Disclosure and Christianity

追加: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]right hello everybody my name is Steven Brown I'm giving a talk here called disclosure and Christianity assessing the potential for theological disruption um before I start I want to just give a little bit of kind of personal note here what I intend to do today is prevent not prevent present some material that is uh fairly critical of the view that most people consider to be Christianity and um I want to note that I'm doing that um from a personal position of love and care not because I dislike the tradition this is my original spiritual home I uh still consider myself a Christian in some uh sense but as we'll see here today I am puzzled by some of the details um so uh let me just go ahead and Jump Right In Here uh disclosure is this kind of um uh hopeful moment when enough information comes out about whatever is going on with UFOs and related phenomenon that people um kind of in Mass go through an experience that's sometimes called ontological Shock where they're trying to wrap their minds around the implications of what this means and um for many of us disclosure is concerning there's uh a a speaker Alex went he's here at Ohio State who gave a a talk a professor he gave a talk at the soul Foundation recently um and Talking about some of the political implications of um UFO disclosure and and he spoke toward the end of that of of a certain wisdom involved in the UFO taboo sometimes people wonder if UFOs uh exist and the US government knows about them how could this have been hidden for so long and I have come to believe that uh that in order for it to have remained hidden for as long as it has or to the degree that it has for as long as it has that there must be some good reason um for why the people who know about it feel like they can't just openly share it um and it's this kind of wisdom of keeping it a secret for some amount of time and being careful about how that information gets out um that uh that I want to kind of address here at the beginning because the idea is that um as we know more about what's going on there could be fairly significant disruptions in government this is what Alex went is concerned about disruptions of global power um is of course uh concerns about economic impact my friend Helen um has written a helpful paper on this and is trying to call attention to the um uh to the kind of business and and uh Financial World about what this might mean and how we could respond to it neither of those are my particular area of Interest my particular area of interest and expertise is in religion so what I want to do here is say uh I suspect that religious impacts will not be evenly distributed uh some traditions like Hinduism Buddhism and most indigenous religions already believe something kind of similar to what seems to be on the horizon with disclosure that is they believe that there are some kinds of beings who have been engaging with humans for long periods of time have taught us things supervised Us in various ways interacted with us in various ways so I actually expect that the religious impacts on Traditions like this will be relatively minimal sometimes people suggest that um it will be most disruptive for the the alrass Tyson types of the world these kind of debunkers and materialists and I do suspect that people of that ill uh they really might have to accept some novel new beliefs the world of the UFOs and the Paranormal seem to be giving us some suggestions that our materialist worldview might be mistaken that we might need to accept the existence of things like telepathy um and of course you know exotic beings and exotic objects however I don't expect this to go particularly poorly because in many ways it's moving from a more sparse worldview to a more fun worldview the kind of Science Fiction worldview that many of us kind of wish were true and um uh there there might be a sense of relief or even a sense of excitement among that Community um it's Christianity that I'm most worried about because Christianity might need to revise some of its most entrenched dogmas and I use Dogma in its technical sense here these are doctrines that have been determined by whoever the relevant authorities of the community are to be mandatory for uh being a believer in good standing so this is my big claim that I'm going to be trying to um uh unpack today that I believe Christianity is uniquely vulnerable to to disruption now as a good philosopher I need to Define my terms and what Christianity is is not at all straightforward this is a 2,000 year old movement that spans the globe and has engaged in all kinds of different theologies and different kinds of sets of practices and so I want to just I'm not going to be able of course to try to map out all of that that would be ridiculous but there are kind of uh four ways that I want to Define Christianity so that I can refer to some differences between them as I go through um the first I'm going to call synoptic Christianity so this is just the events described in the most historically well-founded gospels that is Matthew Mark and Luke um I'm going to take those as an assumption for the rest of the talk I'm just going to assume that everything described in Matthew Mark and Luke did actually happen as described so Jesus was born of a virgin engaged in a lot of miraculous activity was crucified and rose from the dead all that kind of stuff I'm just going to assume when I'm speaking of Christianity that's the kind of core synoptic Christianity if I try to imagine what is the sparsest possible historically respected uh uh Christianity I think this is yet after the events of the synoptic gospels there was a period that I'm calling Apostolic Christianity this is uh the wide variety of theological Explorations that emerged over the first