J. Michael Jones

We are living in an age when mysticism is again vogue. It is not the first time, but it appears in a culture whenever there is a disillusionment with reason, as has been true since the ninetieth century. Religion is now defined by experience not by factual information. In our present times, there is a giving up of the aspiration for classical truth and a focus for many on emotional experiences defined as mystic. This podcast discusses the difference between mysticism, an experience driven by emotions, and mystery, an overwhelming puzzlement over reality driven by our observations of that reality, which may have emotional repercussions. 

Religion has always wrestled with faith vs reason. Christianity is no exception. This is a look at the consequences of divorcing reason from faith.

In my definition, fatalism is a locked-in meta narrative, or the big picture. Both religious people and atheist share that view. Determinism, on the other hand, is absolute control on a granular level, which is held by most religious people but only a few atheists. The religious person believes that the personal creator is deterministic (controlling all trivial events of our lives) because it proves him/her to be big. But I propose that it does the opposite. When we say that God must be in control of all events, then it is us defining God and putting him/her in a tin box. The more important reason that we believe in theistic-determinism, is that we are narcissistic, believing that God designs the entire cosmos around us. That even a flea can't jump on us unless God intended for it to. I believe a much healthier view is that God is so big that he/she does not fit in the clothes that we've tailored for him/her. That God does chose to let chance take its course. This is mostly true in Christianity, which has this cosmos as broken as one of its major tenets. In a broken cosmos, shit happens.

Most people choose to believe in God, or to not believe in God for the wrong reasons. Following social norms can find us personal peace for the moment but is dangerous philosophically. I describe my own journey from Appalachian bible belt to evangelicalism, to atheism and back to the Christian God.  

The white evangelical community has been at war (culture war) with the LGBTQ community for years, but the focus this year has turned to the "T" transexuals. I, as an ex-evangelical, want to make sense of the transexual from an objective and loving perspective, rather of one based on sub-culture (evangelical subculture) imposed morality.

What if everything we call "spiritual" is actually emotional? This podcast explores this possibility and meaning of it.

This is the second part of my discussion of my own journey with cancer and finding a healthy philosophical understanding of its meaning to my life.

What happens when we are diagnosed with cancer? Where do we find meaning in that diagnosis. It is my opinion that we often come to the wrong conclusions, 1) God isn't real, 2) God is cruel, 3) God is dead, 4) God did this for a reason, 5) Satan did this to me, or 6) I'm being punished for something I did wrong. None of these are a healthy conclusion in my opinion. In this part I I tell of my story in being diagnosed with incurable cancer. In part II I discuss the possible philosophical meanings to this diagnosis and finding the one that I think is the healthiest one to have from  spiritual or emotional standpoint.

This is a summary lecture from the original lecture given by the late theologian/philosopher Francis Scaeffer in Switzerland in 1965. It basically looks at the simple options of the fundamental questions of philosophy. 

How do we find truth? A look at the process from the perspective of brain function.