Loading summary
Transcript38 lines
- [00:00]
A
So theological anthropology for me is the view of human nature that comes from beliefs in God and particularly there's a shared view in the monotheistic traditions, but I would argue still a unique view in the Catholic perspective, which is very, very important in the context of the challenge of transhumanism and posthumanism with artificial intelligence.
- [00:29]
B
Keep watching. To learn more, you can now download all nine copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingalowed.org new thinking allowed is
- [00:45]
C
presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spiritual the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu Book 4 in the
- [01:14]
A
New Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology now available on Amazon. Thinking Allowed Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
- [01:48]
B
Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we will be exploring the topic of Jesus Christ and Theological anthropology. This is a follow up interview to the one with my friend James Tunney that we released just a week earlier on Trotsky vs. Jesus. In the first interview on that topic, of course, we focused mostly on Trotsky. Today we'll be focusing mostly on Jesus and the implications of Jesus Christ for our understanding of the nature of the human being. My guest, James Tunney is something of a Renaissance man. He's written two novels, two books of poetry. He's a fine artist whose works have been displayed in several countries. In addition, he is a barrister who has lectured on legal matters throughout the world. Furthermore, he is the author of many books and I'll just list a few of them. AI Governor Vance Care and Possession in Dustopia the Mystical Sutras to Suit our Times, Tech Bondage, Slavery of the Human Spirit, the Mystery of the Trapped Light, Mystical Thoughts in the Dark Age of Scientism, AI Posthumanism, A cryptic Soap Opera Plantation of the Automatons, Rule of an Automaticity Loop, the Mythic Aim of AI Maiming the Mind Empire of Scientism and of course James newest book, Trotsky vs. Jesus Battle of the A I Millennium. James lives in Gothenburg, Sweden, and now I'll switch over to the interview video. Welcome James. It's a pleasure once again to be with you.
- [04:09]
A
It's fantastic as always to see you, Jeff, and I'm looking forward to our
- [04:13]
B
conversation in our previous Discussion we focused mostly, I guess, on Trotsky. Well, also on your. I gu. I guess I would have to say, renewed endorsement of the traditions and the magisterium of the Catholic Church. But today we're going to look at a different angle on this whole question of Jesus versus Trotsky. We'll focus on the Jesus part of the equation in particular. Let's start by defining the term theological anthropology. I'll confess, I don't think I really understood what that term meant.
- [04:58]
A
I was coming to the term before I discovered the literature on that area. So theological anthropology, from my perspective, as I've used it, refers to the relationship between one's theology and their anthropology or their view of humans and their nature. So anthropology on its own purports to be a scientific endeavor and is often very skeptical about claims in relation to God. But much anthropology comes from a theological perspective. That means that our view of God determines how we see the world. And this is a critical idea. It's a critical idea in religion and it's critical in the conflict between a religious view of the world in particular or a spiritual view. But the most spiritual views don't have on their own, don't often have a God element to it. So I'll stick to the religions. And that contrasts with people like Trotsky, for example, with his anti theological position, his materialist, mechanistic position, and a contrast in particular with a kind of inversion which we might call an anthropological theology, whereby you say that starting from humans, we can get it to theology through machines or through other purposes. And that's the Promethean view, if you like. So it's the opposite of an idea that humans are created in some sense and that therefore that's where we get our telos. So this subject is critical in relation also to ideas of moral philosophy insofar as we can talk about people like Alasdair MacIntyre. They argue, or he argues, that going back to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, that we need a theological perspective in order to have a moral philosophy. And I subscribe to that. I subscribe to that general view from a Catholic perspective. So of course I have to speak from a Catholic perspective, although I'd be very close to people like C.S. lewis and I think C.S. lewis and Tolkien, from a Protestant and a Catholic perspective, really pointed a way forward in combination in relation to the challenges that faces. So theological anthropology for me is the view of human nature that comes from beliefs in God. And particularly there's a shared view in the monotheistic traditions. But I would argue, still a unique view in the Catholic perspective, which is very, very important in the context of the challenge of transhumanism and post humanism with artificial intelligence.
- [08:01]
B
I guess it would be fair to say that in the three great Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there is in all the belief or consideration that the human being is made in the image of the deity.
- [08:20]
A
Yes, and that's an important idea. There's a slight different emphasis between the traditions, between Judaism and Christianity and Islam. But the idea that we're created by God, and in particular in Genesis, that we're created in the likeness of God or our likeness, it's a plural form in the. In the text, that we're created in the likeness of God or to the likeness of God, as it says in the. In the Catholic version, is a critical idea. It gives us all the base in the Western tradition in modern times of the dignity of the human from which much jurisprudence came from. And while it's strong in all the traditions, I would argue that there is a bit of a difference in the Christian tradition, as elaborate in particular in the Catholic tradition. But it's shared by both about the significance of the Incarnation and the claim that not only are we created in God's likeness and therefore have a special dignity associated with that, but that God came into human flesh in the Incarnation and became human. So that there was a double nature, if you like, two persons in the human form. And the idea in the. I suppose in the Christian or Catholic sense is that there's a kind of cosmic reset going back to a realignment away from a notion of original sin. And I would also argue that it was a type of singularity. It was the singularity for which the mechanical singularity is a simulacrum, an attempt to replace, and that the Incarnation was perhaps an anticipation as well of the future. So in that sense, there's a very strong claim about the significance of the human body and soul united. So that distinguishes Christianity from, say, for example, Oriental traditions, which often focus on the consciousness or elements of consciousness. So there is a unique emphasis which in particular through the Catholic tradition, emphasizes the human form, which explains the Renaissance, which explains the growth of certain traditions, and informs education and also the network of healthcare that grew up. It didn't come from science, it came from the Church. It came under the wings of the Church. There's a whole complex tradition that now people have forgotten about its origins. And in particular, the Western legal tradition is a Catholic construction based on Roman traditions informed by a number of sources so, yes, there's a great shared correspondence, and therefore I celebrate those elements in all the religions. But I have to emphasize a particular unique perspective coming from the idea of the incarnation.
