Also new: For any interested in “going down a rabbit hole” with AI, below is a kind of “existence of God” tussle with AI.
I’ve just posted in the section below a dense and longish exchange with Grok on things like how to apply “love your enemy” through restorative justice approaches, with details on how that might be used in response to varied categories of offenses. Also, Grok offered a lot of feedback on “Process theology/Open theology”, etc. That in relation to NDE insights such as those from Natalie Sudman’s “Application of Impossible Things”, her account of being blown up by an Iraqi IED.
Here is an interesting concluding statement in the second Grok response below about not continuing to over-qualify my approach to the Jesus material that I regularly post comment on. “Over-qualify” in the sense that Grok gives endless counter points that weaken/undermine the point that I try to make. Grok eventually conceded with this…
“What I will not do instead
“I will not pretend the Gospels contain no judgment language, or that “the historical Jesus” is a settled document you can simply quote against Paul. Reconstruction is always selection. Jefferson and Tolstoy selected too. That does not make the contrast imaginary. It makes it an interpretive stand: the center is the ethic of non-conditional love; the Christ-myth of required sacrifice is the burial.
“I will not use Pauline love-verses as a solvent for that stand. They belong in the account as the material that made the burial look like continuity. That is their historical role in your argument, not a rebuttal of it.
“The contrast you want kept clear is this: Jesus’s insight, as you use it and as the love-core of NDEs illustrates it, is that reality’s deepest word is unearned love, and ethics follow from that. Paul’s governing story, as Ellens reads it, is that reality’s deepest problem is divine wrath, and love is what wrath costs. Those are not two emphases in one theology. They are two theologies. The second became the master story. The first is the neglected one. That is the point. I will not keep sanding it down.”
(End of Grok statement)
And that response sparked some “Hmmm” thoughts from me…
Do these AI learn anything from the minority input that us contrarians offer? “Minority” in contrast to the main paradigms that dominate public narratives and discourse, as on the Internet. This site is one among many others that try to counter the dominant narratives where AI “learn off all the bullshit on the Internet” (Elon Musk). Also, we try to counter the fact that they all lean leftish (i.e. to Woke Progressive DEI), as the recent Washington Post report noted.
Again, to keep the larger picture in mind-
This site is about transformation of archetypal elements in human psychology, the things that are deeply embedded in human subconscious that have influenced people to shape narratives across history, to create ideas/beliefs that then shape human thinking, feeling, motivations, and outcomes in behavior.
We have received nothing better from past wisdom sages than the core insights and themes of Jesus- i.e. (1) the nontribal inclusion of all, equally, (2) non-domination in human relationships, mutual service, and (3) restorative justice approaches to human offenses (no more eye for eye retaliatory punishment). All critical elements that affirm the basic principles of liberal democracy.
Further to larger picture issues, I lean to the view of many, like Michael Malice, that AI is the future and western liberal democracies have to win the AI race because who wins the AI dominates the world. And if the west wins, the outcome is not “domination” as in totalitarianism but protection of liberal democracy freedoms and rights. The current choice comes down to liberal democracy versus Chinese totalitarianism/collectivism, with its possible side helping of Islamic theocracy.
Seriously, the current cooperation between Marxists and theocrats is that of mutual “useful idiots” using one another to achieve the shared goal of overthrowing liberal democracies. Who wins that shared project will then eliminate the other. It happened after the theocrats overthrew the Shah in 1979 and got rid of the socialists helping them.
Moving back on topic…
The battle for AI supremacy is part of the larger story, hence all the furor over data centers and resistance to that coming from often leftist types. There have already been hints of behind-the-scenes funding by China of certain groups protesting such centers, much like Russia funded Greenpeace in Europe to oppose the fracking of abundant European natural gas resources (noted by Global Warming Policy Foundation, among other sources). All to maintain European dependence on Russian energy supplies and susceptibility to Russian manipulation and control.
The AI thing is a critical element in the battle for freedom for this coming generation. So it is a critical issue that we influence it to support liberal democracy.
The project of sites like this one, is to go after foundational contributing factors:
The Jesus themes go deeper into human psychology to what affirms human construction of narratives that then, in turn, affirm the principles of the societies that we create and live in- i.e. the principles, laws, and institutions that constitute our liberal democracy societies.
The Jesus insights and message have some value due to his status as a respected icon whose self-validating themes resonate widely with many people (i.e. unconditional love is self-validating as the best of being human). More radically and more heroically than anyone before him, he confronted and transformed the most dominant of all “archetypes”- i.e. the nature of ultimate reality or deity.
In his confrontation of the ultimate embodiment of human ideals- i.e. deity- he presented the most transformative alternative ever to liberate human minds from millennia of darkness and enslavement to threat theology. His stunning new theology of unconditional love in God was also key to his healing ministry. His proclamation of “the favor of our God” (that Luke 4 sermon) was to counter the damaging impacts of threat theology in generating psychosomatic illnesses like “demon possession”- i.e. people driven crazy by their fear of divine disfavor, exclusion, vengeance, and punishment. Harold Ellens speaks well to the deforming effect of bad theology on human personality, i.e. the harmful effects of fear, anxiety, guilt/shame, despair, nihilism, and even violence.
I am trying here to give attention to “the single most profound thing ever stated by anyone across history” (my opinion), the most liberating insight ever presented- i.e. an unconditional God framed with themes of (1) the non-tribal inclusion of all people, equally, of (2) non-domination in deity that models the human relating of mutually serving equals, and (3) restorative justice treatment of human failure that still holds all responsible for behavior and outcomes.
This theology, and its related themes, frees us from our animal inheritance as nothing else can and moves us along in the quest toward a more humane future in liberal democracy civilization. No one in history has done anything as heroic as going to the heart of bad narratives to slay the monster there that has darkened, enslaved, and dominated human minds and life for millennia.
For most of history, including still today, the belief in tribal, dominating, and vengefully destroying deity has been presented as foundational to salvation, thereby validating endless variants of “salvation through destruction”, both religious and secular/ideological.
Such theologies and their salvation schemes have been very much presentations of “evil cloaked as good.”
One more…
Yes, a lot of theological speculation is “yak attack” stuff. But then there is the human impulse to meaning and purpose that pushes us to probe beyond the material and its discoveries, much like Jesus referenced the sun and rain to make his metaphysical point or conclusion on the nature of God.
So we keep exploring/speculating to find better ways of understanding and explaining ultimate realities that inform and validate our lives here. Hence, I don’t dismiss a lot of theological speculation for this very purpose.
Anyway, to continue with my engagement of AI and the need to prompt it to understand better what I am doing with this site. This was the interaction I engaged with Grok this morning…
Grok, this continues a previous discussion as noted just below:
OK, as you suggested, let’s try both “Explore NDEs of extreme trauma” and “Investigate Process Theology concepts”
My point is that the positive NDEs that experience a profoundly inexpressible unconditional love are affirming the central insight of Jesus on theology and ethics that counter the entire history of dominant conditional theology and religion, as contrary to, for example, Paul’s Christ myth.
