Ep 16: Wilderness

The Christian Transhumanist Podcast

Amy and Micah tackle the deep challenges of losing your faith community, questioning your own beliefs, and dealing with the difficult process of building a new world.

• Code-switching
• ENTP & ENFP
• Analysis, Loss of Meaning, and Religious Transhumanism
• When you reconstruct, you lose language, wallpaper, memories, good songs, etc. All kinds of things you don't account for.
• Amy and Micah's obsession with Iron Man 3. Micah's essay: Iron Man and the Modern Identity Crisis
• The phenomenon of forgetting that you don't know how to pronounce words
• The Dunbar Number
• The Dark Night of the Soul
• Analysis is sometimes a way of replacing missing feelings.
• Faith as a feeling, or as a thinking? The Faith of the Martian
• Amy's aspiration to be on the cover of Christian Woman Magazine
• The multidimensionality of faith: thinking, feeling, participating, enacted trust
• When the people who teach you values reject them
• Trying to get conservative Christians to embrace conservative Christian values
• We have come to cash a check
• Trying to get our beliefs to rise to the level of our behavior
• The mission of God to restore the world
• The mission of God vs the creeping Gnosticism of popular Christianity
• The prosperity gospel in developing nations
• The CENI hermeneutic
• Jesus and Glengarry Glen Ross (warning: profanity)
• Chick Tracts and "salvation laundering"
• Church practicing a kind of munchausen syndrome
• American Fundamentalism as heresy
• NT Wright on the gospels vs the creeds
• Quote from Dr Ben Myers:

“In a nutshell, if the healing Jesus brings restores us to the state of the first Adam — for the ancient Christians, that’s not the real goal of salvation, that’s actually just the beginning. Salvation is not just a restoration of wholeness — Jesus restores us to wholeness so that we can flourish, so that we can actually begin to live life in God’s presence.

The difference in the ancient church is that it does not regard this healing as the end result, but only as providing the basic conditions so that we can begin freely to respond to God. And the whole of our lives is going to be one of growth and exploration and change and sanctification.

And in fact in the ancient church, even heaven was never thought of as the state of perfection that you’ll reach one day. Even heaven was just thought of as where you would get to grow even more dramatically. There will be this constant process of metamorphosis as you change from one degree of glory to another. “