- [11:35]
B
Well, I guess it's the case that in many animistic shamanistic cultures, and certainly in the polytheistic cultures, you have deities who are represented in ways that differ greatly from the human form. You have the elephant God and the monkey God and the lion God. In ancient Egypt, all sorts of gods are depicted with animal heads on human bodies. So Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all distinct from that notion.
- [12:15]
A
Yes, but there's two elements to it. If we look back about our ideas of polytheism, a lot of them come from anthropology, and a lot of the anthropologists went out in imperial context and describes the world that they found them as they wanted to for a particular instrumental view. So there's no guarantee that this description of that reality was accurate. And in fact, modern Native American intellectuals, writers, they describe a Native American theology which is much more comprehensive and was not reducible in the way that imperial anthropology did. And what's very interesting about that is that very significant theorists such as Plekhanov, for example, who was who, really, the Russian that brought Marxism to Russia, he wrote about God, he wrote about anthropology, and he bought all the imperial doctrines in the description of the world. He also said that the intelligentsia didn't understand ideas of theology. So our knowledge of what other people believed has been very much filtered, especially by skeptics. So then I would say the second element is that if we look at CS Lewis idea of the total medieval worldview, as he wrote in the Discarded Image, we see that there was a whole universe, a whole complex of beings that existed and was known to exist within the Christian world. I would refer, for example, as well to the literature associated with St Patrick's Purgatory in Ireland, which was a site of pilgrimage. It was the most known place in Ireland in medieval times, outside Ireland, and people went there to experience purgatory. And it's a fascinating study of kind of extraordinary experiences. And they believed they saw purgatory and hell there in a cave in Donegal. So in that context, they were exposed to a whole range of beings and different beings. And certainly they would have conceived a lot of them as kind of lower order or demonic or associated with a world that they didn't particularly want to go to. So as well as that, Catholicism in Ireland never did away with all these strange beings that existed. They were tolerated by the Church. In fact, they were recorded by the Monks, they were comfortable with the existence of another world, but it wasn't the world that they wanted to return to. It wasn't the world of the people that were following Christ, if you like, that wasn't the world that they came from. So it doesn't deny all these beings. And Irish monasticism was related to the Desert Fathers, Egypt, and that's full of access to demonic beings, different beings, a whole range of beings. So I would say we have forgotten the full extent of the belief system through a reduction in the 19th century in particular, which oversimplifies the existence or the world, the animus, fear that existed.
- [15:38]
B
Well, earlier you pointed out that from the Catholic perspective, theological anthropology focuses largely on the nature of the dual nature of Jesus Christ and the fact that you have in one being both a frail human who will die on the cross and a spiritual being who is one with God the Father. Why is this significant, as opposed to the Jewish view in which I was raised, that would say, well, Jesus was a rabbi.
- [16:20]
A
I believe that the meaning behind the Incarnation is a vindication of the human body and an implication or a validation of the divine nature of the human body, which is an idea which is very much challenged by the notion of suffering and in particular by the idea of transhumanism or ideas that we can attain immortality. So what the Incarnation does, as was understood by people like Steiner, etc. Is Mark a new stage in evolution. From a Catholic perspective or certain Catholic perspectives, the Incarnation was a reset, if you like, the original great reset before its modern technological version is coming to us. And it corrected. It was the process of correction, of a misalignment, if you want to take it from Genesis, whereby the human turns away from God. So that created difficulties, according to the theology which was corrected in particular by the Immaculate Conception, which refers to the conception by the Virgin Mary, who represents, in many sense, the ark of the covenant and a new kind of covenant. But it's critical that it vindicates our bodily. The bodily aspect of our soul, spirit and mind in one. And it's a critical aspect of which is represented in terms of kenosis and emptying of the Deity into a human form in a humbling. Whereby the. As you see in the Taote Ching, it talks about the lowest being. The most significant is this idea of emptying to vindicate the mysteries of suffering that humans experience and to vindicate the necessity to live in this body. I think that's the message. That's the message that people who criticize technology in the 20th century in particular, Elul and Charbonneau took away that the problem associated with the development of technique was associated with this disincarnation, this idea of disembodiment, this fantasy of separation, this idea which manifests as uploading our mind or attaining immortality, which is prevalent now in the billionaire class in the United States and elsewhere. And in Russia, they have similar views as well. There is an international transnational cadre of people that believe in this idea of living forever, living in space, et cetera, et cetera, all of those ideas that go back to Bernal and we see employed in H.G. wells, etc. The incarnation, therefore, it's a very difficult concept for people to grasp, but by definition, if we're talking about divine context, it has to be very, very complex. Paradoxically, if we begin to look at the logic of some of the most complex systems that are evolving, such as artificial intelligence, we begin to see analogies. I wouldn't put it any more than that. But as in the future, as we are dealing with very complex artificial systems, they still have to have a human interface in order to be able to deal with us. They have to appear to be human. It doesn't deny the totality of the thing which is the computational power which is behind them. But we perceive them in forms that allow an interface. And sometimes there are some ideas or some analogies which can explain at least the basic suggestion of a complex theology, which has been argued about for centuries. But yes, for me, what that Incarnation meant, looking forward, was that there would be a challenge to the human species itself. And I think that challenge is associated with the bimillennium of the death of Christ, which means around 2033, which corresponds with a number of international ideas about when we will become merged with machines. So I believe that the vindication of the significance of the Incarnation and a testament to its divine nature, is this evidence that the species itself will be subject to this challenge, and that we have to retain our spiritual consciousness and our bodily integrity in that sense.