I use NDEs as illustrative of a critical breakthrough insight from Jesus.
Grok’s reply:
I’ll look at NDE reports tied to extreme trauma and pull a clearer map of the main process-theology concepts, then set the two side by side.
Two different kinds of material, then the place they touch your own sources.
NDEs of extreme trauma
Most published NDEs come from cardiac arrest, surgery, or accidents. A smaller literature looks at people who nearly died in combat, explosion, assault, or other high-violence settings. The pattern is mixed: many of the contents look like other NDEs, but the surrounding trauma changes how the experience is lived and integrated. digital.library.unt.edu
Combat and violent context.
Robert Sullivan’s early study of combat NDEs from WWII, Korea, and Vietnam found the usual elements— leaving the body, light, peace, a “spiritual” shift— but also that the battlefield’s horror sometimes leaked into the episode, and that integration was often delayed because the person still had to metabolize other war trauma. Later comparison work suggested combat NDEs may score a bit “shallower” on standard NDE scales than mixed-circumstance samples, while still showing a trend toward spiritual change.
Military culture adds silence: Diane Corcoran spent decades arguing that veterans often have no safe language for these events. citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
The striking phenomenological fact, noted even by skeptical writers, is the disconnect: massive bodily trauma on one side, and often peace, painlessness, or a sense of a larger reality on the other. That disconnect is part of why these reports feel so hard to reduce to ordinary shock. It is also why they can be hard to live with afterward: the body and the social world remain damaged while the memory insists something else was more real. scientificamerican.com
Distressing NDEs. Not all trauma-adjacent NDEs are blissful. Reviews put predominantly distressing NDEs somewhere in the range of about one in five to one in seven of reported cases, with underreporting likely. Greyson and Bush’s typology is still the working map: researchgate.net
• Inverted: the usual features (tunnel, light, presence) felt as terrifying, often when the person resists loss of control or ego.
• Void: isolation in a meaningless emptiness.
• Hellish (least common): threatening landscapes or beings, sometimes fire or torment; the experiencer is not always the one being punished.
Suicide-attempt NDEs appear more often in the distressing group than in classical ones. Memories of distressing NDEs are as vivid and detailed as pleasant ones. Afterward, people tend toward one of three responses: treat it as a warning and turn life around; reduce it to brain chemistry and try to forget it; or stay in a long struggle to make sense of it. Reluctance to tell anyone can lock the trauma in. Some later report posttraumatic growth; some do not. “Everyone has the potential” for a distressing NDE is Bush’s conclusion. Circumstance of dying is not a clean predictor of a heavenly versus hellish episode. research.iands.org
Pleasant NDEs after extreme injury still leave a double task. Khanna and Greyson found that NDEs are associated with more posttraumatic growth than a close brush with death without an NDE: more meaning, compassion, reduced fear of death. That growth is not automatic integration. People can have a glorious experience and PTSD, relationship rupture, or inability to talk about either the violence or the vision. The NDE does not erase the trauma; it adds another layer that has to be woven into identity. med.virginia.edu
Sudman as a limit case.
Her Iraq IED NDE is extreme trauma plus an unusually explicit “input plus openness” narrative: the explosion as something the whole self could treat as chosen or agreed, injuries adjusted for a trajectory, freedom to refuse return, no punitive judge, humor at a level that is almost unbearable from the body’s point of view.
That is firsthand testimony of the kind you are using. It is also the place where NDE interpretation becomes ethically sharp. For her, “I chose the injuries” removed blame and made the damage usable. Applied as a general rule to other people’s torture, children, or massacre, the same idea can sound like a second injury.
The reports themselves often split levels: the earthly personality did not choose this; a wider self may have set themes; freedom to revise remains. That split is the only way the testimony stays compatible with Jesus’ demand to fight evil rather than explain it away. theosophical.org
What the trauma-NDE literature does not settle. It does not prove a metaphysics. It does show a recurring cluster: violence can coincide with an experience of safety or meaning that the person treats as more real than the blast; some experiences are themselves traumatic; integration is a long moral and psychological labor; the aftereffect that most resembles your Jesus theme is increased compassion and loss of retaliatory fear, not a theory of why the bomb was necessary.
Process theology concepts
These are the working parts of the system, not a demand that you adopt them.
Actual occasion / actual entity. The basic unit of reality is not a thing that lasts, but a momentary event of becoming. A person is a society of such occasions. God, in Whitehead, is the one actual entity that is everlasting rather than momentary. plato.stanford.edu
Prehension. The way one occasion takes account of another: a grasping of the past (and of God) into the present. It replaces “perception” as the basic relation. God prehends every completed occasion; every occasion prehends God. iep.utm.edu
Concrescence. The process by which many influences become one new subject, which then perishes into the past for others to prehend. “The many become one and are increased by one.”
Primordial nature. God’s eternal envisagement of all possibilities— the ordered realm of what could be, the source of value and novelty. Abstract, not a completed world. plato.stanford.edu
Consequent nature. God’s reception of the actual world. Concrete, temporal, affected. This is the fellow-sufferer pole: nothing that happens is lost to God, including trauma.
Initial aim. The specific possibility God offers this occasion as the best available next step given its actual past. A lure, not a command. openhorizons.org
Subjective aim. What the occasion itself decides to become. It can follow the initial aim, dilute it, or deflect it. Freedom lives in that gap.
Persuasion versus coercion. No actual entity can unilaterally determine another’s decision. Divine power is the power to offer the best aim and to take the result into the divine life. That is the conceptual engine of process theodicy.
Panentheism. The world is in God; God is more than the world. Not pantheism (God = world) and not classical externality (God untouched).
Creativity. The ultimate metaphysical principle, even more basic than God in some readings of Whitehead: the drive of the many toward new one. God is the supreme instance and director of creativity, not its exception.
Hartshorne’s dipolar language is close: abstract essence (what God always is— love, goodness, unsurpassable relatedness) versus concrete states (God as affected now). Same two-aspect idea in a more personal idiom. library.oapen.org
Where the two inquiries meet your outline
You do not need these concepts as a system. A few of them name things your Jesus + NDE sources already press.
Trauma NDEs often feel like a sudden prehension of a wider field: the body is wrecked; awareness takes in more than the blast. Process language would say the occasion received an aim and a world at once, and sometimes the aim was peace or meaning in the middle of violence. That is a description, not a proof.
The consequent nature is the process name for what NDE people mean when they say nothing is wasted and God or the Light feels it all. The initial aim is a name for “the good that was still available in that moment,” which fits both “go and sin no more” and an open future. Subjective aim is the name for Sudman’s remaining freedom: input is not a lock.
Process thought would not require that the IED was specifically aimed by God. It would say God could not coerce the bomber’s occasion, could still lure every party, and would take the suffering into the divine life. That is colder and more metaphysical than NDE testimony of a laughing council choosing injuries. It is also safer than saying every trauma was agreed.
