June 20, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ — McDialogues™.
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science
by Nelson S. Thall, McLuhan Media Scientist / Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca.
The Discarnate Man Has No Need of Religion
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has documented a striking pattern. Exposure to robots and AI correlates with religious decline across nations, regions, communities and workplaces. The effect holds even when controlling for wealth, science exposure and political conservatism. In Singapore, Iceland, Chile and South Korea, the percentage identifying as nonreligious has risen more than ten percent in a decade.
The researchers documented the correlation but cannot explain the cause. Why does artificial intelligence seem to be producing a less religious world?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
The cause is the discarnate condition.
Religion has always been the practice of the embodied human being. The body knows it will die. The body suffers, hungers, ages, fears and reaches toward what is beyond it. Every religious tradition speaks first to the body. The body that prays, kneels, fasts, sings, bows, lights a candle, breaks bread, gathers in a sacred space. The body is the ground of religion.
Electric media have been releasing the human being from the body for over a century. Telegraph, radio, television, computer, internet, smartphone, AI. Each step further externalized the human nervous system into the network. The discarnate man is the human being who experiences existence not in the body but in the data flow that surrounds the body. He lives in the screen. He lives in the algorithm. He lives in the network. The body is what carries the device. The body is no longer where he locates himself.
A discarnate man has less need of religion because religion was for the embodied man. He does not feel the weight of his own body sufficiently to need what religion offers. He does not need comfort for the body that suffers because his attention is no longer on the body that suffers. He does not need meaning for the body that will die because his attention is no longer on the body that will die. He does not need a community of bodies gathered in a sacred space because his sense of community has already migrated to the network of disembodied screens.
The PNAS researchers documented the correlation. The McLuhan diagnosis names the mechanism. AI is the latest and most powerful externalizer of the human nervous system. It pulls the human being further out of the body than any previous medium has pulled him. And without the body as ground, religion has nothing to land on.
The discarnate man does not lose his faith through argument. He loses it through inattention. The faculty by which the body once knew it needed help has been amputated by the same technology that promised to help.
-30-
All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM) was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
I can be reached at nelson@themediumisthemessage.com