Thinking With Somebody Else's Head

This is episode 12 of the Modern Relevance of God audio course here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. I think one of the greatest difficulties I've had in coming closer to spirituality has been a pretty common one: mixing up God with religion. If God was all the mess stirred up by the church over the centuries, I wanted nothing to do with Him. It's a frequent oversimp...

How many times have you heard this phrase: "I don't believe in God anymore because how could a loving God allow all this misery on Earth?" Usually it's a Bruce Willis-like character in a war zone in some desolate African country squinting his eyes and muttering weightily, "God abandoned this place a long time ago." The writers mean this to be profound. a world-weary comment on the state of Man, bu...

Can God and science exist together? I think that’s a fundamental question. I've heard some of the more vocal scientists proclaiming that a belief in God is the sign of a weak mind. Well, one thing I’ve discovered: the deeper I delve into the theological and philosophical knowledge, the more I encounter rather brilliant minds, actually. Some very intelligent people have speculated about, argued for...

The Dark Night of the Soul. In the theological canon, this signifies a spiritual crisis in a journey towards union with God. In more secular language, that would be the transformational journey that takes place when you're suffering.   A journey of transformation. A conversion, even. A deep repentance for a path ill chosen. And at the end, "the sudden reception of grace," as Aquinas called it...

So far in our series, we've been looking at the nature of life and God, and how that knowledge has been pushed aside from our daily considerations and from scientific inquiry, obviously. The concretization of the scientific method was an attempt to free the human being from superstition, squalor and medieval cruelty.   The cherished ascendance of reason that emerged out of the philosophy at t...

Welcome to Episode 7 of our Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.   I was struck in re-listening to our last episode that perhaps some more explanation of the story of man might be necessary. I also realize the challenge today of Biblical references. Religious life has often been equated with fanaticism, and that conjures u...

Welcome to Episode 6 of our Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.   You might have noticed in our first few episodes, I've been mentioning the importance of the wisdom of the past to our understanding of the present. And especially in our understanding of God and spirituality.   That's not been by accident. There were...

Welcome to Episode five of our Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. I’m Richard Lloyd Jones.   In our last episode, we looked at some of the scientists responsible for modern science's turn to materialism. Something that sought to make God irrelevant in the creation of life. English biologist, Richard Dawkins, perhaps best epitomises that point of...

 I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Episode 4 of our Modern Relevance of God special podcast series on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. In our last episode, we looked at some of the consequences of materializing science, the reverberations of which we are obviously still feeling today. From elevating the bean counters to the lofty perches of power to resolving pandemics with material pro...

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and welcome back to our continuing series. This is Episode 3 of our special podcast series, The Modern Relevance of God. This episode is the first of 2 parts exploring how science turned its back on God. Well, the dominant scientific view has actually never been tolerant of dissent, and we know the consequences of challenging authority, don't we? From burning at the stake...

I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and welcome to Episode 2 of our special podcast series, The Modern Relevance of God.  One of the fundamental problems in doing a series on God is the branding that happens of anyone broaching the subject. "Modern? God? Oh my, how 13th century of you!"  Well, religious nutters we are not. The Theology Department of the Keppe & Pacheco Trilogical College is a s...

 I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Welcome to something new on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. A podcast series on what I consider one of the most important subjects in our world today. Spirituality. Finding meaning in this crazy, inverted world today. We could all use some of that, couldn't we? So I've dug back through past Thinking with Somebody Else's Head podcasts and culled the best stuff I c...

 If you were watching a TV series about the pandemic lockdown we are currently suffering through, you might look at it as a phantasmagorical kind of thing. "Oh, that could never happen," you might think. "It's too much." And, of course, they do magnify and dramatize events for dramatic purposes in those series. Real-life dystopia proceeds more glacially. But we're seeing the elements - neighb...

 As we turn the page on what was surely one of the most unprecedented years in modern history, we look forward to better times in 2021. It's natural to do that - greet the new with optimism. Hope, after all, springs eternal in the human breast as Alexander Pope noted almost 300 years ago. But this New Year, there is trepidation present in the mix, and maybe even despair in some. Fear not, how...

It's as old as philosophy itself. Freedom. Free will. Free choice.  We've taken it for granted in our western world. "Of course we're free," we gloat when comparing ourselves to those in the world we consider unfree. Until we're not free. To get together in groups, or sit tight to another table at a restaurant, or even go to a basketball game. Which should cause us to howl in protest. Except...

It's July, and we're still in the middle of the pandemic. Actually, we've been in the middle of this for what, 4 months now? You ever seen anything like this? Of course not. Unless you're a Highlander who lived through the Plague. This crisis feels different, doesn't it, from all the other global crises we've faced. The real ones I mean ... not the big screen inventions. Different because it's hig...

It's week 8 of the quarantine here in Brazil. Restaurants and shops are still closed, they're taking temperatures before they let me in to the supermarket across the street, and no end in sight to the general Big Pharma orientation to lock down everyone, high risk or no. It's an entirely materialistic response to a health condition that is not only physically solved, showing the clearly limited sc...

There must have been a "Eureka!" moment back in the late 1800s when, investigating an infection in the French wine industry, Louis Pasteur happened upon the discovery of micro-organisms. He must have felt the jolt of a thrill of realizing that he'd stumbled upon something really monumental. He was perfectly aware of the concurrent research being conducted by rival French scientists, including the...

One of the challenges in our modern philosophy lies in the difficulty of acknowledging right and wrong, good and bad. We've blurred the lines so much it's almost impossible to clarify this in any absolute way. An artist puts a glass of water on a shelf and calls it an oak tree, and defends that it's an oak tree because he says it is. And there's no argument to be used against his declaration becau...

One of the things that's happened to me over the 18 plus years I've been in Brazil working with the science of Analytical Trilogy elaborated by Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist, Norberto Keppe, has been a gradual opening of the door to my spirituality. I still consider myself pretty "feet on the floor", which I guess is a nice way of saying materialistic, but there is a flicker of the...

As we head into Christmas, we often take time to reflect on friends and family, on hopes and dreams, on plans and logistics. After all, we've got the trips to hometowns, the Christmas gift buying, the parking lot congestion to navigate. It's a time to reflect on what's happened, and how fast it's all gone by. And in those times, we need the wisdom and dedication to commit our efforts to doing what...

Back when I was a kid playing street hockey in my hometown, a couple of Dutch immigrant kids came out hoping to join us. They were carrying hockey sticks their father had made by nailing a piece of wood to long broom handles. These makeshift sticks were far from the sleek, black taped, store bought babies the rest of us were sporting, and my friends were lavish in the derision they heaped on the p...

In Norberto Keppe 's extraordinary book, Liberation of the People , he writes, "Humankind reckons among its numbers a few individuals who are completely sick. This includes those who have succeeded in attaining positions of social power." That's why the subtitle of his book is the Pathology of Power . He wrote that in 1984 - a good year for books like that as Orwell prophesized. But surprisingly,...

We're just out of the Easter period and some reflections. It was a tough week for the faithful. The burning of Notre Dame striking hard in that major center of Christian faith for 800 something years. And then the bombs exploding in Christian churches and popular hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, apparently in retaliation for those terrible attacks on mosques in New Zealand back in March. Does...

Temptation. Like most religious words, that one's been banalized and reduced from its original meaning. It means literally a trial or a test. A moment in your life when you have a choice to be faithful or not. Today, that's like faithful to a diet or a spouse, to a virtue or an ideal. But the original sense was to be tested in your faith to God. Something Job -ian - no matter what life throws at y...