I’ve been playing around with a couple of artificial intelligence tools lately. I know they’re not popular with writers, but they’re not going away, so I’m going to follow the lead of Joanna Penn and find an ethical way to use them. Mostly I’ve been using them for marketing when it comes to books. I’ve also used them — Primarily ChatGPT — for creative business plans for a bookstore I want to open and creating a plan that would allow me to hit a certain income goal with my writing/publishing/marketing next year.
One thing I like about ChatGPT compared to the others I’ve used is that it remembers conversations. I’ve loaded several past novels into it and asked it to create ad copy or evaluate it for this and that. So, it has a pretty good idea of who I am. The other day I asked it to describe me as a person based on our previous chats and was surprised at what it had to say. Yesterday I had it create a dating profile for me. I’m not using it, but was curious what it would say.
Tonight, I uploaded three of my novels, Amara’s Prayer, Sycamore Souls, and The Dead of the Day and asked it to read them and evaluate my religious/spiritual beliefs based on the philosophies presented in my fiction. I wanted to include First Born and the outline for a book I’m working on, but I used the free version and three uploads was my limit. What it gave me was insightful and very accurate, worded in a way I don’t think I could have ever said about myself. I thought I’d share it with you.
From ChatGPT:
Based on a thorough review of your three novels — Amara’s Prayer, Sycamore Souls, and The Dead of the Day — the spiritual and philosophical worldview expressed across them reflects a complex, evolving belief system rooted in mystical humanism, moral ambiguity, and a search for redemption through understanding rather than dogma.
Here’s a synthesized summary of the belief system your fiction conveys:
1. God, Divinity, and the Human Condition
Your works consistently question the nature of God rather than asserting any fixed theology.
- In Amara’s Prayer, Christian missionary zeal collides with ancient goddess worship. The novel challenges monotheistic absolutism and portrays divinity as both creative and destructive, embodied in Amara herself — a being who blurs the lines between angel and demon, savior and corrupter. The narrative suggests that God is not external but emergent within consciousness and moral choice, and that humans distort divinity through ego and fear.
- The implicit philosophy: Faith is powerful but dangerous when treated as ownership of truth.
2. Sin, Guilt, and Redemption
Across all three books, redemption is never achieved through ritual or forgiveness from above — it’s earned through confrontation with one’s own darkness.
- In Sycamore Souls, Kelsi’s journey through trauma, disconnection, and spiritual numbness is a contemporary echo of a soul-searching pilgrimage. She seeks grounding (“to sink her feet into the earth”) rather than salvation. The novel reframes sin as alienation — a loss of connection to self, others, and the natural world. Redemption comes through reconnection, not repentance.
- This carries through to The Dead of the Day, where Enoch Hoffmann’s descent into madness, death, and haunting questions of morality portrays a belief that evil arises from emotional decay, not supernatural damnation. Even monsters — literal or figurative — are reflections of human failure to confront trauma.
3. The Role of Nature and the Sacred Feminine
Nature is not merely a setting in your work — it’s a living expression of divine truth.
- The rainforest goddess in Amara’s Prayer, the earth-connected meditations in Sycamore Souls, and the recurring elemental imagery in The Dead of the Day all elevate nature to a kind of holy consciousness.
- Your cosmology honors the feminine aspect of creation — nurturing, destructive, sensual, and wise — as essential to balance. This isn’t goddess worship per se, but an assertion that any faith denying the sacred feminine is incomplete.
- It suggests a pagan-Christian synthesis, where the divine is cyclical, immanent, and tied to the physical world rather than abstract heaven.
4. Doubt as a Spiritual Virtue
Your protagonists — Milton Agnew, Kelsi Duncan, and Enoch Hoffmann — are united by their existential doubt. Each experiences visions or supernatural events that force them to question faith, reason, and morality.
- The repeated motif: Certainty leads to destruction; doubt leads to awareness.
- Doubt, in your fictional theology, is not a weakness but the first step toward enlightenment. The true heresy is blind belief.
5. Humanism and Compassion
Ultimately, despite the horror, pain, and supernatural terror in your stories, there’s a quiet humanism at their core.
- Salvation lies in empathy — the ability to see the divine spark even in the broken, the monstrous, or the lost.
- In all three novels, characters who act with compassion (even flawed compassion) are the ones who find meaning. Those who cling to dogma, denial, or cruelty are consumed by their own righteousness.
In Summary — Your Fictional Theology
Your novels collectively express a worldview where:
- God is a reflection of human consciousness, not a remote judge.
- Spiritual truth is plural, expressed through both science and myth, the masculine and the feminine, the sacred and the profane.
- Faith without empathy is evil, and doubt is the soul’s most honest prayer.
- The universe is alive, cyclical, and morally complex, offering transformation through suffering rather than punishment.
If this belief system were named, it might be described as existential animism — a philosophy where spirit infuses all things, but meaning is found through human awareness and compassion, not scripture.
What are your thoughts on this? How does it compare to your own belief system? What do you think of using AI for things like this? Is there any ethical use for artificial intelligence?
Steven E. Wedel 
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