- [21:26]
B
In other words, a day will come when, if I understand your thinking correctly, where human beings are going to be asked to accept computer chip implants, perhaps even at birth, and with the idea that eventually our consciousness will be uploaded into a supercomputer and we will be resurrected forever inside of this giant computer that will probably be run autonomously by AI. And that standing against this almost inevitable future will be, in particular, the Catholic Church, which has already made a stand in favor of the idea of humanization and not computerization of the human being.
- [22:17]
A
Yeah, let me Criticize the Catholic Church, lest anyone think I'm going soft on this, because the last Pope said that AI is merely a tool. And unfortunately that shows that he doesn't understand what the technology was. It was an unfortunate statement in my view. Father Ripperger, who I have a lot of respect for, he said a similar thing and they're clearly wrong. And to cite people who I don't necessarily agree with, and other things, like Yuval, Noah Harari, he agrees with the view that I put forward that AI is of a different nature, it's agentic. And to believe that it's just a tool, bearing in mind it's genealogy is wrong. It would be the same idea as saying that an Exocet missile from the French government is merely a tool. It's not. It comes from a whole apparatus and represents something else and will be used for particular purposes consistent with the origin as well. So that's a mistake. The new Pope, when he came in, one of the first pronouncement he made was an association with the challenge of AI. So we can have a hope that we'll begin to see a bit more critical stuff coming out from the Vatican. Now, what I'm arguing is that the philosophical tradition contains the answers, but that certainly doesn't. Doesn't mean that many of the contemporary, particularly the older generation, understand what's going on. So they don't understand the technology. So they're not in a position particularly to. To draw on the tradition. So I would criticize the Church in that. What I am referring to is the core tradition which underpins that, again, the analogy to the AI system. You need certain forces within AI to maintain its coherence over time. The Catholic Church has done that through a vast range of elements, including the Magisterium. So hopefully they will begin to understand what the significance of the challenge is. What will happen, in my view, is we'll have a combination of the use of pointless wars to create destabilization, which is going to induce financial and economic realignment, which is going to call for the supposed necessity for digital currency, which will make us dependent on digital currency and more manageable by a central apparatus of monetary behavioral control, which will then. We will then see arguments for the change from mobile phones. Everyone took mobile phones very sheepishly, and they have become dependent on them. Now that people are dependent and addicted on them, it will be very, very easy to prepare a technology which involves an implant and then force people to either use it or be without it and not be able to function in society. Once the implant comes in the body. And again, it doesn't have to be drilling a hole in your head, as I've argued in AI governance, but it can be something in your which is intravenously taken very, very simply. Or it could be a chip, of course. And once that happens, your humanity cannot be the same because you are governorable and you have given up your. Your control to an outside system. And once that happens, you're not a human. You're definitely a cyborg. They say you're cyborgs already with a mobile phone. That's what Elon Musk says. They say you are a cyborg. But if you had any doubt about that, you will be a cyborg with this in. And then your humanity is gone and you have given it up. And when there is no other choice, many people will do it, they will take it and they will be happy. What I say is that a proper construction of the Catholic tradition is in its bio conservative approach, in its vindication of human dignity, in its vindication of life, in its vindication of free will, warns and anticipates this properly. And that yes, this is the challenge. And in relation to. If you look at the great thinkers, for example, like Augustine, they were never so worried about this end of the world, about the Book of Revelation, about eschatology. This wasn't. It's not a preoccupation in the same way in the Catholic Church that it has become in the American right and in American Protestantism. So as we've argued about John Nelson Darby, I believe that eschatology is being manipulated by imperial and neocolonial forces to drive this agenda. And it's even been projected. Or we can see this narrative in relation to Iran, that they're driven by a similar or an eschatology from a Muslim perspective. So what we see is the manipulation of religious thought as an explanation for a drive towards this empire of scientism that I've talked about. I support the religious traditions as you know, but in relation, from my perspective, I think that the Catholic tradition has anticipated or anticipates in its nature this challenge. And it is a defining challenge. All of the other, the other ideas about apocalypse, revelation really come down to the challenge to the nature of us in our incarnated form. And whether we give that away, part
- [28:27]
B
of what you're claiming here is that the event on Golgotha that we've done a previous interview on was unique in all of human history, in that something about the entire human population, or certainly the Western population changed as a result of the events that took place 2,000 years ago, roughly,
- [28:53]
A
if you look at people like Steiner, he believed he could perceive that event. Not only that, but he believed that the Irish mystery schools were one of the most significant of all of them. And he said that he believed that they could. They could have. They felt Golgotha in Ireland, that they knew about it. So, as we said, it's significant for a lot of major thinkers. They know something happened. I reject the mythicist claim, the literature that claims that this was a myth, that this didn't happen. And I have in recent years looked at the best scholarly evidence. Again, if you look at it from a mythic perspective, two of the experts on myth were C.S. lewis and Tolkien. Both of them believed that that was the most important event. They believed it had the structure of myth, but it was real. It was a real event that happened. And if it's an event that happened, then one has to go and examine the claims about it. The greatest argument perhaps, is about whether Jesus claimed that he was God. Now, I think it's quite clear that Jesus did claim to be God, and that's distinct from, say, an Islamic perspective. Well, it's not. The Jews believed in that because that's what they criticized in him, but they didn't believe that he was God. Of course, they rejected that. But this claim is critical. Even if you were to say Jesus was only a great prophet, you would still have to explain the significance of the effect of Jesus on Western civilization, on the world civilization, and then you would still have to explain what was the prophecy about. Now, my argument is that it's a civilizational moment which is not only about the spreading on the individual level in the way that it was meant to at that pace, but by the time that coverage where the Gospel is preached to all the nations happens, we have the civilizational challenge, so that the vindication as well a corroboration of the significance of this event is proven in some way or validated by the fact that the solution or the understanding of the challenge, the existential challenge posed by technology, is answered and anticipated by the Incarnation itself. And I have talked before about the very structure of the Passion is for me a kind of a strange anticipation of the technological challenge to human consciousness. Included in this is the question of moral philosophy and where that fits in. And it's a critique I have of the spiritual, not religious, community that they're happy with a sensation of spirit, if you like, without the boredom of its acquisition, if you like, without the dogma. And they often cite dogma as restrictive. And we can see this in ideas of