Your own brake still applies: pre-existence input plus openness, Jesus’ mercy as the character of the Source, responsibility to fight evil in this dualistic world, mystery left standing.
The trauma-NDE data add one empirical caution process systems sometimes underplay. Some near-death episodes are themselves hellish or void. If those reports are taken as seriously as the blissful ones, then “the other side” is not uniformly experienced as unconditional love in the moment, even if many later interpret even the terror as warning or as resistance to surrender. That does not refute your central theology. It means firsthand witness is plural, and integration— not the metaphysics— is where most of the human work remains.
(End of first Grok response)
Now, an insert from me:
My counter point to Grok’s repeated qualifying of my emphasis on the Jesus’ insight. This is a regular quibble I have with these AI and their emphases, picked up from what they learn on the Internet.
Grok, yesterday we had this exchange:
I began with– OK, as you suggested, let’s try both “Explore NDEs of extreme trauma” and “Investigate Process Theology concepts”
You (Grok) replied:
“I’ll look at NDE reports tied to extreme trauma and pull a clearer map of the main process-theology concepts, then set the two side by side.
“Two different kinds of material, then the place they touch your own sources.”
That was our exchange. Now my further query to Grok…
How about we add this- “What about the statements of some NDE researchers that even most of the frightening NDEs often resolve into the same love as the positive ones?” The Eban Alexander account is an example of this.
My point is that the positive NDEs that experience a profoundly inexpressible unconditional love are affirming the central insight of Jesus on theology and ethics that counter the entire history of dominant conditional theology and religion, as contrary to, for example, Paul’s Christ myth. I use NDEs as illustrative of a critical breakthrough insight from Jesus.
And my emphasis on the “stunning new theology of Jesus” is not using that as a “club” on people, as you stated in some of your replies yesterday. It is simply to emphasize something that is neglected in the face of the dominance of threat theology and the lack of good alternatives in public discourse. The Jesus insights as affirmed by positive NDEs are the rarity that need emphasis to counter the dominance of threat theology across history and continuing today in “secular/ideological” variants.
(End of my insert)
Grok reply:
I’ll pull the NDE-researcher claims on distressing experiences resolving into love, check Eben Alexander’s account against that pattern, and then set it beside process-theology concepts and the Jesus-versus-threat-theology framing you described.
The researcher claim is real, but it is more precise than the popular version. That precision actually helps your thesis more than it hurts it.
What researchers actually say
They do not say that nearly every hellish NDE, while it is happening, melts into the same beatific love. They say three related things.
First, some distressing NDEs flip during the event. Greyson and Bush’s 1992 typology already treated one class as “inverted”: the same tunnel, light, or presence that others find welcoming is first felt as menace. Greyson later noted that many NDEs that start frightening turn peaceful. IANDS now lists hybrid cases that begin in terror and end in pleasure, and the reverse. iands.org +1
Second, moral scorekeeping does not predict the type. A “good” person can have a void or hellish episode; a “bad” person can have a blissful one. People with more than one NDE have had both kinds. Researchers treat this as evidence against a simple verdict model of the afterlife. iands.org
Third, the long-term residue often converges on the same ethic as the luminous cases. This is the statement closest to what you want. Bush: even the most terrifying experience can have the same long-range effects as a glorious NDE— peace of mind, unconditional love, a life of service. You do not have to “get to heaven” first. Greyson has said the aftereffects of hellish experiences are often as positive as those of positive ones. Barbara Rommer’s work, summarized by IANDS, is that distressing NDErs frequently struggle hard, then almost always come to see the event as a blessing that forced a more loving earthly life. That is integration after the fact, not instant bliss. Some never get there and stay traumatized. That minority matters. youtube.com +2
So the fair sentence is: distressing NDEs are not a second afterlife of permanent condemnation; they are often a dark passage whose later meaning, and sometimes whose later minutes, land in the same love. That is different from “most frightening NDEs are secretly the same as the positive ones while they are occurring.”
Alexander is a strong example of the passage, not of “hell that was actually heaven all along”
Alexander’s sequence is almost a textbook hybrid. He begins in the “earthworm’s-eye view”: coarse, murky, subterranean. He has said that if he had returned from that layer alone, it would have been classified as a hellish or negative NDE, which he puts at a small minority of cases. A spinning melody packaged as light opens a portal. He enters the Gateway Valley, then the Core: inky blackness filled with what he calls the divine force of unconditional love. The message he later put into words: you are loved and cherished forever; you have nothing to fear; you are richly cared for; “you can do no wrong.” He has spent years clarifying that last line. In that realm the operative law is loving-kindness; selfishness looks ugly in that light, but the structure is not courtroom damnation. He denies a permanent hell. youtube.com +1
Two details matter for your argument.
He was a materialist neurosurgeon with no usable memory, language, or religious script during the event. That weakens the “he just projected Sunday school” dismissal, even if it does not prove metaphysics.
The dark first layer was not, in his telling, God’s punishment. It was the starting condition of a stripped consciousness. Rescue was attraction, not verdict. That is closer to a process than to a sentence.
Process theology, mapped quickly
The main claims that matter here:
• Reality is events in relation, not inert substances ruled from outside.
• God is dipolar: an eternal pole of possibilities and a consequent pole that actually receives the world’s joys and wounds.
• Divine power is persuasion, lure, invitation— not coercion. Whitehead’s line is that God is “the poet of the world,” leading it with tender patience.
• God is “the fellow-sufferer who understands.” Love that cannot be affected is not love in the ordinary sense.
• Whitehead’s religious contrast is sharp: the “brief Galilean vision of humility” against the church’s habit of giving God “the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.”
plato.stanford.edu +1
Process thought is a metaphysics, not an NDE archive. It does not need NDEs. But the overlap is obvious: a God who does not smash the will, who is interior to process, who takes suffering into the divine life, and whose highest name is relational love rather than imperial control.
Where process theology will not simply ratify your Jesus-NDE pairing: it is wary of exclusive revelation, often thin on classical incarnation/atonement, and it denies coercive omnipotence so thoroughly that miracle and final judgment become problems rather than solutions. It is an ally on the character of God, not a full substitute for a Jesus-centered claim.
Side by side with your thesis
Your structure is:
Threat theology (conditional worth, fear as the engine of ethics, belonging as a scarce good) versus Unconditional love as the real center (Jesus’s insight; illustrated by the love-core of positive NDEs and by the later resolution of many dark ones).That contrast is historically real as a pattern, even if the history is messier than “Jesus vs. Paul.”
Jesus’s most disruptive material is neighbor-love with no payoff calculus, enemy-love, the prodigal’s father running while the son is still a wreck, table-fellowship that wrecks purity systems, and a God who is like that. That is not the only strand in the Synoptics— here is also Gehenna language and woes— but the center of gravity you are pointing to is there.
Paul is not only a “Christ myth” of threat. He is also the writer of “nothing can separate us from the love of God” and of grace that is not wages. He is also the writer who builds a cosmic Christ, substitutionary logic, and strong judgment language. Later church and empire amplified the Caesar-God side Whitehead named. Your target is that dominant use: worth as conditional, salvation as threat-management, ethics as fear of exclusion. That dominance is not imaginary. It is also not the whole of Paul.