three centuries of the Christian church I will not be talking much about this but I do just want to note in passing that there were many views of who Jesus was and who God is and how Jesus relates to God and what kinds of things happened and which texts should be considered authoritative and there was a really broad variety of beliefs during this roughly three Century long Apostolic period and then the main uh Target of my discussion today is this uh this range of beliefs that I'm calling Imperial Christianity so this is the theological structure established in the first seven ecumenical councils that were convened and enforced originally by Constantine and then by succeeding Emperors so this is NAA and Constantinople and uh uh Caledon and anyways I I shouldn't have done that you know the the kind of ning um uh Caledonian synthesis that kind of stuff um and then there is a period that I'll call divided Christianity I'm really not going to talk about this at all but uh after the great schism between the East and the West um there were many varieties of Christianity that developed and the only reason I even mentioned this is is because Imperial Christianity is not intended to be used as a a kind of temporally bound way of thinking about this because uh the way that Christianity developed after the s ecumenical councils essentially assumes the dogmatic foundations of Imperial Christianity almost universally there are some groups that have challenged various components of the basic synthesis that I'm going to be talking about here today but for the most part when people call themselves Christians in the modern world I take it that they believe something along the lines of what I'm calling Imperial Christianity so I want to just give a very quick crash course in how Imperial Chris Christian it works this is very very technical stuff and I am not an expert in it I've been spending some time talking to uh Christian theologians about this trying to get clear about what seems relevant to the issues I'm concerned with and what uh aren't so I hope I haven't made any egregious errors in what I'm about to do but I believe that what I'm about to do is accurate to this perspective so there is a being um god with a big G we'll Define some terms here a little bit later and this being has a nature the divine nature it is in three parts uh traditionally referred to as the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit um uh because this is a personal notion of God um the divine nature contains mind and will and energies in a nutshell mind would be the set of all of the beliefs that are true containing of course no beliefs that are false will is something analogous to the the set of values and choices that are made perfect values and choices in this case and energies are the kinds of powers and things that can be done by this being um they are somehow connected although as far as I understand it this is one of the matters of theological dispute about exactly how the mind will and energies are related between the three persons of the Trinity not something that I'm going to address here I do want to address in passing that if you kind of look at these three core features uh I think they correlate with the trip the standard uh triple definition of God within the abrahamic Traditions um uh perfect mind would be omniscience perfect will would be Omni benevolence and perfect energies would be omnipotence so that's God uh the Triune God as defined by councils like NAIA uh and clarified in a couple of other ways after that um and then of course there's this question of who Jesus of Nazareth is and um he is uh Divine and human fully Divine and fully human and the way this gets articulated is that Jesus of Nazareth has both well Jesus H Jesus of Nazareth I'll just use to refer to the human nature is uh connected to the second person of the Divine nature the Divine Trinity um there's a connection between Jesus and the Divine son um Jesus has his own distinct mind will and energies so Jesus's mind Jesus of nazareth's Mind does not contain all of omniscience so he can learn things he could forget things he there's things that he doesn't know um his will will then be related to his mind so he doesn't act based on uh the full access to omniscient knowledge and his energies are whatever the human energies are but then there is this relation between uh the divine nature and the human nature um called the hypostatic union which in a nutshell uh ensures in a mysterious way that all of these things are aligned with each other so um the person of Jesus of Nazareth will never act against anything that's going on um in the Divine uh nature and in fact is always acting perfectly in sync with it um okay so um that's the view that I want to uh Express concern about today and I want to begin by uh considering a hypothetical disclosure that I take to be undermining to belief in Imperial Christianity when I say undermining I do not mean contradictory to so I don't mean that it would be somehow logically impossible to reconcile the scenario that I'm going to imagine here with the doctrines that I've just tried to articulate I'm going to suggest that if this thing this kind of disclosure happened it would undermine belief in Imperial Christianity in the following sense whatever reasons one might have for coming to believe that Imperial Christianity is true they would be substantially weakened um such that perhaps it would no longer be for as many people to believe in Imperial Christianity that's the claim it's an epistemic undermining claim it's not a uh strict contradiction claim so here's the kind of scenario that I suspect might happen and even if it doesn't happen this is the kind of scenario that I'm concerned by so let's say that contact is made with an exceedingly ancient multi-species multiplanetary