https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KWfpFov_AGU
Hi, this is Paul and today I’m sure John will post this on his channel too probably. But John, John, I’m gonna say John Van Dong, John Vervecky and I are gonna have another conversation. I posted a video a week or two ago and John made a comment said, oh, let’s let’s talk about some of this stuff. And I, I’m sure that there’ll be no, no shortage of things for John and I to talk about. Yeah. And I was just mentioning that when, you know, I saw that little snippet of what you had done with Rafe about non theism and I was talking to a Roman Catholic scholar about doing a conversation about that Bishop Baron cosmic skeptic conversation, I thought, wow, some of this non theism is very interesting in terms of let’s say classical theism versus non theism and. Yeah. So. And I thought the video was, was, was very good. And I thought some of the, of the critique of some of the stuff the cosmic skeptic was saying was good. You, you had both criticisms and you also pointed out this is a strong argument. This argument needs to be responded to. I thought that was excellent. Now, for me also, I’ve just been reading, I’m reading and purchased a book, this book, for example, mystical monotheism, a study in ancient platonic theology by John Peter Kenny is having a deep impact on the fact that what I thought was classical theism isn’t perhaps best called classical theism. This book, the unknown God negative theology in the platonic tradition, Plato to Regina by Diedre Carabine, which is an ambitious Baron. He’d love that I’ve got this new book. The world is God’s icon creator and creation in the platonic thought of Thomas Aquinas. It’s all about participation and then participation in God, a study in Christian doctrine and metaphysics. So I’ve been trying to be responsible to, you know, that I need a more refined and nuanced way of talking about non theism in contrast to theism. I even proposed in the comment that I might need a distinction between what we might call common theism, the kind of post enlightenment theism that, you know, that was balanced off and bounced with theism and stuff like that. And classical theism in which a lot of notions that I think are found within the non theistic also get prominent place within what turns out to be frequently orthodox Christianity. If Thomas Aquinas isn’t orthodox, I’m not quite sure who is. But of course, some of these people are also considered heretics, Regina, for example. So that stuff sits right for me. And I mean this properly. It sits right on the boundary of Christianity. You know what I mean? What’s inside and outside while still going to the core in a lot of ways. Again, because Augustine and Dionysus, like these are pretty orthodox sources for Western Christianity, Eastern Christianity. Anyways, this is a long rambling way of me saying I want to enter into dialogue about this because I think my own thinking needs refinement on this. I guess I’ll state kind of what I want to do. I want to do that. And I want to enter into your excellent discussion around that. But I have a goal that you might not have, because part of my allegiance to the idea of non theism is I want to be able to talk about, in fact, I’ll make it more personal. When I left Christianity, I found Platonism and Neoplatonism. I found Buddhism and I found Taoism. And they did things for me and they continue to do things for me. The best analogy I can have is they’re some of my best friends and I have a tremendous loyalty to them. And I won’t sort of go into any position that requires me to take up a kind of disloyalty to them or a denigration of what they have done or continue to do for me. And part of my allegiance to non theism, and I don’t think my situation is in any way unique or special. I think there’s lots of people in that boat. And so part of what I want to do with the non theism is be able to talk about the sacred in a way that maintains that loyalty to Neoplatonism, to Buddhism and Taoism. Now, of course, one of the advantages is Neoplatonism also has a long history with Christianity, which makes such a dialogue possible. So I just wanted to put some of my cards on the table of what I’m looking for. And one of the goals that I have in mind. Well, I’ll put some of my cards on the table, too. I mean, I started when I first started making videos, at least these monologue videos, not just the Freddie and Paul show. But I didn’t even have the conceptual framework to know why I was feeling that the world had changed. And Ascension Day, of course, was for me a big puzzle because Jesus goes up. OK. But obviously, the world has changed dramatically since Galileo. The heavens don’t start at the moon. And so I realized that I continue for my occupation to try to contextualize the Bible to a 21st century group of people whose world is very different from the one within the Bible. That led me to, you know, and I saw with Jordan’s work, you know, somebody at least I intuitively had a sense that there’s something going on here that he’s playing around with modernity. He’s trying to bring old things in. And so that was interesting. But then when I listened to him talk to Sam Harris, it became it became very clear that the world that Sam Harris was living in and the world that Jordan Peterson was living in in terms of he cannot almost even know what God was, what they meant by this word God. Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson were very different things. And some of the stuff that I had heard out of Jordan in that conversation with Sam Harris reminded me of some of the earliest reformation confessions and how they talked about God. And as a minister, I would. So those are my confessional statements within the Christian Reformed Church. And then I would listen to just regular people share their experience, characterize God, relate to God. And there was there was a big difference. And that’s sort of where I came up with God, number one and God, number two, because they were sort of buckets and empty placeholders for me to sort of compare and contrast. And then as I listened to your stuff, I mean, you began to give me more categories to work with, like a two worlds mythology and, you know, the agent arena relationship. I had already had, you know, general revelation and natural revelation. I had already had eminence and transcendence. And so you had all these dualities that were sort of floating on out there. And, you know, I had never, despite having had obviously courses in theology, in seminary and had, you know, read plenty of books on theology, I probably hadn’t taken a step back and and done some more classical thinking about what we mean by this word, because the word was very much defined by Christian practice, the Christian community. And of course, everything that we’re reading from the ancient world is in many ways, you know, then framed by the contemporary stuff. And so you don’t really break that. And then it wasn’t until I had the God, number one, God, number two thing going and then talking, reading this book by Brett Sackled, Transubstantiation, that, you know, my eyes began to be open about and then reading this book by a Hebrew scholar, Ezekiel Kaufman, who, who, you know, he asked some questions that I had never thought of. You know, I’ve got a seminary education, not really a classicist. You know, why isn’t there in the Bible a mythology about the beginnings of God? Yes. Yeah. And and so he basically works on those kinds of things. And and so. You know, then then the Medi-Divine realm and why how the Hebrews sort of. Replace the Medi-Divine realm with their God and how that then works with some of these categories and actually this weekend preaching on Act 17 with Paul on Mars Hill. Seeing that passage very much through Kaufman’s categories and, you know, this conversation that that you have brought to me in terms of because when you talk about non-theism, what that does is help me sort of. I don’t want to use say deconstruct because that leads us down a different road, but sort of help me try to see the Hebrew scriptures, the history of the church. What on earth do we mean by this word? And, you know, with that little clip between you and Rafe, it was quite clear that your non-theism helps get you out of this impasse that we’re currently in. That’s the intent. I want to make it clear to people who are watching that people that I would call atheists have now started adopting for themselves the term non-theism, which is really problematic because we need a term other than atheist for what I’m trying to talk about. And traditionally, that term has been non-theism, like Buddhists and Taoists will describe their view as a non-theistic view and describing it as atheism is to fundamentally misrepresented in important ways to my mind. So I just want to warn people that there are books out there that are now using the word non-theism where we until very recently, we would have used the word atheism. So and that’s an odd and interesting trend. And I want to try and figure out what’s going on there as well. Why that shift and what is it they’re trying to do? Part of it is that they’re trying to say that it’s not a position, it’s just the denial of another position. And I think that’s a very problematic thing to say. So at some point, maybe I could lay out what I mean by non-theism. Please do. Just just to be clear. And like I said, I’m really open to negotiating who the contrast class is. So I right. I really am. And so what I what I was trying to do with non-theism was to try and get at the shared presuppositions that I found within the current debate. So that’s part of the stipulation, the current set of people who self-designate as theists and the people who self-designate as atheist and who get sort of center stage in social media, the public domain. Now, of course, I’ve got to qualify that because as I’ve come to know Bishop Aaron, he doesn’t cleanly fall into some of the categories I was using. So, again, that’s part of why I want to talk to you about this. But how I posed it was what are the shared presuppositions between the common theists and the common atheists? If I can put it that way, and I’m trying not to use common in an insulting way, I’m just trying to just designate that group. And this is, of course, a very prominent thing. And so and what I was saying is that the non-theist argues that the theist and the atheist agree on an important set of presuppositions that frame our relationship to the transformative power of sacredness. And they do that by taking I make a distinction between sacredness and the sacred. And maybe we can talk about that at some point. And that for for me and other people like Ray, who I’m talking to, we want to we want to reject the framework, the shared set of presupposition. The basic idea is the theist says yes to all of them and the atheist says no to the And the non-theist says this is kind of this is a bit congenial move. Move. This is like asking what time is it on the sun? And you’ve got people disagreeing about what time it is on the sun without realizing that they’re framing that exactly the wrong way. It doesn’t make any sense to ask that question. What time is it on the sun? Right. And what you have to do is see that the presuppositions are inappropriate to the phenomena. That was one of Wittgenstein’s continual moves. Realize that’s the bewitchment of language. Right. And that’s the question that we’re trying to answer. Realize that’s the bewitchment of language. Right. That the presuppositions that go into your problem formulation, your question generation are sometimes the problem. And we need a kind of insight to break out of them. And so the non-theist is trying to break out of this and it says and then that is recommending that breaking out of that framework is actually existentially psycho existentially important because it allows and affords people to come into a more vital and living relationship to sacredness. And that’s the main proposal of non-theism. And the idea is that aligns with non-theistic traditions within the West, like the Platonic, Neoplatonic tradition and religions that often frequently self-designate as non-theist like Buddhism and Taoism. So that’s what that’s what I’m trying to mean by this term. I was fascinated by your. Your the transformative power of sacredness. Yes. Can you can you flesh that out a little bit more? Yes. So I was just talking to Jim Rutt about this this morning. So this is something I’m thinking about a lot today. So, first of all, I make a distinction. And before anybody jumps on me, I can point within the tradition, the Christian tradition to say this distinction has already been made. And I think Schliermacher was attempting to make it with his he was trying to get worse when we’re talking about sacredness, as we’re talking about a psycho existential. And there’s not there isn’t a single noun here I want to put after the adjective. It’s something like experience, realization, transformation. People have these experiences, realizations, transformations that strike them as importantly profound and comprehensive. They don’t have to be sudden. And that these experience and denying that these experiences occur, it’s just false. I mean, 40 percent