Nietzsche, for example, and the Promethean idea of self creation, which is the view that stands in opposition to this idea of turning to a divine order or aligning yourself or orientating yourself to a divine order. And that idea of self creation rejects any restraint on what it, what it does. It reflects. Last point, the Tower of Babel and the idea of the Tower of Babel. If you look at the standard, standard Protestant versions and compare it with the emphasis in the Catholic version, for example, going from the Latin Vulgate, you see a difference of emphasis and there is difficulty in relation to the translation from the original languages. But there was a culture which came from the Protestant translation. And the idea was, as Arthur C. Clarke suggested, that in the Protestant, the standard Protestant said the King James Bible. You have the idea that God said that if these people are stopped, they can, nothing will stop. We won't be able to stop them. That's the essence of it, that they will be able to do what they want, which was interpreted as a license to reverse engineer prohibitions on humans so that they could be as gods. Arthur C. Clarke emphasized that in I Remember Babylon, which explains an attitude that goes back to Francis Bacon and the New Atlantis, as opposed to an idea in the Catholic version, which for me, if you read it, it says that the people are not going to stop with this project. Now, you can read that specifically about the building of the Tower of Babel, but I believe it was talking about something innate in human nature, that they would never stop with this idea of standardizing. Now, I've argued that the modern version of that is digitization, which is the one language, the one language together, a technical language doesn't have to be a spoken language, and this enables them to build the towers, to go to Mars, etc. And that the people who want to do this, the people who are engaged in some of the most ambitious projects, are deliberately using a theological base to support them. So there's a number of dimensions there.
- [34:50]
B
Jeff One of the ideas that I have gleaned regarding the Catholic tradition, and I think it goes back to Thomas Aquinas, is the idea of human rationality, that because we have the capacity to reason, I believe Aquinas would say that we have the capacity therefore to imagine and thereby understand the nature of God. By looking a little more deeply into the question of theological anthropology, I gather that one of the major Protestant theologians, Karl Barth, argues, no, we can't do this at all. The human being is sinful and can never really use reason and rationality to comprehend God. We only understand God when God chooses to reveal himself to us.
- [35:48]
A
It's interesting. I'm sure my brothers and sisters, now they come to criticize me, they usually say, oh, he hasn't spoken about sin or redemption or faith alone or whatever. Because what happened during the Reformation was that the extensive worldview was contracted. It was contracted into a particular, narrower vision of the human as a sinful being, which was redeemed by sola scriptura, by faith alone, and often by intellectual assent into a very, very narrow focus which denied the extensiveness of the existing worldview and therefore was much more reductionistic. And also that was associated with a. An instrumentality, which is associated with the Protestant mind as well and the growth of modern capitalism. Calvinism is very close or very associated with the growth of modern contract theory and covenants and the way the world was seen. But it was very, very much restricted. Whereas if you look at Aquinas and his idea or the description of rationality, these are ways that we're constructed in the likeness of God, that these are functions. It's not whether we have a beard and long hair or something visualized in an anthropomorphic way. Some of the qualities, the qualia of our souls and spirit are what define us. And that's developed by Alasdair MacIntyre. He writes his book After Virtue, arguing that humans need a telos. They need teleology, which I say the new teleology is technology itself. It's collapsing. So he writes his book After Virtue, and also he writes about dependent, rational animals. He refers to us as. He refers to us as dependent and rational, but having, if you like, an animal form. I think the proper word is. Creature is the proper word in the sense of something which is created is a better word, but it is a core aspect. And it's also. But here's the difference. If we take the French Revolution, the French Revolution, they introduced the cult of reason. And of course, great, great celebrants of the cult of reason was the. The great reasonable man, the Marquis de Sade. He was a great champion of reason. So. But when you divorce reason from anything else, it becomes something else. The cult of reason wasn't going so well, so they introduced the cult of the Supreme Being. So Robespierre was very much in the cult of the Supreme Being. And they had a massive, massive meetings in France. This was at the end of the Reign of Terror, very interestingly, before the end of the Reign of terror. They also executed 16 Carmelite nuns. William Bush has written about that. And so these are Carmelite nuns, are nuns that live in enclosed orders. Now, how they, in their enclosed orders can be a threat to the state and to the revolution is a mystery. They're cut off from society, although they threw them out of the convent. So they executed these 16 nuns and the reign of terror came to an end shortly thereafter. The nuns believed that they were sacrificing their life and it would alter events. It did. Robespierre himself was executed shortly thereafter. So, but in that context, what we see in the revolution is an idea that there is this free floating system of reason, as opposed to seeing reason as a mere tool which is related to something else. And as you begin to divorce the faculty of reason from an end, well, then you must come to the Bolshevik Revolution. You must come to the League of Godlessness, which the Bolsheviks introduced. You must come to Trotsky's, who wrote in their morals, not ours, that really morality doesn't exist, it's a construction, and morality that drives the revolution is justified. Which meant that when the Cheka, for example, in Russia came into power, they suspended all legal restrictions. And the only decision a commander had to do was does this further the aims of the revolution. There's no other restriction on that. So there's a bit of an irony in that. Before the revolution, a lot of people seemed to think that Trotsky was a pacifist, which he never was. And then they were surprised to see him as commander of the or in charge of the Red army, and they were genuinely surprised. And this is a similar conflict. We see that many people that appear to be pacifistic are not. And that's again a consequence of not having a commitment to a moral philosophy, which is associated with a teleology, which is associated with a theology. And that's the difficulty we get. So I'm very critical now of the Protestant intelligentsia. Well, intelligentsia is not a word, really. Some of them are not very bright. The politicians who misuse Scripture, who demonstrate that they're not referring to any tradition, who proof text the Bible to use for arguments, and who become effectively like a biblical emotivism. Emotivism was the description that Alasdair MacIntyre used to describe the modern replacement of moral philosophy, whereby attitudes determine what is meant to be moral. And that, as you know, comes from the logical positivism itself. I would also add there's an emotionalism which we could add on to the emotivism. So we end up Hearing people taking statements from the Bible in a decontextualized way and using them as evidence or a demand that you abide by their worldview, or else you're not a follower of Christ. Now, this is something that can't happen when you have a total tradition and a complex system which determines what happens, which is as objective as it can be. That's the argument that MacIntyre or I would use, that when the system is described, worked out, worked out over centuries, fine tuned, informed, there are people, hierarchy, authority that can make pronouncements. It's not left to the individual to decide for themselves. Everyone cannot be their own pope.
