Teleomachy: The Transhuman and the Divine Problem with Social Purposes

Speaker 1

Charles Randall Paul is the founder and president of the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy. New York and Utah that works to build trust between religious critics and rivals. He is the co-founder of The World Table, a software platform for respectful conversations on the internet. He received a B. S. from Brigham Young University in Social Psychology and an MBA from Harvard University. After a career as a commercial real estate developer, he obtained a PhD at the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought. He and his wife, Jan, have five children and 15 grandchildren. Please welcome Randy.

Charles Randall Paul

Can God have limitations? asks President Kimball. I’m glad it was a question. Because my report is yes, and he would not want it any other way.

Charles Randall Paul

I’ve taken my liberties here today to respond to a couple of things and in Mormon style, I feel impressed. to uh respond to uh Brian Johnson’s comment comments. Uh first, give a context. Those of you who are scholars in the room who care about this, I’ll be talking heavily influenced by uh Radical empiricism and personalism as my religious context. William James and Jonathan Haidt. By the way, if you haven’t Seen any of Jonathan Haight’s work on the social psychology of conflict in our country today? Check him out on the internet. It’s great stuff. In terms of social psychology, They deeply influence me. And in social theory, of course, Joseph Smith’s notions of Zion coupled heavily with French-Belgian scholar who’s about 74 years old by the name of Chantal Mouffe today, who has written a great set of books. My favorite being agonists or agonistics, and you’ll see why I’m going to be talking about that word today in a big, big way.

Charles Randall Paul

In terms of Brian Johnson’s work and some of the work we heard today, I believe there’s a basic notion that comes from Plato, if you look at our Western history, that if we just could have the mind of God, if we just knew the full truth and the full context, our behavior would be good. Period. The problem, therefore, the fundamental problem is ignorance, lack of perspective. Knowledge, full knowledge, equals good. My whole theory is that’s wrong. That I’m at Dostoevskian, where he believes there’s what he called stupid freedom to do for no reason at all evil, to literally act to harm. And we put that out there today as a radical assumption of everything I’m talking about. You’ll see where it applies in many places.

Charles Randall Paul

What’s the therapy? If you cannot, no matter how smart you are, By action on another or in put into another, even in God’s presence, in the war in heaven, we have the classic example. No atheists, right? There is the loving being, and yet there’s a war in heaven. What is going on here? I think this is a deep Mormon mythological, and meaning not in any negative sense, in a sense of deep meaning. Aspect that has informed all my work. So, I would resist Brother Johnson’s notion That if we just could all get there as superhuman knowers, the behavior would follow just fine in terms of our. And I’d love to have a conversation more with him on that subject. Um next point quickly.

Charles Randall Paul

I believe that we are in a divine, lively experiment, to use another one of my favorite characters, Roger Williams, in optimizing the experience of joy-producing love. Though I don’t claim that there is a ultimate purpose that is final, the penultimate purpose of our System of salvation or our divinities is to optimize joy-producing love and that that itself is always a negotiation. There is no commandment set. There is no formula that will allow it to be fixed and final. It’s always a question of mutual negotiation. Of what love means between us now. Speaking with God, speaking with each other, it’s an open question. It’s very important, given my remarks, that you understand that that to me is the driving purpose. And I’ll be talking about teleamachi today, or conflict or war over purposes. I believe we do have that as part of our structure.

Charles Randall Paul

God is love, and Christ at the end of his life, of course, said, You are no longer my servants. You are my friends. If you want to be a Christian, you will love each other like I love you, right? This idea of the form we call friendship. Couples with the idea of what love is. It’s equivalent as far as we can get in communicating in this world to friendship. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that again in a few minutes. But I’m going to my final points first so that if I lose steam later, you can all say, oh, I think he said this. Okay. And the next one I’m going to put a point on my point.

Charles Randall Paul

According to the doctrine of Joseph Smith, 132nd section, everlasting or eternal beings are gods. It’s provocative to say it, but I think we have to all admit it: that we have various definitions of gods as Mormons, believing God is not the answer to a joyful eternal life. Is crucial to what I’m about to say. Just living forever is not the answer to joy. Just having the ability or capacity To avoid scarcity of anything you would worry about in this world is not the production of joy.

Charles Randall Paul

Joy that matters is derived from a free gift of another free agent that you cannot command or control. The one thing in heaven that you value most, that our gods value most, is a free agent to love me. Our God is a voracious lover who can’t get what he wants by his desire. You have to participate. You have to give the free gift to God. Just as God gave us through Jesus and his example, he loved us first so we would love him. He puts the extender out there. But that which is most valuable in heaven is that which gods cannot command or do with all their technology and all their knowledge, which is to have another free agent to love them. And that’s what makes it powerful, right? That’s why we’re all important.