of the population has them regardless of religious affiliation. Denying that they have the real potential to transform identities and lives is also just false. And so, you know, and Schliermacher tried to say, you know, when he’s defending religion, he tried to say, put aside the metaphysics, let’s talk about, you know, this sense of dependence. Right. And he tried to he tried to shift it onto what I would call sacredness. The this and again, there isn’t one word to cover it. It’s I’m sorry, I’m loop loop linking these three words together. Experience, realization, transformation. And the idea here is that people have these experiences, realizations, transformations. And I want to talk about that with this word sacredness. That’s what I’m trying to use and acknowledge the reality of this and the real value of it to human lives, both individually and collectively. And that this is, you know, of course, I was going to mention this at some point, to my mind, coming into a having a proper framework by which people can come into right relationship with sacredness is integral to addressing the meeting crisis. Now, there’s another term, which is the sacred. And I’ll try to use these terms consistently, but even in the video episode, I slip. The sacred is some kind of metaphysical ontological proposal as to what is the cause of sacredness. Right. The reason why sacredness happened was because of X. Right. And of course, there’s lots of variation on what that proposal is. So when I’m talking about sacredness, that’s what I’m talking about. And what one of the things I’m proposing, although I’m really happy to discuss it with you and you know that I’m proposing that non theism has a flexible stance towards the answer as to what the sacred is. That is allows for more recognition of right relationship to sacredness, especially in other religions, etc. And the second point. Non theism says that what it’s trying to do, and I haven’t made this clear, but I want to make it clear here now. Non theism says that we, although these experiences are happening here in this, we’ve tended to create, I don’t know what to call them, Paul. And so I’m going to use this term, and I don’t mean any insult or specification, but we’ve tended to create orthodoxies. I don’t know if that’s the right word. Right. In which we say we give an answer to the sacred and that then constrains our interpretation of sacredness. The non theist is recommending going the other way. Let’s get the best phenomenological functional account of sacredness and use that to constrain the answers we give to the sacred. That’s the proposal. I thought that was very good and very clear. And I think it’s helpful to, especially what you just said at the end there, like in many ways part of part of what we’re trying to do at this point. This is post historically there’s so much I’ve been talking about lately. I’ll see if I can summarize it. Part of how we arrive at this in the West is certainly partly through pluralism. With globalization, the world has opened up. And so we’re looking for language that can recognize this phenomenological and I like, I think you have three good words, experience, realization, transformation that that is that you see happening in many different cultures and many different places in the world. Obviously, once Europe at the at the Colombian exchange, when in a sense you really have the beginning of globalization after Columbus, you know, now you have the Americas and then you have the connection to Asia. You know, you have the whole thing going on. Now suddenly groups are within recorded history at a different level. Obviously these kinds of these kind of contacts had been made prior to the Colombian exchange. We just have very little documentation of them. And because we don’t have a lot of documentation, we don’t have a lot of material to sort of analyze. But all of now suddenly Christians and Buddhists and eventually this this, you know, because of the British colonial situation, you have Hinduism because the British needed to be able to name for whatever it is these Indians are doing. Yeah. And, you know, all around the world now, there’s this there’s this human there’s this human experience, human phenomena of transformation. And well, how does that then how does that then converse with the the kinds of exclusive claims that develop in Judaism, Christianity and Islam? Yes. And so there’s, you know, there’s gonna have to be a conversation between these. And so I think, again, it’s helpful to recognize that the direction that we’re working from here is starting from the beginning of the 20th century. Now this this for someone like myself as a Christian minister in a time and place where many people like yourself, whether people do it when they’re young or people do it when they’re old, they’re leaving a religious community, a set of religious practices be leaving a religious community. And usually, usually when they do so, part of what prompts them is either a usually a combination of this this no longer works for me, which is language we put on something to sort of get a rough estimate of what it’s like to be a Christian. And so I think that’s a really important thing to recognize. And so I think that’s a really important thing to recognize. And so I think that’s a really important thing to recognize. And so I think that’s a really important thing to recognize. And so I think that’s a really important thing to recognize. And so I think that’s a really important thing to recognize. I think that there’s that there’s an intuitive sense of this ease dissatisfaction. The everything in my world isn’t lining up and we can use McGill Christ’s. We can use McGill Chris schema that you know one side of the brain is looking at the other and saying, Well, you’re not really happy so let’s come to a conclusion that not this. And then suddenly, what about these other things, because we notice transformations happen in people and I think also with McGill Chris idea. Well, once we notice that transformations are happening, one hemisphere is going to say okay, let’s let’s try to organize and systematize and and this is where you’re going to have orthodoxies emerge, even outside of traditions. Yes, there where things will begin to develop, and then we’re going to have to seek around, you know, look for language and somehow gain orientation with respect to these things and so And so, you know, I thought it very helpful in, as you just did right now and as you did with rave Kelly with an experience realization and transformation. Okay, we see that these transformations happen in people. Yes, even if we are roughly unclear about how these transformations line up, let’s say, all the way from top to bottom, but just sort of here in this buffered secular space, we can see in a person that they’re okay they’re a little happier. And I love the language you used in the awakening from the meaning crisis let’s use agency, either reciprocal narrowing reciprocal broadening. Exactly, exactly. So we can see that let’s say someone has say deconstructed from Christianity or they’ve made a move that that we that sort of crosses lines that have been around for a long time, and we see a transformation has taken place. And generally speaking, just within a little timeframe we look and we say, hmm, there seems to be some reciprocal broadening here. They get a little bit more joy, they’ve get a little bit better sense of identity, they’ve got a little bit more energy and agency and you know now that that obviously is within time frames, something that we hold a little bit of humility with because what what we’re seeing is a little bit of a transformation we think, oh, this is going to be a good thing and then within days or weeks or even years we bump into something and realize, oh this, you know, it’s kind of going through a maze, I hit an end wall and now I have to backtrack so it’s helpful just to locate this in that frame, especially within the secular sphere, where, as I say often we don’t, we don’t have stars to guide us, partly because of a lot of what has happened in the West over the last 500 years to say, I’m not going to make a huge number of ultimate claims. So people deal with, use this kind of language, well for me or for now or for us or within this tradition, we’re always trying to locate things, say I’m not going to make my claim to ultimate, even though I think at some point, we have to deal with the ultimate, and we will jump there. But we’re here in this, in these transformations we can say, hmm, I might not be able to connect that to the ultimate, but for now, it seems an improvement. You’re dead reckoning metaphor. Exactly. Right. Right. And, and I would, I would, I would buttress that by saying, you know, there’s increasing empirical evidence, you know, that people, and atheists have had these higher states of consciousness experiences. I’ve read books and reports, and they lead to these kinds of transformations. And importantly, these transformations, like, like they’re by objective measures and by asking other people. I relate one in some of my videos about I’ve been doing Tai Chi Chuan religiously for like about two or three years, and I’ve been having all these amazing phenomenological experiences, days where I was as hot as fire, and I had to do Tai Chi practically naked, and days when I’m cold as ice and all the, and I’m getting into the flow state, all of that’s happening. But then, my friends in graduate school came up to me and said, what’s going on with you? And I was like, what do you mean? Well, you’re way different than you used to be, you’re much more balanced when you’re arguing, and you’re much more empathetic and picking up, you’re much more flexible and you’re, and I realized, oh wow, the Tai Chi Chuan is permeating in my life and percolating through my psyche in ways I’m not recognizing, but other people are recognizing. And when you get, and I, in fact, I often recommend, I often say to my students, how do you know, they say, how do I know I’m doing that right? And I said, when other people notice a change in you, that’s when you notice, that’s when you know, there’s nothing inside the experience that’s going to work for you to do that. And so you can get reports by other people, you can get more objective reports about, right, and Yaden’s work and a whole bunch of people, right, like, yeah, these things happen, they happen on a spectrum of belief, and yet they reliably, not perfectly, but they reliably produce long-standing improvements. People have a mystical experience, the Griffith lab, people have a mystical experience and they have long-standing change in the personality trait of openness. That is a, that’s not supposed to change. In fact, it’s supposed to go down with time gradually, and in fact, it’s open and it stays open. That’s a real significant measurable change. And we, like, if we’re going to be, if we’re going to be scientific about this, not scientific, we’re going to be scientific about this, we have to acknowledge that and we have to take it into, we have to take it into account. Now I’m interested in both the science of what’s going on there, but I’m also interested in, but how do we enter into right relationship, the existential question? How do we, how do we frame this undeniable phenomena such that we, like, we make it appropriately available to people? That’s the thing that I’m concerned with. And I happen to think that the language, the, well, the language of common theism and atheism and the presuppositions don’t do a good job of that. That’s the main argument I’m making. Yeah, and I agree with that. Now, once we have now once we’ve agreed to transformations and that these transformations and again as a Christian pastor, I can see that this is these things can be very messy. Yes, in terms of people’s lives. Yeah, because people, of course, are situated in in structures and communities and so, as you well know to leave a community. You know, with a faith tradition is a very, it’s a very difficult thing and that’s, that’s part of the reason actually that I’m not skeptical about the power and importance and relevance of transformations because people don’t take such risky, costly steps, unless there is something powerful driving them. Yeah, and you see this in the tradition the Buddha leaves the palace and his family with, like, you have to stop and pause on that. For many of us that’s in him. I mean leaving the palace oh yeah, no no he also leaves his wife and his, his young kid. Yeah, right, right, and Jesus, you know you have to leave your father and your mother. Right. And if you can’t do that you can’t follow me and oh no Jesus doesn’t. Jesus didn’t say that well yeah he did. And I think that’s part of the reason why I’m not skeptical about the power of the Buddha. Right. And I think that’s part of the reason why I’m not skeptical about the power of the Buddha. Right. And I think that’s part of the reason why I’m not skeptical about the power of the Buddha. Right. And I think that’s part of the reason why I’m not skeptical about the power of the Buddha. Right. And then, also we have to recognize that these transformation scale. Yes, that we will have, you know, for right now there’s in, at least in the United States there’s a lot of younger