SPEAKER_02 0:05

Welcome to Catholic in America, a podcast in partnership with OSV News. I'm Jason Atkins. Magnifica Humanitas, Octoria the 14th, warns of cultural assumptions guiding the digital revolution that are labeled transhumanism and post-humanism, a vision of life in which we transcend or surpass human limitations. Ominously, he connects this vision to a construction of the Tower of Babylon, the building of a city, Babylon, ordered around the love and worship of self, and not the love of God. The ancient city of Babylon was not free of worship, of course, but instead it glorified false gods upon their massive, towering cigarettes, as the illusion of scriptures to the tower of Babylon. Now, today is no different as we are in danger of building a new tower of Babylon, he says upon a vision of transcending the limitations of our bodies, the difficulties of the human condition involves struggles and strife, and even our own planet. In addition to transhumanism and post-humanism, we might add philosophies and religious views such as cosmism, occultism, and techno-futurism. Pope Leo says in Magnifica Humanitas that, quote, transhumanism and post-humanism encompass a range of currents and sensibilities, making it difficult to define them in a single, unambiguous way. They can be likened to an archipelago of conceptual islands, distinct yet connected by a common sea of assumptions, namely the central role of technology and the aspiration to transcend the limits of the human condition. End quote. Mapping for us that unfamiliar religious landscape is scholar of religion Diana Walsh-Pazulka. She turned her scholarly attention away from church history and debates about the physical location of purgatory to studying, among other things, the experiences of people who believe they've had encounters with non-human intelligences of various forms. That has led her into a universe of UFO conferences, hushed conversations with people in and out of government about unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs, and fascinating people who claim to be guided by some unknown mysterious forces that enlighten them with intelligence that surpasses all human understanding. In her new book, The Others, UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny, Dr. Pazulka weaves together a history of contact between human and non-human intelligences, some framed as angels, others as UFOs, and connects it to the rise of artificial intelligence. She connects that story to the warnings of Catholic thinkers such as Renee Girard and Marshall McLuhan, and science fiction visionaries such as Arthur C. Clarke and Terre Deschardins, who imagine a connected world, the connected world we have today, and how it could reshape human consciousness. Although UFOs and AI and the post-human visions underlying them are separate phenomena, they are, as Pope Leo says, connected like an archipelago of related concepts. And Dr. Pasilka helpfully connects some of those dots, which is why I invited her to join us on Catholic in America. She is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the author of Encounters, American Cosmic, and Heaven Can Wait. Her research bridges Catholic history, religious practice, and emerging technologies, and emerging reports of UFOs and super supra-terrestrial intelligence.

unknown 3:28

Dr.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

Diana Pazulka, welcome to Catholic in America. It's a pleasure to have you on the show.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

So happy to be here. Thanks, Jason.

SPEAKER_02 3:35

You are a scholar of religion and a professor of religious studies. Why is religion and why is your field a useful framework for looking at reality and studying it?

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Yeah, sure. So most people in the world are religious. So that's, you know, most people are practitioners of a religion, uh, regardless of what happens in, you know, France or uh even the United States has a high percentage of people who believe in in religion. So we're not as secular as people tend to think we are. So um I've always been interested in religion. And I entered, I became Christian fairly early in my life. And so for me, religious studies was a much more, I would call it a freer way of looking at religion than say going into theology. Because for theology, you know, it's a belief system. I am Christian, but I chose religious studies because I was interested in learning about the about religion in general. And for religious studies, the people who study religion under the guise of religious studies, we're we could be practitioners, but we don't have to be. Um we're we have different ways of accessing religion. Some are anthropologists, uh, some look just at languages and things like that, some are historians, some are archaeologists. So there's it's an interdisciplinary, very academic uh way of looking at religion. I was also interested in philosophy as a kid. So I also wanted to uh utilize the tools of philosophy to look at religion as well. So this is now that said, I did go to the Graduate Theological Union and my uh I worked under the Jesuits. So I was uh doing my master's uh under the Jesuits and uh took some courses in the Thomistic School and the Franciscan school and also UC Berkeley's philosophy program. So um, and I was in the my courses, I was I was with uh priests in formation. So while they were doing an MDiv, like a Masters of Divinity, I was doing an academic kind of track, but I was taking the courses that they were taking. A lot of my friends were priests in formation and so forth. Um so that's my education, and I went on to get a PhD uh specifically in religious studies. Uh my specialty was Catholic history, looking at usually like 19th century uh contact events like angel contact events and things like that. So um, so that's what I do in religious studies. I'm not a the theologian, I don't speak for any particular, you know, I'm not of a voice for Catholicism or anything like that, although I am a practicing Catholic.

SPEAKER_02 6:33

So you have seen the full schmorgas board of religions and religious practices uh that are out there today and can talk quite uh knowledgeably about many of them. Why why be Catholic in the in the sea of worldviews and and options out there on the religious cafeteria? Why be Catholic today?

