Yeah I saw that about “caught up in the clouds.” I had been introduced to Wright before and my reaction is mixed. I agree on a lot but not about everything. As for Peterson’s songs, I just finished listening to “Silence of God,” “Matthew Begats,” “Faith to be Strong,” and now starting “After the last Tear Falls.” My dislike isn’t just for the usual answers in eschatology, rather it is this whole idea that the future is written already to which I am fundamentally opposed.
I quite agree with regards to 2-5, but the objection to #1 sounds like reincarnation which I do not agree with at all, not even in the Christianized version of this happening once to return us to a post-apocalyptic Jesus ruled kingdom. The physical universe serves a good purpose as the womb in which our spirit is conceived and grows but then it is time to be born and there is no point in going back into the womb. Going back to the other thread “Would any scientific discovery make you lose your faith,” this contradicts reason number 1 why I believe in any of this religious stuff at all. I cannot believe that this mathematical space-time structure is the sum total of what we are – it looks more like a representation in a computer game to me. I can well believe that the laws of nature are necessary for our free will and development but not for our eternal existence as if we were so fundamentally different from God and the angels that our existence depends on a bunch of mathematical equations. And as big as the universe may be, our imaginations are so infinitely bigger than the physical universe, it just isn’t enough for an eternal life – not for me.
Though… perhaps one of the problems is that traditional views of heaven have been even smaller, i.e. less imaginative than the reality of the physical universe.