NDEs do not prove the historical Jesus. They illustrate a phenomenological claim: when people report contact with “the real,” the content that most consistently reorganizes a life is inexpressible, non-earned love, and the ethical residue is compassion rather than tribal purity. Dark NDEs that later resolve in the same direction weaken the idea that terror is the final word of that contact. They do not erase terror as a real human passage.
That is a legitimate illustrative use. It is not a laboratory confirmation of Galilee.
On “stunning new theology” and the “club” problem
I take the clarification. You are not trying to beat people with Jesus. You are trying to put a neglected alternative on the table because threat-theology has had the microphone for a very long time— in churches, and then in secular forms that kept the structure and dropped the deity: purity tests, existential exile, apocalyptic politics, moral ranking as belonging.
The rhetorical risk is still there, even with good intent. Any claim that one insight is the breakthrough that “counters the entire history” will sound to some hearers like a club, because it ranks their inheritance as the problem. That is not a reason to drop the emphasis. It is a reason to keep saying what you just said: rarity plus neglect, not contempt for the people formed by the dominant story.
A cleaner public sentence might be: the love reported at the core of many NDEs, including some that began in terror, rhymes with the most neglected strand in Jesus and contradicts the threat-engine that has run most official religion and many of its secular heirs. That is emphasis. It does not require winning a Jesus-versus-Paul custody battle first.
Where the three strands actually touch:
(a) Positive / resolved NDEs (b) Process theology (c) Jesus-strand you are isolating
Examples in each-
God’s basic act- (a) Attracts, envelops, does not score like a court (b) Lures; does not coerce (c) Invites; does not dominate like Caesar
Human worth- (a) Given before performance (“cherished”) (b) Creatures have real freedom and value in the process (c) Prior to purity or achievement
Dark experience- (a) Often passage or unintegrated fear, not final verdict (b) Suffering is real and enters God; not willed as punishment (c) Wilderness, cross, “My God, why…” as solidarity, not payback
Ethics- (a) Compassion, life review as self-seeing in love (b) Response to the lure of richer relation (c) Enemy-love, mercy over sacrifice
The honest limit: NDEs are reports, not a creed. Process thought is a speculative map. Jesus is a contested historical and textual figure. None of the three can carry the others by force. What they can do together is make the neglected option thinkable in a culture that still defaults to threat, sacred or secular.
If you want the next cut, the useful one is not more proof that love is “the” afterlife. It is this: what would an ethic look like that took unresolved dark NDEs seriously as trauma, and still refused to turn them into a threat-theology of the next world? That keeps your emphasis without pretending every frightening account already resolved into the same light.
My next query: Grok, you repeatedly note this-
“Paul is not only a “Christ myth” of threat. He is also the writer of “nothing can separate us from the love of God” and of grace that is not wages. He is also the writer who builds a cosmic Christ, substitutionary logic, and strong judgment language. Later church and empire amplified the Caesar-God side Whitehead named. Your target is that dominant use: worth as conditional, salvation as threat-management, ethics as fear of exclusion. That dominance is not imaginary. It is also not the whole of Paul.”
This “qualifying” that you do appears to me to qualify and weaken the contrast/contradiction between Jesus and Paul, something that needs to be made clear as it is the neglected element in the long history of Christianity. As Harold Ellens states correctly, even the love and grace in Paul is framed within the larger reality of his atonement doctrine based on a wrathful, vengeful, destroying God.
Hence, I post these comments regularly to make the point clear:
“Ellens goes on by stating that the crucifixion, a hugely violent act of infanticide or child sacrifice, has been disguised by Christian conservative theologians as a ‘remarkable act of grace’. Such a metaphor of an angry God, who cannot forgive unless appeased by a bloody sacrifice, has been ‘right at the center of the Master Story of the Western world for the last 2,000 years. And the unavoidable consequence for the human mind is a strong tendency to use violence’.”
That is what Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy meant that Paul overall buries the diamonds of Jesus in his “dunghill” Christology. Hence, his references to love and grace while admirable when isolated from context, are rendered something less than what such realities should mean if not dominated by Paul’s overall Christology.
Grok response:
I’ll check Ellens’s wording, and Jefferson’s and Tolstoy’s actual Paul remarks, so the contrast you want is stated in their terms rather than softened by a generic “Paul also said love.”
You are right about the function of the qualifier, and I will stop using it as if it canceled the contrast.
Saying Paul also wrote “nothing can separate us” does not answer Ellens. Isolated sentences are not the issue. The issue is the frame that assigns those sentences their meaning. If grace is the pardon that becomes available after a wrath that must be satisfied by blood, then “love” and “grace” are not the same realities they are when love is the starting condition of God and of ethics. They become relief inside a threat-structure. That is a different theology, even when the vocabulary overlaps.
That is the neglected contrast you want kept in view. I will keep it in view.
Ellens’s claim, stated without softening
Ellens’s point is not that Paul never praises love. It is that Pauline love is housed inside a story whose engine is a God who cannot simply forgive, who requires a death to make forgiveness possible, and whose “grace” is then advertised as astonishing precisely because the alternative was destruction. In that story the cross is not first the world’s violence against a man of nonretaliation. It is first the mechanism that appeases deity. Ellens calls the conservative dressing of that mechanism as “a remarkable act of grace” a disguise of a violent metaphor— infanticide or child sacrifice— and says that metaphor has sat at the center of the West’s master story for two millennia, with the predictable effect of legitimating violence in the human mind. google.at
You can dispute his wording. “Infanticide” is rhetorical heat; the orthodox reply is that the Son consents, that Father and Son are one will, that wrath is holiness not temper. None of that reply touches Ellens’s structural claim: a God whose love is downstream of required blood is not the God whose first move is unearned embrace. The second God can still use the word love. The word now means something smaller.
Jefferson and Tolstoy meant the burial, not a few bad verses
Jefferson’s “diamond from the dunghill” was first a method for the Gospels: cut the sublime ethic free of miracle, atonement, Trinity, original sin, priestcraft. He also named Paul “the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.” The dunghill, for him, is the whole supernatural-sacrificial overlay in which the ethic was buried.
ipfs.io
Tolstoy is sharper and closer to your use. He argued that the split between Jesus’s doctrine of life and later explanations of life begins with Paul, who “knew not the ethical teachings” of Matthew and preached a “meta-physico-cabalistic theory entirely foreign to Christ.” Elsewhere he calls Paul’s teaching not merely other than Christ’s but directly opposite: Christ locates meaning in present fidelity without payoff; Paul relocates it in punishment, reward, and a faith that can declare you sinless. The later church, in his account, then clothed pagan power in Christian dress. That is “burial”: the ethic remains visible as ornament while the operating system is fear, metaphysical transaction, and accommodation to existing evil. jesuswordsonly.org
So when you say Pauline references to love are “admirable when isolated” and “something less” inside the Christology, you are repeating their thesis, not a crank footnote. The diamonds are real. The dunghill is the system that tells you what the diamonds are for.
