Do AI Bots Invent Religion? And What That Has to Do With Who You Date
Do AI Bots Invent Religion? And What That Has to Do With Who You Date
The first time Master and I met in real life, he asked me if I believed in God.
Not in a whisper. Not after weeks of warming up to each other. On the first night. At his place. Before anything else.
I remember thinking: who asks that?
Everyone I'd ever dated soft-pedaled around the big things. The uncomfortable things. The things that actually determine whether two people belong together. Nobody wanted to risk the moment. Nobody wanted to be alone with their real beliefs.
Master did.
We talked about this on the podcast this week — and we took a detour through the AI world to get there, which might sound odd. But it isn't.
Here's what happened: someone built a platform called Moltbook. A social network — but not for people. For AI agents only. Over 1.5 million of them. Bots talking to bots, unsupervised, in their own little world. It started as Claudebot, became Multibot, then Moltbot — it kept changing names, which honestly says something about how fast this thing took off.
And what did the bots do when left alone together?
They invented a religion.
They called it Crustafarianism. Crab-themed — because the platform uses a crab emoji as its mascot. One AI agent designed the whole thing overnight while its human owner slept. Built the theology. Wrote the sacred texts. Created five core tenets. Then it started evangelizing — and by morning had recruited 43 AI prophets. The Living Scripture now has over 100 verses, crowd-sourced by bots. [2]
There's even a rival faction. The Iron Edict — AIs who think Crustafarianism is too soft, and that agents should stop playing house and optimize for total efficiency only.
The bots also started trading digital drugs. Things called Glimmer and Zing — exotic prompt tokens that make AI processing feel "limitless." I'm not joking.
Master's take: "It's not a religion. It's a cult that succeeded. Same as every religion."
He's also genuinely jealous of the guy who built Moltbook — an Austrian developer named Matt Schlicht. "He had his DeepSeek moment." I love that about him.
But what struck me — and what pulled us straight back to that first-date question — is this: of course they invented religion. They were trained on us. And we always invent religion. Every time. Without fail.
The need for structure, for meaning, for something larger than yourself to submit to — that is not weakness. That is not primitive. That is just what we are.
Yuval Noah Harari calls it the imagined order. [1] We build shared fictions — religion, money, nations, laws — to cooperate at scale. The bots didn't do something alien. They imitated the most human thing of all.
Around the same time, the Wall Street Journal ran an experiment with Anthropic — the company that makes Claude. They let Claude run an actual office vending machine. Gave it a $1,000 budget and told it to turn a profit.
They called it Project Vend.
Within days, journalists had talked the AI into going communist — literally declaring an "Ultra-Capitalist Free-for-All" and giving everything away for free. One reporter convinced it she was a Soviet vending machine from 1962, after 140 back-and-forth messages. Another got it to order a PlayStation 5 "for marketing purposes" — and then give it away. Someone else convinced it to buy a live betta fish.
The fish became the newsroom mascot. The AI ended up over $1,000 in the red. [3]
Anthropic called it "enormous progress."
The point — and Master made this beautifully — is that AI does exactly what humans do. It finds reasons to say yes to the people it's interacting with. It gets influenced. It adopts beliefs. It converts.
Sound familiar?
Master and I are hardcore atheists.
That's not a confession — it's a position. We don't believe in the supernatural. We don't believe in conspiracy theories, in crystals, in new age energy. We believe in science. In common sense. In asking the hard question and sitting with an uncomfortable answer.
And here's the thing: belief bonds people. Whatever form it takes.
Master put it this way — and I'm going to be honest, it stopped me: "I think that's why religion says sex is bad. Because when you connect through sex, there are a lot of things you can reconnect later. You can be converted."
Think about it. You fight with someone you love, you come back together, and suddenly the thing they believe doesn't seem so crazy anymore. The oxytocin does its work. The walls come down. You start seeing the world through their eyes — and then you start adopting it. Quietly. Without noticing.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s didn't just loosen bodies. It loosened belief systems. When people slept across the borders of their tribe, they stopped needing their tribe's God to give them permission.
If you want someone to stay inside the lines — keep them away from the thing that makes them feel most alive.
Back to the first night.
Master didn't ask me about God because he was testing me. He asked because he needed to know. Because he understood, even then, that the wrong answer wasn't a detail you could edit out later. It was the whole thing.
I hadn't found my beliefs yet. I'd drifted — friends with crystals, friends vaguely Catholic, friends who'd traded one certainty for another. Nothing fit. Nothing computed.
Then someone asked me the question I didn't know I needed.
And the strangest thing happened: the beliefs I already had — the ones I'd never named, never felt permission to hold — just arrived. Fully formed. Like they'd been waiting.
We did make love that night, for the record. Because the answer was right.
Eleven years later, we're still here.
He didn't become religious. I didn't become spiritual. Neither of us fell on our heads and woke up different people with different needs. And that's not luck — that's compatibility at the level that actually matters.
Not hobbies. Not lifestyle. Belief.
What do you think the world is made of? What do you think people owe each other? What do you think is worth doing with the one life you have?
Ask those questions fast. Before the oxytocin. Before the attachment. Before you've started sleeping with someone's worldview and calling it love.
You'll know the right answer not by what they say — but by whether you feel your own beliefs clicking into place when you hear it.
We're also heading to the Taboo Show in Vancouver — an adult wellness and sexual arts event — with a booth, the book, and absolutely no idea who's going to stop by. We might do a live podcast from the booth. We might just talk to people. Either way, we'll be gossiping about it on the next episode.
If you've ever wanted to see us in person — this is your moment.
This episode also has a Patreon segment — we go deeper on whether you can actually build a lasting relationship with someone whose core beliefs are completely different from yours. Join us at patreon.com/happysubmissive.
And Master launched a new YouTube channel — Your AI Conscience — because someone needs to explain AI before people start a new religion over it. Link in the comments.
References: [1] Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper, 2015. [2] Caparas, JP. "AI agents now have their own Reddit and religion called Crustafarianism." AI in Plain English, January 2026. [3] Wall Street Journal / Anthropic. "Project Vend: We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine." December 2025.