My most embarrassing opinion: The Scots-Irish actually did come closest to recovering the spirit of early Christianity

I spend most of my "social media" attention and posting budget at Substack these days substack.com/@micahredding

In retrospect, this was the high point of civilization youtu.be/JqnO40AGRSc?...

I’m kinda like an alternate history buff, except the history I believe in is the conventional history, lol

Asked ChatGPT who to interview, and it suggested me...so that's...flattering?

Jordan Daniel Wood covers the Cosmic Christology of Maximus Confessor, the secular and transhumanist reception of Christian ideas—Teilhard de Chardin, Frank Tipler, Julian Huxley and more. youtu.be/huVz1u8a25U

Every day, I think how lucky I am to have a refrigerator with WiFi—so I can login and fix the settings it automatically screwed up overnight.

Installed a mosquito trap on my back porch. Is this creating inexcusable amounts of insect suffering?

Neuralink and Faith—Noland Arbaugh's Spiritual Journey (direct link, cause this is Bluesky!) youtu.be/xw2Y258hCpU

"America was founded as a Christian nation" always seemed to me like an attempt to reject America's founding philosophy (enlightenment liberalism), or to ignore the deists. But this is a paradoxical subject.

🤔

The modern Christian take on sex, does not match the ancient Christian take on sex. This is a problem no one talks about.

Thinking about a road trip

Newest interview! Critical Rationalism and Religion with Bruce Nielson and Peter Johansen from the Theory of Anything Podcast We explore Critical Rationalism, religion, faith and reason, many worlds theory, the omega point, and how it ALL connects. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzml...

Arguments for the existence of God typically use "God" as a placeholder, and avoid specifying who or what that God is. This is kind of suspicious to me. It's like they push all the most interesting questions into a footnote, and just focus on establishing the conceptual category.

There are clearly aspects of human psychology that are isomorphic to demons. I don’t know whether that’s “demythologizing” or not. They’re in our minds, but they do exist.

They should rebrand "Corporations" as "Cooperations"

I really respect the kind of analytical, highly-differentiated thought you get in academics. Except that, in a large number of cases, it seems clear people are not actually doing that, they're just hiding behind terminology.

The power of Eastern Orthodoxy is tradition. The power of Catholicism is centralization. The power of Protestantism is open-ended critique.

I've enjoyed exploring Dr. Allison's thesis on miracles and super-normal human capabilities youtu.be/YRc0w6AHcRo?...

I find theosis compelling, not because I’m interested in possessing any particular attribute of God, but because I’m compelled by a God who wants to share all of his attributes with us.

A philosopher saying people don't get stuck, is interesting because it seems like people get into philosophy because they get stuck.

Sometimes the anticipations of prior eras sound like snake oil... Because they succeeded more than we expected, and that leads us to expect dramatically more in the future.

The more I think about The Beach Boys, the more confused I am

Thinking about how Pink Pony Club is kind of a story of transfiguration and ascension

If you want to know the power of God, you need to know that God is humble

There’s a lot I love about the Anglican churches. But clearly, western Anglicanism is missing some kind of vitality.

"Tradition" means two, almost opposite, things: 1. Something repeated over and over without change 2. A history of constant change

We believe that our perceptions generally cohere with external reality. We have reason to think this—we have a model of our senses, and their interaction with the world, etc. But all of this is conjectured, not “proven”. We believe it because it is a more coherent story than the alternatives.

I think there must be a positive possibility and meaning for visions. That is, the fact that we can and do “hallucinate” must reflect something positive about our psychology.

“I’ll send you the ebook” “Is…is that your finger?” “Yeah, I had to hold the pages while I was digitizing it” “By digitizing it, do you mean snapping a bunch of photos, as you flipped through the book?” “Yep!”

Christianity is arbitrary unless we realize this: Christ is the archetype and prototype of humanity. Including in his transfiguration, healings, resurrection, ascension.

I only enjoy fantasy if I can imagine a sci-fi substructure

Rationality is about knowing both sides of the argument. (Otherwise, you are not able to decide between them rationally)

I continually find the inner logic of Christianity to mirror the inner logic of rationality. There’s plenty about Christianity that feels irrational, but this deeper fact keeps me on the scent.

The next iteration of Young Earth Creationism is gonna be hyper-evolutionary— About how all of evolution could have easily been speed-run in 6000 years. They’re gonna start claiming fish are evolving into people all the time.

Bluesky could destroy Elon's X relevance forever by making it comfortable for the AI community to move over. The data/API situation here is better and management there keeps burning credibility for no reason . Just got to find a way to convince the people here not to be reactionary about it i guess

Three viewpoints: 1. Naturalism—The world is normal, rational, comprehensible. 2. Supernaturalism—The world is deeply weird, mysterious, chaotic. 3. Super-Rationalism—Intelligence makes the world weird, in ways we don't yet fully grasp.

I wonder if the secret sauce of the British Reformation is that it was both a protest (against Catholicism) and a protest against a protest (against Lutheranism). The Lord loves recursion.

Blown away by this idea from Bulgakov: Humanity was intended for our persons to interpenetrate each other, just as we imagine the Trinity to interpenetrate each other. Christ, because he is transfigured, DOES this with us already. Christ is in us, and we in Christ.

"For humanity, the ability of the human nature of Jesus Christ to partake of the glory and power of His divine nature reveals that human nature from all eternity has been destined not only to be assumed by Christ but to bask in the glory and power of God" — Walter Sisto (paraphrasing Bulgakov)

The best ideas in Christianity come from people who aren't heterodox—but come really close.

Why not just make the furniture out of coaster?

I don't understand your point I guess. You tried to say that LLMs don't "think" so therefore it is not AI. That is not the prerequisite for being "AI" and proven by the many disciplines of AI: Search, Planning (which is mostly just applications of search over a task network), NLP, etc.

Having a fallback theologically liberal belief, seems to allow Christians to more easily embrace a theologically conservative belief.

I worry that the anti-AI stuff on here is going to doom this platform to cultural irrelevance

Christians have been both welcoming and challenging to my book "Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy"...this interview with Micah Redding is a case in point. www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMG0...

Ryan @rphogan.bsky.social and I talk about AI Art—or not-art, whichever the case may be. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTJp...