https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RIB05YeMiW8
Okay, quick question, are you a Christian? I suppose the most straightforward answer to that is yes, although I think it’s… Let’s leave it at yes. Well, I’m a bit dissatisfied with that because there are so many kinds of Christians, and I would never imagine that you are a very literal-minded Christian. Well, there are truths other than the literal that perhaps are more truthful than even literal truths. You know, there are many kinds of truth, and I don’t mean that in a post-modern way, actually, but the truths that govern behaviour and the truths that emerge from facts are not the same truths. Well, do you believe that Jesus rose again from the dead? Yes. Literally. I find it… I cannot answer that question, and the reason is because… Okay, let me think about it for a minute, see if I can come up with a reasonable answer to that. Well, the first answer would be it depends on what you mean by Jesus. A historical human being that existed… In a body. In a body. In a body. And it was a physical body, and then it was on earth. Yes, it was on earth, and that was literally… Was literally… It came back to life after death. Okay. I would say that at the moment I’m agnostic about that issue, which is a lot different than saying I don’t believe that it happened. That’s very interesting. I can’t explain why. When I get to the New Testament in my biblical lectures, I’ll spend like six hours trying to explain what I think about that. But one of the things I have come to learn over the last 15 years in particular, is that the world is a very, very strange place. It’s far stranger than we think. And what we don’t understand about consciousness and its relationship with the body, there’s still many books, and you could say the same thing about our relationship with time, and perhaps corporality and vulnerability and death for that matter. So I don’t understand the structure of being well enough to make my way through the complexities of the resurrection story. I would say it’s the most mysterious element of the biblical stories to me, and perhaps I’m not alone in that. I mean, it’s the central drama in the Christian corpus, let’s say. But I don’t believe that it’s reasonable to boil it down to something like, do you believe that or do you not believe it? You know, it’s not, it’s… I don’t know what the limits, I don’t know the limits of human possibility. I don’t know… That’s an intriguing answer, and it surprises me. You know, because I had sort of very much had you down as somebody who who saw these stories as essentially projections of the human consciousness. No, they are, they are that. And I could say the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ symbolizes the necessity of the psyche to undergo a sequence of deaths and rebirth in its attainment of the ideal. Oh yes, that’s what I expected you to say, but you are agnostic about the literal fact. It’s a phoenix, it’s a phoenix story. But you’re agnostic about the actual fact, historically. The thing is, is that just because that’s true doesn’t mean that’s all that’s true about it. Because I also don’t know, so here, for example, in order to stay alive, it’s necessary to get the balance between death and life right in your psyche and your physiology, because death keeps you alive. Your cells die and regenerate all the time. And if you die too much, then you die, and if you don’t die enough, well, then you also die. You end up with cancer or something like that. You have to get the balance between death and life right in order to survive. I don’t know what would happen if you got the balance between death and life exactly right. And I don’t know what the upper limits are to human possibility, and neither does anyone else. And human consciousness and human beings are capable of… We don’t know what we’re capable of, I suppose, is the final answer. And so I’m unwilling, for a variety of reasons, which I can’t explain. They’re tangled up with experiences that I’ve had that I can’t… I can neither understand nor explain. But I’m unwilling to rule out… I’m unwilling to rule out the existence of heaven. I’m unwilling to rule out the existence of life after death. I’m unwilling to rule out the idea of universal redemption and the defeat of evil. Now, I know perfectly well that all those things can be well conceptualized metaphorically. I know the metaphorical conceptualizations. But I’m not willing to make the claim that those ideas exhaust themselves in the metaphor. Wow. And it’s, you know… And I’m not in a position, as of yet, to articulate why I think that, in a manner that would be anything other than a jumble of lateral thoughts. I have the thoughts, but they’re not organized. And part of the reason I’m doing the biblical lecture series is to organize those thoughts. That’s so interesting. That’s so interesting. I hope one day I’ll have a chance to ask you more about that.