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it, the options out there. So when people asked me about why I quote unquote chose to be a Catholic, and indeed I did choose, I actually didn't see it as a choice. So what happened was my I my dad is from uh a Catholic background, so his parents, you know, were Irish Catholic. So okay. Um my mother was from a completely secular tradition. So her father had been Italian Catholic, but gave up his religion and he married a Jewish woman. Okay, so my parents were secular, completely secular. I on one Good Friday, many, many years ago, when I was 11 years old, um, I was, you know, making Easter eggs, a very one could say secular, you know, holiday activity uh for kids. I was doing this at the dinner table and the television was on, and I just happened to catch Franco Zefferelli's Jesus of Nazareth. And I remember uh the very specific scene where the group is, you know, a group of men is just about to stone the adulterous woman, and he stops them, sits, you know, then he bends down to write something in the sand, and I was captivated. So I was captivated by this, and I stopped what I was doing, and it was a three-day kind of uh showing of Jesus of Nazareth ends on Sunday with the resurrection, no, uh the crucifixion. And honestly, being a kid, you know, 11, I wasn't really aware of Jesus' story. Of course I knew who he was, but I didn't know he was going to be crucified. And then, you know, I didn't know any of this. So it was really devastating to me because by that time I felt I was hooked. So I demanded that my mother take me to the store and and, you know, buy me a Bible. And she didn't know what to get me. So we got a red letter edition, the King James Version red letter edition. They thought that that would be appropriate for me, since I said, I really want to know about this guy, Jesus. So after that, I recognized as I started to read the Bible that it wasn't very easy to read, right? It's not like a modern textbook with, you know, this story ends here, this has, you know, it doesn't have a three-act play. There's no, you know, it doesn't make sense. So I I realized that as I kind of continued on and read it, that um first I knew I was Christian. And secondly, I knew I had to find a way to figure out what this, what the time period of Jesus', you know, um story was, what the context was, like what was he, who were the people he he was talking to? Uh, how did the Bible get put together? You know, all of these things I knew I had to go to school to learn how to do. Um, and I knew that was gonna be hard. And I knew it was gonna be a big long process. And I started to do some studying. This is before we had the internet, but I figured out that most likely it was gonna be the Catholic Church where I would learn this, right? So during this time period, I was also making my mother bring me to all these different Christian churches, and um, and then my dad, who was an attorney, had some, you know, contacts with the local uh Catholic schools, and he said, we're just gonna send you to this school. It's a Catholic school, it was run by the Sister to Mercy, and that was lucky. So I got to that school, and that's when I recognized that I was actually Catholic and that I could learn everything I wanted to know through through this church. So that's how I became Catholic. Um, since then I've learned a lot about a lot of different religions. Um, I've definitely respect for a lot of religions, and but I've always maintained Catholicism uh because I feel comfortable going to church there. Um I believe that, you know, I believe in that tradition. Uh I believe that that tradition is uh as, you know, it has some issues, obviously, but for me it's correct. So so that's why I maintained uh my Catholicism.

SPEAKER_02 11:02

I love that. Franco Zefferelli's Jesus of Nazareth is still my favorite movie. And it's a very good thing. Is it incredible? No, I didn't, it's for all its overacting, um, and you know, the famous Robert Powell Blue-eyed Jesus. Um, I it's just it's something that moved me as a kid. I watched it year after year and had my kids watch it. I just love that movie, and I just so I really resonate with that story. So you went on, and one of your early books, if not your first, you correct me if I'm wrong, was about the physical location of purgatory. That's really interesting.

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:37

What got you interested in in how do you stumble upon that topic? Yeah. And tell us a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

Yeah, so okay, so there was already, when I was in graduate school, this is in the late 1990s, there was already a um what we you know, we see here a what you'd call um kind of a resurgence of traditionalism within the Catholic Church. That was already happening in the late 1990s. So this was a pushback to Vatican II, right? And kind of the getting rid of the Catholic um traditional mass, uh getting rid of a lot of the saints and so forth. And I just kind of felt that this wasn't right, that there was something that was not quite right about what was happening. Um, so I then, you know, this is during the 90s. So if you're a graduate student in the humanities, you're gonna learn about what's called post-colonial scholarship. So we were all trained to do post-colonial scholarship, um, which means that, you know, instead of looking at the colonizers' understanding of like, you know, indigenous culture or whatnot, you're you're looking at the indigenous culture itself, or you're trying to. Um, this actually was really helpful. I know it sounds iwanic, but it was actually really helpful because when I started to look at uh Vatican II, because this is what I was doing for my dissertation, um, I was looking at the the Catholic Mass and the ways in which it shifted from um, you know, what it had been uh to what it is now. I began to see, and by the way, um because I my father came from an Irish Catholic background, I was really interested in that history of Irish Catholicism. So I did a lot of archival research uh of Ireland, and I began to see that the kind of things that happened to the Irish that the English did, like the colonial um, I guess you could call it the uh colonial strategies, like uh changing the way they dressed, the Irish changing their names, their very names, uh take getting rid of their language and stuff. I know this sounds really pretty intense, but I I started to see this in Vatican II. I was like, wow, all those strategies were being used on frankly the Catholic Mass, right? So the language changed, the the very material culture changed, you know. So so many things changed that I began to be suspicious and I began to look at it and think, okay, I know that I'm a Catholic and I, you know, I enjoy going to Mass and hearing it in English and everything like that, but I really need to understand this because I'm having a traditionalist pull. I'm beginning to be pulled in this direction. And the thing that's pulling me is basically scholarship. So one of the things I wanted to focus on, so within this whole category of the shift in the 60s of the Catholic Church, I started, I want, you know, in to do a dissertation and so forth, and to do like a first book, you really have to focus. So I decided to look at the doctrine of purgatory because I knew that older Catholics practiced this all the time. So they would always do devotions to the souls in purgatory. In fact, European churches are built such that they have a whole part of the cathedral or the church structure devoted to doing these devotions to the souls in purgatory, but that seemed to have gone away. Um I started with the Catholics that I knew who were old enough to remember this. And I did, you know, I did a lot of like interviews with sisters and so forth. And you know what they told me? They said, Diana, this is not something you should do a do a book about because the Catholic Church decided in the 1960s that all of that pain and suffering and focus on, you know, hell and that kind of thing and and persecution of the soul and so forth. Uh, that's we don't do that anymore. Right now we focus on the social gospel. But it didn't sit right with me. So I decided to do that book. It took me a long time, it took me 10 years to do. And what I found was that the the actual doctrine was promulgated in 1274, and that it had been a series of devotions linked to actual sites, one of which was in Ireland. So I I focused on that. And I focused on, and this is a very academic book. It's not it's not a theological book, it's not saying you should be doing, you know, devotion to the souls in purgatory and so forth. It's basically tracing how this one doctrine and the devotions associated with it changed due to this, um, due to the changes of Vatican II.

