Easily the most powerful and disturbing documentary I’ve ever watched. Filled with unspeakable evil and inspiring courage. I watched it on HBO but assume/hope it is available elsewhere.
Category Archives: religion
I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Excerpts from I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
All your problems are your body’s problems. All these lose their meaning the moment you realize that you may not be a mere body. You are nothing perceivable, or imaginable.#
Memory creates the illusion of continuity.
Time, space, causation are mental categories, arising and subsiding with the mind.
Nothing can happen unless the entire universe makes it happen. A thing is as it is, because the universe is as it is.
The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. And it is entirely private. Take it to be a dream and be done with it.
Jesus, Interrupted
The full title of the book is: Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them). The author, Bart D. Ehrman, began studying the Bible and its original languages at the Moody Bible Institute and is a 1978 graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois. He received his PhD and M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he studied under Bruce Metzger. He received magna cum laude for both his BA in 1978 and PhD in 1985.
I have not read the Bible and — before reading this book — knew almost nothing about it from an historical, scholarly perspective. Here are a few excerpts I highlighted:
The New Testament, consisting of twenty-seven books, was written by maybe sixteen or seventeen authors over a period of seventy years.
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A Christianity dependent on the inerrancy of the Bible probably cannot survive the reality of the discrepancies.
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Since the nineteenth century, scholars have recognized that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, around 65-70 CE. Continue reading
God as software engineer
“When we make these virtual worlds in the future —worlds whose virtual beings will have autonomy to commit evil, murder, hurt, and destroy options— it’s not unthinkable that the game creator would go in to try to fix the world from the inside. That’s the story of Jesus’ redemption to me. We have an unbounded God who enters this world in the same way that you would go into virtual reality and bind yourself to a limited being and try to redeem the actions of the other beings since they are your creations. So I would begin there. For some technological people, that makes the faith a little more understandable.”
— From a piece titled “Geek Theologian” Kevin Kelly talks with Christianity Today’s Katelyn Beaty.
Difficult to noodle on such things and not recall the scene with The Architect in the later Matrix films.
“A planetary soul”
“I think we should prepare ourselves for all kinds of new religions based around the idea of a planetary soul. As in a single web of electronic neurons around the globe, connecting all sentient beings. The Noosphere will go from a hypothetical speculation by a Catholic priest to an outright competitor to the Catholic faith. We will see the rise of Noosnics, Globalists, Overminders, Bit Monks, Quantumarians, and a hundred other sects and cults that take seriously the idea of a glorified planetary spirit as a reflection of the divine.”
“The internet will become a religion in part because everything will happen on it, including all other religions. But mostly because it will be the first platform for true Otherness that will appear on the planet. Not Other as in other variety of human, or other variety of animal, but Other as in an agent not like us, yet bigger than us. A true alien being. Of which we are part. This conundrum will trigger so many spiritual and religious buttons that it will also shake the established religions.”
— Kevin Kelly interview in CHRISTIANITY TODAY
Bonus Link: AI, God, and the Future of Faith: A conversation