Consortium of nonhuman beings um this Consortium seems to be be functioning at least as well as any large-scale community of Imperial Christians with comparable moral depth due to their long history of development and mutual understanding perhaps facilitated by telepathy they share the same general worldview this worldview confirms and explains the key events of synoptic Christianity and the key events of all other known spiritual Traditions however this world undermines at least one key dogma of Imperial Christianity so were this to occur I take it that this would provide fairly strong evidence against the truth of Imperial Christianity that it would essentially suggest that um the the the Imperial Christian Movement had moved too far past the data gained through this the events described in the synoptic gospels um and that there is essentially a fail in theorizing so that the data set of of Imperial Christianity is correct or the core data set is correct Jesus was born of a virgin um carried out Miracles gave really profound spiritual teaching uh was crucified and rose from the dead all of those things are true but then there was some error that uh theologians made somewhere along the way in uh in the the construction of the dogmatic formulas internal to Imperial Christianity now now this is not in my view only hypothetical in part because I suspect that we actually do have some reasons to believe that such a disclosure might actually occur in the not too distant future but I'm mostly going to be pushing this point by referring not to the distant future but the ancient past because um non-Christian religions already pose similar problems for Imperial Christianity so what I'm trying to do here ultimately is an exercise cross-cultural philosophy of religion minimally among the religious Traditions here on Earth and perhaps among the religious Traditions elsewhere um I am going to do this by talking about Panic Hinduism so this is the Hinduism of the piranhas so kind of La later than the mere vas I am not an expert in Hinduism I know my way around the basics I'm going to go pretty quickly through this I do want to note that everything I say here is about Hinduism but not unique to Hinduism I could make similar arguments with regard to dosm in China for instance I could make similar arguments with regard to Buddhism but I think the the the points I'm trying to make will be easiest to see in talking about Hinduism but the claims I'm making are not restricted to Hinduism when I teach Asian philosophies which I do every semester and have for about 10 years I do an exercise at the beginning of class where I talk about uh the distinction between monotheism polytheism pantheism and Atheism that is one God many gods everything is God and nothing is God and I have students tell me what do you suspect a polytheistic religion is and almost every time someone says Hinduism and almost every time someone says Hinduism first this is not correct Hinduism is not a polytheistic tradition the reason that people think it is a polytheistic tradition is because of the dvas so there are a lot of divine beings in some sense now one of the problems with doing theology in the west is that our terminology that we use tends to blur the distinction between two different kinds of beings that is the big ultimate ground of all being and any being substantially more powerful than humans have the same word assigned to it so in English we use the word God for both types of beings and you have to write it with a lowercase G if you're talking about beings like Thor and Odin and you have to write it with an uppercase uh G if you're talking about the the source of all reality um one of the nice things about Sanskrit is there are more terms to use so the deas are something like minor deities more like you would expect uh Thor or Odin or Zeus to be um and in early Hinduism vdic Hinduism in particular there were a lot of them and there are rather a lot of stories told about them in the vetas and also in the Piranhas um I want to focus um on shiism just because uh it's going to be easier to use one example than to go through many although I'll refer back to some of the other ones shiism uh is the kind of School of Theology and practice Associated specifically with this being Shiva so Shiva has a female uh uh counterpart wife character parva um they have a child Ganesh there's a very famous story about how Ganesha came into being essentially Shiva was traveling parva was bathing and in order to protect her privacy parva creates Ganesha Ganesha originally looked like a normal human boy when Shiva gets home he tries to come in the house Ganesha says you can't go in there because he doesn't recognize who Shiva is Shiva gets angry and cuts off ganesha's head parva then scolds Shiva and Shiva has one of his folk go and remove the head of an elephant and replaces ganesh's head with an elephant this is how Ganesha came into being this I take it is indicative of the kind of tales that we see about these dvas minor deities Etc there is not a a um an assumption of absolute knowledge Shiva doesn't know who Ganesha is there's not an assumption of moral perfection um uh Shiva seems to lose his temper um there seems to be various limitations on power so in in the kind of uh standard uh mythology of Hinduism and essentially all other traditions of which I'm aware this class of beings are more powerful more knowledgeable than we are but they are not perfect in any way so um you know if we were writing this in English I would write these with small G's is there a big G God in Hinduism definitely um that being it's called Brahman um the symbol that I'm using here is the um symbol right and uh there's all kinds of fascinating Theology and practice having to do with the sound and the symbol of Al but I'll just reuse use this to represent Brahman I'm going to quickly read a selection from one of the aads what is the cause of the cosmos is it Brahman from where do we come by what live where shall we find Peace at Last what power governs the duality of Pleasure and Pain by which we are driven time nature necessity accident elements energy intelligence none of these can be the first cause they are effects whose only purpose is to help the self rise above Pleasure and Pain in the depths of meditation sages saw within themselves The Lord Of Love who dwells in the heart of every creature deep in the hearts of all he dwells hidden behind the gunas of law energy and inertia he is one he it is who rules over time space and causality I take it that this is Big G God first cause Lord of love under see undergirds everything is the source of all is the one who rules over time space and causality this is not a little G God this is Big G God so we have at least two beings that are distinct in some sense Brahman and Shiva but as jism develops over time Shiva and Brahman become equated or at least near equated so Shiva starts to be referred to using all the same kinds of language that people use to refer to Brahman so Shiva starts to be spoken of as all- knowing and perfectly good and all powerful Shiva essentially becomes treated as omnigod now in other parts of Hinduism a different being uh Vishnu is also treated in this way so over time the vaishnavite tradition starts to speak of him as Big G God and Shiva among the shites also as Big G God and you might wonder how exactly this fleshes out because now you have an identity between Shiva and Brahman and Vishnu and Brahman so now what is the relationship between Vishnu and Shiva um what ends up happening is there's another character Brahma who comes in at the same kind of level and they are assigned certain roles in reality or they become associated with certain roles so Brahma is the creator visnu is the sustainer and Shiva is the Destroyer I do want to note away that Shiva is in no way a villain so when we think about a destroyer um Shiva is often spoken of as the Destroyer primarily of evil um or perhaps also a Transformer he is the one who brings to an end so that something can begin a new um there are Christian analogues of this in the kind of apostolic uh Christian era views that later came to be viewed as heretical where um God relates to the world through three different modes in some there there might be some difference between God engaging as father God engaging as son or God engaging as Holy Spirit this view as I said came to be viewed as heretical but this is essentially how Hinduism fleshes out this Doctrine which is called the doctrine of the trimer so Brahma acting as Creator is Brahma Brahma acting as Vishnu is sustainer and Brahma acting as a destroyer is um Shiva all right how does this relate to the background metaphysics of Hinduism um I want to just go through a little framework that I have developed so that it's easier to articulate what all of the various options between the relations between the cosmos that is whatever realm that we live in extended out Etc like whatever things there are that God has made or the existence of which God is responsible for somehow and God the Divine itself so this is just uh my attempt to explore all possible set theoretic relationships between the set of the things that are the cosmos and the set of the things that are Divine I've given all these things terms with little greek prefixes nism would be the belief that there is neither a cosmos nor God this would be the belief that there is literally nothing atheism there is no God micro thee ism is that the Divine is somehow a subset of the cosmos autotheism would be God Alone there is no Cosmos at all pantheism is an exact equivalence of between the cosmos and the Divine pantheism the cosmos is a subset of the Divine hthe ISM the Divine and the cosmos partially overlap and apothe ISM the Divine and the cosmos are distinct um I do want to know not as I noted a minute ago that micro thee ism is not the same concept at all as these larger Notions of God so if if if the Divine were This Were Somehow a subset of the cosmos that would be a different kind of being now it's possible that dvas or Thor or aliens could be beings of this kind so I'm just going to represent that using a different color I'm just going to use blue to represent beings of that kind but of course that also means that those could exist in the other Traditions as well or in the other scenarios as well I'm for the purposes of today going to ignore everything on the top here I'm just going to talk about these four options which are really in scope if we're talking about Traditions like Hinduism and Christianity so I'm going to call the blanket term that covers all four of these macro thee ISM right the the the the macro God the macro theistic entity is the the one the big one Big G God the thing that explains everything um uh somehow um I'm going to distinguish between endothe istic views where the cosmos is in fully internal either because of full Identity or because it's a proper subset of the Divine and exoe ISM where um heme ism is the idea that at least some of the cosmos is internal to the vine somehow whereas apatheism is that the cosmos is fully distinct internal to Hinduism all of these traditions exist except possibly hem theism but the other three definitely do so this view is called divid vidon VD just means the completion of the vas so it's just uh the name of the tradition that takes the vadas seriously in a particular way the div means uh other separate um so so the cosmos and the Divine are distinct ad vant is actually the philosophically the dominant um tradition as far as I understand it in Hinduism um that there is no distinction between the cosmos and the Divine that they are identical in some way um and there is this view Vish vant which is pantheistic this is qualified non-dual the D um so the cosmos is an aspect of the Divine but it is not um the entirety so there is there are aspects of the Divine that transcend the cosmos incidentally there are pantheist versions of other Traditions there seems to be in iban alarabi panentheistic versions of Sufi Islam various Christian theologians have at least uh talked about panentheism um it's not obvious to me that there is any tradition which is hthis if I had to guess I I I wonder if Barkley's idealism might count as hthe istic because he seems to believe that minds are distinct from the Divine mind but that we have a common uh percep of the material world I don't know I don't care about this too much I just had to have it there for theoretical completion um okay so here in a nutshell is the big picture of how Hinduism works now at least after this ponic period after the vas sorry um after the trimer uh become the dominant um beings who are discussed there were a bunch of vas but three of them are special um the try have some uniquely uh substantial relationship to Brahman they are the most Divine of the things which are internal to the Divine so Hinduism for the most part is endothe istic that is everything that exists is divine in some sense but Brahma Vishnu and Shiva are Divine in a very special sense there are also a bunch of humans um most of us are normal but a few of us are not I'm going to pick Krishna as our kind of uh most important case in Hinduism of a divinely infused or a divinely present human Krishna is an avatar I'll talk about avatars here in just a moment Krishna has a wife Rada she is also Divine in some sense that's different from ordinary people like me and you um but not same way that Krishna is and as Hinduism develops um it includes uh various teachings about Jesus so Jesus is also presumed to be divine in a sense that is different from those of us who are mere folk um but also different from the way that Krishna is divine at least this is how it is interpreted internal to Hinduism I want to quickly lay out six options my Sanskrit is terrible so I'm not going to try to pronounce all of these I'll just refer to them conceptually so there are avatara these are the avatars they are desent of a daa so one of these beings these uh uh micro deities um like Vishnu or Ganesh or parva um they come into a human somehow there's at least three different ways that this works you can have a full Incarnation you can have a partial incarnation or you can have a power imbued Incarnation so a full Incarnation is relatively close it's not the same but it is quite similar to what Imperial Christianity says about Jesus of Nazareth it is not the same the hypothetic union is different from this idea um but it's it's it is similar in important ways um the distinction between full and partial is how much of the Divine property set is present in the life of the Avatar so a full Incarnation is present in all of the ways that say Vishnu could be in a human form they do uh they're often born and they die they live complete lives but they are fully incarnated versions of one of the dvas so Krishna is a um a full Incarnation a full Avatar of Vishnu not the only one by the way there's also Rah and others who are full incarnations of Vishnu so Vishnu has become fully incarnate at least twice paral incarnations these are humans who have uh uh not incomplete presence of all of the Divine attributes of uh the the DVA that is um incarnate or the daa that has descended into this body um and then a power imbued Incarnation is something like a temporary Incarnation so a person um has some kind of distinct identity but they are embodied temporarily by one of the dvas and granted some of the Dava powers and then there are the anav vatara these are just the non- avatars this is the rest of us so these are not dvas coming to Earth as a human in any way they're just other beings um there are those of us who are liberated while alive so whoever We Are Who manage to overcome our Karma and attain Enlightenment while alive that's these folk um there are various people who are just great spiritual leaders but not fully liberated not fully enlightened yet and then there's ordinary people like you and me who are spiritual aspirants or practitioners in general okay so you can see how Hindu is has developed this very elaborate multifaceted way of talking about a whole lot of different possible interpretations of what kind of being Brahman is the ways in which Brahman engages with the world both in the realm of the dvas and in the realm of the humans there are lots of beings around and there are lots of options about how to discuss them so what I want to do now is a little bit of cross-cultural philosophy of religion using this framework and I need one more tool before I can kind of wrap up the main things that I want to say here I need to introduce you to the causal theory of reference so in the philosophy of language we have words which are language specific and Concepts which are language independent so the word AA and the word water refer to the same substance uh uh H2O um and uh why is that how does that work exactly how do our Concepts refer to objects so the the kind of standard way that this works out um is called the causal theory of reference and the way it works is that there is an object so in this case we'll talk about the big bright thing the big bright hot thing in the sky um that object is real and it causes us to have perceptions of it in a modern scientific way it emits photons they get absorbed into our eyes and passed into our brains and however that relates to our mind right there is an object and it causes us to have a concept we then name that concept and this is how we can actually speak to each other across