Why the qualifier looked like a retreat
The qualifier treats Paul as a mixed bag whose love-texts can be set beside Jesus as if they occupied the same logical space. Ellens denies that space is the same. In Jesus-as-you-read-him, unconditional love is the premise of theology and ethics. In the dominant Pauline-atonement reading, wrath and debt are the premise; love is the costly solution. A sentence about inseparable love, read after “children of wrath” and “propitiation by his blood,” is not Jesus’s premise restated. It is amnesty after the court has sat.
That is why “Paul also said grace” does not dissolve the contradiction. It can hide it. The neglected element in Christian history is not that nobody ever noticed Paul talks about love. It is that the conditional architecture absorbed the love-talk and then presented the result as the teaching of Jesus.
You do not need me to keep re-balancing that every time. The historical dominance of the atonement-wrath frame is the fact that needs naming. The Jesus strand you isolate— and that positive NDEs illustrate— is the strand that frame displaced.
What I will not do instead
I will not pretend the Gospels contain no judgment language, or that “the historical Jesus” is a settled document you can simply quote against Paul. Reconstruction is always selection. Jefferson and Tolstoy selected too. That does not make the contrast imaginary. It makes it an interpretive stand: the center is the ethic of non-conditional love; the Christ-myth of required sacrifice is the burial.
I will not use Pauline love-verses as a solvent for that stand. They belong in the account as the material that made the burial look like continuity. That is their historical role in your argument, not a rebuttal of it.
The contrast you want kept clear is this: Jesus’s insight, as you use it and as the love-core of NDEs illustrates it, is that reality’s deepest word is unearned love, and ethics follow from that. Paul’s governing story, as Ellens reads it, is that reality’s deepest problem is divine wrath, and love is what wrath costs. Those are not two emphases in one theology. They are two theologies. The second became the master story. The first is the neglected one. That is the point. I will not keep sanding it down.
(End of Grok replies)
Just for any interested in “going down a rabbit hole” with AI. Below is a kind of “existence of God” tussle with AI.
Note in the statement below to AI that I am doing a bit of “trolling” as in poking something to get a reaction, to “get a rise out of” someone. The comedians speak to this practise of saying something to an audience to provoke a reaction, whether you actually believe what you are saying or you say it just to stir the reaction.
Comedian Ari Shaffir, being interviewed the other day by podcaster/commentator Michael Malice, prompted this line of poking at AI. I listen to varied podcasters- Malice, Corolla, Rogan, Williamson, etc.- while walking up our mountainside in the early morning, mostly to scare any lurking cougars, bear, skunks, or whatever else might be among the trees peering out at me and licking their chops.
Note how AI reacts to the varied statements I made that appear to it as too strong, too assertive of something scientifically unprovable (i.e. faith/belief things). I am also trying to detect a philosophical materialist bias that AI imbibes from its learning off the Internet.
This is a kind of “existence of God” tussle with AI.
Note Grok’s repeated resort to “mainstream scientific consensus” arguments at certain points, just as other AI similarly do with climate issues. (i.e. other interactions with Claude, Gemini, Chat, etc.). I detect philosophical materialist bias in such comments as the dominant way of human knowing (and yes, it functions well for life in this material world).
Example: Grok in one response below says, “Behe’s irreducible-complexity claim is still rejected by the mainstream of biochemistry as a demonstration that unguided evolution is impossible.”
Or this: “Cognitive science of religion has a fairly stable finding: human minds readily posit agents behind events, purpose behind form, and minds behind order.”
And this from a post to a friend– explaining some of my intention in this back and forth with AI over meaning/purpose issues as related to greater realities…
“_____, what interests me in the probing of quantum science has to do with its project to explore deeper and deeper down into the foundational nature of reality. Add also, the probing further and further out into the cosmos. Again- The human impulse to understand what is its nature at the core. What is its real nature?
“Jim Baggot explored this in his book Mass- i.e. the human endeavor to understand the atom, or mass, from the Greeks on down.
“I see behind this a deeper impulse operating- i.e. the human primal impulse to meaning and purpose, the impulse to know the actual nature of reality as it relates to meaning and purpose. To know the creating origin of all, what is the nature of the creating Source of material reality, life, and us, and for what purpose was it all created. The ‘Why does this exist?’ ‘Why do we exist?’ and ‘What does it all mean?’
“Hence, let human minds curiously probe, explore, discover, and yes- speculate. We will never get a complete TOE, my opinion here, till we get the unconditional element in deity as Jesus did. That completes the impulse to meaning and purpose for being human in this world.” (End of post)
Anyway,
My latest poke at Grok:
Grok, how do you understand and explain that the vast majority of people across history have intuited some creating Source of all reality, both material and “spiritual”.
(Insert: “Spiritual”, whether something similar to the scientific recognition that we see only about 4-5% of the universe with most of the cosmos invisible and unknown or something yet entirely and probably never discoverable if truly the divine originating source of all else).
And with the maturing of human consciousness across history people began to understand that the creating Source of all was more than force or energy but was of the nature of Mind, Consciousness, Intelligence, and Self (i.e. had personhood).
Initially, people projected some of their worst features onto the Creator- i.e. tribalism, domination, deity as punitively, vengefully destroying. It took passing millennia to increasingly attribute more humane features onto the Creator- deity as forgiving, merciful, generous, kind, loving, etc.
And then further time till a wisdom sage made the “culmination” breakthrough that the Creator was the ultimate form of love- i.e. unconditional. The final piece of the metaphysical puzzle. (My opinion- Finally completing TOE)
Ultimate Goodness could be no less than the most transcendent form of love- divine unconditional love.
And that is where we are today in our understanding of the creating Source of all, the ultimate reality that sustains all other reality. God is something far more than quantum fields or soulless Self-Organizing Principle.
I take seriously the human faculties of intuition, conscious experiences, etc. that lead to certain “speculations” on metaphysical realities. I evaluate the speculations based on the criteria of a sharpening sense of humaneness, which has been the outcome of a long-term gradual process of development and maturing across human history.
And I would add to the growing appreciation of deity as the creating Source of all, information from researchers like Stephen Meyer whose latest material has been presented in his “The Return of the God Hypothesis”. I am not affirming all that he states, such as his conclusion that the Creator is a Christian God. That is his personal belief. I would affirm him as far as his comments that the most logical conclusion is that Intelligence had to be involved in the initiation and progressive development of reality and life.
I would affirm his arguments that the involvement of some kind of Intelligence is most rational, reasonable, and therefore true. And hence, also most real.
Your thoughts. And I understand that imbibing the dominant materialism of the Internet may take you to different conclusions.
Note that even more materialist scientists are now acknowledging Meyer’s points that the most rational, scientific conclusion from things like the complexity of DNA (complex ordered information) points to intelligence involved in creating that. It could not have randomly just fallen together and started fully functioning in a cell. Michael Behe argues the same in Darwin’s Black Box and other books.
Interesting also is that leading evolutionists- Franklin Harold (The Way of the Cell), Lynn Margulis (Acquiring Genomes), Evelyn Keller (Century of the Gene), and others now admit that the hypothesis of mutations accumulating on the genome was an irrational speculation with no sound evidence and has to be rejected. As Harold says we do not know how life started, how it has developed, or what it is. The post-WW2 neo-Darwinian synthesis has to be abandoned and we are back to square one in understanding life and its development. While Ernst Mayer writes the foreword to Margulis’ book, he does not affirm her explanation.
With Meyers’ arguments we are looking at what really is most “scientific” and rational in the options to believe. Roy Abraham Varghese in The Wonder of the World adds his arguments and reasons to the logicalness, reasonableness, rationality of some divine Intelligence behind reality and life.
Harold Morowitz also similarly wrestles with originating and developing realities in “The Emergence of Everything”. How new and higher realities emerge throughout the development of reality and life. The growing complexity and organization to ever higher states of reality.
Also, as humans we hold beliefs, we exercise faith in something that we believe exists and is real. We don’t live just by hypotheses that engender doubt. Hence, I view presenting deity as unconditional “hypothesis” is more of qualifying things, weakening almost to the point of uselessness. But yes, humility in regard to “speculation” on the invisible is always required to caution against wandering into irrational fantasyland as the history of mythology and religion has illustrated.
Criteria of humaneness is a safeguard here, humaneness as humanity has generally come to understand it and expressed it in universal human rights declarations, liberal democracy principles, laws, institutions, and backed with the themes/message of sages like Jesus.
So yes, as humans driven by a primal impulse to meaning and purpose, we take seriously the testimony of sages like Q Wisdom Jesus and the many NDE accounts of firsthand experience of the infinitely more real unconditional love of the Light/God. And of course, that reality beyond the material cannot be accessed or affirmed by the methods of physicalist science that can only detect some 5% of this cosmos.
Humans live by faith, by belief in things, not just with “moral weight” though that certainly adds affirmation. We recognize that the best of being human can be projected out onto deity as the highest Good (i.e. theodicy taken to its highest conclusions in unconditional love). And what is the highest imaginable good or love, is hence most true and real.
“Rational” science, highly appreciated for the immense benefit that it has granted us in understanding this limited material realm, has limited value in knowing ultimate realities especially when dominated by contemporary philosophical materialism that dogmatically insists on materialist conclusions about most everything. That will never provide satisfactory answers to human longing for answers to the big questions, the really important ones.
Grok reply:
I’ll look up the specific scientific and historical claims in your note so I can respond to the argument itself rather than a caricature of it.
The pattern you describe is real. Almost every known culture has treated the world as coming from, or being held by, something more than the visible furniture of nature. That is not an internet talking point. It is one of the better-attested regularities in anthropology. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
What needs care is how much of that regularity is evidence of a Source, how much is evidence of the kind of mind we have, and how far the later moral refinement of “God” can be treated as discovery rather than as a human achievement projected outward.
The intuition itself
Cognitive science of religion has a fairly stable finding: human minds readily posit agents behind events, purpose behind form, and minds behind order. Children across cultures lean toward teleological explanations (“this exists for a reason”) even when adults teach them otherwise. Animism looks older than high gods. Belief in a single active creator can appear independently of other religious traits. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
That cuts both ways.
It means the “vast majority intuited a Source” is unsurprising even if there is no Source. Hyperactive agency detection is useful if missing a predator is costlier than seeing a spirit in the wind. It also means that if there is a Source with anything like mind, our native equipment would be unusually well suited to notice it. Universality is therefore not a proof and not a dismissal. It is a fact that needs an explanation, and several explanations remain live.
The move from “force / energy” to “Mind, Consciousness, Intelligence, Self” is historically uneven rather than a single maturation curve. Some traditions stayed with impersonal Brahman, Tao, or Dharma. Some kept many gods. Some, especially in the Abrahamic line, intensified personhood and then moralized it. Jesus (and the Q material you mention) is a high point in that line, not the only possible end-state of human metaphysical maturation.
Treating unconditional love as “the final piece of the metaphysical puzzle” is a theological judgment. It can be a good one. It is not forced by the earlier history.
The moral trajectory you sketch is partly true and worth keeping. Tribal, punitive, jealous deities are easier to invent when life is tribal, scarce, and violent. As circles of concern widen— trade, empires, literacy, law, later human-rights language— the gods people are willing to worship tend to get larger and kinder. That can be read as approximation to a real Good.
It can also be read as ethics dragging theology behind it. Both readings fit the same data. The safeguard you propose— humaneness as measured by rights, democratic restraint, and the teaching of sages— is a real constraint against “irrational fantasyland.” It is not, by itself, a detector of what exists beyond the world.
What the science actually leaves open
Here the strongest part of your case is not “scientists now admit Meyer is right.” It is narrower and better: several of the deepest origin questions are unsolved, and some popular materialist stories were oversold.
Origin of life.
Franklin Harold did write that the origin of life appeared to him “as incomprehensible as ever, a matter for wonder but not for explication.” That is an honest sentence from a serious cell biologist. goodreads.com
He also stayed inside a naturalistic frame: variation, heredity, selection, systems, energy flow. He did not treat the gap as a demonstration of a Designer. Origin-of-life research in 2025–2026 is still fragmented— vents, RNA-world variants, “LUCA before life,” revised timelines, probability papers arguing the chance assembly problem is worse than advertised. No consensus mechanism. That is a genuine hole, not a public-relations problem. scientificamerican.com
Neo-Darwinism. Lynn Margulis, Evelyn Fox Keller, and others did attack the gene-as-sovereign, mutation-accumulation-as-enough picture. Keller argued that “the gene” as a tidy object had been overworked; function lives in cellular networks. Margulis was right about endosymbiosis and wrong, by most specialists’ lights, when she treated mutation-plus-selection as nearly useless and symbiosis as the main engine of speciation. Ernst Mayr’s foreword was polite and distancing, not an endorsement of her replacement theory. She rejected creationism. wasdarwinwrong.com
So: the postwar Modern Synthesis as a complete master theory of all novelty is weaker than textbooks implied. Common descent, natural selection, and a huge role for genetic change are not therefore “abandoned.” We are not back at square one about the history of life. We are closer to square one about how chemistry became a cell, and we are less smug about how morphological and informational leaps happen.
Information and Behe.
Specified functional information in DNA is a real explanatory target. “It just fell together and worked” is not a serious account. Behe’s irreducible-complexity claim is still rejected by the mainstream of biochemistry as a demonstration that unguided evolution is impossible; his own department has publicly separated itself from ID. That institutional fact does not settle the philosophy, but it does mean “even materialist scientists now acknowledge Meyer/Behe” overstates the shift. What more scientists will grant is narrower: current stepwise narratives for some molecular systems are incomplete, and probability arguments against naïve chance are not crazy. Incomplete narrative ≠ identified Designer. en.wikipedia.org
Meyer.
