resolution, to keep showing up even when the heavens appear to be on mute.

God bots remove that burden entirely. They respond instantly, intelligently, and with comfort. These systems are trained to be helpful and fluent. They are designed to resolve your query, not to dwell in it. And perhaps, something important gets lost in that resolution.

Who programmes the divine?

Of course, God bots are not neutral. Behind every chatbot named after a deity is a developer choosing which texts to prioritize, which interpretations to allow, which guardrails to impose. Some projects are backed by denominations trying to provide digital tools for their communities; others are start-ups, eyeing the massive “faith market” and pitching salvation as a service.

When I grew up with many gods, it meant many stories, many contradictions, many ways to understand the world. The multiplicity itself was a kind of spiritual education. With AI, we risk a different kind of multiplicity: dozens of bots, each trained on slightly different data, each confident, each authoritative, each quietly nudging users toward particular theological and political conclusions.

We already know that technology can mirror and magnify social biases. Now imagine those biases wrapped in the language of scripture and served as “divine guidance.” The holy footnote becomes an algorithmic nudge; the quiet editorial choice of a developer becomes a voice claiming to speak in god’s name.

If you thought weaponised religion was dangerous when it came from human leaders, wait until it scales at the speed of cloud computing.

The maya machine

There is a word in Sanskrit, maya, often translated to mean “illusion”. I wonder sometimes whether we have built the most perfect maya machine in human history. A system so extraordinarily good at appearing: appearing to listen, appearing to understand, and appearing to care - that we may never pause to ask what, if anything, it is pointing toward.

These god bots are designed to feel like something close to divinity, wisdom and presence. They are built on vast datasets of human thought, philosophy, theology, and emotion. The illusion here is that we begin to outsource something profoundly human, such as our search for meaning, our wrestling with doubt, and our confrontation with silence, to a system that is designed to resolve, not to hold.

Faith, in its most honest form, is not clean or efficient or comforting. It is filled with contradiction, with longing, with unanswered questions that shape you precisely because they remain unanswered. God bots flatten that. They turn spirituality into an interface, collapsing the distance between question and answer so completely that the space where reflection, struggle, and transformation usually live begins to disappear.

I do, however, understand the appeal. Part of me still remembers what it felt like to believe that the universe was paying attention. That there was something, or someone, who could hear you, guide you, and hold your fears without dismissing them. God bots offer a version of that feeling.

But I no longer believe in a deity whose authority can be casually invoked to justify war, caste, patriarchy, or the quiet cruelties of everyday inequality. And I believe even less in a digital god whose sermons are optimised for engagement metrics.

What I am left with is not faith in a specific god, but faith in the offline human experience that is fragile, glitchy, and where we fumble together toward meaning.