people who are leaving the Christian Church. Yeah, that then has impacts obviously on their peers has impacts on institutions has impacts in politics. I really loved what you said at the beginning of that I wasn’t able to stay the whole time but the question and answer for the awakening from the meaning crisis, talking about, you know this, this powerful movement that, you know, it’s, it always. And when I would whenever I read john’s letters or the letters to the churches at the beginning of the book of Revelation they’re absolutely audacious because they’re telling these tiny little struggling communities that you will overcome Babylon, which is audacious thing to write it beginning of the century. And then by the, the fourth century it happens. And it’s like, Wow. So, so part of the part of the question for me is obviously okay, because I walk with people as they go through transformations. Yes, and that community and not just a community because everybody in the community is going to bring their own idiosync in the idiosyncratic thing. But again as a leader in a community as someone who is let’s say ordained in a church as a who’s a pastor so it’s a shepherd, I walk with people and transformations and sometimes those transformations are out of the church. Sometimes those transformations are into the church. Yes, part of the reason of my estuary project that I’m involved with. And so it’s, it’s helpful to remember, or it’s helpful to continue the conversation. I think understanding two things number one, because when I, you know, lately I’ve been talking about the upper and lower register. Right, when you undergo a transformation, I think, sort of the upper half of the two world mythology in a person must sort of tie it to the, you know, to the existentials to the, to the ultimate to the absolutes. It’s just sort of what we do and another factor, you know, sort of your. It’s not reciprocal it’s, it’s the two opponent processing. So on one hand, the absolute pulls us. And on the other hand the contextual pushes us. Yes, and so, but you know, those tensions are always there in there in us. And so part of the bigger conversation in the midst of continual transformations are. Okay, how can we assess. How can we sort of dead reckoned from below. We’re watching these transformations. What does that tell us about the ultimate. And what I mean because we’re I think we’re always doing this. I agree. I don’t think we can’t. I agree. And so there’s two points I want to make in connection with that. One is the these experience, these experience of these experiences realization transformation sacredness. Right. And that is often bound up with. This is more real. The auto normativity. This is more real and that’s exactly is that that’s the motivating force and this is one of Plato’s great insights to my mind. And that’s related to the next point I want to make, which is a contra Cartesian point, which is the realization that these transformations disclose truths that are not accessible before the transformation. And you have the whole problem of transformative experience that la Paul talks about, and Agnes Callar, the idea that, and this is why I want to use the word realization reality discloses itself in ways it previously didn’t or couldn’t. And, and that starts to get you like you start to wonder in the proper sense of the word wonder about what what is real and I don’t mean as a cafe, you know philosophical discussion as you smoke a cigarette. You like you feel if you feel onto normativity, you start to really, you start to wonder but what’s really real what, like, when I go through this transformation, and I realized, and it’s not just me transforming, it’s the world transforming the reciprocal opening, you, you start to like the question about the profundity of the sacredness raises the question about, well, how, like, what is the most profoundly real to me. What is it that’s affording and driving the realization, if you’ll allow me and I’m putting this in quotes for a reason from from the side of the world, the world is also participating in this in some fashion, and you start to wonder about the ontology of the ontology of the world if I have to use a rather jargony way of putting it, but that that’s what starts, and that’s what these people typically do do it like club spoonville he’s an atheist and he has a mystical experience. And he says you know it made him try to it made him think about what like what does this what’s going on like, how can I help like what is this is this just is just just sort of some sort of brain burp or like is it is it doing something. And if I rule out this experience, but it’s like insight and insight seems to be a driver of us discovering things in science and in art and in literature. So, that’s what I’ve been trying to do with the cognitive continuum hypothesis like like, well, if you reject this and you realize it’s the same machinery that’s at work and flow and an insight you and in wondering, like you’re putting yourself in a really dangerous position. So, I would argue that those two things right really sacredness draws you towards it, and the fact that, like, the transformation is reciprocal. Right. And we realize, wait. When I transform, I, the world discloses in ways, it didn’t before, and if I transform more, more such disclosure could occur. And that disclosure I’m finding that disclosure intrinsically good. It’s making me and my life better. So I should transform more. But what does that mean those questions come up, and the whole issue of how do I follow a path of transcendence. I think comes to. I’m not I’m not saying it comes to the fore for everybody, but it’s highly probable it will come to the fore for most people. Absolutely. And now you and I are, you know, on the, on the scale of things quite cosmopolitan. We, you know, we in a sense, are always conscious of the, of the pluralisms around us and we have relationships across those pluralisms. And so that in many ways, we take on language of taken very measured language I mean that’s sort of the culture of the cosmopolitan class but if I, you know, of course, having been a Christian missionary working in African American context working in church context, what you just described is absolutely the case with Christian conversion, because when someone converts their world changes and one of the things that you notice in a church, they’ll usually be people who sort of inherited, and then people who converted and the converts are almost always more zealous. Yeah, and, yes, you know, sometimes given to certain dogmatisms and absolutisms. Yeah, because of exactly the dynamic that you just, you just noted. Yes, where, you know, I love to use the illustration of Chuck Colson, who, you know, Chuck Colson was Richard Nixon’s hatchet man. And he was known as just a cutthroat political operative who would do anything for his boss, and then he begins, it’s, it’s, it’s nicely documented in his book born again, you know, he begins to realize that, you know, he’s doing anything for his boss, but his boss is going to leave him hanging out to dry, which happened, which yeah which exactly what happened, and there’s this group of, you know, deeply evangelical people in Washington DC. And, you know, at one point, I paraphrase this isn’t exactly he records the moment in his book but basically, he goes home and he tells his wife, you know, I’ve become a Christian, and she’s like, I thought we’re Episcopalians. And, and, and, because you know at that point of course for Chuck Colson he has this religious, he has this, you know, religious transformation, and his entire life change and of course then he’s going to go to jail. And in prison that obviously I mean it’s, it’s almost sent okay you’re going to become a monk sent to you by the United States government, you’re going to live in a cell, you’re going to spend time by yourself, you’re going to have a new community around you and also in cells and of course for for Chuck Colson that launches prison fellowship and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, I want to, you know, I, when I use illustrations I always try to use illustrations, if people in the, in the one side tend to be lean this way. I like using an illustration from the other political camp of course it helps us recognize the, the commonality here in terms of these transformations, but then, of course, over time. I think we’re always also as human beings, both individually and communally checking, you know, did this transformation. I, you know, whether I, whether I speak them or not, I’ve got intuitions of the absolute. And I’ve got an I’ve seen the world an entirely new way. Yes. Am I fooling myself. And you should, you should absolutely. And you can’t reason yourself. And this is la Paul’s point you can’t reason your way through a transformation, and you can’t go back to what made sense before the transformation as your normative base. So you really are in a dangerous place. And I see, you know, literature within Christianity and Buddhism and Taoism warning about this right and it’s often you know, given certain mythological ways different to the culture but there’s this yeah there’s like there’s, there is exactly that. For me, that’s why I argued. And this is this is an, this is an inter hermeneutic exegetical claim. I claim that all of these traditions have said those transformations have to be bound up with the aspiration to wisdom. Right, where wisdom again doesn’t mean being logical. It means this systematic attempt to system to systemically intervene in one’s cognition to reduce self deception both individual and collectible collective and enhance meaning in life. Right. And for me, that’s, again, for me that’s that’s that’s quintessential to what I want to talk about what I want to talk about. And I want to again recognize. Again, my loyalty to the, these, these, these other traditions, these traditions that called them non theist, and the way they have helped coordinate that for me, the training of wisdom through mindfulness in Buddhism the training of wisdom through flow in Buddhism, and that helped me do that coordinate the transformation with. I’m not claiming to be wise that’s ridiculous but an improvement in, you know, in wisdom. And of course, the Socratic Neoplatonic tradition has been just essential for me continues to be that the And the thing for me is that I see some important and this was your point was why I’m so excited about your video when you compare me to, you know, Bishop Baron and the bishop was basically giving the Neoplatonic position. And that’s very fair to say, and to realize how big of a role the Neoplatonic tradition played within officially Orthodox Christianity and also on the edges of Christianity. Right. And so, I see a big, I see a deep similarity between that, and a lot of what I’m talking about what I’m seeing and what I got from Buddhism and Taoism in terms of why of wise transformation. Sorry, this isn’t meant to be insulting, but I see deep similarities between the Neoplatonic tradition that was taken into orthodoxy and the Neoplatonic tradition that was outside and remained non theist, and also these non theist other religions, other people have noted that The Kyoto school is big for noting that Suzuki noted the deep connections between like the deep similarities between Zen and Eckhart and you know and Heidegger picked up on it. I won’t go on about that. I’m not the only person making this observation, but the But the realization that I was making a mistake and attributing all the way back, a certain model of theism that is a post theist model of theism. That was a mistake on my part. And the part and so I’m very excited about what you did. And you’re basically like if you allow me to paraphrase like John, look, right, what you’re talking about a non theism. There’s, there’s something very analogous that’s gone on in what we which, and this is what Kenny argues, what is properly called classical theism the theism of the classical world. And I think that’s bang on and I want to, I want to, I want to sink my teeth into that there’s some that’s a thank you for that. First of all, but there’s, there’s, there’s, there’s something that I want to open it up, there’s something very powerful and important going on there. Well, and I think, I think part of. So, so again for me as a Christian when I, I’ve often told people, I am not necessarily tremendously bothered by watching people deconstruct from Christianity. Yes, sometimes, sometimes the Christianity they are deconstructing should really be deconstructed. And all huge traditions like this all have their nooks and crannies and better and worse and all of that. And so I know, you know, there’s an it is natural to a religious tradition to have a to have a tribal energy to it, and that’s because we need community, and we need those frontiers and boundaries and so you know I don’t apologize for that, but but part of what interested me and again it’s been a real journey for me over these last three years is to recognize to ask harder questions about why in some sense, classical theism was lost. Yeah, and what kinds of theism are have been expressed by the church. And, you know, and this is sort of where I, you know where Jonathan Peugeot is