linguistic boundaries so one of us can point at that thing and say son and then another one could point at that thing and say say soul or whatever the word is in the other language and by that we come to understand how the person who speaks a different language is referring to the same object literally by pointing so um what's interesting for our purposes is that it does not actually require any accurate understanding about what that object is so let's say that in this case the English speaker believes that it is a giant ball of fire uh which we now know is an oxidation reaction and the sun is not an oxidation reaction so this person's view is false um this other person our Spanish speaker uh believes that it is a nuclear fusion reaction which is at least closer to the truth um or at least a part of a more complete truth so in order for a concept to refer it does not have to be correct in fact none of the views have to be correct in order to refer to the object um as long as there is an object and the object is causing the concepts in the right kind of way then the concepts refer to the object this is important for my purposes because there are a series of arguments that are given for a being a Divine being uh uh the being that I will call macro god um that all share a certain um uh set of features there's singular rising in the sense that if they are successful they can only have one reference they can only refer to one thing so that what makes them singularizing a singularizing argument is an argument for macro good based on an absolute superlative so it it's this kind of without restrictions um uh reference to some uh uh superlative good making property um there's at least two types of arguments that do this ontological arguments was famously that by anel God is defined by anel as that than which nothing greater can be conceived in Hinduism there's also versions of ontological arguments where you get something like this Brahman alone is the absolutely real infinite and self-luminous principle if these arguments work they are referring to one specific thing there can't be more than one that than which nothing greater can be conceived there cannot more than one thing which is alone absolutely real infinite and self luminous similarly this is true of cosmological arguments so Plato for instance talks about the self-moved principle um which must be the first and greatest origin of motion in all things and in Hinduism we also have uh very parallel arguments there must be a singular self-existent and eternal cause ishar which is another word in the realm of Brahman like Brahman as Lord or Brahman as personal to be beloved um who is the ultimate source of all so sometimes people try to suggest that the beings of the various macro thee Traditions might be different beings uh and I'm going to suggest that they cannot be different beings so all successful singularizing Arguments for macro God refer to the same being regardless of their conceptual variations so whatever else anybody might believe about it if there's a successful singularizing argument for a being there's only one of those beings so in the same way that different words across languages refer to the same being even if the concepts are distinct and incompatible even if all of the concepts are wrong they are still referring to the same object so I take it that Concepts like Lon this is God most High um Theos as used by uh philosophers like Plato and Aristotle Allah um as used in um uh in Islam and Brahman as used in Hinduism these necessarily refer to the same being if they refer to anything there can only be one macro God so uh what I want to do now is get back to um my concerns for Imperial Christianity and I want to suggest that there are two dogmas of about Imperial Christianity that seem to me relatively unstable they are unstable because of the Precision with which they have been defined which allows them not to be particularly flexible so uh the first one is trinitarian Jewish monotheism so there is one God who uniquely chose the Jewish people and miraculously intervened among them as Des described in the Old Testament that being has always been one and three as modeled in The ecumenical Creeds my concern about this is that it equates the tribal deity of the Jewish people with macro God while attempting to deny parallel moves in Traditions like Hinduism if you look back into the history of Judaism it seems quite clear that the god of the Jewish people was originally seen as one among many there's even evidence that in its earliest forms he had a female counterpart and over time it seems likely that what happened is this being moved developed from being the singular um uh guardian of this one tribe this one group of people to being something like the ruler of all the the most significant of all to eventually being the only one we've seen a parallel thing happen with Shiva in shite um Hinduism we've also seen a parallel thing happen with Vishnu the same basic idea has happened there is a character in the tribal lore the tribal mythology um and he over time as the the kind of singularizing arguments of philosophy operate comes to be equated with this one being in ways that eventually cause theological problems that have to be solved in some way and Hinduism solves them in one way and trinitarian Jewish monotheism the trinitarian theism of Christianity solves it in a different way it's not clear to me how we could possibly have the information required to discriminate between these two uh ways of reconciling our mythologies with the kind of singularizing arguments that lead to macro god um uh so it's it seems to me um problematic fragile to suggest that the this one way of articulating the relationship between the cosmos and the Divine beings that we encounter in the Supernatural space and macro God how that's