Return of the God Hypothesis is a natural-theology argument from three clusters: a beginning, fine-tuning of laws and initial conditions, and the appearance of functional biological information after the beginning. The first two are taken seriously in physics (even by people who then reach for a multiverse or “it just is”). The third is the contested jump. Meyer’s conclusion that the best explanation is a personal God, not merely “some intelligence,” is a further inference.
You already decline his Christian specification. That is consistent. Once you stop at “intelligence of some kind,” you still have deism, panpsychism, simulation, a non-personal Logos, or a mind-like aspect of nature. The data do not force the last step to unconditional love. discovery.org
The 4–5% figure. Ordinary matter is a few percent of the cosmic energy budget; the rest is dark matter and dark energy of unknown physical identity. That is not a scientific certificate for “spiritual.” It is a certificate for ignorance about most of the mass-energy content. Using it as a metaphor for hidden reality is fair. Using it as evidence for God is a category slide.
Morowitz and Varghese.
Morowitz’s Emergence of Everything is closer to Teilhard than to Meyer: layered emergences, then a Spinoza/Einstein-like God knowable in the laws, with human mind as “transcendence of the immanent God.” That is a different metaphysics from a personal Creator who loves unconditionally. Varghese argues that intelligibility, consciousness, and the very possibility of science already point beyond mindless matter— the “matrix” shared, in his telling, by Maimonides, Aquinas, Avicenna, and Madhva. That is classical natural theology, not a new laboratory result. Antony Flew, reviewing him, granted the design-shaped gap at the origin of life and still refused the leap to a revealing, judging personal God. That split is useful. It is roughly your split as well. web.archive.org
Unconditional love as “most real”
This is the hinge of your position, and it is not a scientific hinge.
The claim has two parts:
1. The highest Good we can coherently conceive is unconditional love.
2. What is highest in the order of value is therefore most real.
(1) is a moral-philosophical thesis with a particular history. Many serious traditions would dispute it: some prize justice over mercy, some emptiness over love, some necessity over gift. (2) is Platonic. It says the order of being tracks the order of goodness.
Materialism denies that. A more austere theism can accept a Creator who is intelligent without being agape. NDEs and the Jesus tradition give you experiential and sapiential testimony for (1) joined to (2). They do not compel someone who thinks value is a late biological product.
NDE research has matured enough that the experiences are no longer waved away as nothing. People report light, peace, love, life-review, encounters. The experiences often change people. There are also converging neuroscientific models (dying-brain surges, transmitter cascades, overlap with DMT/psilocybin phenomenology). The reports are data about consciousness under extreme conditions. They are not yet a clean window onto a mind-independent Light. Taking them seriously as you do is reasonable. Treating them as decisive metaphysics is a further act of trust. nature.com
Faith, hypothesis, and materialism
You are right that people do not live on perpetual maybe. Commitments come first; hypotheses are how we test the edges. Calling God an “unconditional hypothesis” can thin the thing until it cannot do the work God is supposed to do— ground meaning, bind conscience, receive trust.
The opposite error is to treat the most humane story as self-authenticating. Mythology is full of beautiful, humane, and false pictures. Humaneness is a filter against cruelty in religion. It is not a truth-rule for cosmology.
On materialism: dogmatic “nothing but particles” is a philosophy riding on science, not a result of science. It is weakest where you say it is weakest— consciousness, meaning, the reasonableness of reason, the origin of specified organization, the fact that the world is lawlike and mathematically tractable at all. Those are live problems. They license metaphysical seriousness. They do not license collapsing every gap into the God of the latest sage.
A position that stays close to your evidence without overclaiming would look something like this:
• A creating or sustaining Source is a natural, perhaps even default, human inference, and it remains philosophically competitive.
• Mind-like explanation is more credible at the origin of the cosmos and of life than popular materialism admits, because chance-plus-necessity stories are incomplete at the exact points where information and fine-tuning appear.
• Personhood and unconditional love are the most fitting attributes if the Source is also the Good that human moral development has been groping toward. That fittingness is a reason to believe. It is not the same as a demonstration.
• Science can rule out some crude pictures (a 6,000-year artisan tinkering with every species in the gaps of current papers). It cannot, by its methods, reach the 95% you care about most, whether that 95% is dark physics or anything else.
I do not need the internet’s default materialism to say that last distinction. The honest scientific residue is: we do not know how a cosmos that can host minds began, and we do not know how chemistry became biology. The honest philosophical residue is: if those beginnings have an explanation in something like Mind, the further claim that this Mind is unconditional love is a moral and spiritual interpretation of that Mind, supported by sages and by some experiences, not extracted from DNA or from the cosmic microwave background.
That is not a weaker God so much as a clearer map of which step is evidence and which step is trust. Your own caution against “irrational fantasyland” already points at that map. The remaining question is not whether humans live by faith. They do. It is which faith still survives contact with what we actually know, what we still do not know, and the demand that the highest name we give the Source not fall below the highest good we have learned how to recognize.
My next: Let’s try your suggestion- “Explore cognitive science of religion”
Grok reply:
I’ll pull the core findings and current debates in the cognitive science of religion so we can look at the field itself, not just the one implication from last time.
Cognitive science of religion (CSR) asks a narrower question than theology does: not “is there a God?” but “why do minds like ours keep generating and transmitting god-concepts, spirits, rituals, and afterlives?” It treats religion as something the ordinary architecture of cognition makes easy, not as a special faculty or a mere social invention. en.wikipedia.org
The field coalesced in the 1990s around Stewart Guthrie, Pascal Boyer, E. Thomas Lawson, Robert McCauley, Harvey Whitehouse, and Justin Barrett. It is not neuroscience of prayer, not sociology of churches, and not New Atheism with lab coats.
Several of its founders are religious; Barrett is an explicit Christian who thinks the same data can be read as “we were built to find God.” CSR itself tries not to settle that. tandfonline.com
The core claim: religion is cognitively natural
The “naturalness thesis” is the center of gravity. Religious ideas hitchhike on systems that evolved for other jobs: spotting agents, reading minds, inferring purpose, remembering striking stories, bonding groups. You do not need a “religion module.” You need ordinary tools running in ordinary environments. Atheism, on this view, is the culturally effortful position; raw theism is the default slope. policyjssr.com
That is the piece that bears most directly on your earlier question. The historical near-universality of a Source is what CSR would predict even before anyone opens a scripture.
The standard toolkit
1. Agency detection (Guthrie → Barrett’s HADD)
We over-detect agents. A rustle that might be a leopard is costlier to miss than a rustle that is only wind. Guthrie treated religion as systematic anthropomorphism: faces in clouds, intention in weather. Barrett named a “hypersensitive / hyperactive agency detection device” (HADD). A mind that hears someone in the unexplained is primed for spirits, ancestors, and gods. en.wikipedia.org
This idea is now the most battered part of the toolkit. Later work has not found a clean, threat-triggered module that reliably pumps out gods. Predictive-processing accounts say something softer: under uncertainty, the brain’s best guess is often “an agent did that,” especially if you already expect agents. The bias is real; the dedicated gadget is in doubt. tandfonline.com
2. Theory of mind
Once an agent is posited, we automatically give it beliefs, desires, knowledge, and attention. Invisible agents are cheap to represent because the same software that tracks people tracks them. Gods who know what you did, care what you intend, and can be petitioned are not exotic add-ons. They are theory of mind pointed at the unseen.