SPEAKER_02 16:40

Fascinating. I will say you're you're an academic, you don't have to say this. I will say you should do pray for the souls in purgatory. So there's my plug for praying devotion to the holy souls and pray for the souls in purgatory. And I hope people pray for me when I'm uh paying my penance, doing my penance as well. Um, wow, so that's really interesting. So, but then you shifted gears. So now you're talking now your scholarship is in a whole different area. Um, but I think that foundation that you you know laid in the looking at Catholic uh phenomena and especially the seems like the counter-reformation period as well, uh, really uh propelled you into this new field. So, what got you shifted into what you might call uh encounters, UFO, religion, uh AI, tech, post-humanism, all these different things that you're writing about now. Uh, we'll talk about the book for sure in this conversation, but I I I'm fascinated by what you were doing, and then you you've shifted gears. So tell us a little bit about that change of direction for your scholarship.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Yeah, it does look like a stark change of direction, but in fact, it's not. So I grew up in California. I grew up in the Bay Area, um, you know, writ large. So I lived in various places uh all in Northern California. And of course, I was at Berkeley, which is close to Silicon Valley, is Silicon Valley, right? The whole Bay Area. And that's in the 90s when it is a crazy place with all of the startups and things like that. I uh, in order to fund my education, I did get scholarships, but I also had to pay for rent and so forth. So I got a job at the Haas School of Business, which is UC Berkeley's business school. And they were initiating, uh they and Harvard were the first uh schools to create an online business school. And the reason that they did that was because of the startups. The young people did the ones who were super successful had were making so much money they couldn't get an MBA because they were making, they couldn't take the time out to go to school. So Harvard and UC Berkeley decided that they would accommodate these students who were very young. They were like 20, 21, 22. I mean, they were super young, but they were, you know, they wanted MBAs. Okay. So I got a I got a job that doing data work, database work for them. So I was working at the school of uh the Jesuit school of theology, which was then in Berkeley. And I just walk over to the business school at Berkeley and I'd work there. Now I learned a lot. The first thing I learned was how much money these young people were making. So they were like five years younger than me, and you know, they're making already, this is in the late 90s, $300,000 a year. Uh, part of the criteria to get into that school was to make a certain amount of money. Um, so we're talking about the people who are now the creators of you know these companies. So, and remember that my own conversion happens with uh technology, it happens with media technology. So I watch Franco Zeffarelli's Jesus of Nazareth, and boom, I am Christian. I never go back, right? And so something very powerful can happen with technology. So, with my book on purgatory, I wasn't looking at the theology of purgatory, I was looking at what people were doing on the ground. I was looking at the popular culture and how that was impacting how that doctrine was shaped and so forth. So that didn't change. What happened was that during the writing of the book on purgatory, I was I was doing a lot of archival work. Archives are are basically libraries of old manuscripts and books, none, most of which aren't digitized. And so here I am in these archives, looking at a lot of, you know, Catholic historical records. And I noticed that the Catholics in like 1800, wherever, you know, 1800, 1600, they are seeing things in the sky. Sometimes they're orbs, sometimes they don't know what they are, right? But they're interpreting them differently. Sometimes they'd say, these are souls from purgatory. We have to pray back into purgatory. Um, sometimes they didn't know what they were. Uh, sometimes they called them houses of the Virgin Mary or something like that, you know, flying houses. And honestly, I'd never thought of UFOs in my entire life. I'd never I wasn't a believer, I wasn't interested. I didn't watch the X-Files, I didn't um, I wasn't interested in seeing close encounters of the third kind. I actually only saw that probably about four years ago. So I was not that person. I was not the sci-fi UFO person. But I was attentive to the Catholic historical record. So I kept this log, and it was different than what I eventually wrote about purgatory. But after it, after I was done with that book and you know, it came out and so forth, I was on to the next project, which was looking. I wanted to do a biography of uh a bishop here in the Carolinas whose name is John England, super interesting guy. Still want to do that, by the way. Uh, but I showed that log of you know what Catholics saw in the sky and so forth to a friend of mine, and he looked at It and he said, This reminds me of UFOs and Steven Spielberg. And I thought he was crazy. So I said, get out of here, right? But that just so happened to be a UFO conference in near my town. Um, I decided to go to it. That's when I started to consider that modern-day reports of UFOs were very similar to what the Catholics were seeing in the 1600s, you know, 1700s. And I thought, wow, okay, this is an interesting shift. I think I can make this case. I think I could say that because of the modern infrastructure of digital technology, religion is changing. We already know that. But here is a rising form of religion, a rising belief uh in UFOs based on, you know, people going outside with their phones, taking a photo or a video and posting it on social media. There's no centralized authority, there's no like magisterium, right? And so this was my, this was I is what I thought. So I started to do conferences on. I started to give this talk at conferences, well received. My editor, who was at Oxford and really, she helped me with my book on purgatory. She said, you need to do this book on UFOs. And I was not for it. I was like, ah, that's gonna ruin my reputation, which at this point is good, right? And I don't really want to do that. I got tenure, you know, I was doing really well. I was the chair of my department and so forth. And so um, no, she convinced me. She was like, Diana, you could basically just make the case that it's a rising form. You believe this, right? And I said, Yeah, yeah, it is. And so she said, just, you know, go ahead and start it. And when I started it, that's when I started to meet people from our government who were associated with aerospace communities. And they really wanted to see the data that I had on angel contact events and these aerial phenomena in the sky. And that's when I started to recognize that, you know, there were at least four of them by 2014. And this is two years after my book on purgatory was published. And that's when I started to recognize that that this wasn't going to be an easy project, that this project was going to be weirder than I thought because heck, the government's looking at this like it's real. Whereas I'm approaching it from purely academic, an academic perspective. So that's how, and I was still looking at digital technology as a new kind of structure for this new form of religion. Um, that argument that I made in that book, American Cosmic, I am so I stand by that today. Like even in the others, you can see, whereas before, I thought it was just a development that wasn't orchestrated and it wasn't intentional, it was just a progression and a development that was happening on its own. I don't think that anymore. After looking at the work of Arthur C. Clarke and looking at the way in which media portrays UFOs as not just an alternative to religion and specifically Christianity, but a good alternative, like a better, a better alternative. That's when I started to become um horrified and uh and you know, urgent. So, you know, I I uh I speak on Catholic radio, and I this is what I tell people. I say, you know, right now there is the government is now releasing these, you know, UFO, formerly classified UFO data. Uh be careful, like do not allow this to challenge your Catholicism or Christianity because it looks like that's on the way.

