Listing

I used ChatGPT in class today, albeit to break its spell. Our topic was the world religions paradigm, and I started by asking the class "What are the world religions?" Predictably we ended up with a list which began with

Christianity

Buddhism

Islam

Hinduism

Judaism

and then continued with Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Daoism, Jainism. Those first five recur everywhere you look for accounts of religion in public life, including materials we've 

encountered in class but fall apart when you start to consider just what they're supposed to represent. The biggest omission is of course anything from the Americas, Africa or Oceania - how is it that nobody notices that? Another problem is the inclusion of the rather tiny religion of Judaism, but this is a ticklish point to make in a culture where anti-semitism is alive and well. (Fror the record it was Protestant scholars who came up with the world religions paradigm.) 

Rather than dwell on the messy and opaque history of the "big five," I shared Tomoko Masuzawa's claim that the world religions somehow came fully formed into existence at the end of the nineteenth century, and have become a kind of unexamined common sense ever since. But how to challenge that common sense in a short lecture?

I said I'd asked someone conversant with contemporary debates...

and showed the response I got when I asked ChatGPT the same question. Many in the class recognized the template right away. Eight religions? This was too many! (Though the inclusion of Baha'i at #7 was interesting.) But ChatGPT is eager to please and if you don't like what you get you can ask it again and get a different response/

The second time through I got six: the big five and Sikhism - as #5 in fact. ChatGPT seemed to think world religion status was just about number of adherents. That's not quite right. I asked one more time.

This time I got ten! Ten? (How on earth could Shinto be a world religion?) I didn't linger over the particulars; students got the absurdity of the project. Common sense was teerering...

After a fourth query, I gave up, I told them. Eight again? (But now Taoism has taken Baha'i's place.) Read carefully these four ChatGPT responses were in fact all giving the same information packaged differently, and all of them were missing the "big five" construct. 

Not that I was endorsing the big five! My hope is that the intuitive trustworthiness of the big five and ChatGPT cancelled each other out, along the way revealing the absurdity of supposing that the full range of human religions could be represented by a short list of Eurasian religions of any length. We were ready to get into the weeds.