A few days ago, I delivered a talk entitled “A Better Apocalypse: Ancient Eschatology for a Transhuman World”. I gave this talk at the 2013 conference of the Morman Transhumanist Association, a group which I have been incredibly fortunate to become friends with over the past two years.

I would love to discuss this topic more broadly. To invite that conversation, I am posting the link to the video, the audio for download (can be loaded on mp3 player or phone), and an edited transcript of the talk.

I have always been drawn to things which are bitter-sweet.

Well, at least since I was 15. I remember hearing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as a kid, and wanting to turn it off because it was so depressing.

I hope that one day humanity will assess its gifts, its skills, and its history, and come to the conclusion that our purpose in this world is to cultivate and create life.

Certainly, this is what we have always done — not just in procreating, but in our efforts to domesticate animals, to breed new kinds of creatures, to grow plants and fruits and pets that would never survive in the wild. This has been with mixed results, but I think at the root of those impulses was the urge to bring more goodness into the world.

The Problem of Evil is the apparent contradiction between the idea that God is infinitely loving, and the fact that he created us in a world with such intense suffering.

It’s a serious problem for Christianity — and it’s probably one of the main reasons people end up rejecting the notion of God altogether. Even if they never consider the question philosophically, most people have dealt with the problem emotionally. They know, at a deep level, that there is something wrong here.

The Problem of Evil contrasts three ideas: