cosmist – Divine Council

This third transcript is Part 2 of the presentation Michael Heiser gave in 2013 to Future Congress 2. It’s entitled “The Post-Christian Future, Part Two, Pop Culture as High Priest of the Post-Christian Religious Worldview.

Part two is ~8500 words and includes 40 slides. All the material (and excerpts, below) is owned and copyrighted by Dr. Heiser and please consider supporting his work in creating, presenting, and posting such presentations on Youtube.

The excerpts, below, are 1/8th of the entire transcript. They are not a summary of the presentation.

Pop Culture as High Priest of the Post-Christian Religious Worldview

MH is Michael S. Heiser

MH: What I’m going to focus on is talking about the post-Christian culture post-Christian condition. And then sort of zero in on how in the post-Christian world what you’re going to see, as far as the morphing of Christianity. And I’m not saying that the morphing is going to be good. In fact, I’m suggesting that the morphing is not a good thing. And it’s really going to morph into something that’s actually very old. And we’ll talk about that at that point. So this is going to be sort of, hey here’s what I think it’s going to look like. And it’s not really just opinion because I’m going to show you what people are saying right now okay, the Futurists scholars and religious studies scholars and pop culture that sort of thing. And we will comment on it as we go.

MH: Techno-utopian values. The usual suspects, here: progress, purposeful evolution, human power over nature, material or technological advancement as the key to success in the future world, all that sort of stuff. Freedom really translates to don’t give me any rules or any dogma so I can be free — happiness and hedonism right in their presentation. The singularity, something we’ll talk about momentarily.

MH: But I want to zero in on this document: “A Cosmist Manifesto,” this one here, and here are the ten points. I’ve abbreviated the annotations for the cosmos manifesto, but here are the ten principles, ten points humans will merge with technology to a rapidly increasing extent. It’s a new phase of the evolution of our species.

MH: You might be thinking cyborgs here, which is one think about it. But if you know anything about nanotechnology that’s an invisible integration. That’s something you never see, but it has the potential. Once you have control over every atom in your body I mean you know every molecule you can change the human species as we know it. And this is going to be and is now, I mean, you can buy whole books on the ethics of nanotechnology. I’ve read a couple of them this year again to get my head into the sequel to the novel. And they’re talking about things like elimination of disease, optimizing the human DNA for its various potentials, and they’re really ultimately talking about immortality because you’re dying cell by cell and every cell is made of molecules and at you know that sort of thing. Well if you can control and release nanobots into the body so to speak that instantly repair cellular loss you have potential immortality other than somebody you know shooting you in the head or something like that I mean you get the idea. You will not age you will not decline as a physical specimen. So this is how it’s going to be cast, but this is the sort of merging they’re talking about, too. It’s not just what we would sort of think of as a cyborg.

MH: So what’s the theological cost? Well, we become divine apart from God’s plan of glorification.

MH: It redefines salvation only in terms of the end, glorification, rather than it dismisses the means which is the cross and the whole reason for it which is sin.

MH: I drew this from my series I did on The Da Vinci Code, someone out there may have seen.

MH: So, what is Gnosticism? The basics. Well, the Gnostics believe that there is something they refer to as the true God or the light or pneuma, which is spirit. And isn’t God a spirit, doesn’t John 4 say that? God is a spirit; he’s pre-existent, God is preexistent, uncaused, and perfect? Sounds pretty biblical, so far.

MH: Gnostics imagined the true God of being both male, the Father, and also female. And the reason they thought this was because everything else that exists is produced by this God.

MH: Now, in terms of cosmology, the highest Aeon is called, in Gnosticism, the Logos. Is that a familiar term? Okay, this is the highest son of the true God, the Logos. The first aeon, the first emanation, the first act of the father, he is the entire likeness and image of the true God. And these are Gnostic statements okay. He’s the form of the formless, the body of the bodyless, the face of the invisible, the word of the unutterable and all these things. And he actually possesses the knowledge of all the eons. He is unquestionably superior. He’s the top dog, the top Eon.

MH: Now, the Logos right here again is the top, and together the law goes with the true God, the father and mother element in the true God, form the Triad. Let ‘s just call it a Trinity and be done with it. It’s not the same as a Trinity. If you know your trinitarianism, this is not same. But they’re using the three language.

MH: Last point: there’s a whole scholarly book. This is University of Chicago Press this, and this is a dense read, it’s a scholarly book called mutants and mystics science fiction superhero comics and the paranormal. And guess who wrote it? Our friend Jeffrey Kripal. He has an entire chapter if you’re into UFOs this will be shocking to you. his entire last chapter is on Whitley Strieber and communion. The whole purpose of the book is to show how comic books, and specifically the alien theme, has been a useful and wonderful and delightful vehicle for transmitting the truths of Gnosticism. I mean, they’re not secretive about this. It’s just, here it is, you know?

MH: I highly recommend that you read this. He argues that much of the recent popular culture of the u.s. Comes from what we used to be called the paranormal. He has a third book called authors of the impossible where he as an academic says academic scholars ought to own up to the fact that paranormal stuff is real. And he’s arguing in favor of paranormal stuff within the account.

MH: He even goes into Madame Blavatsky. None of this is new. The whole alien thing is just rehashed Gnosticism slash occultism slash theosophy slash whatever, fill in the blank, for a technological society. That’s all it is. And this is what’s going to reach the masses.

MH: And what I’m telling you this whole presentation comes down to this: the adaptation is going to be led by people who know what they’re doing and will control the vocabulary and teach others. They will teach others to mine the vocabulary and morph the theology, and it’s only going to take a generation before that becomes the articulation of what Christianity is.