- [43:12]
B
There was a time, particularly in the high Middle Ages, where the Catholic Church really dominated all of society. The great economic activity was the building of cathedrals and the art of that era was all based on biblical themes. But things have changed greatly since then, even in Italy itself. Although the Catholic Church is nominally the religion of the Italian people, I think it's probably fair to say that most Italians are secular these days. Across all religions, church attendance and church belief is dropping. And to my knowledge, the fastest growing social movement is what you criticized earlier, people who consider themselves spiritual but not religious. That's the era in which we're living. It seems to have something to do with a major cultural shift that is taking place.
- [44:19]
A
Let me say I challenge them rather than criticize them because I support all spiritual explorers. I've been consistent on that. But I do challenge them. Yeah, that's a different thing. Yeah, Let me elaborate on that. As Stalin said, again, how many divisions does the Catholic Church have? We have to remember in this story that since the origin of the Catholic Church, which would be traceable back to St. Peter and Jesus, giving Peter the instruction, whether, you know, of course people challenge that, but that's the origin of the Catholic Church. Now, of course, the first generation were martyred and it went on for hundreds of years. So this is nothing new. The attacks, if we look at it from the other perspective, the attacks on Catholicism. So we have a history of martyrdom. Then, of course, the Christians in Rome were blamed for the Great Fire and we had this constant persecution. So anti Catholicism is one of the oldest hostilities and it's seldom represented as that. We had the various attacks, we had the challenges from Islam, the battles with Islam we had in Ireland, the Vikings coming, attacking Ireland for hundreds of years, ransacking the monasteries. The attacks in Britain as well, in Lindisfarne at the end of the 8th century, all over was attacks on great culture. From a pagan north, if you like. So in Ireland, not only did. And then before that was the sorcerers in the early Christian. There's wars between them. Then we had the Normans, who purport to be Catholic, but were often mercenary forces which worked within the system, who challenged the Church at various times. So they invade and argue that there's only barbarians in Ireland in a Catholic country. Then we have the Reformation and hundreds of years of persecution by Protestantism. So then we have Modernism and the challenge of all that attack and attacking Catholicism. In France, we hear about the French Revolution. People will tell you about the Catars shocking without looking at what was happening and who was benefiting from the land. Some of the families that invaded Ireland were involved in the persecution of the Cathars and the Norman things. You'll see some of the same names. In fact, you won't hear people telling you about the hundreds of thousands killed in the Vende and the French Revolution. Mainly Catholic, for example, the war against Catholicism, which is one of the bloodiest at the time of the revolution. And then when you're talking about Italy and you say about the not being Catholic anymore. Well, people have forgotten about the wars against the Papal states in the 19th century, supported by Britain and other forces, which was the deliberate war against them, which continues the war which was going on by the Normans in the south of Italy. This has been going on for ages. And then there's modern things that people don't know about. I mean, we can go back to the burning of the library In Louvain in 1914, a deliberate attack by the Germans on a center of learning. But most of the great libraries in Europe were Catholic and they were taken over by the state. The word secularization refers to taking stuff off the Catholic Church. That's what its origin is. And then we see, apart from the Reformation, you had the Kulturkampf with Bismarck in Germany. And if you read of what was taken off the church at that stage, it's quite amazing. Even under a notional Catholic monarch or Emperor Joseph. In the 1780s in Austria, 700 monasteries were closing down. They were closed down because they weren't useful, they weren't instrumental, because they had contemplative orders. It's no surprise that logical positivism came from Austria, the place which had banned the contemplative orders. So we forget about all the music, all the art, all the sculpture, all the great fun. And we don't know about these. We don't know about the Clusterstorm or the Kirchenkampf that the Nazis had, or the amount of Catholic intellectuals that died in the concentration camps as well, from Edith Stein to Maximilian Kolbe and the whole range and the whole priests that were in there right at the start. So all the Orthodox that were killed, and in fact, not just during the Bolshevik Revolution, but of course the Tsar had waged war against the Old Believers. The siege and Solovetsky of the monks went on for seven years in the north of, of Russia. And they're still Old Believers, people that didn't accept those liturgical changes of Peter the Great. So there's been an utter war going on and everyone has been. There is a unanimity in many senses, or an anti Catholic element. So even at the time when the Pope is supposed to be strong, we had the Pope, we had the Pope in the Avignon Papacy, we had the struggles over control of the Papacy. The Pope has never been as strong as his claim. The Pope had to work through a claim to a moral order. And that happened during the time of Gregory the Great in particular and in the 11th century. And it was from there that we got this centralization and codification. And earlier the Irish tradition came through persuasion and convincing and demonstration and example, as well as having a tradition about nature. So what people don't tell you about is the constant persecution that's going on. And now we have, as we talked about before, contemporary persecution, killing of people in churches, burning churches, amplification of propaganda, all of those things are ongoing. Both worse. If you look at Malachi Martin and you did an interview with Malachi Martin, a lot of people don't realize that unfortunately it's not available to us. But so Malachi Martin believed, effectively, it seems, that Fatima was anticipating apostasy at the highest level of the Church. Now what may happen, that may happen. But the argument even from people like him, is that insofar as Jesus said that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church, ultimately that all of these challenges will happen and the Catholic Church will still survive it. And I do believe that now. I believe that Protestantism will go through a great, a great challenge, a great reduction. And from the history of Europe, you would have to say, if you feed into a computer, you'd have to say that Protestantism is a temporary phase leading to secularism. There's a number of very good books in Swedish, I don't know if they're available in English, which describes the inevitable movement almost from Protestantism to a secular society, and I think probably to something which will be Some initial alliance with Islam and communism initially. And so Katharina Barling has written a good book. I don't think it's available in English. Which is the Varilden's mess Protestantiska land which. The world's most protestant land, which of course it's. It becomes secular like other Protestant countries. There's another book by Per Evert who the Land that Forgot God. He did a PhD on that as well. There's an interesting book called Sex Dialta Shirka, I think which explains about how Marxism came into the Swedish church in the 68 movement. So what's interesting is built what was the established church of Sweden. The vast majority don't believe in God according to consistent surveys. And you say, well, what is the point? But the explanation of that inevitable movement from state controlled Protestantism to secularism is inevitable. And in fact the Swedish church said we have always been woke. Woke came from Protestantism in many senses, as did the incubation of communism. But this doesn't appear in the narrative. I've argued in an article I did on a little article in Substack that Protestantism is probably the most revolutionary movement. If you look at the history properly, it's been one of the most revolutionary movements in modern history. So there's an interesting historical argument, but that's from history. It's arguing about the cultural implications of the belief system as opposed to the individuals. But that story is there and has to be examined.
- [53:58]
B
Well, you brought up the magical word woke in a manner that suggests to me that you think of woke as something negative. I think of woke as something very positive. A desire for. For people to be treated equally under the law.
- [54:17]
A
I don't know what woke means anymore, Jeffrey. So I'm just quoting what the Swedish Church said. But when they were saying that, they were certainly meaning it to refer to a whole matrix of progressive ideas. Now, woke in its. See, there's different genealogy to it. The prior genealogy was associated with a socialist perspective about people waking up to social injustice and certainly sympathetic towards that. The later one was a bit different. And the earlier one of course was about awakening. This is again the Protestant Awakening in particular in the 1830s. And when you're. What happens when you're awake? You're woke. So if you look at the great era of Christianity or Protestantism in the United States, it's associated with the Great Awakenings. And here's a series of prophecies of the coming of Christ that never materialized. The prophecies didn't work and that has continued that tradition. And I know you've talked a lot about prophecies not coming true, but in that there was that concept of woke. So I think it's much older. So I wouldn't oversimplify it. I can genuinely say that what it means these days, it's a politicized point. And there is, I'm sure there's a good side. But all I'm saying is that when the church is saying we have always been woke, they are manifesting a view or a disposition which was totally consistent with the 68, if you like, Marxist influence. There's no doubt that there was a very left sided influence on that. And there's a particular genealogy I'm trying to describe what the thing is, what I'm saying is how I would put it. Once you abandon a theology and believe that everything is mundane, you have broken that telos. Once you say that actually it's not about the connection to God, it's about the world. And you have broken that telos. And that's why I criticize Christ consciousness. I would criticize liberation theology. And remember, in liberation people say, oh, the Catholics are too kind of quiescent and all that. Irish history doesn't justify that. Not only that, but you had Irish priests fighting with the guerrillas in the jungles in South America based on their Catholic disposition. From a liberation theological perspective, when Pope John Paul went to Nicaragua, I think there was two Catholic priests in the government in what was a communist government. So there's a connection there. What the struggle is, is between one view which says the struggle is to connect to God and that the material element comes secondary. The other view is that the material thing is first and it's justified on the basis of a secondary appeal to religious tradition. Now I believe the former one. I believe it's a misconception that was particularly informed by scientistic thinking that altered the reality of God as a force, altered the reality of individual alignment and created great difficulties. So I'm not sympathetic towards, for example, Christ consciousness. I believe, unfortunately it's meaningless. It's associated with a New Age thing if you look at it genealogically. And when you talk about Christ consciousness, you're deliberately separating it from the embodied form. Now the other form does away with any claim to Christ effectively and only focuses on the material element without the other element. So the point being that there is a complex range of views. I'm unashamedly advocating the spiritual awakening. And I believe that that spiritual awakening has social implications because no matter how people want to deny it, it was the church that provided education for a thousand years in Britain before the Reformation. It was the church that developed hospitals across Europe on a mass form. It was the church that developed pilgrimage site and hospitality. And they did make a huge contribution to science, as more recent work explains. And all of that has been wiped off. And that came from, again, virtue, theological virtues, faith, hope and charity or love, and also subsidiary virtues of perseverance, of fortitude, of temperance, etc. So they were manifested. And the first apostles were the initial communists. They owned their things in. Nobody owned possessions. It's in the New Testament. But they weren't forced to do so. They did it voluntarily. I have connections with the Carmelite nuns here. They voluntarily live in a commune in an enclosed form manifest in this view. But in this new world materialist view, those things have to be made subsidiary to a generality. And it can't be allowed because they won't tolerate God. They won't tolerate the idea that there are women that want to dedicate their life, to go behind in an enclosed order, to pray for us. That's what they're doing. That's what they're trying to do. Now people will say that's ridiculous. What's the point in that? But that's what the objective of their contemplative life is. And that's just an individual charism. And if we take the Edith Stein, for example, who converted from Judaism and who had written her PhD a fantastic PhD and was around all those great thinkers, Husserl and Heidegger and those. It was a great intellectual contribution. Again, she gave her life for that belief. But it's not for nothing that these people are doing those things. It's again, the. Or the Carmelites that were executed in the French Revolution. But this is something that we can't see. And the idea, as Jesus said, I mean, the poor will always be with us. But he was clear that what you don't want to be is spiritually impoverished, not humble, but not to be aligned with God. That's a much worse position to be in.