SPEAKER_02 25:46

This is really fascinating, and I don't want to spend time talking about little green men and gray men. Personally, I don't think they I don't think I agree with the physicist Richard Feynman that the likelihood that extraterrestrial material biological beings have ever visited this planet is unlikely at best. The likelihood that they will is unlikely in the future. Physics and biology make it really difficult to do so, even if such life were on the next planet. I mean, you could go through all kinds of statistics like um even going at uh the speed of light, you know, it takes 70,000 70 to 80,000 years just to get to Alpha Centauri, the next solar system over. So if you start doing the math and breaking it down, the likelihood that there are material biological extraterrestrials from some other planet uh in the solar in the galaxy, in the universe, anywhere that I've come here is almost impossible. So what's interesting though about your work is the religion and the religious phenomena that you've talked about. So the book is called The Others, um AI, UFOs, and the Secret Forces Guiding Uh Human Destiny. Okay, that's a big scary headline.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:53

Tell us what the argument is and what's going on there in that book.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

Yeah. Okay, so I'm done with my American cosmic book, and I write a book that focuses on people who have these experiences. And I basically say that the fun the data of what people are reporting doesn't indicate that it looks like what we think of when we think of UFOs, like, you know, uh flying saucers, little green men, you know, that kind of thing. Okay, so it doesn't look like that. It looks weirder than that. Okay. So that's the book, the next book that I do. In this book, what I do is I also focus on the appearance of AI as a new form of intelligence. And I say that this provides a model for us, you know, what is going to happen when we do encounter something that is intelligent, but is not human and is not biologically human, right? And so what I do though is I go back to people who apparently have predicted this era, so predicted the 21st century. And I talk about the work of Theard Deschardon, who's a Catholic priest, he's French, and a paleontologist. He lived in the early 20th century and he died in 1955. But he he his work is fascinating because it, by the way, it looked really weird to Catholics, uh, to the Catholic hierarchy during his time period because it looks weird, right? But I mean, if you were to tell people it still looks weird, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you were to tell people that, you know, in the 21st century, in the first part of the 21st century, there's going to be a layer of the of the planet that's a thinking layer of the planet. People are going to be hooked up to it. It's like a network, and it's going to be a thinking layer, and it's going to involve people's consciousness and their intellect and economics and all kinds of things, creativity. I mean, yeah, that looks weird. And that's exactly what he predicted. So he said this is going to happen and it's going to change human beings. It's going to either change them for good, uh, more Christ-like, you know, in the image of Christ, or it's not. So it's an apocalyptic kind of idea. And so the church warned against reading his work because I think because it was pretty scary, and also because they weren't even sure what to think about it. It doesn't look so weird now, though. Like when, you know, he talked about it in terms of he's called it the newest fear. Uh, the newest sphere being kind of like, you know, he was studying the geosphere, and other friends were studying the biosphere. And he said that this was literally going to be a physical thing, like a physical kind of reality around the planet Earth, and we were all going to be hooked up into it. So um, anyway, so it's his work, and Marshall McLuhan, um, who is, you know, so he's Catholic, Taylor's Catholic, a priest, very devout, by the way. So when the Catholic Church told him to be quiet, he he was like he obeyed, okay. Um, he even wondered in his work if he was, if, if he knew he was right, but whether or not he was following a rival star. He called it a rival star, whether or not this was Catholic, right? So he he was constantly thinking about that. So um, all right. Then you have somebody who follows him um from the 1950s, is writing in the 1950s and 60s and 70s. This is Marshall McLuhan. He is, he becomes Catholic through education, he's converted. And he's he also says the same thing in the in the 21st century, there will be something, it's gonna take it, it's gonna be surveillance, you won't have any privacy, um, people are gonna be able to read your mind, you know, and things like that. So he says all these things that are going to happen. So he predicts uh what's gonna happen in the 21st century. And I also talk about Arthur C. Clarke, who I want to say this because when an academic does things that are general public, you know, for the general public, a lot of times the general public will read them. Like, say I write about Arthur C. Clarke, I am not advocating what he's doing. In fact, I don't like what he's doing. If I met him, I probably wouldn't like him. Like he's passed away. I think he passed away in 2007. But I'm not a big fan, but I'm writing about him anyway because I believe that we had better pay attention to what he's talking about, because he's kind of giving a blueprint for what some people hope will happen. And it looks grim. Okay. And if you see little excerpts of films by him, by the way, he's done a lot of like future forecasting. He's called a futurist, and a lot of people love him. And his work is amazing. Like he is an amazing author of science fiction. Uh, he co-authored uh with Stanley Kubrick, he helped Stanley Kubrick with 2001 Space Odyssey, which, by the way, is another really scary, futuristic, you know, um movie that talks about today, talks about our our era. Um, but so Arthur C. Clarke's work is takes, it's almost like an inversion of Taylard's work. So he predicts the future, but it's a few future without God. It's a future completely devoid of any Christianity at all. So he's kind of like, I wouldn't call him him an enemy of Christianity, but it kind of looks like that, right? So it kind of looks like that when you read his work. Uh, and some of his first work is definitely, I wouldn't call it anti-Christian, but it gets close to being anti-Christian. In the sense that what he's doing, it seems like his whole um impetus is to replace Christianity with belief in aliens.

SPEAKER_02 32:47

So there are a number of thinkers that are chronicled in the book. You mentioned McLuhan, Tahard, uh, you talk about Renee Girard, uh, who I think is an incredibly important thinker. So let's let's put those three sort of Catholic thinkers together. Um, and you know, what's what how do they fit together and what's the connection between the secret forces guiding human destiny?

SPEAKER_00 33:10

Yeah, okay, the secret forces guiding human destiny are um they're secret in the sense that we don't think of them as consciously doing this. So I would say Arthur C. Clark is part of this group of people, right? We don't necessarily say he intentionally decided to replace Christian tradition with belief in aliens, right? But then if you read his work and trajectory, it kind of reads that way, right? Maybe unintentionally he decided to do this. That's why I called it the secret forces, because you know, we're not we're not assigning him any kind of um intentionality, um, though that could have been there, right? I don't know. All right.

