Michael and Christa return with the second part of their conversational recap on the three powers. This one covers the evil of diets and the moral limitations of your survival instinct, the nature of truth and fact, the age of the Spirit and the reformation of the affections, and more. LINKS Michael’s Patreon Ep. 20: Good and Evil, Righteousness and Wickedness Norbert Wiener Second-Order Cybernetic Philosophy (Super Observer concept) Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb Nobel Speech (1970), by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn TRANSCRIPT 00:00:01:01 - 00:00:10:02 Michael This is episode 22 of the Nothing Human podcast. Nothing Human Conversations: Three Powers Recap with Christa: Part Two. 00:00:10:05 - 00:00:31:18 Michael And he says to his disciples, hey, do you see this righteousness of the Pharisees? This this like meticulous box-checking that they do? If your righteousness doesn’t exceed, exceed, that righteousness, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. So, I mean, he just calls it out. It’s like, this is fake. This isn’t real. This is superficial, 00:00:31:20 - 00:00:31:29 Christa Right. 00:00:32:00 - 00:00:44:03 Michael You think it’s always right to fast? You’re wrong. Why do your disciples feast when we’re all fasting? Well, because my disciples don’t love evil. 00:00:55:24 - 00:01:30:12 Michael Welcome to the Nothing Human podcast, a biblically informed thinkspace for exploring and articulating all the ways we make or break sense of human experience. I’m your host, Michael Minkoff. From my youngest days, I’ve been fascinated with categories of thought those often unconscious filing mechanisms that invisibly populate our premises, direct our inquiries, and ordain our conclusions. Join me as we investigate and interrogate our assumptions in an effort to articulate a more cohesive understanding of human information within the superstructure of God’s truth. 00:01:30:15 - 00:03:16:04 Michael Well, this is the second of a few more of these that are going to be coming up, which are conversations that I’m having with Christa about the three power series. If you haven’t listened to the first part of this conversation, you can go ahead and listen to that. It’s episode 21, and if you haven’t listened to the 15 episodes on the Three Powers with the attending five extra episodes, etc., you can check those out as well. All of the episodes of the Nothing Human podcast and my bonus podcast Being Something Extra are available on my website, NothingHumanPodcast.com. You can also leave a comment or ask a question on my website on the relevant episode. Just navigate over to Nothing Human podcast.com and leave your question or comment on the relevant episode. And I would really appreciate if you all would support me on Patreon. It’s $5 a month or $60 a year. That’s really helpful for us, for my family, so that I can make this sustainable and justify all the time I’m spending on this. And it’s also the case that if you want to support me in other ways, and you don’t necessarily want to give every month, if you could rate or review this podcast on whatever podcast platform you’re using right now, that would be really helpful. If you’re listening to this right now and you want to watch me and Christa talk, I’m currently recording video right now, and we have video for all of these conversation episodes, so you can either see that on YouTube, on my YouTube channel, and like and subscribe and all that stuff on that. And you can also go and watch this on Spotify. Spotify has a video capacity. So I think that’s pretty much it for the preliminaries on this. Let’s go ahead and get into my second part of conversation with Christa on the Three Powers recap. 00:03:16:06 - 00:03:24:02 Christa All right. So I’m gonna get my thing. This is episode six. 00:03:24:04 - 00:03:25:24 Michael On the will. 00:03:25:26 - 00:04:09:24 Christa Yes. You talk about that the body on its own terms is tuned to survival. So its inherent morality cannot transcend good and evil. I well, I had, I put this in there. This is really … I mean it could be relevant, but I did a five day cleansing fast. You know, I don’t know if told you about that. And I would wake up, and I would be like ravenously hungry because our bodies are tuned for survival. And so we … that’s the hunter, you know, mode. Go out or whatever. And, anyway, that’s what I thought of when when you said that the body was tuned to survival. Yeah. Are we good? 00:04:09:27 - 00:04:11:12 Michael Yeah. Okay. 00:04:11:14 - 00:04:12:15 Christa So. 00:04:12:17 - 00:04:14:12 Michael She’s over here knocking her mic and stuff. 00:04:14:15 - 00:04:16:19 Christa Sorry, sorry. I’m trying not to. 00:04:16:20 - 00:04:19:02 Michael It’s almost like you, like, don’t podcast all the time or something. 00:04:19:02 - 00:04:28:07 Christa I don’t podcast at all, this will be my first time. So if you hear a knock on the mic, I’m sorry. I’m bad. 00:04:28:15 - 00:04:29:18 Michael You’re good. 00:04:29:21 - 00:04:34:27 Christa Maybe you can edit it out or something. Maybe with magic. I’ll try not to knock it anymore. 00:04:35:00 - 00:04:38:06 Michael I am a sorcerer. I will. We’ll see. 00:04:38:09 - 00:04:52:17 Christa Wizardry. All right. So, so explain that a little bit. Do you have anything else that you’d like to add to that? The body, on its own terms is tuned to survival. So its inherent morality cannot transcend good and evil. 00:04:52:19 - 00:05:32:09 Michael Right. So the … I talked about it a little bit in a later episode when I was talking about the body versus the flesh and how the Scriptures talks about those things, especially in the New Testament. Because in the New Testament you have this word soma in the Greek that means body. And then you have the word sarx, which generally speaking, refers to flesh. Sometimes that’s used really simply in terms of, you know, “parents according to the flesh,” like your bodily parents. Right? But other times you … especially in Paul, he’s talking about the flesh set against the Spirit. And there’s obviously a moral charge there. This is not just a bodily reality. There’s some sort of like a principle. 00:05:32:11 - 00:05:33:11 Christa So is that the different word “sarka.” 00:05:33:12 - 00:05:35:18 Michael A spiritual princ— No, it’s still sarx. 00:05:35:22 - 00:05:36:05 Christa Oh, okay. 00:05:36:08 - 00:07:14:28 Michael Yeah. Which is what is really confusing to a lot of people. And it lent itself to a more Platonic view where the body bad, the spirit good. And, you know, so in some ways you have the ascetics and other, you know, monastic movements that say you have to discipline the body in order to really achieve moral virtue. That moral virtue is becoming more and more and more and more and more separated from the needs and desires of the body. Right? So even Aquinas is saying that the affections and the bodily appetites are not ultimately part of the intellectual life. You know, these kinds of things. Okay. So I disagree with that. But at the same time I … you’d have to be like, well, then why does Paul use that word to talk about the spiritual principle? If it’s not, you know, if the body is not bad, you know, there’s not a bad thing in the body, like, why would Paul use this word which refers to flesh and even just, like body, you know, meat? Why would he use that word if it doesn’t have some moral connotation? And it obviously does. Okay? So it’s like how do you how do you sort that? The way I sort it is with this—that the body’s only morality is survival. Its only intrinsic morality is survival. So if you think about how you’re functioning in the world, if all of your … if you’re only functioning biologically, then you’re oriented towards running from sticks and running towards carrots. You’re functioning basically animalistically. 00:07:15:00 - 00:07:15:10 Christa Okay. 00:07:15:18 - 00:07:21:28 Michael And that unfortunately is the source of most sin. 00:07:22:00 - 00:07:23:09 Christa Sure. I mean, definitely. 00:07:23:10 - 00:08:17:26 Michael So there is … because the … righteousness is choosing between goods and evils. Sometimes it is righteous to suffer harm. But the body will never say that. Do you see what I’m saying? Like the literal body will never say it is righteous to suffer harm. It will say, my principle is no harm. Avoid all harm. Seek all pleasure. That is my principle. And actually there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that. There isn’t. I mean it’s telling you what’s going on there. You know it’s like, “Hey we’re hungry. Will you please feed us?” But there are times when you have to say, “We are hungry, but we’re not going to eat.” There are times when you have to say, we’re not terribly hungry but we are going to eat, right? 00:08:17:29 - 00:08:18:14 Christa Yeah. 00:08:18:17 - 00:08:39:15 Michael There are times when that’s the case, like you went over to your grandma’s and she made, you know, more food than you, and you just ate a meal because you’re … you should have known before you went over your grandma’s that she was going to have food for you, but you’re not going to be rude toward her. And so you’re going to stuff your belly, right? In a way that would be totally and completely gluttonous and irresponsible in most circumstances. But in that circumstance is true righteousness. 00:08:39:17 - 00:08:45:00 Christa You know, that was dad’s grandmother. She really did do that. She would she would continue to tell them to eat and eat and eat. 00:08:45:01 - 00:08:59:21 Michael Yes. And you’re sick there. And if you were to do that to yourself in some like Roman vomitorium, anybody would call you a glutton. Right? But