- [61:35]
B
One of the points you made when we first discussed the definition of theological anthropology, if I recall correctly, is that the incarnation of Jesus gives meaning to human suffering. Can you amplify on that?
- [61:53]
A
If I think back on all the Catholics in Ireland before it changed, there was. People forget this. I hear young people saying, oh, I'm very interested in Stoicism now, as if it's something which has just been discovered. And Stoicism was embedded in the practices, for example, in the Catholic thing. Some of these doctrines were embodied in practices. And the idea that suffering was there was always a part of the picture. It's a kind of modern conceit that we do not suffer. You might say, if you take a Buddhist perspective, that the avoidance of suffering is the end telos. But that's certainly not the Catholic position. It's certainly not the Christian position. Indeed, if one believes it, then the humbling of God to come into human form was in some way revealing a redemptive possibility about suffering. Now, the modern world has said that suffering is inherently bad and has to be avoided at all costs. And part of the transhumanist argument is that if we become transhumanist or mechanical, we're not going to suffer. Now, there's different dimensions to suffering. There's a physical suffering, but there's also a psychological, psychic, and spiritual suffering. And as they say, as the Al Pacino character says, in the Scent of a Woman, there's nothing worse than an amputated spirit. So the idea in the vast range of discussions of the spiritual, of the human condition, is that suffering is inevitable and that we have to transmute our suffering in some way. We have to or use it, or find use it in our spiritual evolution. So it accepts that some suffering is inevitable in the human existence. And modern society doesn't like that. And in particular in the pharmaceutical context, it believes that any suffering has to be dulled and we have to live in a kind of a dulled, pacified sense rather than an aware sense. So there's something in this idea, or there's something there about the acceptance of our embodiment in whatever way the lottery works out and whatever condition happens. Because ultimately the spiritual dimension of ourself as well is the persistent one. Whatever way we manifest in the afterlife, the element of us which enables you to say I am, enables you to make the most fundamental statement about your existence, is one which we must see over a long period of time. And I believe in the afterlife. It's much longer than the short time that we hear in relation to philosophical position. The one thing we can say is I am. And that relates to I am from God in the apparition to Moses, I am who am, or I am that am. And this shows the connection. Now, modernly, people will say, oh, we're consciousness. And there is. The consciousness is fundamental. But if you look at people like Hoffman in his work, he says consciousness is fundamental, but human consciousness is not fundamental. And people miss that. It's a totally different system. It's A totally different idea. It's anticipating a post human AI idea. So people gloss over that and they're not actually reading closely what his argument is. He's different from Federico Fagin on that. I say you are and you are spiritual consciousness created in likeness to the divine spirit. God and our incarnation is important here and you will persist. And also that there is a telos that in the Catholic tradition, the journey is a kind of theosis, not to become God, to be able to participate with God. It's a slightly different emphasis in different traditions, which is distinct from. If I cite Peter Fenwick, for example, who talks a lot about death, but at death, then he seemed to say, you just absorbed like a drop in the ocean, this view. Near death experiences have challenged people that have a limited view of the afterlife. And we see a lot of scrambling to explain what's there, including a lot of dystopian views. For example, you see that from David Icke's view of what happens after, it's a trap. And this represents a gnostic tradition. The Catholic view has been consistent that your life here leads to a path. And this is Jesus who's talking about the path to theosis. Now this is what Trotsky thought was made up. He didn't believe in the spiritual world. He thought this was a bribe. He thought this was a cod. And that view enabled as well a view which has no moral philosophy bar, a claim to the future welfare of the proletariat. And here's the irony. Anyone that read anything about technology in the last 60 years would realize that the implications of the technology would lead to massive worker redundancy. So I was glad to see Bernie Sanders realize that AI is going to devastate workers in America. But. But I'm a bit concerned when I say, well, he's an elderly gentleman who's admired by a lot of people. Why did he not realize this beforehand? Did he not read the literature? I know he's concentrating on workers, but this is a big issue. So the irony is by the time this worker paradise comes about, there won't be any workers, won't be able to identify any proletariat you're talking about. They lead to the same place. And that's the challenge from this mechanistic materialist viewpoint, whether it be Marxist, even notionally informed, or capitalism, even capitalism notionally informed by a religious perspective or a religious claim.
- [69:01]
B
Well, James Tunney, once again, this has been a fascinating excursion into a world wealth of ideas. It's an awful lot to digest, but I Do appreciate your willingness to take a strong and provocative stance about something that you clearly care about deeply. I'm delighted to be able to share your perspective with the new thinking allowed audience. Of course. I look forward to many, many more conversations.
