Introduction
This book covers a wide range of topics: psychology and psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and the psychological insights we find in ancient texts. To be fully inclusive in tackling the question of what it means to be human we need to address spiritual answers as well as scientific answers. Who can possibly be an expert in all these fields?
The good news is that possibly no one is an expert in all these fields, so maybe someone who is quite well read in all of them may be useful.
Not everyone will agree that one needs to see what the New Testament of the Bible has to say on the subject is useful. Some will a priori reject the idea. But suppose it is true that the thing that differentiates us humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is that we have the capacity to be spiritual. Suppose is it true that unless we have a viable relationship with the source of all being we are in reality somehow diminished, somehow less human than we have the potential to be.
In 1999 I began posting occasional short blog articles which I called 'Meditations of a Netcaster'. Fifteen years later I have reviewed these, and decided to include just a few of them in a longer attempt to address the question we are focusing on. Some have been slightly revised in this process.
My qualifications to write on this subject? I read Classics and Theology at Cambridge University, and I taught the New Testament at Advanced Level for several years before starting my own business, a software house. This company provided a back-office system for private client stockbrokers. From ancient texts in languages no longer spoken to modern high level computer languages is quite a jump. It brings one firmly into all the modern ways of thinking, and in my case this has extended to thinking about how one might reconcile modern views on psychology with the traditional answers given by the followers of Jesus Christ about what it means to be human.
My experience as a human includes being a husband, a father, and a grandfather, teaching teenagers, managing a business with 70 employees, and now being an elected local councillor as retirement public service. I have published a text-book on the life of Jesus Christ, and a critique of the book of Genesis, comparing modern scientific knowledge with this ancient text.
I am sure, dear reader, that you will not agree with everything you find here, but my hope is that you will have been stimulated to think about these issues, and come to your own reasoned conclusions. So please read this book slowly, as it is not very long, and pause for thought regularly as you do so. It may provoke you to look in more detail at some of the topics raised. I am more focused on provoking questions than in supplying answers.