Charles Randall Paul

And just to say it outright, I believe that we ought to stop. I’m a Mormon transhumanist, this business of God in embryo. We’re all gods already. In Toronto Mormons, we are all gods already. By the definition I’ve said, we’re eternal intelligences. I mean, if you’re a little kid, you’re not a subhuman. You’re not a human in embryo. You’re a human. Right? And so we are divine beings, and that’s why we have this tension in our society between people I love here who I agree with and disagree with.

Charles Randall Paul

When Joseph Smith in King Follett says, The great secret is if we were to see him today, he’d be sitting out there and you could talk to him like a friend. That did not sound like a mystical experience. I’m not saying what it was, but I’m trying to say this is an important notion, more than a notion, direction of Mormonism. We don’t even believe, I think, at one level our own doctrine. It certainly hasn’t been canonized, right? For some reason. But I push it there in a society like this, because it makes a deep difference to say we’re already there, that the fall was from divinity, if you will.

Charles Randall Paul

This experience was what the Christian theologians would call kenosis, an emptying. It wasn’t only an emptying for Jesus. It was an empathy for all of us. We’ve had our brains knocked out. We don’t, you know, we’re incapable of a lot of things that we were probably capable of before. We certainly lost our memories. And so, with the idea of a personal existence prior, we can see that we’ve all gone through this kenosis and For some reason, and I’m claiming the reason that Jesus gave was to enhance our ability to experience and enjoy love. That’s what this world’s about. Okay. And that’s why people can get it even going through the spirit world and just coming down here for a few seconds. I think we, well, anyhow, that’s another subject. Okay, that’s the background.

Charles Randall Paul

Let me go now to the paper. I’ve got ten minutes. How many minutes do I have left? Help. Uh ten. Okay, ten, five. Ten. Ten, I got ten.

Charles Randall Paul

Ray Kurzwa recent recently said that if all future advances in technology were already realized, eliminating today’s scarcity of resources Extending life indefinitely, expanding knowledge massively and universally, there would be chaos. Because human ethical habits, philosophical, and political systems have not evolved to handle the exponential change in human capacity from technological innovation.

Charles Randall Paul

We have the thesis here, and I’ll just jump to right now then, is that With all our work on transhuman extension of life, we have not extended our capacity for Complex dealing with conflict, especially the conflict over what we do next. For when we get to a point where we’re no longer worried about feeding the poor, because there aren’t That many more or any poor, let’s just put it there.

Charles Randall Paul

We, in Mormonism, have a wonderful analog. for what’s going to happen from a trans from some transhumanist point of view in a few decades, maybe a century or two, we’ll have on Earth Superhumans who no longer have scarcity issues, but who have this great question of what do we new what do we do next? Right? And the conflict will then be: what is our collaborative effort next? Well,

Charles Randall Paul

Where was that once in our story? In the war, Council and War in Heaven, right? We had that same story going on there. So, in a sense, we’ll have a A recapitulation of a war in heaven will have it among superhumans on earth. And my project in life in general and here is to find a way of engaging in that conflict over ultimate purposes between beings who have different views of the good future in a way that is loving, respectful, and not violent.

Charles Randall Paul

I want to, given the time, just Trash most of what I’ve done here and just say, I’d like to talk about these categories and write them down if you have them. I’ve been working on these for years. On one side of your paper, put Enemy, then next would put antagonist, and then put in the middle agonist, and then put ally, and then put friend. Okay? I’m going to work with five categories very quickly with you.

Charles Randall Paul

A friend is someone who Loyally cares about your well-being and is willing to sacrifice deeply his or her well-being in regards to what you see as good for you. It’s a Christ-like action in that sense. It’s a deep loyalty.

Charles Randall Paul

An ally is someone who shares your interests, might not give a darn about you, might not even like you, and might certainly not be committed to you as a loyal friend, but they share your interests.

Charles Randall Paul

An agonist is someone who disagrees with you deeply and resists your persuasions, but does so In a sense of mutual respect, the agonist’s goal is to convert you without coercion or threat. But to change your view. And it’s a serious conflict, but it’s a contest without coercion.

Charles Randall Paul

An antagonist is someone who is acting like an enemy. Moving in coercive means seems to have malevolent motives toward you. But You do not know yet whether that person has malevolent motives or thinks you might have malevolent motives and is acting defensively.

Charles Randall Paul

All right, an enemy. Wants to eliminate you, silence you, doesn’t give a darn about you earlier today. I thou, no, I thou. You’re an it, right? And you’re a bother. Okay? That’s an enemy.

Charles Randall Paul

Now, the whole project that I am working on, and I think the script it has scriptural and social psychological Basis for serious consideration is to shift our general view of those who deeply disagree with us about our ultimate purposes and methods. from people who appear to be antagonists to agonists. People that we can respect as honorable rivals. In a persuasive contest that will go on for eternity.

Charles Randall Paul

The idea here is the screw-up, and remember, this is a speculation. I’m not saying what happened. But the war in heaven could be seen as a failure of divine love that lost its patience, right? It came in and beat up the enemy. Darn it, we’ve had it, we got to get on with this thing. We’re going to have a world or not, right? And it’s time, right? So this idea of

Charles Randall Paul

Of Christ actually, the whole atonement program of Christ is a way of saying, well, the war in heaven didn’t work. What will work? How can we move people’s hearts and minds without coercion? Or violence to come our way? How do we get the third part to come our way? Well, let’s try this radical sacrifice of love that is undeniable to try to move the hearts. Truman Madsen used to say, if getting up on that cross and going to Gethsemane, if you learn about that and if that doesn’t get your heart, you’ve got a heart of absolute stone, right? So this is deep in his thought, too. I remember years ago we used to talk about that. Anyhow, so I think what I’d like to do is simply say then.

Charles Randall Paul

We know that the instant there’s a group, they’ll be heretics, even if they’re all of one faith or one group. Radical perspectivalism is part of Mormon theory. If God is a person, there’s got to be a reason that God has a different experience than you do. With different experiences, you will have different views of what the next action, good action, could be.

Charles Randall Paul

A deep Mormon idea that I’m challenging is that To be of one heart and one mind and having no poor among you means that you ultimately come to a convergence on all important What we would call content issues. That’s the most beautiful blue period. We all know it now, right? That is the only way to goodness. We all know it now.

Charles Randall Paul

My view is The great liar, not God, said, There is no other way. There’s always another way. That is the idea of freedom. that allows us to negotiate the good going forward. And why we’re interesting to God and each other in eternity, why it’s not boring, is we’re always trying to create new collaborative projects, if you will, experiments without without a cycle theory of history, a spiral theory of change going forward, sometimes not getting it quite right. It’s always, though, in a telemako, always having the possibility of a serious war. A desire for imposing the next program on the group as a possibility, and that to be avoided.

Charles Randall Paul

by this idea of being a honorable and loving agonist who you actually desire to have in your eternal life. You actually find that bother Deeply moving to you because you find that other person or entity wanting you to be part of his or her life, and you wanting the same.

Charles Randall Paul

And throwing out the, in my opinion, the flawed idea of unconditional love. All love is conditioned on particulars in this sense. And we choose who we love. And that’s why love matters. We love in hierarchies.

Charles Randall Paul

The conflict over whose program is next to be adopted in a heavenly environment can hurt your feelings if it’s not yours. You might say, Oh, well, we’ve got an eternity here, and eternity is, you know, just get in line, and it’s no big deal. We’ll just wait a few gazillion years. Don’t get upset if your experiment isn’t the one that. The Grand Council wants to do next, we know that in the particular reality we still have our feelings hurt.

Charles Randall Paul

Envy can come up and overcome love, and I believe that I’ll just end by saying that if we oppose Envy to love, we can see the Luciferian move was not so much give me the glory but what the Buddhists would call a lack of mudita. Instead of taking joy and pleasure in lo uh by loving uh another being being elevated, taking joy in that, envy moved in. and destroyed the interrelation of love that is the basis for joyfulness, right? I’m going to end there and I’ll give this one last little beautiful statement.

Charles Randall Paul

It’s a conflation of Bonnie Hoenig’s work and Samuel Chambers. They’re both Students of Chantal Mouffe, to affirm the perpetuity of the contest is not to celebrate a world without points of stabilization. It is to affirm the reality of perpetual contest, even with an ordered setting, and to identify the affirmative dimensions of contestation. Agonism is not simply the undifferentiated celebration of antagonism. Agonism implies deep respect and concern for the other. Indeed, the Greek agon refers most directly to an athletic contest oriented not merely toward victory or defeat, but emphasizing the importance of the struggle itself, a struggle that cannot exist without the opponent. There must be opposition in all things. And that doesn’t mean evil. That means the edge that creates intelligibility itself. Victory through forfeited a fault or over an unworthy opponent comes up short compared to a defeat at the hands of a worthy opponent, a defeat that still brings honor. An agonistic discourse will therefore be one marked not merely by conflict, but just as importantly, by mutual admiration.

Charles Randall Paul

And we’re both live to fight another day. Thanks.