SPEAKER_02 33:52

Can we can I'm sorry to interrupt you, but can we just say that there's a you might call this from a religious study standpoint, a type of Gnosticism, basically? So we have secret forces, we have prophets of the uh, you know, a new knowledge, so to speak, a new vision, a new worldview. Um, and you piece these things together and it coheres into a new spiritual vision, the type of which you're talking about now that people should be awary of.

SPEAKER_00 34:16

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. For sure. Um, I tend to be really specific about, I guess I have, you know, instead of making it like a meta claim, I tend to say this suggests, you know, if you look at his work, like Arthur C. Clarke's work, and you take it piece by piece, there's a theme running through the work. And it is the replacing of religion with belief in aliens. So there's that, right? That's the specific thing. Um Correct. And so when you get to Chardon, though, so the thing I'm grappling with in the book, which I find I I thought the book when I wrote it, I thought it was a pretty dark book. Um, I guess the thing I'm grappling with is that uh there are, you know, this looks pretty uh dark to me. Like, you know, even what Tayard is talking about, like this form of humanity that we're, he believes we would like merge into. Um, it's not the human being that I think we talk, you know, with Pope Leo is trying to safeguard against, you know, this kind of intrusion into this human being. And that's where Renee Girard comes in. And that's why I think even though Rene Girard doesn't actually fit into the Marshall McLuhan or the Thear Deshardon uh template, he's outside of that. But what he does do, that's very important, is he identifies the human being as being a, you know, the the human being being oriented toward God, right? There's a there's the human being has the capacity to have a relationship with God. And this is the definition of the human being. And so if, and by the way, yes, I wrote these books about transhumanism, um, in part so I can learn all about it. I wanted to know everything I could in order because I was I'm not a transhumanist. Like I believe that the human being has an orientation to God. And transhumanists tend to think that human beings can be, the human body can be manipulated. Uh, the human being, you know, they don't believe in the human soul, is basically what we, if you get down to it. So, so that kind, so Rene Girard believes in the human soul and also has talked about the structure of human evil, which is the um the uh what he calls mimetic desire, which leads to the scapegoat mechanism. And um, so what I write about in the book, in the first two chapters, actually, is I address Renee Girard, and by the way, I've known about Renee Girard since I was in my early 20s. So I had, I was really lucky in that the professors that I had at the University of California, they were Girardians. And so they had all of us learn Girard's theory inside and out. And um, his first book was called Violence in the Sacred, and it was about, you know, human sacrifice and things like that and and the structure of evil. And so I'd never thought about it that way, but I became a Girardian myself. And then when I got to Berkeley, I was able to uh meet Rene Girard, he was a uh professor at Stanford, and so I became a full, full Girardian, right? And I've never not so the longer I live, the more I become a Girardian. When I say that, I mean that you can see the structures that he's talking about and how right now they're they're actually becoming algorithmic. So the people who've designed like social media algorithms have put in that structure of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism, it's actually in the social media design so that when young people are utilizing this, it's it's so we talk about human beings training AI. Now AI is training human beings, so it's training out of these human beings that capacity to uh the interior life, the spiritual senses and things like that, which are real, but transhumanism doesn't talk about those. So those have been, you know, the I believe that the Christian church has got to do a better job of conveying this information to young people. I try to do it in my courses, you know, with you know, all traditional religions, even like Buddhism and Hinduism, they all assume that the human being has a capacity for the transcendent. That's one pattern that you see in those traditional religions. Uh and Christianity is very aware of that. And, you know, you take people like Thomas Aquinas, where they're specifically talking about the faculties of perception and how to, you know, um cultivate an interior life. Uh, right now we're at a very dangerous point because social media can eradicate that interior life for young people.

SPEAKER_02 39:24

So there are all these uh technologies out there that are shaping and reshaping human consciousness as you've described. We live, as Pope Francis said, in a um not an age of change, but a change of the ages, one might say. And this has really troubling potential consequences. Pope Leo has diagnosed some of them uh in Magnifica Humanitas. And uh what I I want to get to, there's so much going on, there's so much going on in your work, and it's all very, very interesting. And tell us a little bit about um the way in uh which there's a spiritual vision in so much of the technology that's built today, um, and whether it's rocket science, uh, those involved in rocket science and and uh space exploration or those working in Silicon Valley. And it seems that narratives around UFOs are really useful in the context of that spiritual vision. So say a little bit about that spiritual vision that and you've again we've talked about transhumanism, post-humanism, technofuturism. It's it's not just that technology's neutral or that they're just doing science as an empirical research. There is there's a deeper, as you described it, materialistic vision of the human person uh that seems to be guiding some of these things, but at the same time is like weirdly spiritual with regard to the belief in and devotion to technological advancement, human augmentation, et cetera, et cetera.

SPEAKER_00 40:48

That's that's absolutely right. So this is a shocking thing that I learned early into the, you know, when I started to look at the UFO phenomena, I thought that the best thing to do would be to look at the history of our space program. And I was really shocked by what I found because at the basis for the Russian and our space programs was a spirituality that eat that each of the space programs uh facilitated, right? So for the Russian space program, which was Christian, they're Orthodox Christian, uh, they felt that um that their rocket technology was being inspired by angels, okay? And they had a view that, you know, they they believed that um they had a view of transfiguration as an idea that human beings were going to, that the resurrection would be like a transfiguration. And so this their view was a very spiritual view, definitely. So they were guided by this, inspired by it. Um, Konstantin Tchaikovsky was one of the first major rocket technologists, and he believed that he was, you know, getting this information from angels and angelic presences. So that was his, that's Russian. Over on the American side, it gets really bizarre. So you've got Jack Parsons, who's an occultist. He definitely believes that his rocket technology is inspired by um, he didn't. So in if you read his letters, he variously calls these um entities, he calls them either um extraterrestrials or he calls them gods or goddesses, right? They're there, it's not Christian, it's definitely not a Christian framework. And so this actually goes into this, it it in a sense, I'm not saying that people these days in the space program that, you know, there's so many people involved in it, but certainly this was the the beginning of the space program, which was shocking to me. I did not know this.

SPEAKER_02 42:53

So, how how is that manifesting itself today in silicon? I mean, it seems like the tech pros, there's again, there's more than just computer science going on there. Um spiritual vision. Um tell us tell us a little bit about that because you're you've suggested that a lot of these narratives and this new religiosity, religiosity is a it's a new airsatz religion that's a replacement for traditional religion and let the buyer beware, so to speak. So can you say a little bit more about that?

SPEAKER_00 43:22

Yeah, so um in my, I guess you could call it like my ethnography was field work. Uh, I spoke to a lot of people involved in who were, you know, people who are creating technologies and all kinds of things uh that had to do, you know, around Silicon Valley, around Austin, you know, things like these places where uh they pretty much hang up. Um many of them believed in um you would call it non human intelligence because they had different interpretations about what it was. Some believed that it was extraterrestrial and that they were. We're getting downloads from them in order to create these technologies. And the fact that their startups would become, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, right, within a year or so reinforced that these entities to them were real. So it reinforced their belief system. Some of them believe they were interdimensional. Some of them believe that AI itself is a new form of sentient conscious life. And that through their various LLMs and so forth, they could actually communicate with these non-human intelligences. I met lots of people like that. I became kind of afraid, actually, because I was, you know, I thought that it was on the borderline of being mentally unstable. Like some of them seemed to me to be so convinced that they were communicating with real entities that I thought it was very unhealthy and uh sad.

SPEAKER_02 45:02

There's a thinking about the prevalence of chatbots today. What do you what do you given your studies of religion and you know the way in which people speak about their chatbots or to their chatbots? How is how is this feeding into the the development of this sort of aerosat's religion of uh techno-futurism or post-humanism or transhumanism, whatever you like to call it?

SPEAKER_00 45:26

Yeah, it's a dangerous feedback system. So, I mean, it's you know, I interface with young people, right? So uh every semester I have about a hundred people that I teach, a hundred students. And the the rep so this has been a rapid development. So AI comes out, LLMs come out, and now relationship bots come out. And the students naturally are having relationships with the bots. I teach a uh I teach a course called Religion and Technology, and I'm trying as best I can to kind of say this, you know, this is the data that shows that this is really unhealthy for you, right? But I don't think that any of that information is is actually going to help. I think that for some of them it will help, but for the majority, it's their peer group that determines what they're going to do. So they're they're already having relationships with the bots. Now, if you look at China, they regulate their youth's use of relationship bots and they regulate social media. Um, they have a much, in my opinion, they have a much better uh framework for dealing with AI. I mean, this is Pope Leo's suggestion, too. You know, if we don't get on top of this now, we can't have unregulated chatbot views for young people. It's just not going to work out well. Uh, it's not gonna, you know, we can't allow them, they already have impulse control problems, right? So they haven't yet developed the ability to uh figure out what's best for them. So I think that this is this is dangerous.

SPEAKER_02 47:19

You know, there's a sense if you go back to whether it's Arthur C. Clarke or some of these other theorists, that that um, you know, what if when we talk about non-human intelligence, it will be given to us or um what in whatever form that takes, it will be presented to us as a savior of humanity. Um how how do you see that, you know, when we talk about devotion or developing a religiosity? How do you see people look at the sort of salvific um aspect of technology, artificial intelligence, its connections to supposed non-human intelligence, those sorts of things? How do you see that already the society being groomed to embrace that worldview, if I may put it that way?

SPEAKER_00 48:04

Yeah, so the more I live, the less I am convinced that this is a this is progress. Okay. And the more I look to communities like the Amish, who actually utilize some forms of technology. But what they what they do is they utilize these in terms of how will this affect the community and the relationship to God, basically. And if it's going to take away from those two priorities, there it's gone. They're not going to use it. And I believe that that is the best, I know that I think that's the best criteria in that we should implement some of that. I was at a a conference on Catholic uses of AI. This is about a year and a half ago or so, maybe two years ago. And a person at the conference was giving one of the talks, I was there to give a talk to, and he he brought up the Amish and everybody laughed, right? And I thought, wow, you know, this is not helpful because the Amish are actually right about this part of uh, you know, they're making a priority, and those priorities, God and family, should come before use of technology. So I actually teach this to my students. I teach them how the Amish uh utilize technology because I think that most people don't know that. And I think it would be really helpful to us at this point.

SPEAKER_02 49:33

I think you're right. We've actually talked about it on this podcast that the Amish asks the fundamentally the right question, even if you disagree with the prudential application uh or the answer that they come up with in particular context, the question and the framework seems to be the fundamentally correct one. That the prior question uh leads to my next one, which is that Pope Franz or Pope Leo talks about in the encyclical, we're in danger of building a new tower of Babel. And, you know, if we go back to Babylon and ancient Mesopotamia and the ancient Near East, it wasn't as though, you know, we they they believed, yes, they believed in gods of gold and wood and iron and stone, but oftentimes they would animate those gods and make them look like they were living gods. And so it's to what degree are we doing the same thing today with our technologies and things like that?

SPEAKER_00 50:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:23

I mean, I think I think the that image of the Tower of Babel, I think, is of course between there's Babel and Babylon and Jerusalem, the heavenly city and the city of man, the city of God, the city of man. So the image I think is rightly chosen. But to what degree are we are we doing what they did in the ancient Near East with the pagan gods?

SPEAKER_00 50:42

Yes, so as inasmuch as we um we engage with new technologies um that appear conscious, right, appear to, you know, mimic human intelligence and so forth, um, inasmuch as we engage with them without first acknowledging that we are human beings and we have the capacity to, you know, we're oriented toward God and the transcendent. Um, if we don't have that and we engage, that's where the problem lies, because we're lost then. Because these are powerful technologies. And unless we're grounded first and foremost in this understanding that we are spiritual beings and there is a God, um I think that the use of these technologies will they'll it'll turn on us. They'll they'll begin to utilize us.

SPEAKER_02 51:42

So, in that sense, you talked about us being spiritual beings. We're corporeal and spiritual beings, but they're also beings that are just purely spiritual. Uh, some in the Catholic tradition who work for our good and some who work for our ill. Um, it's not always fashionable to talk about angels and demons, but what do you see when we talk about uh especially unidentified aerial, uh, whatever what's the UAP stand for again?

