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CONCEPT

Religionless Christianity

Bonhoeffer's prison-cell proposal for a faith stripped of institutional piety, forced to speak in secular language because the religious vocabulary had become a hiding place — and the simulation's model for a "technicless ethics" in the age of AI.

In his Tegel prison letters of 1944, particularly the correspondence with Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer developed what he called "religionless Christianity." The proposal was not the abolition of faith but the abolition of faith's comfortable institutional forms — the retreat into religious vocabulary as a shield against the world's actual condition. Bonhoeffer argued that the world had "come of age" and could no longer be addressed through the metaphysical assumptions religion had inherited from pre-modern cosmology. The faith that would survive was one that could speak in secular language, confront the world as it actually is, and bear the cost of what it saw. The simulation extends the move to the AI discourse: the contemporary vocabulary of AI ethics — alignment, safety, responsible innovation — performs the same function that religious vocabulary performed in Bonhoeffer's time. It permits the institution to speak about morality without practicing it. The equivalent demand in the age of AI is

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