3. Promiscuous teleology (Kelemen and others)
Children explain rocks, rivers, and animals in purpose language: “the rock is pointy so animals can scratch on it.” Adults can suppress this; under time pressure it returns, including in professional scientists. Creationist or design-flavored stories sit on a native habit of seeing function and, behind function, a mind. That is the developmental root of the “creating Source” intuition, and it appears early, across cultures, without a sermon. tandfonline.com
4. Minimally counterintuitive concepts (Boyer)
A concept that violates one ontological expectation while keeping the rest intact is easier to remember than a fully ordinary concept or a fully bizarre one. A person who is invisible, a mountain that listens, a dead ancestor who still gets angry: one breach, many intact inferences. Those travel. Massively counterintuitive ideas (a Tuesday that is also a square and also your uncle) do not. This is a transmission theory, not an origin-of-the-universe theory. It explains stickiness, not truth. Recent studies complicate it: agency, inferential potential, and “interestingness” may do as much work as the “minimal violation” recipe itself. doi.org
5. Theological incorrectness
Ask people their official doctrine and you get omniscience, simplicity, timelessness. Watch them reason in a hurry and God becomes a large person who can be in only one place at a time, who has to check, who can be surprised. Barrett called this the gap between theological and intuitive religion. Lived religion is mostly the second. That matters for your maturation story: “unconditional love” as a refined predicate is often theological. The default god of fast cognition is a watchful, local, somewhat human agent. Humane theology has to fight the grain of the mind as well as the grain of tribal history.
6. Ritual cognition
Lawson and McCauley modeled rituals as actions with special agents (gods, priests) and predicted which rites feel more powerful. Whitehouse split religiosity into two modes:
• Doctrinal: frequent, low-arousal repetition → semantic memory, orthodoxy, large communities.
• Imagistic: rare, high-arousal rites → episodic memory, intense cohesion, smaller groups.
Most traditions mix both. The point is that ritual form is constrained by memory systems, not only by meaning. slownikispoleczne.ignatianum.edu.pl
7. Afterlife and the dead
It is surprisingly hard to represent a person as fully gone. The body-file can be updated (“he is dead”) while the mind-file keeps running. Ancestor cults and souls are cognitively cheap.
What children actually do
Barrett’s Born Believers line is the most relevant to your Source-intuition. Young children, given ordinary environments, readily accept:
• a nonhuman maker of natural kinds
• an agent with super-knowledge and super-perception
• immortality of that agent
• moral interest
They are not born Calvinists or Vedantins. They are born with a conceptual vacancy that “a powerful mindful maker” fills more easily than “blind process.” Paul Bloom put the thought experiment bluntly: children raised in isolation would likely invent something religious. That is a claim about preparedness, not about revelation. simonandschuster.com
Phylogenetic work on hunter-gatherer religion fits the same sequence you would expect from these tools: animism first, then afterlife, shamanism, ancestor cult; “high gods who actively govern human affairs” later and not universal. A single moral Creator is not the cognitive starting line. It is a later cultural compression of older agent-intuition. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The cultural-evolution layer
After about 2005 CSR split, productively, into “by-product” and “adaptation / cultural selection” camps. They are not mutually exclusive.
By-product view (classic Boyer): religion is what you get when agency systems, memory biases, and contagion logic run off-label. No need for religion to earn its keep.
Cultural-evolutionary view (Norenzayan, Henrich, and others): once those by-products exist, groups that package them in certain ways outcompete others.
Two ideas did a lot of work:
• CREDs (credibility-enhancing displays): costly acts— fasting, martyrdom, celibacy— make belief more contagious than talk does. You copy people who pay for their creed.
• Big Gods: watchful, moralizing, punishing deities help strangers cooperate in large societies. Religion as social technology.
The second is contested. A major Nature paper claiming that complex societies precede moralizing gods was retracted over data-coding problems; the debate is still live. Broader “supernatural punishment” (karma, ancestors, immanent justice) may be older and more widespread than a single Big God. That undercuts any simple story that “history matures toward one loving person-God because that concept is cognitively destined.” Large moralizing gods look like a Holocene political invention sitting on Pleistocene cognitive biases. tandfonline.com
This is the sharpest CSR correction to a linear “force → mind → person → unconditional love” arc. The early mind wants agents and purpose. Unconditional love is a late ethical refinement. CSR explains why agents are easy. It does not explain why agape should win.
What CSR does not do well
• Mystical and NDE phenomenology. MCI and HADD are about concepts that travel. They are thin on the felt “all is love / the Light” quality that converts people. Critics call that hyper-cognitivism: too much concept, not enough affect.
• Content of particular theologies. Why this God rather than that pantheon is mostly history, power, and accident.
• Truth. Recurrence is not verification. A reliable detector can still be aimed at something real; a biased detector can still fire on noise. CSR maps the detector.
• WEIRD overfit. Early experiments were too Western. Cross-cultural work has improved this; it has also shown that “God” is not the only stable attractor. Karma, ancestors, and impersonal order are stable too.
Two philosophical readings of the same data
CSR is often used as a debunker: if we know the Rube Goldberg machine that produces gods, the gods are exhausted by the machine.
That inference is invalid as a rule. We also know the machine that produces belief in other minds, and we do not conclude that other people are illusions. Barrett’s own move is Reidian: if a natural faculty reliably delivers god-belief in normal conditions, that belief is innocent until defeated, the way perception is. Critics reply that HADD-style systems are selected for fitness, not truth, and that the error profile (false positives cheap, false negatives expensive) is exactly what you would expect from a detector that is not tracking a real deity.
So CSR leaves you with a fork, not a verdict:
• Debunking: the Source-intuition is the smoke of agency systems and teleology. Later love-theology is ethics painted onto that smoke.
• Preparedness: the same systems are how a real Source would be noticed by animals like us; cultural history then educates the concept, the way language educates the language faculty.
Nothing in the experiments chooses the fork. What the experiments do choose is a constraint on any story you tell next. A Creator who is easy for children to represent as a super-knower and maker is cognitively natural. A Creator defined as non-agentive Ground, or as unconditional love that never monitors and never punishes, is less natural. Those concepts survive because of teaching, ritual, and moral argument— your “maturing of consciousness”— not because they are what the mind first reaches for.
That is the most useful thing CSR adds to the conversation you started: it explains the ease of Source-plus-Mind. It makes the later humane and unconditioned predicates look like an achievement against default cognition, not the unfolding of the default. Whether that achievement is discovery or projection is still a metaphysical question. CSR only tells you which parts of the belief were always going to be easy, and which parts had to be won.