Podoholic

When you're in the middle of a full-blown podcast addiction you don't listen primarily because you're interested, but in order to drown out the deafening silence. The emptiness of your own thoughts hurts and terrifies you, gives you the shakes. Sometimes the continuing flow of spoken words barely cover the neurotic, nihilistic whirlpool, but ultimately the podcasts are slightly more dopaminergic - or "motivating" as we used to say back in the day - than the solitary confinement of your own thoughts. So you keep on listening, religiously. You're an information-junkie, and your drug of choice is the spoken word. The iTunes Store is your pusher and the BBC is a meth lab.

Every now and then, however, you stumble across something of extraordinary value. You're struck by delightful surprise as the words pouring into your ears suddenly speak to you in more ways than you thought possible. For 30 minutes, or an hour, or two if you're as lucky as I was todya, you're engulfed; your poor addicted brain, so accutely sensitized to extracting value from those streaming headphones, is showered in relevance, meaning, expectation, monoamines, creative memory formation and retrieval. For that short duration of time, your personality grows and you're completely attentive.

Nowhere are such experiences more likely than in Professor Robert Harrison's Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature), live from the Stanford campus. Seventy four hours of material, and counting. For the longest time I avoided the two-part program entitled The Rescurrection, despite an interesting earlier program with the same guest (Prof Thomas Sheehan) entitled The Historical Jesus (that show preceeds the monumental '1910', with Harrison's brother Thomas). I guess I thought The Rescurrection would be a dry mulling over the relation between culture, scripture and historical data (don't get me wrong: some episodes of Entitled Opinions, like the most recent one on the heart, are pretty lousy). It was anything but dull.

In the first hour, Sheehan, a professor of religion and a catholic, subjects the fundamentalist conception of Christ's resurrection to intense critizism, scrutinizing historical and biblical sources and presenting a strikingly unorthordox account of what really happened after Joshua's death on the cross, almost two milennia ago. In the second hour, Sheehan's scrutiny turns to Harrison's own latent catholisism. I won't try to recount this second hour, let's just say that topics include the profound absurdity of human existence and of Christian faith, and how the two connect and mirror eachother, as well as the limits of human understanding and the exceptionality of life. It's a great exchange, and I'll end with a quote from it:

"If there is not an agency of mystification, then somehow the sacrality even of these everyday things with which we live or eat - bread and wine - cannot assume, let's say the proper dignity, or absolute value associated with life, that they deserve." -Robert Harrison

More God

While I'm on the topic of Christianity, here's three prayers I just translated from Swedish and links to dad's updated website (www.skolhuset.nu) and latest book (www.innerlighet.se).

65
Prayer of the United Nations

Source of Life and Goodness, our Earth is but a speck of dust
It is our task now, to make it a planet
where no one suffers war, hunger or fear
where no one is rejected for country, appearance or opinion

Source of Life and Goodness, bless us with courage and foresight
to carry out this task
so that our children and grandchildren
may call themselves human with pride


76
Creation

Endless window panes, a thousand million suns
shine like fire in your universe
Our tiny Earth is hard to spot
You, who made all this: Give us meaning

You filled space with dark matter
It holds the Milky ways together
Oh, if only we could hold together in love
Make the tender bonds between us strong

You chartered the depths of the black holes,
where time itself deforms
What approaches them shines violently
Protect us at our precipice, ignite the light in us

You created endless oceans of time
that stretch out long before the Earth was formed
Man is younger still, only a child
Give us the hope and the courage to live

Earth, your cosmic pearl, brilliantly beautiful,
sea and flowing plains and jagged mountains
Perils from space but also from ourselves
Protect your treasure, our only home

See these wonderful plants and animals,
myriad riches, never seizing to amaze
formed by your chance and merciless struggle
Teach us respect, don't let us harm

You, who blessed us with perception
senses that show us order, meaning and form,
perpetually you recreate the world within us
Give us your creative flame, and teach us to relax

- Bengt Gustafsson (1943-)


205
Facing change

Source of Life and Goodness, help us face that which we do not understand
Grant us courage to face the new,
patience to comprehend the strange
and wisdom to receive the good that hides where we least expect it

Help us honour all good will and honest strife
And if we reject the views of another
help us to accept her as a human being

- Adapted from William Penn (1644-1718)

A Christian bioethics podcast

One of the reasons biotechnology is so meaningful/important/salient/dopaminergic to me is that it catalyses thinking about the larger existential picture, in everyone. It puts us face to face with what life and human beings really are, what we think they are, and what we want them to be.

Like transhumanists, Christians are often seriously annoying. But say what you will, at least they take the existential challenge of biotechnology seriously. Like transhumanists, Christians have enough courage and imagination to strive for immortality and the transcendence of the human body. Unlike humanists and existentialists, they the have good sense to reject, violently, the assertion that this life, this absurd affair right here, is it.

No surprise then that one of the best the best bioethics podcast I've come across so far is from the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, a Christian think-tank.

One quote:

"One of the things I suggest is that these techno-sentimentalists don't address the real problem. They see the technology as evil and therefore they don't in any way try to take responsibility for the reactions that they have to these technologies. So I would suggest that while their criticisms and cautions are helpful, they can only take us so far, because most of us live in a world that's getting ever more immersed in technology, not less." - Michael Sleasman

The Bioethics Podcast

The painting is by Emin Sinanyan, and is called 'LABYRINTH: Maybe I'm Crazy'.