someone to play with because on one hand, through him I can access some more of these classical things because orthodoxy is really good at preserving stuff they don’t change. Yeah, but at the same time, the new things that come down the road, usually come down the road for a reason. Yeah, and, and so when I, so on one hand, you know, you’ve got a guy who’s a he’s a he’s a Roman Catholic bishop, you know, so he’s, he’s not some rando Protestant pastor with an internet connection is a Roman Catholic bishop and, you know, very well educated, you know tremendously well informed. And so, what I’ve seen in a lot of this, and what I saw immediately why was Jordan. I mean, the amazing thing about those first few years of the Jordan Peterson phenomena was, I was in just in looking at people thinking, wow, transformations, significant transformations are happening in people. Yes, who are watching Jordan Peterson videos. That’s interesting. Why, I can add to that, I mean I’m not claiming to be Jordan Peterson or anything like that, but I get a lot of those emails, I get a lot of those comments, I get a lot of those reflections for people about my work. Yep. And, and, and, and that, and, and, you know, you know, I talk to people have can have said that I’m a better Christian than, than any great and I don’t know what to do without that, no matter what I say it’s going to be insulting. I want to somehow acknowledge that, and you know it’d be appropriately, you know, grateful for the kindness and the encouragement that is behind that act, but the actual proposition I don’t know what to do with. So, the thing for me is I wanted, let me pick up on a specific thing that was in that video. It was also in the discussion that Bishop Baron and Jordan, Jonathan Peugeot and Jordan Peterson and I had. I’m really, I’m really happy and proud about that I really want that to come out. I think we all did. Bishop Baron tweeted a long time ago about, and Jonathan was like, he had Jonathan I actually recorded a follow up conversation that’s going to come out once it’s released. We’re all excited. We’re all excited about it. But this came up in the video that you made. And I want, because I want to, I want to zero in on a concrete example so people can get clear about what we’re talking about. Okay, so, you know, I, you know, I came, I was educated about you know the onto theological critique of Heidegger and Heidegger is one of his main arguments was, you know, we have misunderstood being in terms of the supreme being. That is the cause of beings, and that’s just a fundamental category mistake, and that category mistake actually cuts us off from participating in being capital B, and that’s the history of nihilism. Now that’s, you know, that’s a profound argument it’s a profound point. And I’d always taken it, because I was brought up this way that what theism meant was the idea of a supreme being. And then I hear, you know, and I knew from I knew from the neoplatonic tradition the criticisms of that. And, but I hear a bishop who’s speaking on behalf of Thomas Aquinas. You know, saying, well no that’s just a fundamental mistake, thinking of God as a being is God is not the supreme being that doesn’t make any sense as a category mistake. He was making Heidegger’s argument, and I thought, wow, that’s really interesting and then he’s making that argument from the very neo neoplatonic tradition. Now for me that was, it was like one of the things that I see common theism and atheism arguing about is whether or not there is a supreme being. And, and, and, and to me the non theist says, that’s just the wrong question. You’re trying to get at the ultimate nature of reality being, and the ground of being to use Tillich’s phrase, and you’re just making a category mistake. Both of you. The answer isn’t yes or no is it that’s the, that’s like asking what’s north of the North Pole, you’re asking the wrong question. And so for me that I’m just trying to give a specific example I have other things that I would, for me, right, and I, this is very much a move made in Buddhism, the gods are irrelevant, they might exist who cares, they’re irrelevant because they’re not ultimate in this proper proper way, or the, or the discovery of the difference between immortality and eternity within Greek philosophy, when the Greek philosophers realized that the Greek gods were only immortal and not eternal this was like. This is a very specific thing. And it’s like, ah, right. And then I hear Bishop Baron say oh yeah well then, of course, you know, and I knew Aquinas I’ve read it, but you know, the, but for me that platonic tradition had sort of been lost in the Catholicism that I had seen to, but he knows God is not God is the ocean of being right to use one of Aquinas is beautiful phrases. I thought, wow, that’s really interesting he’s clearly a bishop so he’s got to obey, like, an orthodox structure, right, he can’t just say stuff willy nilly because he’s a bishop, but he’s he’s getting behind he’s, and he’s doing it astutely I don’t agree with everything he says, but that made an impact on me it was like, wow, here’s somebody basically saying, yes, the auto theological critique is right, and common theism and common atheism are both wrong and he was trying to get that point across, it wasn’t being the, I can forget the name of the guy who’s the cosmic skeptic he wasn’t getting that point he just wasn’t getting that point in a profound way. And so that’s what I mean about, for me that’s sort of a defining feature of what I call non theism that we don’t, there isn’t a proposal that the sacred, not sacredness that the sacred is the supreme being there, there’s no no it’s being, which is properly it’s not sacred, and this is the Buddhist meaning of it as no thing this, but that same language is in the Christian tradition to it’s a diagnosis. It’s an era Gina it’s in Maximus right that language is all it’s a Nicholas of Cusa although and I’m reading these people a lot. And so for me, is that I’m sorry I’m going on about this but I’m trying to get how this like it made a significant impact on me. And I think that’s it made an impact on me when I first began to see it, and I began to then connect dots with language that I grew up in even reformation period confessions, I began to notice the, if not the language as such. Let’s say just a generation apart from that language was still pointing to it. Yeah, and you could see that in the attributes of God let’s say which of course I was trained in as, you know, within the, the reformation context, then the, and for me where this gets very in terms of, because for me, for me, what you just described is the reawakening of God number one. And what had happened, I think, in after especially D ism. When we conceptualized, we sort of were able to conceptualize the physical universe as kind of a replacement laws of physics, kind of a replacement to God that that aspect of God, and sort of the arena. And so what’s accentuated is the God number two the agent. Yeah, and because it’d be. So, and one of the things I also began to notice is, this is where I get into Pascal and the spirit of finesse. Yes. We can really, as human beings. The only way we can relate to the arena so often is via person. And because it’s, it’s, you know, CS Lewis is greatest novel, which he wrote with joy David men was till we have faces. Yes, yes. Yeah, it is. And, and, you know, I remember reading it and I read it a couple of times and it’s, I just had to kind of get my mind around the problem of why, why you can’t see the God, you know what, why can’t you see the God now this is very much if And so when I, when I look at this, you know I began to notice with the Christian atheist arguments that this was, it was all about God number two. Well you’re. It’s all about the agent God as agent. And, and so then the atheist sort of punt, you know when Bishop Aaron sort of puts it back on him and says, Well, how do you deal with suffering. And they have no, they have no answer. Yeah, they have no answer. Yeah, they have no answer. You get sort of often tepid versions of in of enlightenment in that in the in the historical sense of modernity the odds you get as well you know will improve people’s lives, etc. And let’s be clear that did make a difference. People’s lives were made better, but it, but, but it was not without significant cost and we’re bearing that cost. I keep telling people remember Nietzsche didn’t say God is dead to the believers he said it to the The great prophet of this has to be taken. I mean profit in the biblical sense and that’s how he saw himself I would argue that you have to take very seriously what he’s point, like, how did we do this. How do we take a sponge and erase the sky. And he’s saying, Oh, we’re never falling. How do we do this, and you know and the atheists are all sort of tittering and laughing at him, and he abandons them and he goes into the church and he wants to sing a funeral dirge for God’s death, right, because we have to become worthy of this event. Why am I, why am I saying all that it’s like if you, like, if you make God the ultimate subject I think you’re saying the same thing, then objectivity hangs free, that’s the earth now disconnected from the sun, and he’s using neoplatonic imagery there by the way, it’s funny how much these people are influenced. And I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. And I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. I think that’s why he’s saying that. And she really makes clear. And that’s why I bought these books, by the way, these books on participation. Spinoza was really trying to stop that, and he was really trying to steer away from deism in a very powerful way. I’m not saying he had the answer, but there’s a lot going on there that’s really profound. Well, that makes perfect sense because it’s right at that, historically he’s right at that point. And he’s in Holland, where Cartesianism and Calvinism are right like this together. Right. So he’s right at the pivot point. And he’s basically. So, I would present to you the proposal that Spinoza is a great non theist in the way I’ve been trying to talk about. And what he’s trying to do is he’s trying to do the reverse. He’s trying to, he’s trying to properly. I’m looking for a verb here, Paul. He’s trying to translate with all the sort of hermeneutic sense to that word, he’s tries to translate all the God to language into God one language, but not in the sense of explaining it away as an atheist, he really thinks he is committed to the proposition, no no no, this will actually bring about you loving God the intellectual love of God it’s it’s not an attempt to, you know, people, it’s all just metaphorical and we’re just talking about the laws of the universe. That’s not, and that’s what Carlisle’s arguing that’s not what Spinoza is doing. He’s trying to, he’s trying to say look, we’ve got to have a conception of God that is deeper than the ultimate agent, and the ultimate arena, ultimate and this is till it’s point to this the, you know, the God beyond the God of theism is one of till it’s great essays, right. Like, people need to read it right they need to read it, the God beyond the God of theism, and the way he talks about at the end of the courage to be this God that’s beyond the God of theism is the answer to the meeting crisis. So what, what I, you can see this is really sort of just sparking like this is why I’m reading all this stuff like this, this trying to get it. I would want to say to you that the God beyond the God of theism and be provocative here is that which lies below God number one and God number two, and properly relates and grounds them together, such that the agent and the arena relationship of our life is properly grounded and home. That’s what I would want to say to you. Yeah, and I’ll have to I haven’t read the essay so off to take a look at it, but that that I think is the struggle that we’re dealing with and I think the struggle goes back to the Greeks I remember, I’ve I’ve looked for it but I can’t find it. You know part of what the Greeks. Part of what you see in the Greeks, let’s say that the development of the fates. Yes, so, so what are what are the fates, because the if you look at if you look at Kaufman’s, if you look at Kaufman’s argument that, you know, there’s this tension between the agent and the arena. Yeah, that in a sense the Greeks try to resolve with the fates or you also see that the Greeks, you know you have Nike victory, you take something like victory which I think is is similar to you know you have experience realization transformation. And you turn it into a God, and, and that’s, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a right move in terms of down below here trying to figure out how to conceptualize victory. But then, how then do we will we want victory, and we need victory. And how then do we call victory to ourselves. Yes, of course in the ancient world you call victory to yourself by sacrificing to the God and, you know, so you have a personal narrative relationship with the God, in order to bring the God in and have the God, you know bring victory to you. Now, what happens obviously, you know, and I, I don’t, I’m not anywhere near enough educated but my suspicion is, you know, why