going to work out similar ly with christology exclusivist christology so Jesus of Nazareth is the sole human incarnation of the second person of the Divine Trinity his life death and Resurrection uniquely constitute the complete revelation of God to the world through him alone we are saved from our sins and reconciled to God in a way that implies the incompleteness or falsehood of other religions in a way that you can probably predict by now I'm concerned that this equates the mysteriously born miracle workking teacher of the synoptic gospels with the Jewish macro God while attempting to deny parallel moves in Traditions like Hinduism there appears to be a one forone analog between the stories told about Krishna and the stories told about Jesus that is Krishna was born of a virgin um was able to walk on water was able to heal the sick and raise the dead that he essentially exhibited it's all of the same kinds of divine attributes that we see in the life of Jesus of Nazareth but he of course is not equated in Hinduism uh to the god of Israel he is instead equated to Vishnu um and uh again I'm concerned that there isn't going to be a plausible way to suggest that Christianity is in a position to equate Jesus with the Divine in a way that Hinduism is not able to equate Krishna with the Divine regardless of the difference between how the theory works out especially because the details of the the theoretical constraints on each one seem to be so specifically culture-bound so if this is true uh how is it that Christianity has up until now excluded Hinduism in all honesty the most straightforward answer is that it's simply ignoring it uh precious few Christians are even slightly aware of what Hinduism actually teaches almost everybody who assume who considers themsel a Christian believes that Hinduism is for instance a polytheistic tradition it is not a polytheistic tradition it is very much a monotheistic tradition it has all the same kinds of singularizing arguments as the abrahamic Traditions do there is an almost exact one for one analog between cosmological arguments in the abrahamic traditions and cosmological arguments in Hinduism ontological arguments and ontological arguments design arguments moral arguments religious experience arguments they're all there in both Traditions it's just that most people in Christianity have no idea that it's there it's also of course been dismissed by demonizing it and when I mean demonizing it I mean literally demonizing it like making the claim that um Vishnu and Shiva and parvad and Ganesha are actually demons so in the kind of Christian theology that they are Spiritual Beings who are evil that they have rebelled against God and that therefore they are to be greatly feared and ignored this is wildly implausible given the commonality of singularizing arguments the high moral quality of the best parts of Hinduism and the low moral quality of the worst parts of Christianity the idea that Christianity is Holy and Hinduism is evil is preposterous anybody who thinks this does not know what they're talking about they it is not possible to reduce the full tradition of Hinduism and all of its complexity to simply saying it is the work of the devil this is uh ignorance of the highest form um and and furthermore implausible because Hinduism and Christianity are at least on a par with regard to their General moral quality like it's pretty easy for anybody in a Christian tradition to point at the worst parts of the Hindu tradition and say look at all those bad things that happened we can save you from that but Hindus can of course do exactly the same thing in response to Christianity they can pick the worst parts of Christianity and say you can safely ignore them because we can save you from that this is not actually what Hinduism does but in principle it could so the exclusion Runway would just as well justify the exclusion the other way and it shouldn't be excluded anyways because the singular regularizing arguments are essentially identical these are two Traditions that believe in the same kind of being they just theorize about it in different ways another option which is the way that I did it up until relatively recently is by mythologizing it so CS Lewis very famously said this now the story of Christ is simply a true myth a myth working on us in the same way as the others but with this tremendous differ that it really happened and one must be content to accept it in the same way remembering that it is God's myth where the others are men's myths Lewis was actually quite aware of Hinduism and quite well read um and this was his personal solution to the problem how does Lewis in reading the bog OFA Gita when seeing the stories of Krishna as an avatar of Vishnu essentially a Triune incarnate personal God asking for personal devotion how does he reconcile this with his Christianity he assumes that the Bava Gita is a mere myth and a predecessor to the preaching of the Gospel that God has implanted in the imagination of the Hindu people a version of The Gospel so that when Thomas and the other early Christians arrive in India they will be able to convert to Christianity this is Lewis's View I've been talking all about Christianity and Hinduism what's up with the UFOs and the aliens and the nhi and the disclosure why do I think this might be relevant why do I think we are moving from a scenario where not only have we been uh mostly just ignoring or demonizing Hinduism but why might there be something new that makes us reconsider the role of and the plausibility of Imperial Christian it so my suggestion is that disclosure UFO disclosure of the kind I imagined earlier um nhi disclosure alien disclosure undermines exclusion through mythologizing in the way that Lewis um uh suggests obviously ignoring a tradition is not a sufficient response demonizing a