- [69:36]
A
Thanks, Jeff. There was a final thought, if you give me a minute to espouse that. If you have a minute. I generally haven't talked about personal experiences in these things because my arguments are not intended to be based on that because obviously it's not subject to. It's not subject to scrutiny, it's not objective in that sense. But I'm gonna. There was a little thing I was thinking about which illustrates the way I think about some of these things and the strangeness of. Of some of these notions. I was walking up in the woods in August, going for a swim. I swim all year round, but in the cold as well. But it was. It was fine. And I had a very clear vision of my grandfather, who was a politician in Ireland. He was in parliament, I think, eight times and involved in the land struggle, all this kind of stuff. I don't have visions of him. He's not, because he died the year I was born. So I don't have, you know, you see pictures of him, but I don't have a, you know, a living vision. So I had a very strong image of him. And in the communication was, you should pay the rosary for your family or for their family. Now, it was kind of striking the way it was in daylight and often in the wood, you kind of have some of these images. Again, there's a problem in the description of these kind of intuitions, which I think we should be better at explaining the hierarchy and the descriptors. So I did. Anyway. So I did, because I had a strong view. And then when I came home, I was talking to my sister in Ireland and she said, do you know that woman that's kidnapped in Haiti? She said, she's related to us, a kind of cousin, if you like, not someone that I know personally. There's a woman called Gina Herety from the west of Orange. She's a kind of humanitarian. She was motivated by religious reasons to go and look after children, has done so for 30 years, disabled children, etc. In Haiti. And she said, this woman was kidnapped. And again, so this was related to my grandfather's family. So that kind of explained what the. The image was about. So. So I said, well, who is this? So I began to look at. Read a bit about her. And so she looks after orphanage or two in Haiti and She has done so. And I listened to her talking about the problems there, like watching some of her co workers being killed before her, you know, beside her. And she did so in a very, a very stoic view that I would associate that was clear in. I used to be there in Ireland, a very matter of fact way, not in a kind of a weak way insofar as she was describing it. So she was kidnapped with a young child, I don't know, it was about four or something like that, and a couple of other people from the orphanage. So they marched over the hill and they were kept in terrible conditions. And she said, so this is interesting as well about the reality of some of the darker sides because she said that the people told her. Now she's very convincing, persuasive witness to me and I don't believe she's any reason to make it up. She said the people tell her that they are, these groups abducted her, that they worship the devil. That's what they told her. I'm just reporting what they said. A lot of people say these things are, are not true. And so of course she's not worried about herself, she's worried about the child and she's worried about the kids that were back at the orphanage. The Irish government did do good work and thankfully they were released after three weeks. In the meantime, the people down the west of Ireland were playing the rosary for her at the local church where my father would have been born. And she, when she came out, she, she did a couple of interviews about the process. She said, she said, I don't pay the rosary, but I had a, I had a feeling that I should pray the rosary when I went. It's not a thing that she does, but she said she was reminded of the people at home. And so she said the rosary. And not only that, she said that the boy that was there, the little boy and he can hardly talk, but he said, oh, there's Mother Mary, meaning the Virgin Mary in, in the room now. She said nobody else in the darkened room where they were imprisoned, nobody else could, could see her but the kids. The kids do. So she sent out, she sent out a voicemail afterwards to people that had been praying for. But there is a strange reality that you understand from a parapsychological perspective that you know is true from your own context, that is, that does exist in a religious context, which is very, very real. And through the process of a number of intellectual movements from the mythicism movement, from the deconstruction movement, from the materialist movement, it has had the effect to take these experiences away from people, and I take them, in my terms as ontologically real. It's not something that I managed to concoct in my head as a sequence. And I have had too many utterly consistent visions or things that I could fit into a clear and coherent pattern that for me, I'm not going to change on those things. And in fact, I'm going to endeavor to present a reality at the same time also challenging the Church itself, which has huge, huge internal problems of its own that we all know about, that needs to be challenged, that needs to deal with things without throwing the baby out of the bathwater, without throwing the reality of spiritual experience. So I just. Because you often say about that, and I generally don't talk about individual experience, but I'll have to do so more because otherwise it's not persuasive if you don't expose your thinking processes or your experiences. And it's only an objective context. That was the last thought. Sorry for going on so long. I just thought I'd share that with you. Jeff, thanks for the talk, and I'll talk to you soon.
- [77:10]
B
Well, I think what you're saying is that your own visionary experiences seem to open up to you a window into the world which is described in Catholic theology. So it, in effect, is reinforcing the religions in which you were trained as a child.
- [77:34]
A
Yes, yes, true. Again, at a time, and it did go back, and at a time when I became very critical and not practicing the Church and because of the obvious problems that were going on and a lack of conviction for me in the conviction of the reality that I saw before me. And so that having been said, there is a different dimension. There is a number of dimensions, including what the Chinese would recognize in relation to your connection to your ancestors. And I don't presume that all the generations before me were fools. They weren't. In fact, 100 years ago, some of them were predicting what would happen in Ireland today in relation to his change. Some of them were very intelligent people. And that goes back in a way, and that's the thing I feel close to. So as the country is changing radically, my connection to those people doesn't change. In fact, it gets stronger. In fact, it's one of the only things that may survive the metamorphosis that's going through in this journey to materialism. And there has been a tradition or an experience, a set of experiences I had in relation to the Virgin Mary that convinces me of the ontological reality of these things in a personal sense. And again, sometimes it takes a while to work out. But if you look at Ingo Swann on that, he was also interested in the Virgin Mary as part of I think he's one of the fewer but who took that seriously, I think, and I can see it in Preston in certain elements. So yes, to be authentic in this context and bear in mind how open you are, it's incumbent on me to try and explain the way I interpret the world on a subjective level as well as the objective thing. So yes, it's corroboration for me.
- [79:40]
B
Well, James, once again it's been a great pleasure to be with you. I look forward to many more opportunities.
- [79:48]
A
Thank you again, Jeff, and for those
- [79:51]
B
of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.
- [80:21]
C
New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs.
- [80:50]
B
You can now download all nine copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingalowed.org book4 in the New
- [81:04]
A
Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is Charles T. Tart 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.
- [81:18]
B
For early access to our videos and live stream events, sign up for our free weekly newsletter@newthinkingallowed.org.
- [81:40]
A
Sa.