does, why does science the way that we recognize it today. If you have a full blown, if you have a full blown understanding of God number one that you are still living within when you’re dropping balls from a tower in Italy. Yeah, you’re doing theology. You properly are. And I think the successor to the face is are the platonic forms. The platonic forms are an attempt to like ground intelligibility. And, and to say that they’re all use Jonathan’s language and this is what I mean by he’s more radical than people realize there are real patterns and there are real principles governing those real patterns. And they. And, and Pearl makes this in his thinking being classical metaphysics in the classical tradition, there’s a deep connectedness between intelligibility, being and sacredness. And this is, and this is the platonic notion of the form. And the interesting idea about it is, you can even see in Platonism people wrestling with just the issue you made, because you have in Plato the forms are there just well, the best analogy, it’s an only an analogy, it’s like the formulas of chemistry, and they’re formulas and they form a system, if I can use a neutral word, and then you get the middle plate and it’s worrying about exactly that, like, but, but, but my relationship to this is so transformative, and you get the move well maybe they’re, they’re actually ideas in the mind of God, but then what you got to do is you got to really expand what you mean by God to do this and then and then you, and then it goes on and on. But yeah, that move. Right. So, so that that move. And what I see Neil Platonism doing. And I want to mention how I also see it in the Bible, and this will be maybe provocative. Right. But what I see Neil Platonism doing is trying to get below the agent in the arena with the notion of the one right the notion that the one is somehow deeper than the agent is actually really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really I mean, he’s talking around and talking at the beginning of the Bible. And he, like, he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and he withdraws and I feel like the Bible is even wrestling with that, right? They’re trying to wrestle with kind of a God number two that’s, you know, like in Genesis and a God number one, which is really, I mean, Paul on Mars Hill, the God, we live and move and have our being, right? And the Bible, I think, is actually wrestling with that too. I agree. So obviously the story starts with, you know, God walking with the man and the woman in the garden. Yeah. And then the second scene, you have two brothers who are both sacrificing and, you know, God favors the one and again, the language is so completely mysterious. And so, you know, the hunger for God and the other and the hunger for the father’s affirmation drives the one brother to kill the other brother. And of course then, but there is some coming and going because of course with Israel and Egypt, they have so forgotten. Well, you could do a lot with Exodus. They’ve forgotten the God, but it could very well be that they have forgotten the God because there are so many gods. You know, there’s a God on the throne. So then, of course, the you have the desert wandering and I always tell people in some ways the the tabernacle is sort of a God containment unit. I mean, because you don’t want him to break out because when he breaks out, you know, but I think that’s right. And as you go then through the Hebrew scriptures, once Israel is, you know, you have God showing up outside of Babylon and then it’s like, well, wait a minute, you’re, you know, you always had geographical gods. You’re, you’re, how are you here? Then you have this brilliant move by the Hebrew prophets of no God sent Babylon. In a sense, God sent the gods of Babylon down to destroy the temple. It’s like, how does that work and then of course for Christian you have the New Testament, where, you know, God writes himself into the story. And but then after, you know, after acts, then God is then obviously regularly coming down through the spirit, you know, onto Gentiles. And then of course the climactic, you know, apocalyptic apocalyptic book at the end of the story where, you know, cover us, you know, the great and the small of the earth, plea to the mountains, cover us from the face of the one on the throne and the lamb. So, you know, the very, the Bible is very much a conversation about, about the God number two, who walks and has conversations with Abraham and, you know, will appear to David and David will sing love songs to him and David calls himself his son. And then, you know, the spirit and the incarnation and all of that. But yet also in the body within the Bible is still God number one. When Joseph will say things like to his brothers, you know, you sold me into slavery. You have any idea how much I suffered because you, you idiots did this to me, you meant it for evil God meant it for good and so you see, you see all through the Bible also this borderline, a reneic agentic, trying to work things out of the God of it’s it’s in a sense the God of You know, this happened, therefore it’s God’s will that doesn’t leave Christianity. And that remains in it, and you see it all over the place. This happened therefore it was God’s will. Oh, but that sometimes these things that happen are really bad and awful. And that of course sets up a bunch of the stuff that cosmic skeptic was was wrestling with, as if Christians, you know, we’re the ones that are actually in here praying, and then it doesn’t work, and we’re keeping our You think you think we’re blind to this dynamic, we live personally with that tension. And that of course sets up, you know, you know, part of where so someone has a transformation, and then they can’t help but feel it. You know, both the absolute and the contextual. Yes, and it comes together in a transformation. I think that’s, I think that’s fundamental to a transformation. I that you don’t just say, this kind of works for me, you, you say, everything is different. Now the arena in which I am living has fundamentally changed because of this transformation, and everything is different and I’m willing to say case of Paul of Tarsus, I’m willing to say, now to my closest friends now want me dead, and are, in fact, seeking my life, but I’ll take that because of this transformation and the new world, I am now living in. And so I think as, as these transformations go from individual because, you know, we’re as human these things go viral, you know, good things and bad things. I mean, even, even suicide can be a contagion. Yeah, yeah. And so these transformations, then they start to spark between us, and then they start to develop into communities and then, but of course all those communities are going through history. I mean, this, this is religion and in many ways, you know, I love how you put this here. You know, this is the human story it is a story of, you know, these realization transformation experience, but then sacredness always seems to long for the sacred. Yes, it does. And I think that’s well put. I guess I want to ask you a question that you seem to acknowledge the, I guess, the plausibility of the, I guess the proposal I made about that I see exemplified in somebody like Spinoza, to the independent degree to which he succeeded about trying to get a language, a conceptual vocabulary, a theoretical grammar below, if that’s even the right metaphor below between beyond God one, God number two, like to try and that that is in some sense, the ultimate. I’m wondering, because part of what part part of what I, and I think you saw it too part of what happens is in the theist atheist debate is equivocation between God number one and God number two all over the place. And that, to my mind, that equivocation blocks the idea of, of God, I don’t know what number to give to that. Maybe God to infinity or something I don’t know what to call it but the below beneath. Right. The deeper than, you know, this is why, you know, whiteheads bipolar, which is not a good we maybe should call it dipolar so we don’t confuse it with the disorder view of And so what I was, what I, what I’m trying to do is to come up with what would that like, what would that language be like. Such that I’m trying to point below. I’m trying to, I’m trying to almost the image I have in my mind I’ve been doing my thing I didn’t mean to, but the stereoscopic. Here’s God number one and you use this language sometimes so it’s fair. Here’s God number one God number two lens but you know I want to actually see the depth, I want to see through them to the depth behind them. And I want to know. And maybe this is impossible for me maybe I have to go through, I have, I would need to go through some transformation that I can’t, but I want to, I want to try and craft know participate in the crafting of the language that allows that stereoscopic vision, right, possible for us, because I see other people like Spinoza or Tillic and you know the God beyond the God of theism. And he’s not advocating atheism that’s just a mistake. I want, they’re on to something. And you know and they both, and they’re at direct different ends of modern theology Spinoza is at the beginning, till it is near and towards when some people say towards the end of it in some ways I don’t know what that means but anyways, right more recent. And they’re both saying that that move is essential for responding to the meaning crisis that that like, I pay attention to that claim, and I want it like what do I need to do. And what do I need to do. I want to transform it existentially conceptually in order to grok that in order. I’m sorry that’s from Robert Highland stranger strange life, right in order to get it in a profound way. That’s part of how I see the project of non theism and trying to put it into discussion with classical theism I want to get that. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know if this is making sense to you. I’m at the very edge of like my thinking and where I am. But that’s what I, and I want to be able to I want to be able to understand, like, why is it like so the the the metaphors that are used in Buddhism and Taoism are very much agentic their spatial metaphors, the void, the way, right, and then the West are reading. I meant to renege sorry I meant to read it not agentic, whereas the West is very agentic right, as you point out, and, and I think, again, this is, this is my response to pluralism which you’ve already, I think they both have something to teach us about the sacred in some profound way. And again, the, what I’m trying to do with non theism is look through those two lenses, the eastern and the western lens, and I know this is audacious but I provoked by, you know, by Spinoza until like, and other people saying but this is this is what you have to get in order to respond to nihilism to the meaning crisis, etc. Sorry I’m getting very passionate here but no no no no I get it, keep going there you’re fine I don’t ever know I and I think you know just a few things number one. I can’t. We never do it alone. Oh, of course, of course so number one we never do it alone. That’s why I’m here talking to you exactly exactly so we never do it alone. And, and I think deep within Christianity I, you know, I, again I see people, and it’s, it’s absolutely appropriate and biblical to talk about the Holy Spirit being a gift. But I think what has happened in our culture is that that gift sort of became a possession of ours. And no you are possessed by the Spirit. It is nothing that it’s a category mistake that you imagine you can possess or well well Paul, that’s excellent well done. So, so that’s one thing and I also noticed in reading the New Testament because of course I’m a minister I read the New Testament all the time. The Spirit is at least as much between us as within us. I’m so glad you said, I mean, you’ll know that I’m, I’m, I’m doing Lexio divina with David Bentley hearts, new translation of the New Testament really. Yes, interesting. Yes. Does he talk in that language. I mean he’s Eastern Orthodox so there’s neoplatonic language right in his theology, and but he, he also like the experience of God he’s really willing to use, you know, experiences of sacred experiences realization transformation of sacred of sacredness Eastern traditions to talk about, you know that God is ultimately bliss in some way that’s that’s right out of the data is right out of the pan as she adds right and he’s happy to do that, and he still thinks. And I take him to be sincere, that that is still very consonant with his orthodoxy in the sense of Eastern Orthodoxy. And it’s been really powerful me to do that because he’s a very, I mean he knows the Greek really well and he’s very honest and he knows the, he knows the whole theological tradition and the neoplatonism and the middle platonism that’s around and the stoicism that he just. And so, you’re reading, when I read passages it. And so I mean this to be a mean this to be provocative in a good way not in a derogatory way. And I think that the testament is weirder than I’ve ever read it before. That’s a good sign. Well, so, so then, so then, you know, we’re never do it alone, the spirit is between us. It is always a gift. Yes, and I think