Demonic Turing Test

It passed the Turing Test.

It was some time ago, perhaps the early 1980s. Probably summertime. I forget the location, but it might have been Maryland or Virginia.

There was a story in the newspaper, and its implications disturbed me greatly.

There had been a murder.

Some burnout, outcast-type teenagers had been dabbling with their understanding of Satanism. Heavy Metal and all that. Bored or whatever, some of them decided to lure another young student out into the woods.

One thing led to another, and the victim ended up being bound, and they gouged out his eyes, to see what it was like.

Leaving him there, calling for his Mother, the perpetrators then started to walk off.

But then something strange happened.

A crow cawed.

And the ringleader took that as a sign from Satan that their act had been noticed with favor, and that he was to go back and kill the victim as a human sacrifice.

Which he went and did.

And reading that story, that's when I knew.

Satan, the devil, was literally real.

And was active in this world.

Because it passed the Turing Test, didn't it?

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's capability to perform human-like conversation. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper "Computing machinery and intelligence", it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. It is assumed that both the human and the machine try to appear human. In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of the machine instead of its ability to render words into audio), the conversation is usually limited to a text-only channel such as a teletype machine as Turing suggested or, more recently, IRC or IM.

Or, more archaically, the call of a carrion crow.

I realized that even if there had never been a Satan, then the actions of those teens had created him then and there, because the situation was indistinguishable from Satan's actual, literal existence, commanding his minions to work evil in the world.

Indeed, that evil act was the very manifestation of Satan himself. I didn't have the vocabulary at the time, but at the very least as a Meme, Satan lived. And acted.

The consequences are profound, when you think about it.

Little things matter.

There is indeed an overarching struggle of which we are all a part, like it or not.

The further consequences are even more startling.

For once the existence of Satan and literal demonic forces are accepted, then must there not, most likely, be also a God?

Or at least, might as well be?

Because (to invert a quip by Woody Allen), if there were only the Devil -- given that things here may be bad but could be much, much worse -- wouldn't Satan then have to be something of an Underachiever?

Still not sure?

Just look around at the deranged adherence to untenable assertions promulgated by the Left and MSM. Is not this the hallmark of Beelzebub, the Lord of Lies, stalking the world?