David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcript

Hello, I’m David Breeden. I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This week we have been looking at the idea of embodied cognition, why the Western world has been slow to coming to this realization, looking a little bit at the theology and the science that has been part of that, and the philosophy. Then looking at where other parts of the world where these ideas have been part of the water, cultural water for many years. And what I’m contrasting here is “I think therefore I am” as a way of exploring cognition, and “I am because we are” as a way of exploring cognition. As I mentioned yesterday, one of the persistent ideas in the Western world, or questions, has been, could we save Hitler’s brain? Yes, this is a silly 19 late 50s, early 60s movie Sci-Fi about this kind of idea. But it very much comes out of a Western idea of how the body really doesn’t matter. It’s all about that gray tissue up there. Could we save it and then would we have the same person if we put that brain in a different body? This has been around for a long time and it has been explored more or less scientifically back in the 1960s that we did have a Robert Ettinger who came up with the idea for cryonics. He is long dead, but maybe not because his body has been preserved at his institute. In the mid 60s, he wrote a book called The Prospect of Immortality when he founded the Cryonics Institute. Still around today, you can still pay to have yourself frozen to see if somehow later in time you might be thawed out and exist again in the body that you had when you died. So how about that? Again, pseudoscience to some extent, some science involved. But it’s also not true that Walt Disney had his body cryogenically preserved and that it is under Disneyland in California. No, that’s an urban myth, but some people do leave their bodies to the Cryonics Institute. All of this idea really comes from a Western philosophical idea that we usually call Descartian dualism, the mind/body split that has been explored so much in the Western world. As I mentioned yesterday, really, Rene Descartes was merely summarizing and building on an idea that goes all the way back to Plato and becomes very much embedded in early Christianity and then, therefore, is spread over Europe and then Europe’s colonies as they colonized the world. Cogito, ergo sum, “I think therefore I am” is the famous part of that. But it is a little more complicated. Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum. “I doubt, therefore I think, I think therefore I am.” So the essence of thinking is doubt, according to Descartes. That very much has been a driver within the scientific world since that time. Now the Protestant Reformation, as I mentioned yesterday, with its inherent ideas of nationalism and theology and individualism, eventually this idea of the autonomous self gets built into what last week we were calling classic liberalism, and it does eventually become part of Roman Catholicism as well. Pope John Paul II wrote, “transcendent dignity of the human person as the visible image of the invisible God.” Really, that is exactly what those reformation Protestants were saying a long time ago. But it has now become part of Roman Catholic doctrine as well. This is in a encyclical called Centesimus Annus, “The 100th Year,” that came out in 1991. And it was a reflection on Rerum Novarum, “Of New Things,” by Pope Leo XIII back in 1891 when he began to try to think about how Roman Catholicism could embrace the workers’ movements of the time that were happening all over Europe and th...