that’s, you know, that’s where people. We are ministers, because we are practitioners. Yeah, it’s always a gift that that site is always a gift but I think the fourth thing is that I think it, it, it gets fundamental, it has to be fundamentally manifest in the, in where heaven and earth meet together and so if even though language and narrative poetry. These are all enormously powerful compression mechanisms. I think, I think, action is finally, even more powerful compression algorithm than speech, because an action, heaven and earth meet. So I’m now going to say this word to you that picks up on it perfectly. Yes, indeed. And, and so, as I, you know, I’m, I’m encouraged because so then I, you know, when I think if you talk about, if you talk to Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox about the Protestant Reformation, it’s kind of like, oh, I wish we could have avoided that. And as a Protestant I say, I bet you we couldn’t, because it was, it was popping up in all kinds of places even before, you know, Luther then was the earthquake but Jan Haas and Wickliffe. All those tensions were there in the system and all the Orthodox say well if you had always listened to us before maybe we wouldn’t have had it well I can’t answer any of those questions okay and it’s, I don’t need to. But I do, I do think that, you know, we are living in an exciting time because I think we are sort of at the end of that long 500 year thing, and we are coming into a new something. And I like, just like you I’ve looked at the atheist, theist debate saying, this isn’t this, this isn’t, this isn’t how this isn’t how we are transformed. Exactly. It’s sterile. Yeah, I find a sterility into it in it. And I find it lacks the vitality, but that brings that leads me to a question I wanted to ask you and I want to ask it to you in fellowship and friendship, and you know, and, which is your argument of, you know, the spirit of finesse. And so, I thought a lot about that. And you know I tried to answer you honestly and critically in the good sense of the word, when you presented that argument. But is, I mean, And if I get your argument wrong, please interject but part of what you’re saying is, there’s a spirit of finesse and relating to God as a person enhances the spirit of finesse. And that’s why we could keep coming back to it. And you were very careful about, you know, you have to work, you have to, you have to take care about idolatry throughout all of that you said that I get that I’m not trapping you into any small box. And if I am, tell me. But I was thinking, because I’m thinking about spinosa’s claim about the intellectual love of God and he means but he doesn’t mean intellectual the way we mean the word intellectual, he means it in the neoplatonic sense as the intellect, right, that the act of reflection with the ski empty into a TVA in which we realize our deep participation in God, and the Carlisle book is all about that spinosa’s religion is the, the, the, the, when we go from when we can, when we, when we go from reasoning it to realizing that everything is in God that’s the big that’s that that’s what brings about blessedness. Right, and spinosa called that’s what he means by the intellectual love of God he doesn’t begin means sitting at a cafe, saying wordy things about God he means this profound experience realization transformation that brings about blessedness and as a response, he thinks this is a better response to the meeting crisis than day cards proposal of pursuing a kind of epistemic certainty, etc, etc. So those also said and such a man would in, there’s nothing he would try less to do than to get God to love him in return. Now, just give me a minute. The reason he says this is he says, to do that would be to subvert, he thinks of love as a virtue, and in both the moral sense and the empowerment sense. And to do that would to would be to would be to remove the virtue within love. Because if virtue is not for its own sake, then it is not virtue. Right, and if you were loving so that you get loved back, then it’s not actual love and, and there’s, there’s, I think there’s profundity there. And I was thinking about that and I was thinking, well, the Bible seems to use lots of impersonal metaphor, what I’m reading Dionysus, like I do that. I do that. Lexi on Dionysus, you know the names, and there’s just as many impersonal names as there’s personal gods a rock. Right gods a light gods a wind. Right and sometimes he’s not a wind right all this they’re all very arenic. Yes, yes, yes. And I was thinking, is it not possible for people to fall in love with. Let me try this. Let me try this. So, Aquinas, God is the ocean of being, and he’s not even an ocean because that’s the thing but something like that. Right, but I know people who have a profound love of the ocean. And, and, and it’s even properly it can become properly spiritual for them. I have. I have such a love for the wind. I don’t know why, but it’s just. And of course that picks up on, you know barfield and the double meaning of wind and spirit. And I would say, you know, and the Taoist have that love for the Dow. Is it not possible to have that kind of profound love to something that is not conceived of as a person. I think, well, let’s talk about loves. You know, CS Lewis had his. He actually Lewis actually reads it which is quite fascinating. Oh wow, store gay is, you know, we talked about filet a gap a arrows. The fourth one is usually not talked about much which is store gay, which is sort of affection. Yes, and I would say that yes we can, we can have love for a renek for a renek entities. But I think part of what we want for that love for what we, how we want, how do we want to act out that love, usually with engagement. I want to go into the ocean, and I want to let the ocean have me and, and with the wind I don’t just want to think about wind in the abstract. I want to go into the wind and have it blow me and then push back on the wind. I want to couple with it. Yes, I want to couple with it. Yes, yes. And I think that’s, I think there’s. And, and in that sense, it’s, it’s very difficult to not personify and fall in, you know, to personify the wind, in order to really share in a dance with it, and to have the wind know me and me know the wind, you know to love and be loved I mean it’s, I think love always wants that, you know, reciprocity going back and forth. And, and I think that’s part of the reason why, you know, we are the. We, we sort of put romantic love or interpersonal love at the heights because it is, it is far more terrifying. Because once we are once we are relating to. We identify the ocean. We identify the wind I mean we, I don’t know. You know I love that conversation you had with Jonathan because, you know, as Jonathan said you go up a certain high and maybe up beyond, you know we we can only imagine and there it sort of takes an personal thing, but as long as we’re involved with any of this. I don’t know that it is, it is, we are capable of really loving without interacting and having giving and receiving. I don’t know maybe I think that I think that’s part. You’re being honest that I appreciate that. And you’re being thoughtful and I appreciate that. And I’m not trying to win an argument with you know I know that I trust you, John, you don’t have to worry. So here’s what, like, first of all, I take spinosa’s point to be clear, and people don’t realize that you know spinosa quotes the official of john at the beginning of like one of his, one of his major works, right, because, because he like those who live in love right are live in God, he, and he got and john’s proposal that God is a God. And, and, and, and spinosa is using that when he’s making this proposal because he’s, he’s, I think he’s pointing to the conception that well no a God back love is actually beyond right erotic and philia and a copy club doesn’t doesn’t look for reciprocity. You know, Jesus says that you know, God’s love is like the rain it falls on everybody it’s not looking for reciprocity. That’s perfection. Yeah, yes, tell us. Yeah, yeah, which is really kind of an interesting way of talking about it. And isn’t, isn’t there something agapic and what I’m proposing that when you know, I’m sorry I don’t want to sound romantic and like Don Quixote or something. But, you know, when I look. It is a wonderful book. It is a wonderful book. Right. And I’m putting this as a question. Right. Isn’t supposed to getting something right about virtue and agape by not looking for reciprocity as being central to it. I don’t know if it’s not looking for it as much as not demanding it. But I think it’s still hopes for it. I don’t think, I don’t think love. I don’t think I think love won’t. I think love is disappointed with indifference. Because let’s say you know I love Yosemite National Park. And any chance I get to take that little three and a half hour trip. I’ll go to Yosemite and always take cameras with me, and I’ll annoy my family because I’ll stop and my family will say, How many pictures do you have of that rock. In many ways the rock is indifferent to me I certainly know that but but part of me longs for a communion with. With the arena, and, and I think it’s in that way that spaces become sacred to us. And, and this is where I sort of pick up on Lewis, and in his book miracles where the, the vision is that we, you know, we are the stuff of earth and the breath of God, and And, and nature is to be our sister. And we long to dance with her, but we have. We have become estranged from her because of our, our hubris and our avarice. And so we have abused her and so we have a prickly relationship with her. And then in, in the, you know, in the resurrection I mean I think part of part of why Christianity can say, Oh yes that the vision of God, but we are we are not fine, you know our, our telos is not finally merely seeing God, but God clothing us with the flesh of a new creation by which the relationship with our sister will now finally fully be healed, and we can dance with her, like we dare not dance in this in this world. And, and I, I want to be honest that resonates with me I mean there’s beauty in what you’re saying, but I’m going to I’m going to give to you another, the other inkling. So I want to talk about what I’m reading Tolkien, and the Lord of the Rings and the scene is in the extended cut but it’s not properly given them the momentousness it should. So, Sam and Frodo are in Mordor, and they’re there, it’s just oppressive, and they’re losing. And the clouds part for a moment, and I can’t remember which one it is I think it’s Sam sees the light of the stars. And he’s the fact that the stars are above all of this, literally and also in the sense of your time, they, they, they are untouched by all of this, and none of this touches them. And the fact that that’s an aspect of reality gives him great comfort. I also get that comfort. And I think that’s something that’s been Oasis also pointing to right that there’s also a way in which I don’t like this word, but I’ll say the impersonal, right. And they give us tremendous hope. I mean that’s what tokens doing in that moment he’s doing in that scene. And I kind of like the proposition that, you know, truth and justice might be like, well, what Plato says they might be impersonal they might be beyond right, the vicissitudes of her personality, and that’s, that’s almost important to how they work and how they function. I don’t know if I’m making my point well but I’m trying to it is it is and that’s true too. And I think that’s part of the reason why, you know the psalmist you are my rock. Yes, you are my fortress and you I put my trust. It’s, and that’s, you know, in some ways the Bible then is that that that that example from Lord of the Rings, you know, if you read it in the text, it’s far more powerful in the text than it is in the movie. And I think that’s exactly this minister in New York, in New York City. He tells the story that when he was being wheeled into surgery, right before they put him under. He didn’t have a psalm on his mind like a Christian minister should he thought about that moment in the text because because Keller is a huge Tolkien file, and the light of the star smote him, but what’s interesting because of course it’s Tolkien. The stars for Tolkien are, you know, alive, alive. Yes, so I think you’re right in that there is a. And I would say in the Psalms God is our rock. We are. We are, we are leaning into a steadfastness from God that we often only experience in his arenic in our experience of him as a renec does not change. And the fear of, of real personal relationship is and you hear that in other Psalms. Oh Lord, why are you so far from me. Why do the wicked triumph and, and the good are squashed and actually you know the, the Old Testament is full of that. And, you know, also in the Old Testament of course you have law, which is also kind of a post agentic arenic. But yet we always know that law, law, that law comes to an end, because there must be a judge, because law itself is too low resolution to finally agree with that since for what they are. You said that eloquently and awakening from the meaning crisis. That was a powerful point. And so this, I think you’re exactly right that this we at some point, we long to