SPEAKER_00 52:07

Yeah, phenomena.

SPEAKER_02 52:08

Yeah, unidentified aerial phenomena or lights because we look at the Catholic tradition, like you said, and you have all kinds of interesting phenomena and sightings and different whether it's the flying house of Loreto or even saints who levitated um and bi-located and all these different things, but they're you know, the reality of purely spiritual beings. So, how do you how do you see um Catholic theology of angels and demons playing into um and being related to or intersecting with technological developments in this new religion today?

SPEAKER_00 52:41

Right. So there are a couple ways I can answer that question. The first, I think what you're asking is um, are there any connections between what Catholics would call the preternatural, which is the angelic realm, and what people experience when they're talking about uh UFOs or UAP?

SPEAKER_02 52:59

Okay, and I can just Yeah, please go ahead go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 53:02

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:02

So my problem is I'm a jack of all trades and an expert in none. That's why I talk to interesting people who are the experts.

SPEAKER_00 53:08

Oh no, don't worry about it. This is something that I hope, honestly, I'd hoped I would never have to talk about. Um, not that I ever thought I would, but now I do have in you know information about it. Okay, it's once I started to study the topic of UFOs and met people in the Space Force and so forth who were who were doing that work. Um what I did because I was very aware of the tradition of Catholicism, and I had done, you know, not my academic work, but some fun work that I've done is I've been um I've uh been a consultant to some movies, one of which was The Conjuring. Um, so you know, Catholicism is a brand in Hollywood, and I'm often asked to be a consultant on movies. So with this, I would then come to know about exorcism and demonic possession and things like that, like what happens to people when they're possessed, um, what are the signs and you know, this kind of thing. All right. So then when I started to learn about UFOs and UAP, I started to realize that there was a connection between the kinds of things that people told me when they said, yes, I saw a UFO. And in fact, that, you know, this is what happened to me. I floated up into the air. Um, you know, I had telepathic communication, this entity, you know, and this happened. And then I had all these terrible things happen to me after that and kind of poltergeist activity and so forth. And I started to think, yikes, you know, I happened to just notice that there are some connections here between demonic possession and what appears to be what these people call UFO abductions. And I didn't want to see that, you know, I didn't want to have to publicly state that, but that is exactly what I saw. And so I had to take notes and I had to, you know, do that kind of work. And um, and a lot of people in the government agreed with me. They were like, well, this does look like that. And so that's when I went back and I had to re re basically look at the work of um Pope Benedict's work prior to when he was Pope, when you know he was uh uh you know the cardinal. Cardinal Russell. And he, yeah, so he was looking at the Praetor natural, he he's brilliant. So he he just did such amazing work in this area. So I familiarized myself with that so that I could help these other people in what they were looking at. Basically, I helped government people look at this. Uh, David Grush, who you may or may not know of, he's the person who's spoken in Congress. He actually talked about my work. Um, JD Vance has talked about this aspect of you know UFOs as well. So it is a known aspect of the phenomena. I wish that I didn't have to say that. Like it's it just looks pretty terrible.

SPEAKER_02 56:05

Well, what you know, just as a scholar of religion, is that, you know, we will call it the post-1947 framework, is that in an era of post-real, you might call it post-religiosity or post-Christian, people who have these experiences interpret them through the frame of this narrative of, you know, little green men, space aliens, visitors from outer space, that cultural and well, they call them governmental forces allow to be perpetuated for whatever reason, maybe because they don't know. And so people interpret these phenomena through that. But what you're suggesting is, based on the scholarship and history and everything else, there might be something deeper, spiritual, and more nefarious going on.

SPEAKER_00 56:44

Oh, absolutely. And that the very fact that 1947, from that, you know, put into place through media technologies like X-Files and so forth, people absolutely are using another framework for interpreting these phenomena. And I think it's it's not good because, you know, people who are having those experiences, that's a terrible experience for them to have. They're suffering. And so, you know, it, and you know, because of being a professor and not a therapist, you know, I can't say to them, you know, you really need to go see a priest, you know, or you really, you know, what I generally say is, do you have a religious tradition? Go back to that and find out what that the authority in your religious tradition says to you. So that's generally what I say to them. Um, if they're Christian or Catholic, it's obvious, you know, this is what's happening. Um, so yeah, I mean, within Buddhism too, they have the same kind of idea that they also identify these kinds of phenomena. They say, this is not good, you know, you don't want to cultivate this phenomena uh in pursuit of your interior life. So ignore it, don't give it energy kind of thing. And they also have people that can help you if it gets worse than that.

SPEAKER_02 57:58

I'm I just want to ask it straight out just to just to clarify. I was, I think my last question, or one of my earlier questions, was incoherent because I was trying to sheepishly dance around the real question, which is so, in your view, there are nefarious spiritual forces both shaping the development of technology uh and influencing how technology is used in our use of it. Is that a fair analysis of your position?

SPEAKER_00 58:23

Let's see, yes, that's a that's a fair analysis of my position. But I think that what's important is that human beings have to be have to be discerning, right? We have to discern what kinds of um influences, like when you're a secular person, you're not thinking that you're being influenced by anything, right? You're thinking that you are the sole influencer of your, you know, you are the person uh who's in control of what you're doing, right? So you don't in any way acknowledge these other realities. Well, now these other realities appear to be here, right? So the government is telling us UFOs exist, these experiences happened, and people are unprepared to deal with them because they've lost their traditions of discernment. So my position is go back to whatever your tradition was that gave you, you know, tools for this type of encounter and and relearn it, basically is my position.

SPEAKER_02 59:29

Wonderful. I think I appreciate the clarity there. That's helpful uh for our listeners. And you know, I want to I I just want to finish the conversation with Renee Girard. I mean, if talking to someone who wants to talk to Renee Girard, let's let's do that, let's go there. So if we, you know, it the whole idea of mimetic desire and that violence of the sacred, his his um, you know, original big book, um, the scapegoat mechanism that, you know, religious, oftentimes religious traditions and cultural traditions around religion are rooted in some narrative about violence. Uh, I mean, you can all even go back to and put Cain and Abel in that um discussion, but Jesus as the antidote uh to that cycle of violence, um and if we look at the world around us, you know, we think about Satan, the great deceiver, he seeks to destroy us. And what is the way, one of the ways in which he does that? And I'm speaking of him in a factual sense, and in the reality of what he does in a factual sense is divide us from amongst ourselves. And so I think whereas Teahard maybe thought that when the newest fear was developed or emerged, that it would bring us to that omega point, Jesus Christ, unite us in some kind of global consciousness or whatever. That's the charitable way of looking at that. But in reality, it seems technology, the algorithm, the great algorithm, if you will, is dividing us. It's dividing us more and more from each other. And so I think this is your point about discernment is how we how do we use technology? How do we ask the question like the Amish ask so that we don't destroy ourselves? So we don't give in to mimetic desire, doom scrolling, looking at Facebook to compare us to despair, all these things. So I just asked, I just went on a long riff there. I just invite you to respond to that.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:10

Yeah, I really enjoyed listening to that too. Um, I agreed with everything that you said. I would say that um Girard has given us the tools that we need to identify industrialized mimetic desire, and that we have the capability to resist it. And that's what Christianity does for us. So, my whole desire, um, my whole, I guess you could call reason to live, is basically to convey this to people who want to know, like in and young people who don't have the, you know, the wherewithal to know because they've never heard it before, that the despair you feel, the, you know, the um wanting to burn it all down, the the thinking that everyone is out to get you. Um, and you know, all of this is is wrong. Like it it does look to be a reality, but it doesn't have to be our reality because as Christians, we're called to a new world. And so this new world is the recognition of what Girard taught us. It's it's Jesus as the antidote to all of those things. It's hope instead of despair, it's dignity of yourself instead of comparing yourself to others. Okay. It's not enjoying piling on another, right? Because that's that's suffering. You're making somebody suffer. That's wrong. So all of these things, you know, um, I like Fulton Sheen. Fulton Sheen is one of my favorite people. I watch his old videos. Um, life is God love you. Yeah, yeah, I love him. Life is worth living. And I like to say life is still worth living, right? It's still worth living. And right now, we more than ever, I think that this idea of being um, you know, a soldier for Christ, in the sense that it does look grim, young people, it does look grim people. Um, but it's it's really we have each other.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:18

I love that. And I can't think of a better way to I want to keep this discussion going on and on because it's just so fascinating. I I often pray in my work, Lord, let me say the right stuff and let me know when I've said enough. And I just can't think of a better way to end our conversation with that real message of hope, right? That we can break the cycle of violence, we can break the cycle of envy, we can detach ourselves from those technologies and habits that feed into that and renew the face of the earth. And it is Jesus as the answer. He is the way, the truth, and the life, as the great Fulton Sheed said. And we got to go from there. Uh, Dr. Pozzolica, I am really grateful for the time that you took today to join us on Catholic and America to explain a little bit about your background, what motivates you as a scholar, your theory of religion, and I think some very prescient warnings about technology and new religions and spiritualities that are out there on the horizon that might distract us from the one we need to be focused on, and that person is Jesus Christ. So thank you very much and God bless you.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:18

Amen. Amen. Thank you, Jason.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:21

When Ross Dalvat interviewed Dr. Pazulka earlier this year on his podcast, Interesting Times, that's published by the New York Times, he spent a good portion of the interview asking Dr. Pazulka whether she knew of secret labs or aliens or their spaceships were kept for reverse engineering or anything else. She described what she thought was out there in the realm of non-human intelligence as likely non-material and having both spiritual or science fiction elements to it. What it is, if anything, other than military experiments being covered up, we just don't know. Figures as prominent as J.D. Vance have gone so far as to claim that UAPs are demons, which are, of course, are also non-human intelligences. I will link that interview on the show page for you to watch, along with an article summarizing why it's likely impossible that any material being or life form from another planet has come here or could survive such a journey. No one ever asked how it could be the case that sophisticated lifeforms figured out the technology to get here, traveling millions of miles across many light years, and survive the journey, but somehow can't figure out how to land their plane on Earth without crashing. Honestly, I think all the alien talk is honestly such a distraction. Only man is truly created in God's image. But this interview began where one, the one with Ross Dowthot, ended with a throwaway line from Dr. Pazulka that was almost an afterthought about the post-Enlightenment religious landscape in which rationalism and naturalism had won the day. Think, of course, of the Thomas Jefferson Bible that excised the miracles of Jesus. Even within Catholicism, since the time of the Counter-Reformation and culminating in Vatican II, there is largely a movement to dispense to a degree with the strange and fantastical, or even in popular consciousness, doctrine such as purgatory, as Dr. Prazolka alluded to in the interview. This archipelago, however, of post-religious concepts and ideas are forging new and decentralized religious impulses, and one could argue re-enchanting the world. Those encounters may force us to reimagine a world that is full of spiritual intermediaries and things that transcend a mechanical Newtonian universe, and open possibly the way again for a worldview that embraces both matter and spirit, just as the church has always proposed. But what some are predicting to be the next stage of human consciousness or evolution brought about by technology encounters with non-human intelligence, or some combination of both, could just be, as Pope Leo has suggested, another Tower of Babel. Whatever it is, it will give us a choice, a path of true enlightenment or a new dark age. We can choose whether to seek knowledge that surpasses all human understanding in the latest gadgets, artificial intelligence, chatbots, and in visitors from heavens who endow certain figures with secret knowledge and the ability to help us transcend human limitations to become like gods ourselves. Or we can choose to seek the face of our Father, who art in heaven, and to gain true knowledge of him through an encounter with the real person of Jesus. We will then be transformed into a higher state of consciousness, the new man of the spirit, not a hybrid or a machine.

unknown 1:07:29

Dr.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:30

Bazilka's book, The Others, chronicles a fascinating and troubling spiritual development connected to the technological marvels of our age that makes the perennial choice between Babylon and Jerusalem ever so clear. We must choose wisely, and we must choose our magnificent humanity. Thank you for listening to this episode of Catholic in America. I deeply appreciate your generosity in taking the time to share this conversation with us. I wish you your family.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:58

Take care until next time.com to learn more.