tradition inappropriately is not a sufficient response what do we make of this mythologizing kind of claim that Lewis tries to use so Christianity Hindu and UFO lore all contain virgin births miraculous healings levitation passing through solid objects and profound spiritual teachings it's plausible that all of these are going to stand and fall together that is if it turns out that modern UFO experiencers are becoming pregnant without having sex which they seem to be that we see people being healed from diseases miraculously which they seem to be Etc Etc that there's more plausibly a common explanation to all of them if you accept Christianity and UFOs you're going to have to also accept Hinduism and in general you're going to have to accept that a lot of these things which have been allegedly mythologized away are likely to turn out to be true so that the number of contacts with beings who have the sort of Supernatural capacities that Jesus of Nazareth had might turn out to be quite numerous this is not surprising if you've spent any time with the indic traditions because Hinduism and jism and Buddhism they all believe that beings like Jesus in the sense described in the synoptic gospels have occurred in human history many times and that Jesus's Powers um and his insight and all of that are a result of his being an especially spiritually Advanced person another way in which disclosure might be relevant is that it undermines the equation of any one micro deity with macro God if we become aware of the involvement of very powerful non-human beings in our past it becomes much less plausible that any one culture was correct in exclusively equating their tribal deity with macro God if we come to believe that there is a fairly substantial community of beings that is engaging with Humanity that has powers of the kinds that the vas sorry that the dvas have then it's unlikely that any one of those beings was simply macro God in a way that is exclusive of the others this is especially true if the tribal micro deity inage engaged in Mor morally questionable activities so for instance in the story of Shiva we see this impatient beheading of a child this should lead us to question whether Shiva is properly fully equated with Brahman or whether he is something else in the case of the god of Israel the commands to commit genocide are comparable it's more plausible that tribal micro deities were always finite and imperfect non-human beings of some kind or another this is fully compatible with the success of all singularizing Arguments for macro God so this does in no way under mind the idea that macro God the Big G God the ground of all being the being that is responsible for the existence of all things that then which nothing greater can be conceived the first cause Etc this does nothing to undermine that what it does is to undermine the specific characters as described in the myth mythological tribal era um stories of the beings that are direct ly engaging us like Shiva and Vishnu um it's the the claim that those can be straightforwardly equated with macro God looks like it gets undermined and that we should just instead believe that there is a community of dvas and that they are not macro God except in the sense that the general pantheism or panentheism is true in which case everything is God in one way or another and then you could articulate different ways in which those beings are Divine big punch lines and then we can uh wrap things up so my suggestion is that Christianity might need to become more like Hinduism and the first thing I want to say about this is that this is nothing to be afraid of um this is Mahatma Gandhi um Gandhi was very intentionally synthesizing aspects of Christianity with aspects of Hinduism um by doing so he was able to overthrow one of the most powerful governments in the world in a nonviolent way um there's every reason to believe that a healthy synthesis of Hinduism and Christianity is uh going to be perfectly capable of providing a rich and life satisfying worldview in which we can um persist in fact just in general a worldview that can unite Christianity and Hinduism is better than one that can't it has always been a peculiar feature of Christianity that it is felt Imperial Christianity that it has felt it necessary to condemn Traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism and it would be better if Christianity could alter its um dogmas in a way that would allow for a more substantial um uh recognition of the goodness of other Traditions Christianity also did used to be more like Hinduism that is in the apostolic era there was a wide variety of theological Expressions including ones that look a lot like the Hindu doctrines of avatars and their various States various concepts of who Jesus was how he related to the Divine Etc were fleshed out in ways that are allowed in Hinduism but that are not allowed in Christianity and the reason is because the politicians got involved there has never been a Hindu Constantine and for that reason Hinduism continues to express a very broad range of theological possibilities which Christianity has not allowed itself to do essentially because it aligned itself with the Imperial desire to homogenize belief across the Empire to make it easier to rule the punchline for me then is that after disclosure synoptic Christianity that is the stories of Jesus being born of a virgin perform performing Miracles walking on water raising the dead being crucified and raised from the dead himself those stories all become more plausible than they did before because then we start to see other cases in which those same kinds of powers and capacities were exhibited the standard of evidence then goes down in order to believe that such things actually happened but Imperial Christianity will likely become less plausible thank you