get beyond the agent arena relationship, and we have an intuition that the arenic and the agentic will meet. Yes, yes, this is well put. This is well put. I like that. So, let me try again let me move it into, I think we’re making progress I feel we’re making progress. If you feel that I’m just belaboring something that let me know. So, and I grew up with this, and I think this is a fairly prevalent thing for Chris, so they love the Bible and the Bible is holy. And it’s like, I don’t like, like, the Bible, like the Bible isn’t the person. And what I mean is, there’s a there’s a love there, and there’s an attribution of sacredness even of the sacred to this. Let’s be fair, this impersonal object, and don’t say well it’s a story about people that’s not the point. That’s not the point I can have a rock carved with that. This is not a person. Right. But, but, especially the church, I was brought up in, you know, and I’ve heard. I’ve heard Catholics, sometimes mean spirited sometimes loving spirited talk about Protestants having the paper pope that the Bible is basically like the pope, they treat it like a person that makes pronouncements and say, No, it’s not it’s a book. Right. And then, but now to try and make it more fair. Right. I have the same relationship to Plato’s Republic. I love this one of my best friends is Plato’s Republic. And it’s sacred to me because of the way I described. It has been constant it has been trustworthy in its ability to afford reciprocal opening and grow with me as I grow I’m reminded of another part of the Psalms where the deep calls to deep and Plato’s Republic has never failed to do that for me. Now, it doesn’t mean I could just sit back and look at it I have to participate in it. But, but see what I’m trying to get out. I’m trying to get out with both within without Christianity. Again, this this, we can have this profound love, and we want to attribute even a sacredness to that a holiness to it, because what we’re in relationship with is constantly doing that with us. So, that’s another example I wanted, I wanted to get your reflections and response on that. I’m very happy that Protestants have not gone so gone so far to say the Trinity is Father Son and Holy Scripture. That is a constant. That is a constant issue in Protestantism. Okay, in some ways, the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church don’t quite have those issues. I get into regular conversations with respect to icons, for example, yes, yes. And so, so, so Calvin one of the things that Calvin dealt with. You don’t, the scriptures, and this is the language we use in the church, the scriptures don’t come alive for you apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. And that way Calvin tries to keep the soul of scriptura, keep the Bible from becoming an idol. Right, and in many in in with Protestants, often the Bible Protestants will use the Bible idolatrously. But the Bible is always supposed to be, you know, it’s supposed to guide us to God, the Bible is not God. And, you know, as a Protestant, it’s, it’s really important to say that. Now, again, part of what I think happened with the Protestant Reformation is there was there was just a sense that their stuff had accumulated in the church and they’re needed. There needed to be a scraping down there needed to be some housekeeping done. Now, as is almost always the case with human beings. We use our agency. We don’t use our agency well even with the best intent, even. Yes, yes, because we simply and Gandalf. And he says that beautifully to to Frodo, when, when in the minds of Moria. Yeah, yeah, you know, Frodo’s I wish I wish Bilbo had killed golem. And, and Gandalf says, Are you able to, you know, give life and take it. Now obviously the thing for human beings is, well, we give life in this, you know, rather unscientific drama, but we take it with ruthless self righteousness. So, yeah, that’s, that’s figuring out our relationship with the Bible is an is a is a difficult thing. But at least with Calvin, it was always the Bible is a tool used by scripture and just functionally in a community. It’s helpful to have a cannon. Yeah. If you live within that community you very quickly realize that there’s some parts feel a little more canonical than others. That sounds almost like a Georgia Orwell statement there. So what happens is then that this sort of an epigenetics on top of the genetics that sort of, you know, go with the Bible and traditions and yeah it’s it’s it’s it’s totally messy. It’s totally messy. And, but, you know, so Peugeot and Richard Roland was doing a conversation about icons and Richard Roland had been a reformed Baptist and went to reform Baptist seminary and there were these statues outside the seminary and pictures in there of, you know, former lights of their tradition and he’s like these are icons. So, it’s, it’s this human. It’s our humanity. We can’t we can’t help but be who we are. And again for me in terms of my Calvinism that’s why I appreciate my tradition in that, you know, finally fully it’s God’s gift to us. And it doesn’t mean we don’t have work to do. But, but even you know back to moments of transformation. Again I find it. People will talk about the path that led up to it, but almost always at sort of at the moment of, of release. It’s so it’s so feels like giftedness that that. And that’s used by the people who are in the flow state by the way chick sent my high passed away. Oh, yeah, just to just to. Wow. Yeah, that’s a great loss. So let me ask you a question that’s both philosophical and asking as a friend. I mean, I know what Calvin might say but I’m wondering what you say my my relationship to the republic, it would you consider that idolatrous. No. Right, right. My relationship I mean, there are times when I read CS Lewis and I think, am I, am I thinking he should be in the Bible and then I read other CS Lewis like a good thing he isn’t. So we all, you know, we can’t help but we can’t help but fall in love with, with, with places you know I love Yosemite National Park. You know, there are there are some places, you know Calvin College for me I spent years on that campus that sacred ground for me in some ways that I go there and it’s it’s not like other places. And it gets just how we are we. We, we, I don’t think that I don’t think there’s anything that we should be ashamed of I mean look at Dante’s Divine Comedy, you know, Virgil. Yeah. So I, I, I, Christians. There’s this weird thing where, on one hand, God is a refining fire and he’s holy. And you can never measure up. On the other hand, God is enormously generous. And, and, and so you know God’s perfection in the Father’s perfection in the Sermon on the Mount, he sends the rain to fall on the fields of the just and the unjust. Yes, and and be perfect and that’s so often I’d hear in Protestantism that be perfect was always in this peculiar, narrow rigid. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and even in the relationship between the son and the father, there’s this dialogue. And, and so, yeah, I, it’s, it’s a difficult dynamic to figure out how to live with on one hand, this, you know, the most, the most rat, the most absolutist demand coupled with the most irresponsible generosity. And I think it’s, it’s those qualities that we see in Jesus that is the reason, I mean, Tom Holland in one interview notes, he says, the fact that they were able to construct a text that presents a character, which has been fresh and, you know, transformation inducing, not just for the first century and that they were written, but, you know, across cultures and through time. And in fact, that four people did this about the same person. It’s, it’s, to me, it says something about, I don’t know, Peterson has good language about it. He says, that’s archetypal, you can’t get around it. And that’s, that’s how I feel about that story often. So, And, and, and you should, I mean, I, like, I’m not trying to challenge or deny that. What I was trying to get at was, just as like, there’s an intuition that the agent and the, in the arena, there’s something below them. I’m wondering if there, there, there, there, there, there is, there’s an impersonal and personal form of finesse and there’s something below that. You know, people have, have, have coined this term transpersonal and they’re trying to get clear about what it means. But it’s, it, and I’m thinking that those two, they fit inside each other. I’m not quite sure what the, which fits inside which. That’s what I’ve been trying to, that’s what I’ve been trying to gesture towards. And I see, you know, I’m reading Nikolas of Kusa right now and he’s playing with that a lot. He’s playing, he sets these oppositions up and then you sort of, you sort of, you sort of do massive frame breaking because neither one out, like, you know, he’ll first just use a geometrical example. Okay, so I have a circle and as I expand the circle, the arc gets less and less. So an infinite circle is a straight line and your mind goes bang. That’s like as Ed Cohen. And then he does the same thing in the vision of God. He does the same thing. He said, you know, the transcendence and the imminence, try and do that with them. Each one is undermining the other. And yet somehow if you get the bang, then you’re getting the actual thing. That’s what I’m trying to do here. I’m trying to, I’m trying to do exactly that move. And again, this is, this has been sort of the guiding impulse in what I call non-theism. That’s what I keep trying to do again and again and again. You know, I, when I look at, so if you read Matthew, it’s the kingdom of heaven and Mark and Luke, it’s the kingdom of God and John, it’s eternal life, which is, it’s a life of the age in Greek. But Paul has in Christ. Yes, yes. He almost, he makes Christ a renec. Yes, he does. Which is really interesting. Yes. And I think it’s Carlisle, Spinoza actually cites Paul trying to pick up on that. And he uses that when he makes his proposal that being in God is the fundamental ontological thing we have to get, we have to recognize. Again, not just intellectually, propositionally, we have to recognize it. Transformatively, we have to transform so that we can come into the best possible conformity to that reality that is possible for human beings. Right. We have to realize it. Yes, exactly. It is, it is finally realization. And, and so, you know, I think for Christians, Christ is, of course, that. Yes, yes. It’s heaven and earth coming together and then for the Christian, I mean, someone made a comment about, they thought I had some weird, strange name for my church. And I said, well, read first, we’re free first Peter to because Christ, who is the living stone. Yes. And then we then are living stones, and we are built into a temple. So if you if you’re paying attention to this agent arena relationship, it’s all over the New Testament. Yes, yes. That’s well said. That’s very well said. It’s very well said. Wow. This I’m finding this conversation very helpful. So thank you for it. Well, thank you. I mean, I, I, I have so benefited from your work and look, more than just more than just your work, your person, because you have, you know, I have seen in you, I mean, you and I have never met in the flesh. We’re always have this media between us. But, you know, I have seen in your work, you know, someone who is hungering and thirsting for righteousness and by righteousness, I don’t mean a conformity to a list of narrow precepts. But Dallas Willard in his book, the Divine Comedy, you know, he’s trying to get at this, the kiosk soon. And when I read so Dallas Willard, he taught philosophy at University of Southern California. And I passed away just a few years ago. But so he taught, he taught phenomenology was a hussle expert. And he, he wrote, he wrote this book, the Divine Comedy, which very much gets it. He was one of the sort of revivifiers of Christian practice, intentional practice. And I, you know, I’ve read his book, the Divine Comedy, a number of times. It’s one of these books that I go back to regularly. And, you know, one of the things that he did in that book was he, he mentioned to Kiosune and then he started connecting it with Plato, which sort of prompted me to, oh, I want to, I want to take a look at Plato’s Republic in the Greek. And I want, you know, I want to be around with this stuff. And, and so for me, you know, Dallas Willard sort of helped me connect some of these things. Okay. What on earth is this, is this righteousness that we read about in the Gospel of Matthew and, and of course in the Beatitudes, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and then just the, you know, the absolute radical statement that Jesus makes. And they will be satisfied. Yes, yes. You know, it’s, you know, on one hand, quite rightly. It’s sort of like, you know, trying to get at this is sort of like trying to get at the problem of the exclusive and the inclusive. You know, in sort of a Hegelian way, we say, oh, there’s a, but, but, you know, Chris, when Jesus says those kinds of things in the Sermon on the Mount, you know, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be satisfied. What a radical pronouncement and what a, you know, what a word of hope and I get that. I don’t know if I can ever get that from Yosemite