Artificial Intelligence, Religion, and Values: Opportunities, Risks, and the Family as the First Line of Defense

Abstract

The accelerating integration of artificial intelligence into the domains of religion, culture, and values marks a profound transformation in the relationship between human beings and knowledge, yet this presence remains strikingly under-examined: studies addressing the representation of religious values and references constitute scarcely 0.2% of specialized artificial-intelligence research. This paper maps both the opportunities and the risks of that integration. On one hand, advanced neural translation has dissolved long-standing linguistic barriers, exemplified by the real-time rendering of liturgical texts into more than sixty languages, while large language models have surfaced substantial thematic convergences across scriptural and philosophical traditions, with one analysis identifying roughly 73% similarity between the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, opening fertile ground for comparative dialogue and the recovery of shared human values. On the other hand, the study identifies a cluster of intellectual and ethical hazards: the reduction of spiritual experience to statistical data, generative hallucination on sensitive doctrinal matters, the simulation of interpretive authority that displaces accumulated human wisdom, the reproduction of cultural bias embedded in training data, and the flattening of layered religious language. It further examines the weaponization of digital narrative by extremist movements, whose algorithmically amplified content, echo chambers, and deepfake fabrications convert social platforms into instruments of radicalization, and argues that the family, supported by educational, religious, and media institutions, constitutes the first line of defense, cultivating critical discernment and intellectual immunity against digital misinformation and reinforcing social cohesion in an increasingly contested information environment.