Valley. One of the things that was interesting in the, in the Bishop Baron unbelievable thing was Bishop Baron kept coming back to God speaks now, you know, Yosemite Valley certainly does speak to me Psalm 19 the heavens declare the glories of God. It’s a very poor fourth speech. And so in many ways I go to Yosemite Valley and it’s a sacred place for me and it speaks to me of glory and grandeur and patience and, and also danger you know there’s wild animals there and I meet bears in Yosemite. But, you know, to have to be given a word of hope that those who hunger and thirst for dekayosune, they will be satisfied. And, you know, hmm. I can live into that and say, Okay, so, so I watch transformations around me and they’re stepping over lines that make me anxious and I watch people in process and I, I’m watching this very live this very live community around me and multiple communities. But, but now within me and again I think I think you really need an agent to say, and I loved how you said in that video, being is good. Yes. Wow. Do I dare hope that on what basis. Can I, can I responsibly maintain that hope because if being is good. That’s going to have entailments in terms of my actions, and so, you know that my life isn’t just, you know, zero to 80 or 90. And I have to try and, you know, in whatever hedonistic even moral hedonistic way squeeze all the goodness out of it, so I can experience, but that, you know, somehow, and this really get into the upper register, somehow I can’t but imagine that maybe somehow I I can participate in something that won’t simply end with the termination of, of this heart and this body. And I don’t know I mean and this is. In fact, being is good. Might I not take time and sit with the homeless or the schizophrenic or the poor, you know, not just jigger the economics and maybe help them have more stuff. But might I not. And one. Might I not be able to lend some of that agency to them. Yeah, I get it. I think it was a, I forget which video conversation, I was saying, you know, when when you’re with somebody who’s lost someone to death, there’s nothing you can say what you have to do is be there beside them as like you have to be present, I get what you’re saying about that I do I hear what you’re saying that there’s that kind of connection that only, only a person can provide for us. And I see, I see the truth in that. I guess for me. I guess I’m wrestling with the question. And I’m not trying to like make a confession to you or anything. I’m wrestling with the question of whether or not people have genuinely profoundly personal relationships to things that are not properly thought of as persons, because persons are bounded spatial temporal things there, etc, etc. And that seems, I, I see. I’m realizing to you that maybe the Bible is actually suggesting that in Plato and Spinoza are arguing that we can, in fact, enter into deeply personal relationships to I don’t know what to call it because it’s not a being right to, you know, ontological I’m trying to get at that. And that, that, that, and, and, and, and that, again, the stereoscopic that we like, we, we have a impersonal personal relationship to this thing that is neither a person nor not a person. And, and, and the wisdom is trying to coordinate those together in a life that’s well lived. And again, that’s what I keep trying to come back to. And, and you just, you just did both sides of that. Yeah, right. You were in Christ, but you know, Jesus is like somebody who can sit beside you when you’re grieving. And I get that and I get that and I’m trying to honor that, but I’m trying to I’m trying to say, I’m trying to say why I still I’m committed to what I’m seeing as non theism, because I see it as trying to make this question, the central. I guess I’ll use this adjective, the central philosophical theological question. That’s what that’s, that’s what I, that’s what I, that’s what I’m trying to say I guess finally. I don’t know that that Bishop Barron’s non theism is impersonal. And so I don’t know that non theism is necessarily impersonal. I agree with you on that I don’t I don’t know it’s a question. But the problem I have with the adjectives. And then you in the this comes up when you did it with the Bible, right, and there’s ways in which we can make personhood and idle. The meaning I have for that term is of things, you and I are things in the ontological sense, I don’t mean in the moral sense that’s ridiculous. Right, so all here I can I can say this very confidently all the people that I’ve met have been things. And so for me to try and say, well, I have a personal relationship to something that is properly no thing. I’m trying to work out what that means because it isn’t it isn’t easily resolved. I know what you mean by when you say Bishop Barron’s relationship isn’t impersonal his non theism, but I wonder if it’s also properly called personal or if it’s something somehow beyond both of them in an important way. I might be pushing you and I don’t mean no no no I think you know I think it’s it’s easy for us to imagine that our grasp on on the personal is limited by our capacity and experience of the personal. I mean we can sort of level up imaginatively, but that’s always sort of, you know, if you have a camera or a phone you have the, you have the, you have the, the physical zoom and then you have the digital zoom and the digital zoom is always crummy. You know you said you said persons are bounded temporal things. And I don’t know that that’s true. And part of why I don’t know that that’s true is because on one hand you are a thing. And we both agree with that, but there’s something about you that is more than a thing. And we completely recognize that with each other. And the way that moreness is, is, is, is terribly difficult to articulate, but again to pull a Peterson, we act as if that you have moreness and I have moreness. And when we don’t act as if people have moreness. Oh, no, we should we should recognize that. And that’s the way in which everything has moreness and everything else. Yeah, yeah. But but then to sort of the, to what degree are we bringing, are we lending. So when I sit down when I work with one of these homeless addicts. Yeah, what I do in a very strange way is I bit by bit in tiny little increments, I lend my agency to them. Yes, yes, how much of it they can accept and sort of internalize and take and then help them grow more agency well that it’s a very slow process but it could be that in fact that some of what we do with our sister. We, we, and this stuff is just so it’s just so hard it’s so difficult but it is and and and and you’re right. And I hope I’m not presenting my ideas in a hubristic way we should approach them with humility and proper humility, and I, I’m trying to formulate, I’m trying to I’m trying to formulate non theism as you know properly exploratory in this way that we’re doing here. And as a provocation to reflection and dialogue and trying to break out of the straight, this, this sterile straight jackets that we find ourselves in, and I’ve been finding this conversation extremely helpful both, both, you know, philosophically and personally, because you know what I’m talking about. And I’m like these issues they stand on the border between impersonal philosophical reflection and personal involvement and transformation, and properly so I mean that’s where they should be placed. And so, I’m wrestling with this, and I see that you are too. And we both have, we both have loyalties we don’t want to trespass against and and and and and respect we’re respecting that in each other. But, yeah, I think that the combination of the profundity of this and the humility that we have to bring to us. I think we can agree that’s largely missing from a lot of the public debate between theism and atheism on both sides. That’s something I would want to say. Absolutely. And I agree with that wholeheartedly. There’s there’s a weird. So obviously in Christian theology there’s, there’s, there’s very, there’s very binary language about Christian and not Christian. Okay, you’ve certainly got that language. And I don’t mean to displace that or, or undermine that. That’s one thing in Christianity but Christianity also flips the other way when Jesus says of the Centurion, surely I’ve not found anyone with such faith in Israel. Yes, yes. You know it’s it’s a minor miracle that he wasn’t stoned at that moment given the political religious context he was in course of course. And, and so there’s all these tensions that. And so in my own Dutch Calvinist tradition. There’s two big things that came out of Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands he was this Dutch polymath at the beginning of the 20th century. One was common grace, and the other was the antithesis, and the antithesis is actually black and white light dark is the binary, and then common grace is, you know this God sends his grace upon everyone in the world. And how can you have a system that has these two things together. Well it’s really hard but the truth is, there’s lots of these systems that we all live with it with And so, in, I find in, in the Christian faith, both a both language that says, I’m a Calvinist repeats like language that says I was chosen by God from the foundation of the earth completely apart from any works that I might do. On the other hand, um, you know this God’s radical generosity that same message says, you didn’t do a darn thing and he loves you, regardless. And he’s, he is, he is drawing you and transforming you and taking you to himself. And he will not be frustrated by any power on earth. And you know all that absolutism is like, oh gosh, then you watch Calvinists and you know they don’t act like it’s all cut and dried there. Stupid human games anyway. And so you know, many of these things. Many of these, many of these things I think we will continue to bump up against struggle with but you know what I’m so encouraged by you john and by, you know, what we’ve what we found in this little corner on the internet. You know I didn’t know we could. I didn’t know we could do this. Yes, yes I agree with that wholeheartedly. And I borrowed a word from Christianity. The, the, the, to try and remind people of this, the notion of fellowship, which is not friendship, and is not partnership, and is not family fellowship, and the possum and the necessity of bringing back the recognition of the importance of fellowship for proper human life and development. And so, the fact that the logos can occur in fellowship between people who will all, you know, you and I don’t come to some final agreement we come to some things we agree on, you give some ground I give some ground but there’s things we won’t let go of. Yep, and that’s the way it should be. I mean, and that’s what I meant earlier when I said I wasn’t trying to win an argument with you. I was really wanting to hear what you had to say about this, knowing that I probably wouldn’t fully agree with it, but knowing also that you because you are outside of my position, you have the ability to pull me in a direction I couldn’t go on my own, and I value that I love it I appreciate it profoundly and so yeah I yeah the fact that this is occurring, and the fact that is occurring more and more in this corner of the internet and you know so fellow just, we should all be paying her royalties for that phrase by the way. Yes, yes. Yeah, it’s just really profound for me. I should get going soon but I, I just, I just wanted to thank you for this. I mean, you afforded me, trying to make very clear what I mean by non theism and why it shouldn’t be seen as just a sort of weak atheism. It’s something other and I’m trying to point that out. I wanted to point out the, at least the potential dialogical value it has. And you’ve seemed to be acknowledging that at certain at certain parts of the conversation, I think sincerely. And so, I just wanted to thank you for that because I wanted to try and get clear what my motivation is and what I’m trying to do and what I’m trying to talk about with this, this language and who I want other people to read and think about. And I also, I wanted to take the opportunity to admit a mistake I had made. I named the thing I was, you know, opposing to atheism classical theism and I, sorry, the thing I was opposing to non theism as classical theism, and that’s a mistake that’s clearly a mistake and I wanted to explore what making amends for that mistake would look like and you’ve helped me to do that a lot and I really appreciate that. I, I, I again I’m super appreciative john for what you’ve done and who you, but especially who you are, because you’re in each of our stories people who watch this will will connect to us. You know I know that you have, you have helped a lot of people break out of some things and experience some transformations and continue on in the conversation and you know I see part of what we’re doing as the continuation of civilization. I mean, yeah, we’re taking, we’re taking these ancient conversations and they’re being revividate where they’re they’re alive again amongst us and and influenced by in a Plato and Spinoza and john Calvin and Abram Kuyper and you know, I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you for that and I’m so grateful to you!